Picture Perfect
The Perfect Couple director Susanne Bier speaks to DQ about reuniting with Nicole Kidman for this Netflix murder mystery, why she wanted to take charge of all six episodes, and the drama’s eye-catching opening title sequence.
With the finishing touches being added to Netflix murder mystery The Perfect Couple little more than a week before the drama’s London premiere, director Susanne Bier jokes that she is still expecting a phone call about some technical issue or other.
She need not have worried – but it serves as evidence of how involved Bier has been across the series, having directed all six episodes. And that’s just the way she likes it.
Danish filmmaker Bier is the director behind Academy Award-winning feature In a Better World, which was named best foreign-language film in 2011, while her other movie credits include After the Wedding, A Second Chance and Things We Lost in the Fire.
More recently, she has turned her attention to television, first taking charge of BBC and AMC miniseries The Night Manager before shooting every episode of both HBO’s The Undoing and Showtime’s The First Lady.
“I’m a film director and I treat television like film in the sense that I take on a show and make it the way I see it,” Bier tells DQ ahead of the show’s debut. “I don’t think I could just do one episode or anything like that. I don’t think that’d be possible.”
The Perfect Couple is the latest example of Bier applying her filmmaking approach to the small screen, on a project that sees her reunite with The Undoing star Nicole Kidman. Eve Hewson (Bad Sisters, The Luminaries) stars as Amelia Sacks, who is about to marry into one of the wealthiest families on Nantucket. Her disapproving future mother-in-law, famous novelist Greer Garrison Winbury (Kidman), has spared no expense in planning what promises to be the premier wedding of the season – until a body turns up on the beach. As secrets come to light, the stage is set for a real-life investigation that feels plucked from the pages of one of Greer’s novels, and suddenly everyone is a suspect.
Based on the book by Elin Hilderbrand, the project comes from showrunner Jenna Lamia and is produced by 21 Laps Entertainment, The Jackal Group and Kidman’s Blossom Films. The ensemble cast also includes Dakota Fanning, Billy Howle, Jack Reynor, Ishaan Khatter, Meghann Fahy, Sam Nivola, Michael Beach, Donna Lynne Champlin and Mia Isaac, with Liev Schreiber and Isabelle Adjani.
“First of all, it’s shot like a film, so it’s essentially just shot cross-boarded,” Bier says of making the series out of chronological order. “We do one scene from episode five in the morning, and then one scene from episode two in the afternoon, so it’s not like we finish one beat and then we go on to the next beat. But you need to have a gilded overview. You do need to have a very precise sense of how every single bit fits into everything.
“Then you need to edit it very carefully. I edit from the moment I start shooting, and I edit very meticulously. I’d be talking with Sam Williams, the editor, several times a day, every single day. It’s very much about having it all in your mind and then testing all different possibilities while you shoot, just to make sure you don’t lose things.”
The series opens on the eve of Amelia’s wedding to Greer’s son Benji (Howle). But when a body is discovered on the beach on the morning of the big day, all plans are thrown into chaos as the local police descend on the Winburys’ exclusive estate. The story then follows the familial fallout from the police investigation, with flashbacks and memories providing alibis or intensifying the spotlight on certain characters until, at last, the murderer is revealed.
Bier reveals that the numerous cuts between story points and timelines were planned in the script, but admits that the finished series – which launches worldwide on Netflix today – is remarkably different from the initial plan. “A script is like a skeleton, and that needs to be really interesting and really solid,” she says. “But then once you put flesh on top of that, it changes and you need to be organically part of that process in order to understand what’s going on.”
The director says she never made a conscious decision to only direct TV miniseries where she can take charge of all the episodes, “but I’m drawn to challenges. I’m drawn to things I haven’t really tried before.”
That same philosophy applies to The Perfect Couple. “Part of what drew me to this was the sense of humour,” Bier continues. “There was a real wit in the pilot and I was very drawn to the potential of doing something funny and light. And frankly, I really believe the audience at this point in time needs that.
“Interestingly, I think that was also very much what drew Nicole to the project, doing something which, tonally, yes, it’s a ‘who did it?,’ it’s a murder mystery, but it’s also really funny, and doing something funny was very enticing for both of us.”
Bier and Kidman became close while making The Undoing, the 2020 psychological thriller that also starred Hugh Grant. The director describes Kidman’s role in the David E Kelley-penned series as a “huge part for her” after the Oscar-winning actor had become a more familiar face on TV thanks to parts in Big Little Lies and Top of the Lake.
