Directing the Blues
On the set of the BBC’s Belfast crime drama Blue Lights, actor turned director Angela Griffin reveals her passion for filmmaking as she takes charge behind the camera for season three’s climactic scenes.
On a large, tree-lined street in East Belfast, Angela Griffin is studying the pictures from two monitors displaying close-ups of Blue Lights star Siân Brooke. It’s a pivotal scene in the BBC crime drama’s third season, as Brooke’s character, PSNI officer Grace Ellis, is about to have a hand in the arrest of an accountant linked to organised crime in the city.
“She’s amazing. She’s got such a great energy on set,” Brooke says of Griffin, who is directing the season’s second block, episodes four to six. “She’s very positive, and as an actor, she is great because she’s walked in those shoes so she understands exactly how to get the best out of people and how to be in all the different camps that you need as director, in terms of your cast, your crew. She’s absolutely wonderful. She’s a real dream to work with. I’m hoping it will happen again.”
“I love Angela. I just love the fact we have a female director,” adds Katherine Devlin, who plays Grace’s PSNI colleague Annie Conlon in the series. “It’s not only so inspiring for me to see that and see how she operates, but also she just brings such a beautiful energy into the show and such a new, fresh energy as well. There definitely needs to be more female directors in the industry, there’s not enough of them.”
Later in the day, back in May this year, the action shifts to the drama’s key shooting location, Netherleigh House, formerly known as Northern Ireland’s Department for the Economy and now recognisable to Blue Lights aficionados as the show’s Blackthorn Police Station. In the car park, a convoy of Tangis (armoured vehicles) has arrived back from a key operation in the season finale that sees Grace’s life come under threat as she transports a suspect some people in Belfast would rather see dead. Griffin watches on as the cameras capture Grace stumbling out of the back of one vehicle, just as colleague and romantic partner Stevie Neill (Martin McCann) is there to greet her.
“Angela is a dream. She’s fast, she’s razor-sharp and she’s just a really good director,” McCann says between takes. “There’s such fun, it’s easy, there’s no stress, and that’s important on a set because it’s a creative thing. When people are rushed and stressed and under pressure, that stifles people creatively. So she runs a really good set, and she’s brilliant. All her instincts are great. It’s just lovely.”
Of course, Griffin is no stranger to being on the floor of a television show. As an actor, she made her name in long-running Manchester-set soap Coronation Street before starring in series including Cutting It, Mount Pleasant, Ordinary Lies, Harlots, White Lines, Waterloo Road and The Wives.
When DQ catches up with her, she’s enjoying herself on set with just two days left of filming to complete. “It’s going gorgeous. It’s Belfast. It’s 17 degrees. We’re outside, and I’m not wearing a big coat, so I’m winning,” she laughs. “We’ve had so much sunshine, but it’s going really well. We’ve had a few tricky days, but I’d say 90% of the days have been really lovely and great.”
She landed the director’s role after impressing Blue Lights co-creators, writers and executive producers Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, who immediately recognised her “energy” for the show during their first Zoom call. Watching school-set Waterloo Road – on which Griffin made her TV directing debut after helming an episode of shortform lockdown production Dun Breedin’ – they also spotted the “impact” she had on her individual episodes.
“When you’ve got an ensemble cast and it’s a long-running show, you need someone to come in and give them confidence and continuity,” Patterson says. “We knew that with her experience on set, that’d be a big asset. It’s obviously proven to be exactly that.”
Griffin says she was “completely blown away” when she first watched Blue Lights, which debuted in 2023 and explores policing in Belfast from the perspectives of three new probationary officers – Grace, Annie and Tommy Foster (Nathan Braniff). The show is produced by Two Cities Television and coproduced by Gallagher Films, with BBC Studios distributing.
“It was just so unapologetically Northern Irish, but not telling the tale of The Troubles. It just felt like a really fresh take on a police drama, and it was [about] the rookies but they weren’t being pathetic,” she says. “It was gritty, it was weird and it was sweary. It just completely got me.”
Watching the credits, she spotted the name of Jack Casey, the show’s second-unit director, with whom she had worked a decade earlier when he was a 3rd AD. They had kept in touch over the years, with Griffin watching on as Casey became the second-block director on Blue Lights S2. He was then lead director on S3, which is now streaming on BBC iPlayer, with Griffin following his lead for the second block.
She had also previously worked with Brooke, but was drawn to the fact that Blue Lights wasn’t a “big-star drama.” “It was all these fresh faces, and I really love watching stuff where I don’t know who everybody is,” she says. “There’s something really lovely about it, and then I get to come and direct it, and the actors are brilliant.”
