Drama in spades

Director Douglas Mackinnon teases a pivotal moment in six-part psychological thriller The Ridge, a cross-cultural coproduction between BBC Scotland and Sky New Zealand.

We’re all used to working within limitations. So far in my career, I’ve not had a producer come to me and say, ‘We’ve got too much money, can you help us spend it?’ On The Ridge, the budget (it’s always the budget) created its own creative limitations, mostly to do with shooting time. I regard these limitations on any show as a solution opportunity.

In this case, I arrived in New Zealand to direct the first two episodes of a show written for a nine-day-per-episode shoot (already tight) and discovered we had just six days per ep.

I love a puzzle, so I had to find ways to get on screen the propulsive, dynamic and original psychological thriller everyone wanted, but instead of plan A, I had to find plan AA (I don’t believe in plan Bs) – i.e. ways to make the show better within its boundaries. So I had to re-write the scripts to that effect. I hope most of the tricks I used – like the very original way of showing text messages – read like creative choices, which just happen to save time on set.

The series follows Mia, a troubled addict from Scotland who travels to New Zealand for her estranged sister’s wedding. When she arrives, she finds her sister dead, pulling her into a dark web of secrets within the local community, where environmental tensions and personal betrayals collide.

My professional nose is in commercial storytelling (Sherlock, Line of Duty, Doctor Who, Good Omens), so I love that The Ridge has a procedural investigation layer tucked under the psychological drive of Mia’s character, played with beautiful and manic abandon by Lauren Lyle. I wanted to exploit Mia’s character as much as I could, having Lauren on screen as much as possible, often with the other main character, Ewan (played with ominous kindness by Jay Ryan).

A scene in episode two perfectly describes the on- and off-screen drama we were faced with as a production, and on set as a team. In her disruptive and challenging investigation of her sister’s death, Mia has just shown Ewan a blackmail video of his dead fiancée skinny-dipping with another character, Teddy (played with eloquent but pressurised calm by Kauri Williams), just days before their wedding and her death.

In the scene, they drive fast to Teddy’s mother’s farm, where a violently angry Ewan will confront him, swinging at him with a spade, before the mum comes out with a shotgun, firing it in the air as Mia and Ewan are forced to leave. So there were quite a lot of elements to shoot in a very short time. The ‘normal’ way to shoot this scene would involve pretty extensive rehearsals with stunt performers and cast, overlapping the action and shooting from a pile of angles.

We couldn’t do that, so we used one shot in the car, a drone set wide on the journey (lots of dramatic dust from the wheels) and rehearsed the stunt drivers to come out on the wide shot and swing that spade. Then I cut. We cut into the actors just at the moment the spade swung, and there were no more stunts needed in the scene, as the performances took over. The shotgun was a simple CGI blast.

I hope my first two episodes set the scene for a wonderful series, where the story and history of Mia as a very original character is slowly unveiled. I love The Ridge and love what the New Zealand and Scottish teams have done together.

Supported by our two production companies, Sinner Films in Scotland and Great Southern Studios in New Zealand, and our commissioners – Thomas Robins at Sky Originals New Zealand and Gavin Smith at BBC Scotland – as well as our friends at Screen Scotland, NZ On Air and our global distributor Boat Rocker Studios, I was given the freedom to make a show I hope stands out as being both commercial and different. What is it we say these days? ‘Familiar with a twist.’

tagged in: BBC Scotland, Boat Rocker Studios, Douglas Mackinnon, Great Southern Studios, Ridge, Sinner Films, Sky New Zealand