See How They Run team breaks down all those Agatha Christie Easter eggs
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Warning: This article contains spoilers about See How They Run.
For 100 years, Agatha Christie has reigned supreme as the grand dame of mystery.
So, it stands to reason that she could use a little spoofing every once and awhile, and that's what See How They Run does oh-so-lovingly.
Set against the backdrop of the West End production of Christie's The Mousetrap during its earliest days of success in the 1950s, the whodunit unravels a morass of murder involving film directors, movie stars, and peevish screenwriters. Detective Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and the resolutely earnest Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) navigate a web of lies and deceit worthy of Christie herself.
But the script by Mark Chappell is bursting with winking nods to Christie's work, including Belgian hotel staff, the plot of the Mousetrap itself, and the very name of its inspector and its title. It's both a comedy and a mystery, employing the best of Christie's trademarks.
We caught up with Chappell and director Tom George to break down just how they managed to stuff in so many Christie Easter eggs, plus how they pulled off the film's epic climax, and more.
Parisa Taghizadeh/20th Century Studios
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Which one of you is the Agatha Christie super fan or is it both of you?
MARK CHAPPELL: I certainly know a lot more about Agatha Christie now than I did before I started on this. Whatever I felt before I certainly came to love her and cherish her, and I hoped that the fun of the film is good-natured fun in terms of playing with her.
How did you get the idea to construct a script around The Mousetrap and this meta approach to a Christie homage?
CHAPPELL: At the heart of it was this anecdote about the film producer who acquired the film rights to adapt the play into a motion picture — there was a clause in the contract, as we say in the film, that stipulated no film could go into production until the play in the West End came to a finish. At the time, the longest-running play was a couple of months, even the big box office smashes. So, he thought he was in the clear here. He's since died and the play is still going strong. I think his son owns the rights now. It's a fun anecdote, but it is just an anecdote and what came out of that was the idea of a murder mystery set against the backdrop of arguably one of the most famous murder mysteries in the world. From there, it was a case of trying to have as much fun and to put in as many knowing references to play with the conventions of the whodunit. And the whodunit is synonymous with Agatha Christie. So, you had to have a lot of fun with her at the same time.
TOM GEORGE: Even if you're not a fan of Agatha Christie, per se, certainly in the [United Kingdom], it is deeply burned into our subconscious. Every Saturday night, I would sit down and watch a Poirot with my little brother when we were kids. It might feel like it waxes and wanes in the wider world, but here, it's pretty constant.
CHAPPELL: I had no idea how much I knew about Agatha Christie and the murder mysteries until I got into this. And I was like, "Yeah, I know all of this." We are steeped in the conventions of the Agatha Christie-style whodunit, which is great for comedy because you're constantly playing on an expectation that the audience doesn't even realize they have.
Your title is a nod to the original title of The Mousetrap, Three Blind Mice. Did you go through multiple titles or was that always what you wanted?
CHAPPELL: I'd be lying if I said there were not at least 1,000 titles that we played with. This is such rich, fertile territory, right? You want to have a fun title, as a reference to Agatha Christie. And there's a lot to play with. Going back to Three Blind Mice and her penchant for nursery rhymes in her titles, we had a lot of clever ones and brilliant ones, but none of them worked as well as this one.
Tom, as you said, there have been so many adaptations of her work in television and film. Did you want to borrow from any of those visually?
GEORGE: Not particularly. The direction for the overall stylistic and tonal approach came from the script. It was clear that there was this tension between, on the one hand, a film that is set in 1953 and needs to feel like a fully realized period world, but at the same time, only functions from a modern viewpoint. It requires that the audience know a little about the history of theater and film noir and murder mysteries of course. That tension between this modern viewpoint and this period film guided everything across all departments. The conversation I kept having over and over was, "Where exactly do we sit in terms of being a faithful reproduction of the period or something that slightly unseats the period setting and honors that contemporary thread that is running through the script?"
CHAPPELL: We did borrow one location. The very popular David Suchet Poirot [series]. Mervyn Cocker-Norris, the writer, David Oyelowo's character — his apartment is in the same building as David Suchet's Poirot.
The Christie family is still very involved in monitoring her legacy. Did you have to work with the estate a lot on this or were you one step far enough removed that you were in the clear?
CHAPPELL: I'm going to make it clear, I'm not a lawyer. [Laughs] We hear snippets of The Mousetrap, but they're not actual lines of dialogue from the play. The family knows about this. They've read the script. I'm led to believe that although the film might not be hilarious to them, they know that it's well-intentioned. It's affectionate.
