Titans of Industry
Industry showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay reflect on the unique journey behind making the HBO financial drama, reveal how they evolved from students to showrunners, and offer their advice to aspiring creatives.
As production steams ahead on the fourth season of Industry, creators and showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay describe their award-winning HBO financial drama as a “10-year overnight success.”
The friends met at Oxford University before they both landed jobs in London’s financial district. But after realising they were “ill suited” to banking, they instead decided to follow their love of film and television and look for work in the creative arts.
Down, who had written plays while at school and university, landed a job with a talent agency, where he was able to build his contacts book while making a series of short films in his spare time – at the same time Kay left his City job.
The pair then collaborated on their first “micro budget” feature film, Not An Exit, which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign and carries some of the DNA that would be infused into Industry.
Produced by Bad Wolf and debuting on HBO and the BBC in 2020, Industry follows a group of young bankers as they forge their identities within the pressure-cooker environment and sex- and drug-fuelled blitz of international bank Pierpoint & Co’s London office.
The cast is led by Myha’la (as Harper Stern), Marisa Abela (Yasmin Kara-Hanai), Harry Lawtey (Robert Spearing), Ken Leung (Eric Tao), Conor MacNeill (Kenny Kilbane), Sagar Radia (Rishi Ramdani) and Indy Lewis (Venetia Berens).
Kay and Down took time out from producing season four to take part in a panel at SXSW London earlier this month, where they talked about making the move into the TV business, working out what kind of show they wanted to make and why the cast are the secret to the show’s success.
They first pitched Industry to HBO when the streaming boom was still in its early stages, and when there was no concept of a writers room or a writer-producer in the UK.
Down: You would write something, you’d pitch it to Channel 4 or the BBC, you’d wait a very long time for a response, and the response would 99 times out of 100 be no. If the response was yes, you write it all yourself – there’s no writing room, because they’re very expensive and that’s just not the way it was done in the UK – and then you would hand that script off to the director and the production company and, quite honestly, you’d be on set a few days and then just see it when it comes out. You might go to the edit once.
We were in a position after we made the micro-budget feature where we were going into a lot of rooms and pitching a lot of ideas, and we sold lots of shows. But selling a show in the UK is not like selling a show in the US. You sell a show in the US, that is a huge amount of money, that’s a lot of time, that’s probably going to be in a writers room. Selling a show to the UK, you might sell it for £500.
We sold like 10 ideas, just to keep working and trying to basically convince ourselves we were still writers and that actually the next thing was gonna happen. We had this rule, which is just say yes to everything – we need 10 plates spinning so, if nine of them fall, one’s spinning still.
They came up with one project called Highway – a “pulpy, gothic, Regency-set, sub-Tarantino” drama about a black highwaywoman who is sold into slavery.
Down: It was very violent and vicious, and it was a lot of fun. We sold that to [US cable network] Cinemax and we were in development on that. We’d written a lot of first episodes, and this was the first time we’d written a second episode, because Cinemax were like, ‘We’ll take four scripts before we decide whether we’re going to make this.’ So halfway through writing those episodes, Jane Tranter, who runs [Industry producer] Bad Wolf, said, ‘Have you considered writing about banking, which is what you know?’
We said, ‘Well, we have. We’ve written this thing called Not An Exit,’ which was just a mess, a bag of ideas. We got it out of a drawer, dusted it off, gave it to her, and she was like, ‘This is interesting. Do you want to write this for HBO, potentially?’ She pitched it to HBO on our behalf.
HBO quickly confirmed its interest in the new project. But as HBO and Cinemax were both owned by the same company, Down and Kay had to choose which series to continue with.
Down: We said, ‘OK, we’re going to do Industry.’ We were in Development Hell pretty much with Industry for three years. We wrote the first episode 60 times. We had three massive iterations of it. The first version we wrote, we were like, ‘We’re writing a show about banking for HBO. It has to be all this sort of verité, documentarian [series].’
Kay: We literally said in the pitch that it would be glacially slow, so you can imagine how fucking stupid [that was]. It was so bad – anti-commercial and weird. I don’t know why we did it.
But inspired by notes from Tranter and then-HBO head of programming Casey Bloys, they revisited the concept from the perspective of characters on the trading floor who don’t have any power.
Down: It allowed us to do what we wanted to do and what we had written before, which is a slice of life of London told through the prism of very ambitious young people, and then that unlocked the show. Richard Plepler, CEO of HBO, was stepping down, and one of the last things he did was greenlight our little show.
However, they admit they still weren’t quite sure what Industry was even as they were making season one.
Down: The show has evolved season on season, but in the first season we really didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know what the tone was. We didn’t think it was supposed to be funny, sad, melodramatic. It is all those things now. We lean into different parts in different episodes, and every episode has a different kind of atmosphere. We lean into the actors’ abilities, which are monumental, but I really didn’t know what we were doing. I can’t stress that enough.
Kay: There’s this thing where you’re a young creative in any field and originality is by far the most important thing, especially in TV. We were so afraid to lean into any kind of trope or any kind genre element as a scaffold for the dialogue-driven character stuff. By the time we got to the end of season two, we were like, ‘Actually, we’ve made a quite granular ‘Inside Baseball’ look at this trading floor. It might become more exciting for us to write if we give the thing a proper motor and maybe lean a little bit out of the hard reality of it.’ Little elements of soap here, a murder, something about a father, maybe this IPO is going to go spectacularly wrong in a way that isn’t really true to life but will tell you something about the characters. It was just a little bit more about leaning into the scaffold of TV, which we were scared to do
Down: We were also learning to trust our collaborators a little bit more. At HBO, we realised that, actually, their notes are very constructive and excavate what we’re trying to do pretty well. They give very good notes, and we find ourselves taking 99% of them. They’re also not prescriptive. They will say, ‘Have you thought about this?’ If we show our working, they’ll always be, ‘OK, fine.’ We’ve barely worked anywhere else but that really does set them apart as collaborators.
