The road to freedom
Prisoner 951 star Narges Rashidi, writer Stephen Butchard and director Philippa Lowthorpe reveal how they dramatised the years-long story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s detention in Iran and her husband Richard Ratcliffe’s fight for justice in the UK.
When Gangs of London actor Narges Rashidi got a call from her agent about a potential new project, she was sworn to secrecy before he would reveal any details.
“He was like, ‘Are you sitting? I need you to sit down.’ It was super secretive,” she remembers. “He got me really scared and was very dramatic about it. Nobody was supposed to know it was happening.”
Writer Stephen Butchard had already been developing the project for several years under a level of secrecy that meant the factual drama went by the working title Love Story. At one point, he didn’t think it would even make it to air, while those in the know were all working under non-disclosure agreements.
Last month, the veil was finally lifted when the BBC announced Rashidi and Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare in Love) would lead a four-part drama called Prisoner 951. Produced by Dancing Ledge Productions and distributed by Fremantle, the series debuted on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Sunday.
Dramatising the extraordinary true story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband Richard Ratcliffe, it follows the experience of British-Iranian citizen Nazanin who was imprisoned and held hostage by the Iranian state for six years, while Richard campaigned for justice and her return from their home in the UK.
The show begins in April 2016 as Nazanin (Rashidi) phones Richard (Fiennes) before taking a flight home to the UK from Tehran. She then finds herself separated from her two-year-old daughter and arrested at Imam Khomeini International Airport – the start of a six-year journey through the Iranian prison system that takes her from solitary confinement to the companionship of a women’s prison, before she is finally released and reunited with Richard, who led efforts at home to win her release.
Butchard (This City is Ours) had been working on a project relating to the experience of Nazanin and Richard for “many years,” as far back as when Nazanin was still in jail. At that time, the writer was speaking only to Richard, listening to his side of the story and learning of the trauma and pressure he was facing.
As those discussions continued and before Butchard had started writing any scripts, “things were happening.” He paused work, and Nazanin was released in March 2022. The project appeared to be at an end. But when it became clear the show could marry Richard’s experiences with Nazanin’s own story, it was resurrected – under extreme caution.
“We realised how careful we needed to be, because her family is still in Tehran and [due to] the political situation,” Butchard tells DQ. “With these stories, you never know whether it’s going to come to fruition. You’ve got to be prepared to put a whole load of work in and just not know. But the signs were good because it was so rich, and because Richard and Nazanin were involved as well.
“It just began to take [shape], not only as a strange love story, but one of real compassion and bravery and courage. It’s ordinary people doing incredible things and just putting one foot in front of the other each day. For me, that was a really big thing. It was showing the real human strength that these ordinary families had, both in Tehran and Richard’s family here in the UK. It became a compulsive story.”
So secret was the plan behind Prisoner 951 that director Philippa Lowthorpe (Three Girls) had no idea it was in the works – at the same time as she had been working on something else with Butchard.
“He’d kept it completely secret. I had no idea he was working on this drama,” she says. “When he told me what it was, my jaw hit the floor. I was thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, what an incredible story to tell.’ And because Stephen’s such a fantastic writer, I said yes without even reading his script. He’s just so talented and also able to get under the skin of characters and real characters in a way that has a real immediacy, and that’s incredibly gripping.”
Telling a six-year story in just four episodes, Butchard devised a structure for the series where episode one takes place in the days after Nazanin’s arrest, before episode two is set in the following weeks. Episode three picks up the story after several months, then episode four is set in the years after her detainment, leading up to her eventual release.
The story also bounces back and forth between Nazanin and Richard’s perspectives, as they battle in later episodes to keep her case in the UK headlines amid a revolving door of Conservative prime ministers, the fallout from the Brexit vote and the Covid pandemic, which all dominated British news during Nazanin’s incarceration on spying charges. She has always maintained her innocence.
As a filmmaker, Lowthorpe looks for naturalistic performances that lean into her documentary background, and prefers everything to feel very real. “But I also like the idea of using very considered framing,” she says. “Sometimes, for example, when we film the trial scenes, the camera’s quite still and quite graphic, and that really suits those scenes. Sometimes, when the energy is different, we’re using handheld because that [provides] a feeling of life and energy.”
When she’s working on a new project, Lowthorpe often becomes “obsessed” with a particular film. On this occasion, it was Terence Malick’s 1978 romantic period drama Days of Heaven. She and DOP Ole Bratt Birkeland also turned to 1970s thrillers like The Parallax View and All the President’s Men, “which really felt so resonant with Richard’s story,” she notes.