You have this really interesting mix of real people, where you have Richard Attenborough and Agatha comes in herself. How did you decide who would be pulled from history and who you would invent?
CHAPPELL: It felt like it needed to be about half and half. There was only really one character who wasn't obvious. And that was the police commissioner — he's actually a real person as well. He was the first bureaucratic cop. There is the staple of an American copper who's just a desk jockey. He was like the first English version of that stereotype. Wherever it was convenient, a real person was used. In almost all the cases, they are real names. And any resemblance to the real people is entirely coincidental. I can certainly vouch for that. But they fall into great Agatha Christie-type characters, like Dickie Attenborough. I know him more as a director than an actor, but he was huge at the time and his appearance in The Mousetrap was the first of its kind of a big film star doing a West End show. And his wife was in it. There were a lot of moments where it all added up very nicely for what we were trying to do.
Tom, I love the planting and payoff of getting the whole climax storyboarded, and then that ends up being the actual climax of the film. Did you reverse engineer that and decide what the climax would look like? And then have the art department do the drawings? What was that process?
GEORGE: I said to the first AD, "I only have one request for your whole schedule. Please, can we shoot the storyboarding scene with Leo Kopernick after we've shot the finale scene that his storyboards will be based on?" So, of course, that was impossible. Instead, we shot the Leo storyboard scene first. So, ironically, we had to storyboard [the climax]. We had to know exactly how we were going to do that final sequence before we did the Leo scene. That was one of the moments as a director that was unbelievably exciting and got me really enthused about the project. The seeding of it in a way that there is a really satisfying payoff for the audience, to give them just enough to go on but not too much. And that was something that we found throughout in the mystery elements, and in balancing the comedy elements with the mystery thriller elements.
CHAPPELL: I find Adrien very funny in his storyboarding scene. If you're enjoying that comedically, your brain doesn't necessarily register that this might be a setup for something later on.
GEORGE: Hopefully, for some members of the audience there's enough in there that you think, "Hold on, is this something more than it is?" But the great thing about having comedy and thriller in play is that you can bury one in the other. You can bury plot or bury the seeding of future ideas in a joke.
There are so many Easter eggs in here for people who are Christie fans. There's the red herring of "the inspector did it," which will be obvious to anyone who's seen The Mousetrap.
CHAPPELL: Which is an idea that came very late in the day.
Tell me more about that.
CHAPPELL: It was just one of those moments where it was like, "Of course, we've got to sell that the inspector did it." It's the only thing I knew about The Mousetrap and it's like, "Well, why is that not in it?"
And then you have some smaller ones like Inspector Stoppard, nodding to Tom Stoppard's Mousetrap spoof, The Real Inspector Hound, and the Savoy Butler being Belgian and not French. Were those all coming to you as you were writing or were they workshopped? How did you figure out what you'd sprinkle in where?
GEORGE: They definitely weren't workshopped. I was still unpicking them in rehearsals. The workshopping that was going on was me trying to understand just how deep the rabbit hole went.
CHAPPELL: Writing can be a lonely process. And if you can't amuse yourself, what hope do you have that an audience is going to be amused? Over time you can build and build and the more books you read, the more you find [things to include]. For example, the dentists, when Saoirse looks for the dentist, each one of those dentists is a reference to some dentist. It's like, "Why would you bother?" But then at the same time, you've got to name the dentist, so why not name the dentist Norman Gale after a dentist in an Agatha Christie story who was the murderer in that story?
What made Sam the right choice for your Poirot or Marple figure here?
GEORGE: What we knew we'd get with Sam was nuance and detail and richness in the character, and particularly, a depth to the story that goes beneath the surface. As soon as we landed on Sam, it made total sense because he brings to a lot of his roles, that slight insecurity or that sense of something slightly broken inside. He's so adept at bringing those characters to life. Our original instinct was to find someone with an English accent. It speaks to the fact of how good a fit Sam felt once we landed on it.
CHAPPELL: We also talked about his gravitas. It's a different combination of that insecurity that Tom speaks of but also a seriousness. You get the comedy of Saoirse's character feeling a little nervous in his presence. He's not a light-hearted character.
GEORGE: Stoppard's the straight man in a lot of the scenes, particularly their early interactions. Stalker gets the funny lines and is the oddball, and he's very much on the straight and narrow. In other hands, that could become slightly uninteresting or bland, and that's what Sam is able to find. He makes unusual choices in a performance that opens up the character and bring unexpected detail and nuances.
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