Making Magpie Murders

- What makes Magpie Murders so interesting is the "who done it" in the "who done it."

It's the play within the play.

- This series mixes them together in a very unusual and, I think, quite delightful way.

- Well, Magpie Murders has two very distinct sections to it.

- Susan Ryeland exists in the modern world, the present day.

But the book she's editing, in which we dramatize, is set in 1955.

So half the time you are in the present and half of the time you are back then.

- The two times, they kind of oscillate together like that.

And so you learn about one from the other.

- It will be wonderful for cutting between the two different storylines and seeing the echoes between the two stories.

- And that just felt like an irresistible challenge, or creative challenge for a director, in terms of the look, the editing, music, and everything.

The way we can weave these two worlds and the transitions from one to the other.

- The tone for '55 world came to us quite quickly through thinking about films of the era, like Third Man and Hitchcock, plus some more kind of contemporary detective shows and detective films.

So we kind of cohered around that.

We talked about doing Dutch shots, quite high contrast images.

We had some discussions about possibly shooting '55 in black and white.

And then the contemporary world, we really knew we wanted clean shots, instead of kind of shooting over the shoulders with bits of shoulder and foreground.

As much as we could, we just tried to isolate the characters in portraits and almost all of the contemporary scenes were told through Susan, through Lesley Manville's character.

So it was very important to frame her as the kind of key protagonist through which everything else unravels.

So a lot of clean portrait shots of her were very important.

- Because that's the kind of person he was.

He played games and they were always games designed to hurt people.

- We're looking at the way that we light things differently and frame things differently between '21 and '55.

And that's gonna be quite fun because we are using the same village, but it's going to just look, with the color adjustments, slightly different.

- So we are in the village of Kersey today, which is where most of the 1955 story occurs.

And it's the most beautiful, quintessential English country village.

You feel that time is stood still here.

- Everywhere you turn, the camera works and it's pretty much unchanged from 1955.

We even found old photos of it in '55 and it stayed the same.

The location department did a really good job and the people of Kersey were just lovely.

People were really helpful.

It was great.

Let us just use the houses and we had to move all the contemporary cars out of the high street.

We could sometimes change our minds on the square or moment or, "Can we shoot it outside your house?"

People were totally cool.

It was lovely.

It's been great fun playing with the echoes and even the things like Clarisa Pye's House and Claire Jenkins' house where we've got the same shots and you've got an old kettle and a new kettle and you've got an old toaster and a new toaster.

And I kind of hope that people love the show.

They can actually look back and spot all these little echoes.

- It's such a collaborative thing.

You only see the end result on the screen, but the conversations and the working process to arrive at how you create the whole of the character, their environment, as well as how they look and how they are.

- I hope audiences are going to get a great deal of pleasure out of this series because we are dealing with these two worlds.

- I mean, doubling up with locations.

I mean, that's gonna be incredibly difficult for production designers and I'm really looking forward to see how they do that.

- The attention to detail they put into all the sets was just amazing.

And we are continually walking onto these very narratively rich, and sort of gorgeous sets.

- I think it'll be a delight in so many ways.

(suspenseful music)