Finding Fault
British director Minkie Spiro tells DQ about making Peacock and Sky thriller All Her Fault, how her career has taken her from working in the UK to the US and why her first stop on set is always the hair and makeup truck.
In Sydney, Minkie Spiro is working through post-production on her next project, forthcoming Peacock series The Five-Star Weekend.
Relocating down under to complete the edit on her latest US series, the director is half a world away – literally and figuratively – from the British series on which she made her name. After working on shows such as Holby City, No Angels, Hustle, Dalziel & Pascoe, Skins, Doc Martin, Call the Midwife and Downton Abbey – to name a few – Spiro headed to the US, where she took up work on Jessica Jones, Better Call Saul, The Deuce, Barry, Dead to Me and 3 Body Problem. Her most recent series, All Her Fault, debuted on Peacock and Sky in November.
“I love a challenge. I always like to put myself outside of my comfort zone and see where that leads,” Spiro tells DQ. “I remember when I was a very successful photographer, everyone was like, ‘What are you doing, going to film school? You’ve got an incredible photography career.’ And I’m like, ‘Ah, I need a new challenge in my life.’”
She then completed a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, and after picking up work as a director in the UK, Spiro was encouraged to find an agent in the US by Call the Midwife executive producer Pippa Harris. She consequently went out to the States for a series of meetings, “and by the end of that week of meetings, I had three job offers on the table. I wasn’t actually planning to do much US work, but just through the various meetings I had, and their reactions to the way I interpreted the scripts they sent me, they got excited by my vision and thoughts for the various shows, and it just snowballed.”
The filmmaker no longer bases herself so much in the US anymore. But whether it’s London or Sydney, “I’ll just go where the work takes me,” Spiro says. Yet there is something about working in the US industry – a “well-oiled machine” – and its showrunner model that really appeals to her. This creative figurehead, more usually made up of several people on a British set, oversees every aspect of a production in the US, and Spiro is grateful to have someone to bounce ideas off, rather than “holding it all together” herself.
“I’m a collaborator, I get on generally with pretty much everybody. So to me, it’s a gift when you have a showrunner,” she explains. “I don’t see it as putting my nose out of joint. The beauty of a showrunner is if they are experienced, or if they are good at what they do, they know to respect a director’s thoughts and challenges.
“As a British director, we have spent so much time in an edit suite that we understand how to construct a scene and the rhythm and the pace of a show. It’s held me in such good stead with the US way of working. Because I have all that 20-odd years working in British TV, I can bring that knowledge to the floor. I love both systems. It’s not like one over the other. Every job has its merits, and every system has its merits too. I guess doing All Her Fault was really exciting, because I was working in the US system but with a British production company. That was pretty special.”
Produced by Downton Abbey’s Carnival Films, All Her Fault stars Sarah Snook as Marissa Irvine, who arrives to collect her young son Milo from his first playdate, but the woman who answers the door isn’t a mother she recognises. She doesn’t have Milo and has never heard of him. As Marissa begins her own investigation into Milo’s disappearance, new questions expose deep secrets, revealing cracks in her family’s seemingly perfect world until everything is left shattered.
Based on the novel by Andrea Mara, the series is set in Chicago, even though the bulk of filming took place in Melbourne. But the film crew did spend seven days shooting in Chicago to capture footage that would be “toploaded” into the first few episodes to establish the show’s setting.
“What I loved about the show was you have this propulsive engine of this mystery, this thriller that drives the entire eight episodes. But really, if you scratch that away, it’s about so much more than that,” Spiro says. “It’s about societal discrepancies – how primarily in heterosexual marriages, the mother, the woman, it is assumed that she takes on the heavy lifting of organising the doctor’s appointments, the vaccinations, filling out the school paperwork.
“It’s about class. It’s looking at how society deals with kids with special needs. It looks at so many things that have just needed addressing for so long, and it’s great. It’s now opening up important conversations. So for me, it just makes all the blood, sweat and tears that you do when you make a show worthwhile when it gets well received, but you also know it’s actually lit a much-needed conversation. It’s provoked people to start talking and challenging what has become a norm, and that shouldn’t be a norm.”
The Five-Star Weekend will similarly expose the secrets and push the boundaries of its characters. Starring and executive produced by Jennifer Garner (The Last Thing He Told Me), this adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel centres on Hollis Shaw (Garner), a famous food influencer who suffers a devastating loss that starts to expose the cracks in her seemingly perfect life. In an effort to overcome her grief, she decides to host a weekend away at her house on Nantucket with three friends from different stages of her life: her childhood, her 20s, her 30s and a surprise extra. But when they come together, they will mature in ways they never imagined. UCP is producing the series, which will also star Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, Gemma Chan and Darcey Carden.
