Behind the Scenes: Dept Q

IBC

New Netflix police procedural is a love letter to hardboiled noir and classic British TV crime drama says showrunner Scott Frank.

article here

The Hollywood scriptwriter behind Minority Report, Get Shorty, Logan and The Queen’s Gambit says his happy place is British TV crime drama – and now he has now created such a show of his own. New Netflix series Dept Q is as rain sodden, dour and shot through with grim humour as UK audiences expect of their detective mysteries.

“What's different about British police drama are the characters,” enthuses writer-director and showrunner Scott Frank. “I think about Sarah Lancaster (Sgt Catherine Cawood) in Happy Valley. These are characters that are sometimes put under certain personal pressures and I find that it's done really well. You could say it’s all cliché but in these shows it feels fresh to me.”

He reels off a list of classic Brit crime drama including Line of Duty, Blue Lights, The Responder and Cracker. “Happy Valley is my happy place! Broadchurch, Prime Suspect - my wife and I tear through them all. I feel that I’m watching a different sort of procedural. You're steeped in this tone and mood and you don't want to look away. There aren't parts where you want to pause. If you have to go get a drink or go to the bathroom, you don't want to. You're not as tempted to look away because you know that everything is important. I just love that.”

That is what he has attempted to achieve in Dept Q, a dense nine-part adaptation of the novel by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. The series revolves around Carl Morck (Matthew Goode), a former top-rated detective assigned to a new cold case whilst wracked with guilt following an attack that left his partner paralysed and another police officer dead.

Noir as Trojan horse

As is clear from Frank’s filmography (Dead Again, Malice, Out Of Sight, A Walk Among The Tombstones) he is also attracted to the neo noir genre. His last TV series Monsieur Slade imagined the famous Maltese Falcon detective Sam Spade living in the south of France in 1963.

“In noir literature no one is all good or all bad and the best characters are those that inhabit that grey area. It's really interesting to see people in a situation where they have to be the worst of themselves in order to do something good. You see that in westerns, too, like Unforgiven. Morality is elastic as people try to do the right thing or try to survive. It’s intense.

“The other thing is that the noir genre can hold emotion. You can have all these other values if they're done right and not just an exercise in plot. Some movies have great plots and you enjoy them for that but others like Chinatown rise above that. A good film noir can be everything.”

Genre fiction shows are like Trojan horses, he adds. “The audience immediately knows and understands the type of story that they're in and that allows us as storytellers to smuggle in other subjects.”

Family drama

Dept Q’s lead character Morck is one miserable bastard. He carries a lot of baggage into the series when we meet him. No-one seems to like him, not his colleagues and least of all his teenage son.  For all that, he exhibits the caustic wit and unshakeable integrity of the hardboiled hero.

“Yeah, he's quite a hard going character,” agrees Frank, filling in the character’s back story. “He's trapped in Scotland. He didn't want to be there in the first place. He's only there because of his wife who then left him. A lot of him has just kind of given up but he becomes increasingly activated as the show goes on and I think that's an enjoyable thing to experience. You want him to wake up. You're like, ‘Come on Carl! We need you to help this person.’”

At one point someone tells Morck ‘I heard you were dead’ and Morck quips back, ‘Only on the inside.’  

“I felt like he was dead and it would be fun to have him reborn to give him a sense of purpose,” Frank says. “At the beginning he doesn’t have a sense of purpose. He’s marking time more than anything else. When he sees that they've put him out to pasture in the basement of the police headquarters, he says, ‘Perfect, this will do’ because he doesn't really want to work. But this case gets to him and the de facto family-like unit that he works with wake him up.”

The ‘who’ and ‘why dunnit?’ of Dept Q aside it is the familial relationships which drive the drama. Morck for instance feels isolated from his own family.

“I was very conscious of writing about the dysfunctional family that ends up as Department Q,” Franks explains. “I always knew how I wanted the story to end. I knew what the final shot should be. I just needed to figure out the pace of how it all happens so it doesn't feel sentimental. Emotion is good, sentiment is bad. So how do we gradually bring everybody together in a way that feels genuine and not some cliched archetype?”

Illuminating a dark show

Frank briefed French cinematographer David Ungaro (Monsieur Slade) and production designer Grant Montgomery to light interiors not as single rooms but with light spaces and dark spaces.

“I don't like watching a show and wondering where the light comes from,” he says. “So, if we need light in a room we would add a skylight or another light to make its presence more natural. We had a colour palette that didn't have too much in it so that certain colours would really stick out. It isn't desaturated by any means. It's a very colourful show but there isn't every colour of the rainbow.”

He says he hasn’t seen the several Danish feature adaptations of Adler-Olsen’s books, including The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013) but did reference the 2004 film Birth directed by Jonathan Glazer.