On Prisoner 951, “we chose this very direct, quite simple and spare style, which is very reminiscent of those 1970s thrillers where you don’t have 20 shots when one will do. Everything is very considered, and we decided to shoot it with a single camera, not with multiple cameras, which directors are made to do on telly quite a lot.
“But on this one, we wanted to have a real singular point of view and to inhabit the character’s subjective point of view. That meant being very planned and considered about how we were going to shoot it, and not trying to do everything from a million different angles.
“That simplicity is quite hard to achieve, and that’s what I hope we’ve managed to do – to be really spare with our with our camera work and make the audience feel like they’re in the room with Richard and Nazanin at any one time. We’re in their subjective point of view. That was our rule for the way we filmed it – don’t have two shots where one will do.”
Filming took place between Bristol, Wales and Athens, which doubled for Tehran, and proved to be “a very intense time” for Rashidi, who was born in Iran, grew up in Germany and now lives in LA. “It was extremely draining but in the best way, for an actor,” she says. “Having the opportunity to play a role written so well and so meaty and then adding that it is a real life story, it’s just such a big task and big stretch for an actor. So it’s a lifetime gift. But it was intense.”
Rashidi wasn’t able to meet the real Nazanin, but she studied her interviews and read her side of the upcoming book she has written with her husband, A Yard of Sky. The book was Rashidi’s starting point, and it also became Lowthorpe’s bible on set – a reference she shared with costume designer Justine Seymour, production designer Stéphane Collonge and make-up and hair designer Jill Sweeney, who all found inspiration in Nazanin’s “vivid and brilliantly written” descriptions.
Portraying Nazanin, the actor didn’t believe an “impersonation” was necessary to tell the story, but she did work with a dialect coach to enhance her performance. In particular, she had to change her voice so that it maintained the same tone whether she was speaking in English or Farsi, which features in a lot of the series.
More important to her was tackling the numerous emotional scenes she had to play, and figuring out how she could take the audience with her without overwhelming them. “Then another task was, ‘Where do I find the light in it all?’ When you are in extreme situations, you’re not always very emotional about it. You just have to go through them, and then the emotionality usually comes afterwards,” she says. “As much light I could find, I would grab those [moments]. That was an important point for me.”
Though Rashidi and Fiennes are together for only a fraction of the show’s running time, Lowthorpe made sure the actors connected during Nazanin and Richard’s numerous phone calls, bringing both actors on set to play the scene even though the cameras would only capture one side of the conversation at a time.
“For all of his phone calls, I was there hiding in a corner, and same goes for me. He was there for most of mine as well,” Rashidi says. “Even the ones in Athens, he was there. That was really special, and not something that’s a given. It’s just such a difference, because you’re playing off of someone and you’re not just making it up all for yourself. It’s a big difference if you’re doing it with your actual partner. I didn’t know I thought that until I had the opportunity to do it. It makes all the difference.”
Nazanin and Richard also appear together during “postcards” from their marriage, which Lowthorpe designed to show viewers what the couple were fighting for during their years of enforced separation. There are also dreamlike sequences where one will appear in the other’s space.
“We don’t really ever see them together, unless it’s flashbacks or those magical realisms we have, and the nightmares,” Rashidi says. “They bring them back together to show the connectedness of their relationship, which was so huge and a vital part of the whole story.”
Viewers will be able to resonate with the emotional experiences facing Nazanin and Richard “in the darkest of circumstances,” but Butchard believes the strength of their bond means Prisoner 951 is also a hopeful story with “real spirit” and “real courage.”
“It is showing the ordinary man and woman being incredibly brave. It’s us at our best. For me, that’s what was really important,” he says. “It’s not the best of times in the world. Globally, the situation appears dark in a lot of countries, but we can’t forget what we possess. This thing that we will do for family, for the people we love; the strength we will find from somewhere, the kindness that was shown to the family throughout. And that’s really important. That’s what kept Richard going. It was the kindness, and that doesn’t go away.”
“I’m very proud and honoured to have been a part of telling it,” Lowthorpe adds. “It’s an amazing story and I hope it shines a light on what they went through, because we only know the tip of the iceberg of what they both went through.
“[It] also shines a light on other people who’ve been wrongly imprisoned throughout the world or in this country, or are victims of all kinds of injustice. I hope it resonates for people personally, but also, as you look around the world at really difficult regimes, we can think how important our own democracy is to preserve.”
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tagged in: BBC, Narges Rashidi, Philippa Lowthorpe, Prisoner 951, Stephen Butchard