Working again with the Australian star, “there is a shorthand, but there’s also a huge amount of respect and a huge amount of joy,” Bier says. “We are having fun. She’s totally courageous, her sense of audacity is insane and I really enjoy that. And we both feel excited about it.
“Interestingly, for the entire cast, there was a bit of a summer camp [feeling] of, ‘Let’s just go for it. Let’s just go for the fun of it.’ They would all be improvising and they would be putting their heart out there. For me as a director, that’s a huge amount of trust that you then need to honour. So that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Kidman, Schreiber et al weren’t improvising for the entire time they were on set, though Bier certainly let them play loose with their characters in each scene. However, that would only come after she rehearsed with them on their own each morning before the crew arrived.
“So by the time the crew comes, we are all pretty comfortable about it. Then we show the crew what we’ve done, everybody thinks, ‘Oh, this is what we’re doing,’ and then we change it anyway,” she laughs. “It’s an interesting mix of making agreements and then weirdly agreeing to still grow from there, and they all enjoy that.
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“It’s not like a completely free improvisation, because it’s very important, particularly with a murder mystery, to not lose the core [of the story]. But we do improvise within the framework of the scene and within what works for the bigger elements of the storytelling.”
As for her own creative freedom, Bier found the chance to infuse The Perfect Couple with her own style came in the camerawork as she sought to create “extreme intensity” between the characters.
“When my colleagues in film school were interested in those very elaborate, crazy tracking shots, I was always obsessing about the close-up,” she says. “What possibly sets it slightly apart [from similar series] is that there is a real presence between all the characters. That presence also, in this particular case, leads to a heightened suspicion on all characters.
“I’ve been asking people who haven’t seen the entire series who the murderer is, and they all say different characters. That is a little bit of what I’m hoping for. I’m hoping that I’m creating enough mystery about every single character so that theoretically it could be this one or it could be another one.”
Though the story isn’t told from a single perspective, viewers are introduced to the uber-wealthy Winbury family through the experiences of Amelia, a fish-out-of-water who struggles to find her place in her new surroundings while trying to win over matriarch Greer.
“She is the one we identify with and sympathise with because she actually happens to be a proper human being in this world of entitlement and privilege and snobbish behaviour,” Bier notes. “Then as the series moves on and the characters unravel a bit more, we realise they might be human after all. But I do think she is the one who has a sense of normality, and also she’s got values in a world that is pretty liberated from moral values other than hers.”
The majority of filming took place on location on the Cape Cod peninsula in Massachusetts last year, with some production also carried out on the island of Nantucket, where the series is set. Shooting was forced to pause amid the US actors and writers strikes, after which the Nantucket set was rebuilt in LA so filming could resume for five more weeks.
Bier describes that final period as a particularly difficult one, not least because of the challenge of rebuilding the show’s starry – and much in demand – cast. “As you might recognise, it’s a pretty popular cast. They were all doing other things, so the logistics of getting everybody together to finish the show was a bit of a nightmare,” she says.
Another nightmare related to a scene in the script that called for a TikTok-style group dance to be performed. But though Bier didn’t want to do it and it was eventually dropped, it did spark the idea for what would become the show’s opening title sequence, which features the whole cast dancing on the beach to the sound of Meghan Trainor’s aptly-titled song Criminals.
“There was something about dancing that I really liked, and I’ve been a bit fatigued by title sequences lately. So I was like, ‘I just want all of them to dance in the title sequence, and I want to signal to audience that this is going to be fun, this is going to be light,’ but it was crazy because we had such a short time to do it,” Bier recalls. “Everybody was like, ‘Are you sure you really want to do this?’ And the cast were like, ‘I don’t have time to rehearse it.’”
Eventually they were all persuaded, and the sequence was recorded in just one-and-a-half hours towards the end of the shoot. Bier even joined them on one occasion, “so they could all laugh at me and get their revenge,” she says. “That was almost the last thing we did. But I think it was so fun. And in the end, everybody really loved it and everybody really enjoyed it. But before, everybody was like, ‘I can’t dance. I’m not doing this.’”
After spending 18 months making The Perfect Couple, Bier is now looking for her next challenge – though she won’t be returning for the second season of The Night Manager.
As for whether her future lies in film or TV, she believes the opportunities for film directors to take on whole miniseries are “softening,” just as they have been for movie stars to do TV. “Everybody is recognising that TV has a potential it did not use to have,” she says. “Do I want to go back and do a movie? Yes, at some point definitely I will, but I really enjoy doing movies that are six hours, like this one. It’s just really fun, interesting and exciting.”
tagged in: 21 Laps Entertainment, Blossom Films, Netflix, Nicole Kidman, Susanne Bier, The Jackal Group, The Perfect Couple