Creating Unforgotten

(soft music) - My process is to take, first of all each of the guest characters and thread their story through all six episodes.

So I know exactly what happens to them in every single episode.

I do that with all four of them, and only at that point do I then go and start creating the investigation into those characters.

So I hit the beats that I want to hit for each character on each episode and then I allow the investigation to get me there to the places where I want to take the characters emotionally.

- Chris has given those characters a real life, and so everyone, every actor that we encounter, you can tell they feel well cared for by Chris' words.

And then you have Andy on set everyday who's doing the same.

- When I've read the scripts I thought, what I wanted to do with it was to do a portrait of life as it is lived and make the situations very real and try and make everything as real as possible and you responded to that straight away and said yeah that's great.

- He is absolutely stripping everything away and asking you to do something really naturalistic which is quite a, personally quite a challenge.

- What were you main lines of inquiry?

- He knows what he wants - Yeah.

- You know there's a lot of directors that will kind of shoot, cover everything.

And so you do wide, you do a mid-shot, you do a closeup.

Shoot it from every angle and then you go and create it in the edit.

Whereas I think Andy kind of knows what he's looking for he's knows what he's looking for in terms of tone, he knows what he's looking for in terms the rhythm of a scene and all that kind of stuff.

- Mate, I've nowhere to stay tonight.

- Then find a hotel like a normal person.

- With what?

- You don't have that energy sapping debilitating process of somebody shooting everything just in case because they don't quite know how it's gonna come together.

Which also makes the shooting very efficient.

Everyone stays fresh everyone still enjoys it.

- On certain jobs you're doing take after take after take after take actually after an hour or so just becomes gobbelty gook that's coming out your mouth its very difficult for you to believe it yourself.

- He's one of the best directors I think I've ever worked with.

You just end up trusting him you trust him when he says it's great because you trust him when he says hmm that wasn't so good.

- They're just a joy to watch, it's the lovely camera operator we had this year, Martin Foley, the first time he sat he shot Nicola and Sanjeev talking to Alex Jennings he just sort of got up at the end of it.

I always do the closeups first so he got full Nicola and on the first take and he just said, front row seat, fantastic.

You know, and that's how it feels, you get to see that first it's just magnificent it's why I do the job, love it.