A Conversation with Anthony Horowitz - Foyle's War series 1 dvd; 20 November 2002 - Part 2

Interviewer: How much research did you have to do for the period, or was it a period that you were quite interested in and knew a lot about anyway?

Anthony Horowitz: It's a period I was interested in and knew a certain amount about, but I did have to do a lot of research. I mean, I have read, oh, many, many books - for each episode I seem to read about four or five books that specialises [sic] in the area that I'm dealing in, and I think I'm … it would have been nice to meet people and talk to them but I couldn't ever do that, so I read. I do read a great deal.

Interviewer: I like the Desoutter leg. I thought that was interesting. Was that actually true?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, it's details like that that really take my fancy. In a way I've suggested to the producer that we really ought to do a sort of a 'The Real Story of Foyle's War' because almost everything in every script is based on reality. And that's one of the things I like most of all about writing it, is that you read books and you find things that people just don't know about. An example - it's a small thing, but Mr Smith, the character in Eagle Day, the fourth episode, says he's an ice-cream seller. 'Stop me and buy one!' Now, just that - 'stop me and buy one!' - to me, suddenly, just those words put together takes me back to 1940! I mean, I wasn't alive then; I wasn't born for another fifteen-odd years, but still, just those words - I'm there! And then he adds that he's lost his job because, first of all, his truck was taken away for carrying blood around, blood transfusions, and anyway there's no more ice-cream. And both those details again give me enormous pleasure. The fact that somebody, in 1930 or '40, sat down and said 'we've got to transport blood; how can we do it? Oh - we'll take the ice-cream vans' - that's very English, isn't it? I think it's just a wonderfully rich detail. And the fact that there was no more ice-cream, one of the things that went out, just comes together and it makes the character live and it adds a reality to the show. I think all of the details together - and there are hundreds of them even in the first four scripts - are the fun of writing it in many ways, and something that I wasn't able to do before.

Interviewer: When you're actually writing an episode, you're now intimately acquainted with your characters, they're absolutely uppermost in your mind, so how do you set about the series? Did you plot the entire four episodes, or did you take each one as an individual one-off?

Anthony Horowitz: The series works this way: first of all, we have a timeline. We started in, I think it's May 1940, by now, second series, we're into September 1940. We've got a lot of 1940 stuff because it's such an interesting year. So where I tend to start with each episode is with a date and with an event. So you look at something like the fall of Norway, which is Episode One, and Milner losing his leg there. Then we go to Dunkirk for Episode Two. Episode Three is Italy declares war and joins the Axis, and the fourth one, Eagle Day, as the title says, is Eagle Day, when the Germans attempted to knock out the English airfields. These are four big events of the war. The fifth one, which I'm just writing at the moment, is going to be the American involvement in the Second World War, and a deal that was struck in September 1940. So that's where I begin in terms of each story. Not, as I would with the Midsomer Murders, with who kills who, but with 'when does this happen?' The second thing I do is sort of the core of each episode, which is 'who's going to be murdered, and who by, and why?' It's almost like rings in a circle to me, it's concentric rings, the middle ring, the one in the bulls-eye of this, is the murder; the outer ring, the very edge of the dart-board if you like, is the world in which it is set, and then it's just a question of filling in all the different rings within that until you've got the whole thing. I don't know if that makes any sense to you, but that's how it works.

Interviewer: How much did the financial limitations limit the way you wrote the episodes? Were there things that you would have preferred to have been a lot more expansive about but that you knew you couldn't because shooting it would have been over the budget?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, it's not my job to think about budgets, ever. I write what I want to write, and it's the producer's job to make it happen. This is slightly complicated by the fact that the producer in this case, Jill Green, is also married to me. So occasionally I'd be sitting in bed with my note pad and I'd say, 'Yes, the Spitfires take off in this scene and fly into this and then we'll swivel round and see this thing explode' and next to me I can see her freezing and saying 'You must be joking - what do you think you're doing? Forget it!' But to be fair to Jill, just about everything I wrote was done. Always, television is about making compromises. But it's not the writer who makes the compromises at the end of the day, it's the director. You know, the director has his own vision of what he wants, and so if you want to have a Spitfire flying, or an airfield being bombed, which we do have in Eagle Day, then you have to cut back. And so when they drive to Wales in that same episode to go and visit the art treasures, in fact they're driving somewhere north of Luton. They didn't get to Wales, although there was a wonderful mine we could have used, in fact, that was a school-room in a disused school in St. Albans. So those are the sort of compromises one makes, but then we did get the bombed airfields. Now I'm about to deliver an episode where the end of Part One is a German submarine coming to the surface, and that in fact same episode begins with a bombing on Hastings and everything else. I have absolutely no qualms about writing it, but somewhere down the line there might be a scene that I would have liked to have seen set in London that will now have to move to somewhere else. So it is a balancing act, but I think by and large the production values on Foyle's War have been fantastic. Don't forget you are talking about the single most expensive television it is possible to make, by far and away. And you know we don't have the same budgets of a Steven Spielberg or whoever, and I think that, you know, given the amount of money that there was that it looks better than I could have hoped for, and that's very much down - it is, of course, the director, the designer Maurice Cain, brilliant, able to do anything. Give him a box of matches and he'll give you a radar station! But also, you know, Jill Green and Jeremy Silberston and the other people working on it who have done that.