“It had a similar vibe that I wanted visually, in particular the way that movie used light and dark. I knew that I didn't want Dept Q to be The Killing or another typical Scandinavian noir. I wanted it to have a little more room for colour and more room for light than those shows typically do.”

As with every Netflix show Dept Q is shot digitally. Frank continues, “It’s very hard to tell the difference between digital and film when lit properly. Digital can look great when you push it to the very edge and use as little light as you can get away with. I wanted the sets to work so that it wasn’t too dark and we can't see anything but also they had to feel real and not as if light is coming from artificial source.”

Scenes shot inside an air pressured hyperbaric chamber were framed with a square aspect ratio. “The whole reason to do that was to put us in there with [the character] and not have your eye wander too much but to stay in the confines of their world,” he says.

“Any kind of composition that I come up with has to be about story and character. How much can we tell in one shot? That's where light and production design, wardrobe and props comes into play. When you're composing a shot I want to get the maximum story out of it.”

 

Writing episode one, scene one

Like the first paragraph of a novel screenwriter’s want the opening scene to grip the audience to get them to want to stay for more.

“The truth is I'm often criticised for being too slow at the start. I’m always being asked if there’s any way we can shorten the first episode! I feel like you want to have something that announces the show. Something arresting. But you don’t just want to grab the audiences’ attention, you also want to grab their trust. If they feel you know what you’re doing, then they’ll be patient and get engaged. That’s a tall order. A strong start leads to the next thing, that leads to the next thing, that leads to the next thing.”

They covered the scene in multiple ways because it’s one that the narrative revisits and pieces together from different angles. The footage we see first is in the style of bodycam footage, the inspiration for which Frank says came from 2009 crime drama Harry Brown which opened with shaky mobile phone video.

“I put more thought into that opening than to any other scene because I really wanted it to get you from the beginning. I wanted you to wonder what you're looking at, to be a little thrown off so that you have to pay attention. You have to listen. It starts in the middle of a sentence. You do not see the end coming. That was the trickiest for me.”

Other writers on the show (Chandni Lakhani Stephen Greenhorn, Colette Kane) helped him ground the show for British audiences. He says he asked them “What would really piss a Scotsman into a good argument with an Englishman?’ – hence the scene in which Morck and partner debate the legitimacy of the 1966 World Cup win.

“If I can't hear the characters talking, I can't write the story,” Frank says. “Once I get the characters speaking to one another then the story gets much better. Dialogue for me is the most fun. Sometimes, if I'm not sure what to do in a scene, I'll just have people start talking. I might not use all of it, but it’s a great way to get started. It’s like journaling, except, instead of writing my own thoughts, I'm writing their thoughts and their words.”

Based in Edinburgh

Frank had landed the rights to the books in 2013. While he was prepping The Queens Gambit in Berlin, Rob Bullock (Executive Producer, Left Bank Pictures and producer of The Night Manager for BBC/AMC) got in touch about the project. Frank suggested that Left Bank took it on and did it as a British production.

It was Bullock’s idea to transplant the show from Denmark to Scotland and to Edinburgh in particular. Bullock says, “What appealed to me about Edinburgh was that in the conversations I'd had with Scott, we talked about how Scandi drama has this tradition of being shot in dark, gloomy, moody locations, and how we’d like to make something warm and colourful that cut against that. Edinburgh has this extraordinary architecture and beauty, but with a dark underbelly.”

Department Q based itself at FirstStage Studios in Leith and filmed in Edinburgh over six months, making use of varied locations across the whole of the city and East Lothian.

Location manager Hugh Gourlay says, “A lot of shows that are set in Edinburgh often just use it for exteriors and then film in Glasgow, whereas we made the decision to do everything there and it really makes for a great backdrop.”

Locations include Arthur’s Seat, the International Climbing Arena, Wester Hailes with its hills and 1960s housing estates, a crematorium at Mortonhall (used for the Christian Centre) and a former WWII radar station in North Berwick that became a lawyer’s house.

A key location was a ferry which should have been easy but not given the recent shortage of them in the country. Gourlay found a family-run company based in Orkney that had two vessels, one of which they could hire for two to three days.

Goode casting

Matthew Goode has appeared in films for Woody Allen, Zack Snyder and Matthew Vaughn as well as in Downton Abbey, The Crown and The Discovery of Witches. He’d also starred with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in Frank’s directorial feature debut The Lookout (2007).

“I wrote it with him in mind because we’d worked together before and I knew he could do it,” Frank says. “There were certainly bigger ‘names’ that were bandied about, but I'm a big believer in the show makes the star rather than vice versa. I know Matthew was concerned that he wasn't a big enough star in that Netflix wouldn't approve him but the truth is they said yes rather quickly. He really is a chameleon. Also at his core, like Morck, he's complicated and dark and funny, and can be caustic. I just knew he would get it.”