As the show has progressed, Down and Kay have found the confidence to take the stories in Industry away from the trading floor.
Kay: It’s years of our lives we’ve given to this thing. It is incredibly hard to do. It takes 18 months to make eight hours of TV, so it’s like, how are we going to keep ourselves creatively engaged? And the truth is, because we’ve got older and because we’ve become more interested in this stuff, it’s just a natural broadening of the canvas to keep us engaged in what we’re doing.
Down: S3, which I love and is a success in so many ways, I just think, ‘OK, well, we’ve done that now. Maybe the show is something different.’ It started off as this slice-of-life thing. Young people, very high stakes for them, but very low stakes universally. Then it’s developed and expanded into something else. Season on season, the show’s very different.
Kay: We almost thought every season was going to be the last. Because there’s no IP, which is very rare, there’s nothing to follow. There’s no roadmap for what we’re doing. As long as we take HBO on the journey, we get to Trojan Horse whatever we want into the show. There are genre elements that we’ve never played in before. We’re just going, ‘Oh, this episode’s going to feel a bit like this.’ I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s that kind of evolution. We’ll write an episode and think, ‘Christ, that feels totally unlike anything we’ve done before.’ That’s good, because that’s exciting.
Down credits the cast as the reason Industry is renewed every year.
Down: As we’ve struggled in some respects to figure out what the show is and to write the show, [they] have been just fantastic from the off. We were given a lot of responsibility by HBO to produce all aspects of the show. I’m not sure, in the old world of making TV in the UK, how much power the writers would have to choose their cast, but we had a lot of say in it. We saw so many people. It was very important to us to have unknown people. We also wanted people who looked young, who were the right age, and people you’d never seen before. It added a sense of realism and we thought it was an opportunity to find some really cool new actors.
We could throw anything at them, but we started writing towards the personalities and their talents, and we started moulding the characters around them. We wrote Robert as a ‘Jack the Lad.’ Obviously he has some issues with his home life and he has this class anxiety, but quite honestly, he’s there for a good time. Then Harry Lawtey came in and he played it like that. We were like, ‘I don’t know if this is right, actually.’ Firstly, it’s not that sympathetic. And also, it is quite one-note. Then when he dropped the persona and he was himself, he was great. He was vulnerable, and there was life behind his eyes. He came back in and he did the same audition again; he was loose and was just so good.
Harry has such a vulnerability as a performer that we just started writing into that, and then Robert became the emotional heartbeat of the show because Harry is a very vulnerable and great performer in that space. We write towards Marisa’s ability to do humour, we’re writing towards Myha’la’s steeliness. They’re so good at emotion. I can’t thank our cast enough.
Kay: And then like people like Ken Leung… Why the fuck a guy of his stature would come and shoot a first-season show with two nobodies in Cardiff, and then why the fuck we wouldn’t write enough stuff for him in season one and keep him in the wings, which is another one of our daft decisions…
Down’s advice to aspiring writers and directors is just to make something, and build a community of like-minded creatives. He also says scripts need to grab the reader’s attention within the first few pages.
Down: If you are writing a spec script, make it interesting in the first few pages. And if you can make something, that would still be the advice. Then the other advice is find a collaborator. If you’re a writer, find a director you want to work with. Or if you are a director, find a writer or an actor. Create a little community of people you can work with.
This is a very lonely job; I’m very grateful I have Konrad. We have the same taste and we like working together. It would be impossible to produce the show as we are now without two of us. We split the workload. Psychologically, it is great to have a collaborator.
Kay: It can be really disingenuous when people say they’re in the right place at the right time. I hate hearing that because it’s not practical advice – but we were in the right place at the right time. We met Jane just at a time when she had the influence to put us in front of HBO. We effectively joined the industry at the start of the gold rush. If you were to list the things that happened in order to get us to where we were, it’s a one-in-a-million thing. That makes us grateful and we have gratitude for it.
Down: You’ve got to keep going. You need to be somewhat delusional to think you’ll be a success in this industry – and if you are that delusional, you should go for it. There’s other practical stuff like say yes to everything. Especially now that the market is contracting, just say yes to everything. That’s Valhalla for a writer, to be paid to write. So just get in a position where you can do that.
If they knew the formula for getting original series on TV, they say they would be very rich.
Kay: If you’re a writer or director without profile, the idea of doing something that doesn’t have IP behind it would be almost impossible. We’re so lucky because Industry is our thing and it doesn’t really come from anything apart from our brains. But even with the track record of the show being successful, if we came with an actual idea to one of the big players, it would be very hard for us to get off the ground. Unless it had a very easy conceit like a murder mystery or an actor or a director [of note attached], I can’t really see it happening.
But they hope to be making Industry for years to come.
Kay: We love our relationship with HBO, we’re in a deal with them and we want to do as many seasons of Industry as we feel creatively fulfilled by. To be honest, with the fourth season, we feel like we’ve reset the show and we would love to do probably a couple more seasons afterwards.
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
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Bad Banks: This German series dives into the intense, high-pressure world of investment banking, following a young woman navigating the treacherous waters of corporate intrigue and personal ambition.
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