Courtesy of TAKE 36 Winter Issue from the Screen Directors Guild of New Zealand

Insiders Guide to Happiness
It's cool, it's hip, it's new - so what happened, how did we get this on our telescreens?
Interview by Shonagh Lindsay with directors Jonathan Brough, Mark Beesley and Brendon Donovan.Courtesy of TAKE 36 Winter Issue from the Screen Directors Guild of New Zealand

Insiders Guide to Happiness
It's cool, it's hip, it's new - so what happened, how did we get this on our telescreens?
Interview by Shonagh Lindsay with directors Jonathan Brough, Mark Beesley and Brendon Donovan.Jonathon Brough
JB It was a good bit of risk taking on Dave Gibson's part. I thought the scripts were fantastic, unusual, in fact the first scripts were even slightly weirder, they made me pursue the job. I guess unusual scripts called for a different approach, it wasn't going to be shot like a normal show and casting around Dave chose Donovan and me, who between us had short film, commercials, music video and documentary experience but no television drama series. So at the outset it wasn't going to look like a standard TV drama. But Mark, of course, had done a lot of television drama.

SL Were the scripts complete when you began shooting?

JB No, they were actually being written as we went some didn't arrive till less than a week before we shot. But we had a long rehearsal period, so the writers could see how the characters were developing, which fed into what they were writing. It's such a rarity to get such a long rehearsal period in television, but if we'd gone into it with less we would have been floundering.

SL What else was different?

JB We used two full units - though with small crews - at the same time, making for interesting scheduling of the nine main character actors, not to mention all the 180 secondary parts, it's a fairly populated series.

SL Was this to save costs?

JB It was both to save money and time; the broadcasters wanted it in a hurry.

SL That must have been hard on the actors. How did you manage that as a director?

JB Some of the actors could have been acting in four different episodes in the same day. So we concentrated on cementing character, rather than specifically working through scenes in the script, so if they going from ep to ep were secure in who their character was and could act through whatever was thrown at them.

We also worked on the scripts with the actors, they could comment on scenes that didn't work for them and these would be fed back to the writers.

SL What were the writers' work backgrounds?

JB Peter Cox, whose idea the series was, is primarily a comedy writer in plays; Paula Bock, is a novelist; and Damien Wilken is also a novelist; and David Brecken-Smith, who's more of a television tradesman, he wrote a lot of The Strip.

SL How else did you approach the scripts?

JB The one thing I was worried about was wearing out the material - we could have worked and reworked the scenes - but my take was that we needed to keep spontaneity, so we did more work off the scripts then we did on. Improvising around situations, getting one character to play another so they could observe their character, a whole lot of things.

SL And any other directors' methods?

JB In terms of other experimental techniques, it was unusual for television to shoot everything on location as they did - sometimes being in four to five different places on any given day - so we kept the overall visual style quite formal because the narrative was so complicated.

Getting the actors to play things out, uncut two shots, and wider shots and only use close-ups sparingly where they'd have a good visual impact. A rule we stuck to was that when we tracked the camera it was only ever for a point, not just to reframe or make a piece of blocking work. It would always be for some kind of set piece. We had a hell of a lot of material to shoot so it had to stay relatively simple.

SL I came to it halfway through so found it a bit hard get a sense of the characters.

JB The thing about the show is that it's an accumulative experience, you need to watch each episode, the events that happen to each person, and the nuances of each episode build on each other rather than seeing it a single ep and say that was one thing. And that's unusual for television.

The eps can be very different in style, and the complexity of storylines varies as well. It's appealed, surprisingly, to older viewers, when it was expected to be popular with the younger lot.

SL What was the actors' experience like?

JB They had mostly not done much TV before either, which gave them a naivety that allowed them to experiment. As we got further through the rehearsal process we could see many of the actors were quite similar to their characters in a lot of ways, which is kind of essential in filmmaking, though not so in television. The casting (done by Sandra Bullock and Dave Gibson) was ongoing. I think we used just about everyone in Wellington!"

Mark Beesley

SL I see they're playing it twice a week, repeating it on Sunday nights, is that usual?

MB That's something they're doing with anything they think will be "water cooler TV."

