Emmy Talk: ‘The Night Manager’ Director Susanne Bier on AMC’s Spy Thriller (and Her Own Bond Rumors)
Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston in “The Night Manager.” (Photo: Des Willie/AMC)
Susanne Bier is already an Oscar winner, for Denmark’s 2011 Best Foreign Language Film In a Better World, but she could be looking at her first Emmy nomination for helming AMC’s miniseries The Night Manager, the six-part adaptation of the 1993 John le Carré novel about a charming international arms dealer (Hugh Laurie’s Richard Roper) and the soldier turned hotel manager turned spy (Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine) who infiltrates his organization to bring him down.
It’s a glossy, gripping thriller grounded by an equally Emmy-worthy performance by Olivia Colman (as Pine’s pregnant handler, Angela Burr). It also fueled Bond rumors for Hiddleston — and ignited them for Bier, who, if chosen to inherit the franchise from Sam Mendes, would be the first woman to direct a Bond film.
Asked if she could’ve imagined being part of that speculation before The Night Manager, Bier takes some time to word her answer. “I just really had a lot of fun doing all the action stuff and the suspense stuff way more than I had been. It just felt really natural and exciting, and I loved doing it,” she says. “I love Bond. I’ve seen all of them, and I’d be superhonored. But it’s not really something which is part of any sort of planning.”
Here, Bier looks back on The Night Manager, an experience she says she would, “in a blink,” happily do all over again.
Warning: This interview contains spoilers.
Yahoo TV: When you think of The Night Manager now, what are you most proud of?
Susanne Bier: I think I am most proud of the fact that we maintained the tension of the big question: whether Jonathan Pine is going to be corrupted in his mission or whether he’s going to stick to his principles. To keep that tension and to keep that doubt throughout the series was my biggest worry and, in a way, the biggest challenge. I’m very proud, because we actually succeeded.
I was at the Tribeca Film Festival screening and Q&A that you and Tom attended, and I loved hearing how closely the two of you worked, seeing who’d call first on a Sunday.
Yes. Basically, I think I read the first version of the first episode in the middle of October 2014, and we had the window, which was from February until June of 2015, where Tom and Hugh were available. So it was a very, very short window. The script was being written as we were prepping, so it was very, very chaotic. For obvious reasons, the script wasn’t quite ready when we started shooting, so there were so many questions and there were so many decisions being made as we were in production and as we were working along.
Because we weren’t shooting in continuity, and we weren’t shooting one episode at a time, there were lots and lots of things which were up in the air. Sunday was basically our only day off. So every week, Tom and I would have this thing: who was going to call the other one first, starting around 7:30 in the morning, to go over the coming week’s scenes in order to figure out, “Are we missing some bit of information in this scene, which we are now doing for Episode 3?” We’d done the previous scene three weeks earlier. We’d need to address that in terms of changing it slightly or whatever, so there was this continued massaging of all the material throughout the entire 17 weeks.
Susanne Bier and Tom Hiddleston. (Photo: Getty Images)
I did weekly postmortems with executive producer Stephen Garrett as the miniseries aired in the U.S., and he said one scene that required a lot of discussion was in the finale, when Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) is brought as a hostage to Burr’s room. There was a question as to whether Burr would have a gun?
The scene where Burr ends up shooting Frisky in the leg? Yes. We had a lot of discussions about that, and Hugh had this thing: "No, no, no. She’s British, she needs to have a pepper spray.” And I was like, “But it’s not going to be a dramatic scene like that.” [Laughs] Hugh and I had quite a lot of disagreements, but they were always extremely friendly and very, very loving disagreements, and we had a lot of fun with them, but this was one of them. I was going, “No, no, no, Hugh. It’s not going to work. You can’t fight Frisky with a pepper spray.” But I did agree with him [on some level] — that’s why she shoots him in the leg, because she is British and she’s not going to kill somebody. She’d rather have somebody in a state where she can get away and she can then arrest him, which is what she does.
Olivia Colman (Photo: Des Willie//The Ink Factory/AMC)
The miniseries has huge, gorgeous shots — like the two boats driving to the restaurant on Majorca in Episode 2 — but also intimate ones, like my favorite Burr scene, when she tells her colleague why she’s after Roper (He started selling sarin after seeing firsthand what it did to 112 children and 58 adults at a school sports day.). Olivia Colman is so wonderful in that scene.
