Into the metaverse
Neal Street Productions execs Pippa Harris, Julie Pastor and Nicolas Brown take DQ inside the making of HBO’s meta comedy The Franchise, reveal why it’s a love letter to filmmaking and offer an update on the latest season of Call the Midwife.
On the set of Tecto: Eye of the Storm, the eponymous hero is facing off against a dangerous villain, surrounded by figures known as Moss Men and the Fish People.
Watching on are the crew responsible for making the outer-space blockbuster – and watching them are the crew of The Franchise, HBO’s workplace comedy where the office just happens to be the set of a multimillion-dollar superhero movie.
If that sounds like a mind-bending concept for a new TV series, spare a thought for those who worked on it, directed by lanyards that denoted whether they were part of the real crew of the eight-part series or the fictional crew responsible for bringing Tecto to life.
“It was a very meta experience making the show,” executive producer Julie Pastor tells DQ. “One of the things that was very important was that in the world we’re depicting, you really believe you’re on a film set, and everyone who was on that set works on sets.
“We had two lanyards. There’s the Franchise lanyard, which was one colour, and then the Tecto lanyards for the movie within the show – blue and yellow – otherwise you really couldn’t tell if the person standing there operating the monitors is from our show or the movie. It was a constant state of needing to figure out the confusion.”
Skewering the film industry in general and superhero movies in particular, The Franchise follows the crew of an unloved franchise movie fighting for their place in a savage and unruly cinematic universe, while shining a light on the secret chaos behind the camera on a gruelling 117-day shoot.
Played by Himesh Patel, first assistant director (AD) Daniel is charged with making sure everything runs smoothly, yet his task is largely hindered by a neverending stream of requests from new producer Anita (Aya Cash), third AD Dag (Lolly Adefope), auteur director Eric (Daniel Brühl), script supervisor Steph (Jessica Hynes), leading man Adam (Billy Magnussen) and Shakespearean actor-turned-screen villain Peter (Richard E Grant).
But while the series pulls apart the genre to look at some of the more ludicrous elements of movie-making – from never-ending script changes and “a fish person in a panic spiral” to last-minute character cameos, product placement and interfering studio heads – “it’s done with real love and affection for both those big tentpole movies and the people who make them,” says fellow EP Pippa Harris.
“Obviously everyone working in film wants to do the best job they can, wants to create the best film they can, so I feel there’s a lot of love on display, love for the art, love for movie-making, love for the craft behind the scenes and the people who do it all. I’m really pleased that comes through in the finished series.”
“Daniel, Himesh’s character, at one point says when these movies are really good, there’s nothing better, and he really believes that,” adds EP Nicolas Brown. “That [feeling] is what everybody wanted to make sure was there, because they’re hugely popular, people love them and they are brilliant when they work. But it does what it does in the show: it drives people to the very edge.”
Produced by Neal Street Productions, the series comes from Sam Mendes, Jon Brown and Armando Iannucci, who knows a thing or two about workplace comedies after the success of his BBC series The Thick of It and another HBO show, Veep. Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall) directed the pilot, while Brown (Dead Pixels, Succession) is the showrunner.
Making use of significant research and the real experiences of people working in the film industry, the writing team were given the freedom to have fun with the premise – a comedy about the unsung heroes of the franchise filmmaking world. Brown ran the writers room with episodic writers Tony Roche, Rachel Axler, Dillon Mapletoft, Keith Akushie and Marina Hyde, while Liza Johnson, Tom George and Kevin Bray direct alongside Mendes.
“They wanted to create a very funny workplace comedy, but they also wanted it to be a love letter to movie-making, to the craft behind films, to the people who slave away making those films who don’t normally get put in the spotlight,” Harris says, “and also to take the Mickey out of some of the worst excesses of the studio system and some of the unintended consequences of that whole world where you’re getting spin-offs from films which maybe haven’t even been filmed yet. There’s the slight insanity of the machine.”
“They are very experienced, very hardworking, very talented craftspeople and members of crew [working on these films] but they’re in a machine that has taken over a sector of the industry. So what’s it look like when you have people working in this new world of filmmaking?” Pastor says. “That’s the conflict. That’s where the fun really comes from. And then you have to make it really believable. That’s why all the Veeps and The Thick of Its work so well.”