SL How did directing Insider compare to your other television drama work?

MB Insiders is quite different in all sorts of ways, generally TV drama becomes quite soap-like: who is in love with who and so on. But from the beginning Insiders Guide took a more cinematic approach, probably in an effort to gain the younger, film and media savvy, audience. Usually shows are crafted to work in seven-minute segments, it's not designed to linger with you very long.

It's hard to compete with the big-budget US shows the younger audience have dieted on. Insider didn't take the short cuts TV so often does: close-ups where they sit and talk, it was not dialogue driven, the characters tend to be doing not saying things. I noticed that when I first read the scripts. What they were doing in those was quite odd but somehow moving.

SL Was Insider more director-driven than is usual in television?

MB Without a doubt, and for the director this is exciting and quite rare. Usually, in television, the producer rules, but when I came to Wellington I found Jonathon and Brendan rejecting locations cause they didn't fit the visual look they wanted, they were treating this as a very personal project and along with the rest of the department were developing this approach.

This could be quite difficult. But Dave gave them the head to push this out of a comfortable soapy zone into something fresh. When we three directors first met to talk about Insider, we immediately began talking about Lantana and Magnolia as opposed to The Secret Life of Us; our references were film not television. The episodes play a lot more like short films, where a lot of information may be given visually but not much by dialogue

SL What about your approach to the performances?

MB TV series can lose their sense of mystery all the work gets done for the audience; you begin to know what's going to happen. In Insiders you don't know and there's always a complete surprise, where suddenly something is revealed. And the performances had to leave space for this.

We tried not to just render the script, but to get the actors into a space where they could give a performance that even they probably could not quite do like that again. Mostly in TV it's stand on the mark, say your piece, cut, let's move the camera, do it again. We've got plenty of actors who are good at managing that, but a certain amount of spontaneity can get drained out.

With this cast there were some extraordinary things going on with the reactions in their performances, it's renewed my faith in television and what's possible in drama here. I just want to see something I haven't seen before. I don't really mind if I've heard the story before, but I want to see a different way of performing it, something fresh. It's sort of true for all the characters that you're on a journey with them.

SL The visual style is very fresh also.

MB The idea was to shoot it as realistically as possible, so that the strange things that happen in it are similar to what happens in real life, so we can see it as recognisable and real. And because we shot on digital tape we tried to use its strengths rather than expose its weaknesses, you can't really use lighting to give it a filmic quality but we shot it letter-box style and gave it a de-saturated look.

Brendan Donovan

SL What had you made prior to Insiders?

BD I'd just finished a NZ short - Cockle - and before that made Here and Grasp, both made in the States, the last for Sci-Fi channel, and I'd made a fair few commercials.

SL What attracted you enough to come back and direct Insider?

BD I thought the scripts were very cinematic - complex plot with multi-protagonist interweaving, bigger issues being explored than usual in television. I don't actually watch or respect television as a rule; lately I've watched Sopranos and Six Feet Under, much earlier Edge of Darkness and Twin Peaks.

SL So how were you going to treat these?

BD I knew I'd treat them as cinema. I see myself as having an auteur approach. The Insiders Guide is a particular way of looking at the world and I wanted us to keep true to the spirit of the scripts. We worked hard to create a whole visual tone: to stand back a lot more, not as bright and tight as television usually is, use natural light a lot and long lens, have people speaking beyond the screen and so on.

Jonathan and I discussed these, and then along with a bunch of images and video scenes from films we'd looked at, I created a kind of visual reference code, useful for getting the producer and department on board. And it was also part of our rehearsal process.

SL And your performances?

BD For the initial seven episodes we'd have a read through, for some of these several times, then the actors would leave and we'd have a discussion. Those discussions were better for plot and script structure than developing the characters. I really enjoyed the whole process, and found it excellent preparation for doing my feature.

SL What is your feature film?

BD I've been optioned by Touchdown Films and Robyn Scholes for a film I've written. It's about two families in Howick - Asian and White - with a romance, exploring the reverse racism, the new community being forged there between two disparate communities. It's called Chowick. An entirely new suburb created in only eight years. Everyone is in the process of adaptation out there.