Helming Hostage
Isabelle Sieb tells DQ about taking on her first lead director role with Netflix’s Hostage, reuniting with star Suranne Jones and why she didn’t want the political thriller’s camerawork to go “full Blair Witch Project.”
Director Isabelle Sieb is used to jumping in at the deep end, having worked on the first season of submarine thriller Vigil and underwater adventure series Nautilus, adapted from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Her credits also include Prime Video horror The Devil’s Hour and BBC crime drama Shetland.
But her latest project, Netflix political thriller Hostage, marks the first time she has stepped up as the lead director on a major TV show. Set at the heart of UK politics, it follows what happens when the British prime minister’s husband is kidnapped overseas, just as the French president faces blackmail.
“This is the first thing of that scale and magnitude that I have got to set up,” she tells DQ, “so it was so nice and exciting to get to do that on this, especially with putting the casting together and figuring out what our Downing Street was going to look like, where we were going to shoot and all of those key decisions. It was so brilliant to be a part of.”
Hostage stars Suranne Jones as British premier Abigail Dalton, who is welcoming French president Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy) for a vital summit that could lead to a resolution to healthcare and security concerns for both parties. But when Dalton’s husband Alex (Ashley Thomas) is kidnapped and Toussaint’s personal life is used to blackmail her, both women face unimaginable choices. Forced into a fierce rivalry where their political futures – and lives – hang in the balance, can they work together to uncover the plot that threatens them both?
The show is written by Matt Charman (Bridge of Spies), while star Jones is also an executive producer – and it was the actor who first approached Sieb about taking on Hostage after they first worked together on Vigil S1.
“I felt like we needed a woman to tell this story, and I know me and Isabelle wanted to do something together,” Jones says. “In Vigil, she managed to tell the romantic story of Kirsten [Rose Leslie] and Amy [Jones], as well as the whole submarine shenanigans, really well. So I knew she was good at action and the personal stuff, and that’s what this required. We’re hoping to do something else together that’s very female-led as well. I just like her sensibilities.”
“We got on so well on Vigil and had a beautiful time working together,” Sieb recalls. “Suranne called me and said, ‘Look, here are three projects I’ve got coming up. Do any of them sound good to you?’ Obviously they all sounded great, but as soon as she said [about Hostage], ‘It’s Netflix, it’s Matt Charman and I’m playing the prime minister,’ I was like, ‘Sign me up.’”
Sieb then embarked on an 18-month journey to set up the five-part drama and helm the first three episodes, working alongside fellow director Amy Neil, who picked up episodes four and five.
Despite describing herself as “not somebody who ever reads on public transport,” Sieb remembers finding the pages too engrossing to put away when she boarded the London Underground. “I just couldn’t stop, and I could tell the thriller elements of it were so solid,” she says. “You had these two amazing female world leaders at the centre of it, and that was something that really excited me. Then I went in to pitch, and the nice thing about meeting Matt and the Netflix team was there was a really easy synergy from the start. I felt that Matt was genuinely excited by how I saw it, by my ideas, and they then offered me the job, and we got started pretty much immediately.”
Sieb’s ideas for Hostage mirrored the script’s attempt to balance familiarity with something fresh and different, with a large part of the show taking place behind the doors of 10 Downing Street inside the prime minister’s residence.
“What I wanted to do was give it a really stately and composed look that we would recognise from a political thriller, but at the same time include the human messiness,” she explains. One early conversation focused on the need for Abigail to constantly be surrounded by snacks, to have a framed football shirt from her favourite club on the wall and a treadmill in the corner of her office, while also ensuring the residence really felt like a family home.
Sieb felt it was important to show Dalton and Toussaint as “powerful beings, powerful leaders and humans.” Their first meeting was filmed from low angles, using 40mm lenses to capture “stately and composed” shots presenting them as equals.
But as the story unfolds, their vulnerabilities begin to surface and the camera comes closer to them. “It was really about showing both of them in as many facets as I could, and really showing them in their complexities and their full three-dimensional glory, but then also understanding what part of the journey required what kind of visual approach,” she says.
