Peter Kosminsky Talks ‘The Undeclared War’ And The Ongoing Threat To UK Broadcasters BBC And Channel 4

“How do you tell a story? You have a good script, and you ensure that you get some fantastic actors who will engage the audience and will stay with the story as it unfolds and care about the characters,” enthused revered British director and writer Peter Kosminsky as we discussed The Undeclared War. “I’m fanatically thorough about casting.”

The intricately researched six-part cyber-thriller, streaming on Peacock, is set in 2024. It follows a leading team of analysts in Britain’s GCHQ who are frantically working to thwart an online attack on the UK’s electoral system. The cast, led by Simon Pegg and newcomer Hannah Khalique-Brown, also reunites Kosminsky with legendary actor, Mark Rylance.

I spoke with Kosminsky to discuss the cast, the attacks against British broadcasters Channel 4 and BBC, and why auditions are so important to the legendary creative.

Simon Thompson: Why did you decide to set it when you did and not now or further in the future?

Peter Kosminsky: This is five years of work, and the research we did was of now, and by its nature, this subject, this material, and the relevance of the research you carry out has a relatively short half-life. The world of cyber and the conflict in the cyber domain moves pretty fast. On one level, setting it too far in the future would always be unwise because we would be setting it beyond the point where our research continued to have relevance. Secondly, and probably more importantly, I wanted to build the show around the idea of Russian interference in a UK General Election. Obviously, we’ve seen claims that Russians are purportedly fiddling around with American elections, and there’s been some suggestion that they fiddled around with the UK Brexit referendum. I thought that it would focus on the sense in which our democracy and our tenets of our civilization were under attack and the point at which power changes hands peacefully.

Thompson: With something like this that involves so much research and is a heavy topic, how do you find a line between keeping it authentic and realistic and making it entertaining?

Kosminsky: Well, it’s an excellent question. It’s easy at the start because you have a central idea. Usually, I will have quite a few, and I’m working on them, researching them with others; then one emerges from the pack, and it’s straightforward. You have a very clear objective when it comes to why you want to tell the story. Then you get to the far more difficult stage, which you have very smartly alluded to. It’s an interesting and vital point. The public may be interested in this, but how do you get it into such a state where they’re not just going to say, ‘That’s too serious, too dark, too scary, too impenetrable.’ I suppose I was wrestling with that on several levels. The first and most obvious one is making the process of sitting at a computer terminal, staring at lines of what for most of us is going to be utterly incomprehensible code, not only interesting but even comprehensible. Hannah Khalique-Brown plays Saara Parvin who is a computer coding prodigy and one of those people who comes along once or twice in a generation. Her mind works in a way, not only very different from mine but also very different from many coders. She sees in lateral jumps and leaps, so trying to find a series of visual metaphors which would help an audience that didn’t think like that to understand how her mind was working was the first big challenge. The second one was equally important. Whether you’re sitting in Los Angeles, London, Paris, Kyiv, or Beijing, these are dark and scary times we’re living through. If we engage seriously with the world we’re living in, then we’re not going to want to turn our eyes entirely away from serious subjects like this. At the same time, there’s a limit to how much gloom you can take, so I wanted to get around that by digging deep into their character stories, specifically Saara. I wanted to look at who she is the complexity of the life that is her hinterland, and why it’s particularly difficult for somebody of her gender and ethnicity to find her way in a fairly male, fairly white environment such as GCHQ.

Thompson: So was casting key here?

Kosminsky: It’s the most important thing there. In my view, I have two jobs. I’m primarily a director or a storyteller. Ninety percent of my job is to get the script right and cast the right people. It’s also about ensuring you’ve got a good crew around you, and I’ve worked with the same people for a long time. There’s a lot of bullshit talked about directing. There are far better and more stylish directors than me, but in the end, we are storytellers. How do you tell the story? You have a good script, and you ensure that you get some fantastic actors who will engage the audience and will stay with the story as it unfolds and care about the characters. I’m fanatically thorough about casting. I mean, poor old Hannah, this extraordinary young actress we have somehow by sheer good fortune found and discovered for the lead in this role in this show. She was auditioning for two years before she cut through. I don’t know how many auditions she had. To me, auditioning is a free rehearsal, and it works on several levels because I get to see the actors run the lines and that means I also get to hear whether the lines are working. Auditioning is one of the most critical parts of the process for all those reasons.