Interviewer: And how pleased were you with the characters' representation?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, if you talk about the actors on this, inevitably when you're filming an interview like this I'm not going to start saying, you know, he or she was awful -

Interviewer: No, no, of course not, but I mean, sometimes, you can say 'well, actually I didn't quite see the character like that but it was interesting way it was interpreted'.

Anthony Horowitz: (laughing) Well, one of the good things about working on Foyle's War is if there are any actors or actresses I'm not happy with, because it's 1940 we can drop a bomb on them in any episode. It's quite nice to have that control, that power! But, actually, no - we've got four leads: Michael Kitchen, Anthony Howell, Honeysuckle Weeks, and Julian Ovenden, and all four of them are so exactly what I wanted, and yet more. When you write a script -- a television script is only the beginning of a character. You can't write it all in. You intimate things. You layer it in quite lightly. The actor or actress has to bring so much more to the part. And in all four cases they've made them their own, and that's exciting for me. What I always say is a good actor shows me things I didn't expect, not things that I did expect, and that's been the case - and certainly with Michael, you know, who's the only actor I've ever worked with who says, 'Give me less lines'. And that -- I've never heard it before from anybody because, you know, I've worked on shows where actors, they get the script and you can see them thumbing through to see where they're going to speak. Not him. I mean, he's much more interested on [sic] saying less and doing more just with his eyes, with his face, with silence, and that's something I've had to learn to adapt to. That less is more, and can be. It's not normally the way I write.

A lot of it is luck. You know, Honeysuckle was quite a late arrival in the show, into that part. And the fact that it's her -- I can't imagine anyone who would have done it better, I really can't. Because, you know - look at the scene, there's a scene - well, she's delightful, and funny - and Michael also became aware - this is what I'm talking about when I say that the show grew - but after the first episode, we're looking at it and we're saying 'what is working here?', and one thing that we realised is working terribly well is the chemistry between Foyle and Sam. There is something very warm and very human and very slightly humourous - we're not going for sort of big laughs, but just with a smile to it. And we both agreed that we had to have more of that and to develop that any way we could.

Interviewer: So it's going to make your job easier now having four established characters that obviously are knitting together so well, or is that actually going to give you, as the writer, more difficulties?

Anthony Horowitz: Well, it's never that easy. There are problems. I don't - first of all, these are characters who are developing. We're talking about a five-year period, 1940 through to 1945, with lots of things happening, and so they're not going to remain static. And what I don't want to get into, and this is sort of a danger of television detective shows, is that you end up with your little Sam story, or your little Milner story, or your little diversions that are just to give each actor and actress a bit of screen time. I want to do more than that; I want to keep them evolving. So in one sense it's easier because I know them so well now at least when I write lines for them I know that the line sounds right in their mouths and will work. But I want to keep them surprising me and surprising the audience, and that's more difficult, is to do things that are unexpected. I'll give you a good example, though, of it. When Sam firsts meets Andrew, the son, at the beginning of Eagle Day, I thought when I wrote that scene it was going to be love at first sight and I was quite surprised to find myself writing a rather sort of sparky, difficult scene where they don't see eye to eye. And where that's going to go, where that relationship's going to go, as I sit here now I don't really know, because we're not just writing down 'A falls in love with B, B marries C', et cetera -

Interviewer: That's the fun, isn't it?

Anthony Horowitz: It's the unpredictability, but that's why it's not so easy to answer your question, or to know, because .. it's sort of wait and see.

Interviewer: I've got a quote here that says that you 'love horror, and those dark things that are always just out of sight in the corner of your eye'. Does this mean that Foyle's going to become a bit darker and more horrific?

Anthony Horowitz: Ummm … that's a quote from my children's books rather than from my TV writing, because I write horror stories for young people, but - the answer to your question is no. I don't think so. I think that the world of Foyle - I've always seen it like this, that it's a very, very dark time with a lot of bad things happening, and the four characters, the four main characters I see as rays of light in the darkness. In a way the opening credits are very apt because you see the searchlights flowing, coming across the screen, and that's exactly how I see the four characters, as lights in the darkness. And I don't think in the world of Foyle's War, in the Home Front that we're creating we need to go into the real horror, the real blood and the real darkness. I just don't think that that's us. I think that we're more interested in moral questions and dramatic questions, and bad things happen, but I don't see the real horror of Naziism and some of other things that took place in those years intruding too far into our world. At least I hope not.

Interviewer: Good. Anthony Horowitz, thank you very much.

Anthony Horowitz: Thank you.


Thanks to Lynette for the transcription.