“It’s been a real gift of a show,” Spiro says. “I directed the pilot and the second episode, and exec produced all eight episodes, but then came and did another two just before the final two, so I was across the whole lot. But the way it works in the US is you do the pilot, set up the show, the look book and all the rest of it, and then the next director follows suit. So it worked out well.”
Hilderbrand previously saw her novel The Perfect Couple adapted for Netflix with Nicole Kidman in the lead role. Spiro describes the author as “the queen of Nantucket books,” with her stories often featuring mysteries set on the picturesque island located off the coast of Massachusetts.
“It’s a great premise. It’s a great story,” the director says. “There are big themes explored there about love, life, grief, friendship and how we often get absorbed in our own bubble of work and we don’t invest in those very important things in our life. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not pure froth. There’s a lot of very deep, difficult emotional truths that are explored – and the cast are phenomenal. They really dug in with me, and they just allowed me to just push their buttons and really create a much deeper study into all those themes, which is really rewarding and I think will be very watchable and relatable.”
Notably, the series isn’t driven by a crime story. Instead, “it’s much more character driven, and there’s a lot of humour, but it’s humour that has to undercut the pain, which is always very satisfying,” the director says. “All of the five women are going through their own personal crises. One’s got a very terrible health scare and another’s being cancelled. One is questioning her sexuality. There’s a lot going on. It just draws you in because the characters are all very complex, but there’s a deep heart to the show, which I think we need right now.”
Marrying her directing role with her responsibilities as an executive producer, Spiro now can’t imagine not ever taking on double duties on any future projects, whether they’re based in the UK or the US. “It’s much more challenging, but rewarding for it,” she says.
All Her Fault was the best of both worlds – a show produced by a British company in Carnival Films for US streamer Peacock and Sky in the UK.
“That was a British show where I was still the pilot director, the lead director, very much securing the look and feel of the entire eight episodes, making sure that the director who came on to do subsequent episodes followed the remit of what the look book was,” she says. “So there were a lot of subtleties in how I conceived the visual arc of the show.”
In particular, she worked closely with production designer Rob Harris, costume designer Gypsy Taylor and DOP Sergio Delgado to establish a colour scheme that could run through the series, shifting from warmer to cooler, more alienating tones as the story’s “ugly truths” begin to emerge.
All Her Fault also marked the latest series on which Spiro has worked on a show starring a top female talent, this time in the form of Snook, who was coming off HBO’s awards-laden Succession. She also formed a close bond with Garner on The Five-Star Weekend, and has previously worked with actors including Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini on Dead to Me, Winona Ryder on The Plot Against America and Toni Collette on Pieces of Her.
With rehearsal time in television continually shrinking, Spiro likes to spend time with her cast talking about character and getting to know them, so that they have built truth together by the time they get on set.
“I have to get them very quickly to a position where they know that if I push them outside of their comfort zone, I will also catch them if they fall,” she says. “I successfully managed to get all these top talent to trust in me, to allow me to push them in directions that can sometimes be scary and unnerving. It’s a testament that these talented actors want to keep working with me, because I will call them out if I smell bullshit or if they haven’t dug as deep as they can go, because ultimately they will regret it.
“If an actor gets difficult on set, that’s OK. I can handle that. What’s important is that, if that’s what they need to get out of their system before they get to the place they need to get to in order to give the performance of a lifetime, then bring it on. We will work together.”
In particular, Spiro makes a point to check in with her actors at the end of each shooting day, to make sure “they’re going home in one piece.” She also makes the effort to arrive on set an hour before the day’s call time and heads straight to the hair and makeup trailer.
“That’s not just to let them know that I know they’ve been there since silly o’clock and I appreciate it, but it’s also so I can have a quiet word with the hair and makeup designer and just check in and see how everybody is,” she explains. “They’re on the front line more than anybody else. They receive actors in every state imaginable, and their job isn’t just to get them looking great, but to get their psychological wellbeing back in the right gear, to be able to put their best foot forward.”
She adds: “At the top of the day, I will check in, and that makes a huge difference. If the designer turns round and says, ‘So-and-so just had a really difficult conversation,’ or ‘So-and-so’s parent is very poorly,’ I know how to manage that on set and not have other actors or myself misread it as somebody causing issues. That’s always a useful protocol I put in my timetable of things to do every morning before I get on set.”
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tagged in: 3 Body Problem, All Her Fault, Minkie Spiro, Peacock, Toxic Town