“Almost everything that happens is true,” adds Harris. “It’s happened to one of us or one of the people the writers spoke to. The more bizarre incidents are all based in a reality – not exactly as they were in real life, but that’s hopefully why it should feel authentic and all the more funny, because there is more than a grain of truth in everything.”
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That The Franchise is about a US blockbuster being made in a UK studio – it was filmed at Warner Bros Studios Leavesden, home of Barbie and the Harry Potter movies – means it is also reflective of real life, as numerous UK studios have been bought or booked up by US film and television studios.
But beyond crafting the characters and the neverending stream of mishaps that befall Dan, the makers of The Franchise also had to devise the world of Tecto and what the film-within-the-show’s elaborate sets – complete with giant blue screen, water features and a blinding lamp standing in for a “second sun” – might look like.
“Jon and his team did a huge amount of work on creating the whole Tecto world and the world of the studio and the history of it and everything else,” Brown says, pointing to the company behind Tecto, Maximum Studios.
“There’s this bulky document that tells you everything you need to know about Maximum Studios, its rise and fall and rise again, where it is in the landscape and where Tecto is within the movies that are being made. There’s reference [in the show] to Centurios 2 [the preceding franchise movie to Tecto]. They did a lot of work on that, and that fed into everything that appeared on set and in the scripts.”
That background information was also worked into the costumes and other props. Daniel can be seen wearing a Maximum Studios gilet and also sports some merchandise from another film he has worked on, while posters for Toxic Man (“I’m pretty sure I dated him,” quips Dag) and Crimson Splash line the studio corridors.
“At Leavesden, all those scenes with the offices were downstairs from where our offices were,” Pastor says. “So we’re producing the show upstairs and the people making the film within our show are doing it downstairs. The offices in the show were a mirror of our offices, which is a wild thing to happen as well.”
Pastor says a great challenge for costume designers Michele Clapton (pilot) and Sinéad Kidao (series) was dressing the Tecto crew in an authentic way, often in merch from previous projects they had worked on (like Dan) or building their unique personalities into the clothes they wear around set.
“But then the costumes of the characters in the film – Tecto, played by Billy Magnussen, and Eye, played by Richard E Grant, and Lilac Ghost [Quinn Walker, played by Katherine Waterston] in episode three – these are the sort of believable costumes you could imagine you’d be wearing in a real superhero world. So you have to do both sides with equal authenticity in order to make the show work. And that was very important to us.”
Have the execs considered making a Tecto spin-off? “That might make my head explode,” Harris jokes. “Not yet, but never say never.”
While Neal Street harbours hopes for a second season of The Franchise, work is well underway on the 14th season of its much-loved period drama Call the Midwife, which returns next year following a two-part Christmas special.
Based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, the series follows a group of midwives working in Poplar, in London’s East End, beginning in 1957. Each season then moves forward one year as the characters are confronted by real themes and issues informed by creator and writer Heidi Thomas’s historical research. That includes looking at population censuses to uncover information about significant diseases, immigration levels and other socioeconomic changes that affected that part of London.
“Each year you can see interesting new things happening, not only within Poplar but across the UK,” Harris says. “That’s meant the show keeps fresh and there’s always new medical advances to look at.”
Previous seasons have looked at the impact of the thalidomide scandal (season five) and the legalisation of abortion (season eight). “Each year is something new for the show to look at and it often becomes the spine across the series,” Harris continues. “Heidi and I and Ann [Tricklebank], our fellow exec, remain just as passionate about it, as do the cast. We’ve got this amazing cast, many of whom have been there since the beginning.”
With the show now heading into the 1970s, Harris says stories about sterilisation and the loss of the dock industry in London will be explored in season 14. “For me, the 1970s feels like only the other day but you realise that, in terms of medicine, it’s actually a really long time ago,” she notes. “There were lots of conditions that weren’t treatable at all. But it’s a familiar world. It feels oddly at a cusp, I would say. It feels like we’re just heading into the modern era.”
With season 15 already commissioned, Thomas and Neal Street are already thinking about new stories to tell. Other new projects at Neal Street include The Magus, Tom Edge’s adaptation of John Fowles’s novel that is set to go into production next year. Johan Renck (Chernobyl) is attached to direct.
tagged in: Call the Midwife, HBO, Julie Pastor, Neal Street Productions, Nicolas Brown, Pippa Harris, The Franchise