doHow do you go from directing two mini-series for the BBC to leading a Searchlight and Disney project with a huge cast led by Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan?? Not even Tom George himself explains it in this exclusive interview for eCartelera. His debut on the big screen, ‘Look how they run’, a whodunnit or manual murder mystery, is already in all the cinemas in Spain. But it had something in common with his previous works, ‘This Country’ and ‘Defending the guilty’: “it’s also a comedy of characters, it’s a piece focused on performances and that’s what excited me and made me believe that it could fit”. In our review we confirm that it was so, and in these 5 minutes we discover all the challenges he faced in his first film. Among them, of course, the coronavirus.
The history of its filming is full of lime and sand. On the one hand, being a very theatrical film with an ensemble but small cast, they did not see their technical means as limited when shooting in the midst of a pandemic. His main goal as team captain was “create a space where people could come and work and forget about what was going on in the world”. Of course, this close touch also caused tensions to rise: “everyone was stressed, it was a very strange time to be living alone and shooting a movie”. Specifically, That moment was the second quarantine due to the spread of COVID-19 in London and the entire United Kingdom.
This abnormality in the central location of the film also had its advantages and disadvantages. “We were able to record in some amazing locations around London that we normally wouldn’t have had for the time we needed them. Like the Old Vic theater, where we were able to be in the stalls and on stage”. This is, without a doubt, one of the great incentives to enjoy ‘Look how they run’ in the biggest cinema or on the best television when it arrives in less than two months on Disney +. “It gave us the opportunity to show these places to spectators and help those theaters financially”. Therein lies the paradox: all those scenes of interrogations and conspiracies so well lit are now a reminder of the crisis that theaters suffered during the quarantine. For the manager, “It was bittersweet, since we could be there because their doors were closed”.
Follow the rules or break them?
Aside from being a character story, what most attracted Tom to Mark Chappell’s script was that “it’s a murder-solving thriller but it’s also a movie about those murder thrillers”. Given this approach, instead of following the classic scheme of Kenneth Branagh in ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, he has tried to emulate the groundbreaking style of Rian Johnson in ‘Daggers in the Back’: “wasn’t interested in doing a simple whodunnit”. Of course, the director of ‘Look how they run’ warns that “you have to build those guidelines before you put your spin on them. You can’t get rid of all the rules, because then it’s not a whodunnit anymore”. He tries to fulfill them with the murder of a member of a stage adaptation of Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery. All the clues and literal musings about how they unfold are already in those 98 minutes of footage. He now it’s up to the viewer to discover them to answer the question that all whodunnit raises, even those who try to be more disruptive like this: who did it?
Reference-www.ecartelera.com