Having only directed Waterloo Road before joining Blue Lights, “my fear was that people would go, ‘Who’s she, telling me what to do?’ And there’s been none of that at all,” she continues. “Everyone’s been so open. Declan’s scripts are brilliant. They’re magnificent, and the storylines and the plots and the characters… We’ve just mined it and dug as deep as we can into all those characters.”
Thanks to the show’s naturalistic style, Griffin immediately felt at home behind the monitors, and also wanted to use a lot of handheld camera and Steadicam. “Stylistically, it’s how I like to work. It’s not too slick, it’s not too clear-cut. It’s meant to be gritty. It’s meant to be raw. I genuinely went, ‘I think I can do it,’ because it’s how I direct.”
Surrounded by a crew made up of many people returning to the show for the third time, Griffin also knew she had a “safety net” of people who knew the drama’s DNA. “But I pushed it as well, because you’ve got to put your own stamp on it,” she says.
In particular, Griffin likes to orchestrate long single takes á la Adolescence and episode five of Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Story. “I don’t mind not seeing people’s faces all the time, which can be a little bit nervy for execs, so I always make sure I get my coverage,” she says. “But for example, the shot we just did [outside the police station] was one shot past three Tangis, bringing Stevie out of the building, and it’s about what he thinks, what he feels, and then it ended up on the two of them [with Grace].”
She adds: “I’m not making an independent film. My experience on set over the years has given me that insight of, ‘Make sure you’ve got what people might ask for,’ and as long as you’ve got it in your back pocket, you can indulge yourself.”
Of course, Griffin’s experience as an actor means she is uniquely placed to work with the Blue Lights cast. “I give a shit about the actors. I really do. And I love actors,” she says.
That she has also worked on several long-running series means she knows what it’s like for an actor returning to the same character. “You know your character, and you can sometimes phone it in,” she admits. “If nobody’s asking anything, you can phone it in. But actors love notes, actors love thoughts, and I’m not scared of them, so I’ll go up and do that,” she says. “I feel like my experience means I understand where the actors can be in terms of what they’re bringing onto set, and I’m helping reawaken and reactivate [them]. Some directors can be scared of actors and be scared of giving someone a note if they have been doing it for ages, and they don’t realise that actors love working. They love finding another layer. They love being given a different thought, and I’m not scared of that.”
As second-block director, Griffin got to do “the big thing” – the biggest scene of the series that arrives in episode six when Grace drives through Belfast fearing for her and her passengers’ lives as masked gunmen prepare to fire. Most of the time, the director worked with two cameras. But for that particular scene, she employed a third camera alongside a drone and two GoPros worn by actors.
“We’d been talking about it for weeks and setting it all up and speaking to stunts and so on. Then on the day, everybody came – every exec, every writer. I went, ‘Hang on a second, is this the biggest thing that’s happened?’ Thank God I hadn’t thought about that before.
“I’d worked with stunts before, and I’ve definitely been involved in them, but I’ve done more car chases, more fights, near misses with cars and scooters. I’d never done a full-blown collision before, and it needed a lot of prep, a lot of planning, a lot of stunt people, but it was brilliant. We got one chance.”
Despite her move into directing on Blue Lights, which was named best drama at the Bafta Television Awards earlier this year, Griffin stresses “there’s no way I’m giving up acting. I really love acting. I’m passionate about acting, which is why I’m passionate about working with actors.”
Yet she gets a “daily buzz” from directing, and finds it offers her a feeling of satisfaction at the end of a day’s filming that she doesn’t necessarily get when she’s acting. “I need to work with directors like me who come up and go, ‘You were fucking brilliant,’ or come up crying their eyes out, going, ‘Yes, you moved me.’ Then I might have that feeling,” she says. “On the other side, directing is a lot of work, and to be able to do it to the standard I want to do it, it takes a lot and I’m a bit tired. Being an actor and just being given some lines and standing on a mark and getting ‘here’s a lovely Winnebago’ is quite appealing as well.”
It’s likely, then, that Griffin will continue to work on both sides of the camera as she assesses her next move. “If I can, I really want to do both,” she says. “But I’ve definitely found – and I never thought I would – something that equals the buzz I get from acting.”
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tagged in: Adam Patterson, Angela Griffin, BBC, BBC Studios, Blue Lights., Declan Lawn, Gallagher Films, Two Cities Television