It was interesting, because there was the script version of the scene, and then I told Hugh that I think, in a way, that maybe something more could come out of the scene. And then a few days before shooting, he sent me a version of the scene, and I showed it to Olivia, and she loved it. We did a couple of changes to that.
It was basically the scene where you realize that for all Burr’s coolness and for all her determination and for all her relentless chasing of Roper, there is a real heart and there is a real profound pain behind the whole thing. That scene was crucial for us to really understand her completely. We did a couple takes of it, and she did one which was really kind of grand, and she looked at me and I looked at her, and we both went, “No, no, no. We can’t do that.” It has to be sad, but it has to be less grand.
There’s a moment where she almost laughs as she’s describing the horror, and I think that’s such a real human moment — a defense mechanism where you can’t believe you’re having to say something this horrible or that you’re about to cry in front of someone.
She’s a fantastic actress, and she managed to do that thing of being very honest. This is a real person standing in front of you.
There were many changes from the novel: big ones like Leonard Burr becoming Angela Burr, and smaller ones, like Sophie’s dog living.
In the novel, the dog is dead as well. We thought for some reason on film, it would actually be more harrowing if the dog is not dead. I also thought somehow, and Hugh had this thing, that probably Roper loved animals, and there was something quite brutal about letting the dog stay alive and killing Sophie. So we changed that.
At Tribeca, you’d talked about how when you get on set and something doesn’t feel right as scripted, you will change it, because you need it to feel right in the space, in the moment, on that day. What were some things that you found yourself tweaking on set?
Every day it’s like that. It can be a piece of dialogue, or I might change the location. A scene might be written for the bedroom, and we get there and it feels stale and it feels artificial, and you say, “OK, let’s just take it outside,” and then we’ll do that and basically have the same scene.
For me, it’s about being very respectful of the script, but being respectful enough to know when it comes to life and when it doesn’t come to life. And when it doesn’t come to life on set, you need to address that, and you need to address that extremely efficiently.
It does feel like both Tom and Hugh had such an understanding of, and love for, their characters. Stephen had mentioned that Roper’s line to Pine at the end, “Couldn’t just scratch my nose, could you?” as he’s being led out in handcuffs, was something that Hugh had added. Did he do a lot of improvising?
I love that line. He just said it on the spot. [Laughs] They’d both be doing that all the time. I’m not a fan of complete improvisation, because it quite often gets boring. I am a fan of words being real when they come out of mouths of actors who really know their characters and who really know what they are doing. Every day, they would be tweaking, adding, maybe switching lines, because yes, the words might be right, but actually the other person is saying it. It was a very vivid and incredibly creative collaboration.
I’ve heard Tom often uses music to get into the mood right before a scene. Do you have anything special that you do to prepare for your day? Any rituals?
I have extreme, disciplined rituals. I wake up three, four hours before I go to set every morning, and I don’t talk to anyone. I usually stay on my own, in a hotel away from everyone else, and I just sit down and go over all the scenes and go over all the dialogue, so that I’m ready to embrace whatever ideas come from the cast or from the crew. I think the only way to work slightly freely with a script is if you are extremely well-prepared. The actors need to communicate with me, and I need to communicate with the [director of photography], with continuity, with the costume group, everybody, so I have that moment of meditating upon the material before I get to set.
We have to talk about the Episode 4 sex scene. When it aired in the U.K., #Hiddlesbum trended. AMC had to trim the scene a bit, but put it up on YouTube to make amends. Did you expect that much fanfare when you filmed it?
No. We made a scene, which is a passionate scene where those two people, who have been stuck on one another for a while, finally have a short moment on their own. I treat sex scenes like all other scenes. They have to be right for that moment. They have to embrace whatever is going on between the characters, and I thought that was the right way to do it. I’m a little bit mystified by it. Yes, I think they’re super-handsome and super-sexy, and of course it’s a sexy scene. It needs to be a sexy scene. But for me, it’s the right shape of that scene.
I’ve also been asked, “Did you just have him stand up because it was more convenient?” I was looking at that journalist asking that question, and I was like, “Of course I don’t do it because it’s more convenient. I do it because it’s an artistic decision, and I thought it was the right decision.” I have been a bit surprised by it, but I have not been anywhere as surprised as Tom has been. I think he’s been slightly shocked by the whole thing.
This is the last time I will objectify him in this interview, but I’ve heard people say Tom looks so good in blue (which he wears a lot of in this miniseries) that he should have his own shade of blue, like Hiddleston Blue.
Yes. He looks great in blue. Those eyes and a blue jacket is very, very compelling.
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