The director also wanted to reflect the repercussions of what was happening to both Dalton and Toussaint in the way she approached the camerawork. “What that meant was control versus chaos, and the slow descent from being in control to facing the chaos of what was going on,” she notes. “That meant starting off the visual language in quite a smooth, controlled movement manner. We had a lot of Steadicam, and we had some crane shots and really purposefully framed static shots. Then as soon as the abduction happens and things start to unravel, we started introducing more handheld and we started to loosen it up, but still being really purposeful about it.
“If you pay attention, the first ever handheld shot on Suranne is in the scene where she’s told about her husband’s abduction, and it’s just one close-up. I wanted to keep it really subtle, and not go full Blair Witch Project.”
The handheld camera puts the audience in the centre of the more action-driven scenes, such as the aforementioned abduction and episode three’s riot sequence. It’s also used to convey strong emotional moments, though the audience might not know how those shots were captured.
“I feel like my main job is to understand in each scene what is the feeling I want to give the audience, and then find technical ways of translating that,” Sieb says.
When it came to finding an actor who could play opposite Jones, Sieb says there were “very few” candidates for the job of French president. Delpy immediately connected with the material and quickly said yes to the role, “which was very exciting.”
“What I found really thrilling was that they’re a pair you would have never dreamt of – you have Suranne who’s this icon of British TV, and then Julie, who’s this international indie film star and two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter,” she continues. “They very much feel from very separate worlds. But I feel like the two of them together are such an exciting, unexpected dynamic.”
Sieb initially conducted several Zoom calls with LA-based Delpy to discuss the show, before the actor joined up with the director and Jones for a week of rehearsals ahead of filming.
“That was really helpful. We got to have all of those conversations about, ‘OK, what is the character’s journey? How do we want to play those beats? How do we want to make sure we do see your differences and your similarities?’ But it’s never a cheesy version of ‘Women coming together to save the world.’ That would have been a really lazy version of this, which you didn’t want to do.”
Instead, Dalton and Toussaint each have their own agendas and goals, though events throw their plans into disarray. “Then there’s always a bit of luck in it as well. They’d never met before, but they got on amazingly well,” Sieb says of the show’s stars, “and they’re both really wonderful, lovely people.”
Sieb’s partnership with Jones went beyond filming thanks to the latter’s additional responsibilities as an exec producer, and the star led from the front as number one on the call sheet. “She really understands the duty that comes with that – how to make the other actors feel valued and welcome, and setting the tone for what our day-to-day work life is going to be like,” Sieb says. “I do that in the same way, but the actors tend to look to the number one on the call sheet and she really carries that responsibility so beautifully.”
After their experience on Vigil, Sieb and Jones already had a shorthand for working together and, importantly, how to track the emotional beats of a series. “One of the key challenges on this was, because Dalton experiences so much trauma all the time and experiences so many difficult moments in each scene, how not to make her performance repetitive,” Sieb says. “That was something we were both really keen on monitoring together and making sure that journey feels real and that each moment feels unique and different.”
Filming took place across London, as well as on the Canary Island of La Palma, which doubled for scenes set in French Guiana – where Alex is working as a medic before he and his colleagues are taken hostage in episode one.
“That was the place we could go that, politically, it was still Europe, but had the right vegetation and look, and had the jungly feel,” Sieb says. That came at the end of the shoot, after all the London footage had been captured.
“I’m so glad that’s part of the story, because it’s something that will feel really fresh and unexpected for a political thriller. Usually the political thrillers really take place inside rooms, and all of the top-secret conversations [happen] behind closed doors. But in this show, we also get to cut to a completely different world with a completely different type of sunlight and colours.”
Filming in La Palma brought logistical challenges owing to the remote shooting locations used by the production. It meant there was a pressure to deliver each day, particularly when there were stunts such as car chases or shootouts.
“But often, I quite like working with that sort of pressure, because it puts you in a rhythm,” Sieb says. “It really helped the actors as well, because there was no downtime for them to sit and relax. I remember Ashley saying to me that those days were his favourite days, because he got to stay in that energy and in that space and really make it feel real to him.”
With Hostage now streaming on Netflix, Sieb is looking towards her next project. “It was an amazing thing to get to as my first major lead director credit,” she says. “I really hope people will respond to it the way we want them to.”
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