Thompson: Several people in The Undeclared War have come up through the BBC and Channel 4. Was there a kinship around the fact that both are increasingly under attack?

Kosminsky: I think that’s the most important question you will ask me this year, and I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about it. Let’s be honest, there’s an enormous and deep well of creative talent in the UK. There are many reasons US streamers, broadcasters, and Hollywood studios have come to make shows here. It’s not just because it’s cheaper; it’s because there are many talented people here who will continue to work. The question is, will they continue to be able to work on stuff like this? When I say things like this, I don’t mean some piece of s**t from Kosminsky, I mean stuff that is about Britain. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an international life because here’s NBC’s streaming service opening the show in America. The Undeclared War is essentially a British story about GCHQ with British characters, but absolutely in a world environment and the cyber threat to the UK. The threat is no different from the cyber threat to the US or any other Five Eyes nations. However, there are other shows that are even more peculiarly British and that traditionally the BBC and Channel Four have done because they creatively feel it’s important but partly because they have a regulatory obligation to do so. I think the streamers make some fantastic television, and I spent quite a lot of my life watching it, you know, but it’s different. They do not have regulatory obligations. There’s a space in the market for that, but also a space for public service broadcasting. There is a regulatory obligation to have decentralization and not all coming out of London, to have ethnic and gender diversity both in front of and behind the camera, and deal with subjects that have some meaning, power, and relevance to public policy in the UK and how we live our lives. I’m not saying that every show has to be like that or even 25 percent, but there has to be a measurable minority of material like that; otherwise, what are we doing? We’re becoming a facility house for much richer companies primarily based in Los Angeles. So, I’m for plurality. I’m for diversity and aspiration in production. What’s concerning me is how some of the legislation is being framed at the moment, and some of the thinking in the DCMS in Whitehall is about shutting down choice and diversity. There is a focus on one type of programming that is already incredibly well served.

Thompson: It’s great to see you reteaming with Mark Rylance. You’ve worked with him several times, so do you consider him a muse? How much do your relationship and his experience influence your work?

Kosminsky: I don’t consider him to be a muse. Frankly, I wouldn’t be that arrogant, you know, because he’s the world’s property. I’ve worked with many great actors, but I consider him the best actor I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. For somebody with a reputation for being an actor’s director, that will be precious. Mark and I have so far worked together on three extraordinarily different roles. In The Government Inspector, he played a real person, Dr. David Kelly, a man who was in government service involved in the quest for so-called weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and who ended up very tragically and avoidably, I think, killing himself in an Oxfordshire wood. Mark won a BAFTAFTA
for that. Then we worked together on Wolf Hall, where he played Thomas Cromwell in an adaptation of the first two of the three Wolf Hall novels written by extraordinary Hilary Mantel. It’s a breathtaking, extremely complex, subtle performance for which he also won a BAFTA. Now he has been kind enough to come and play a relatively small, but critical, role in The Undeclared War. He plays this cast aside figure, a Cold War warrior, whose expertise is not particularly rated by GCHQ but who forms this close friendship and collaboration with Saara. You asked about how we work together, and it’s interesting because every actor is different. As a director, my first job is not to say anything when nothing needs to be said. That’s the hardest lesson to learn and I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Shut up if you have nothing helpful to say. Do not say something to prove that you’re the director. The amount of damage I did in my early career by not realizing that was significant. You don’t have to say a great deal with somebody like Mark. We had a lot of conversations about the role in advance. We talk about the script, we make changes where the lines don’t feel comfortable to him, and when Mark wants to change a line, there’s a good reason, and you’d be stupid not to take it seriously. I think the reason Mark and I work well together is twofold. I know how important it is to him to create an atmosphere on the set and around the show where he feels able to do his best work, where he doesn’t feel like he’s being rushed, that the tail is wagging the dog on the show, and that there’s a thoughtful work-like atmosphere. He knows that he has a journey to go on, but I will go on the journey with him. If you take the example of Dr. David Kelly, he had to dive into a dark place for that role. Dr. Kelly was a guy who became suicidal, and the best actors go there. They’re not just reading the lines. My job was to go on that journey with him. That’s what I always try to do with actors and what I try to do with Mark.

The Undeclared War is now streaming on Peacock.