"I think there will be an appetite to reflect what we went through," says Isolation Stories’ writer and executive producer Jeff Pope.Supplied
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The pandemic has been a boon for clichés – for instance, the old and rather annoying line that “crisis is the mother of invention.” However, ask anyone involved in the film and television industry, and this platitude has proven true, with creators across the landscape coming up with innovative and potentially game-changing ways to tell their stories.
The examples are everywhere. Last week, horror streamer Shudder announced that it was releasing the Zoom-based film Host, which was shot and produced remotely during quarantine. The Michael Bay-produced thriller Songbird is currently in production in Los Angeles, telling a pandemic tale all while the pandemic rages on in the city. And now, BritBox is streaming Isolation Stories – a series shot in Britain entirely during lockdown, with actors such as Eddie Marsan and Angela Griffin performing small domestic dramas revolving around the pandemic’s key themes of loneliness, anxiety, and heartache.
With the unprecedented moment giving rise to unprecedented creativity, The Globe and Mail spoke with Isolation Stories’ writer and executive producer Jeff Pope about the production.
Congratulations on the series, which plays out as a nice series of intimate dramas. But I suppose the bigger achievement is accomplishing this with mind-boggling speed.
That was a key component of it, the speed from first idea to screen, which was just a month. Normally, that’s what precludes a drama from really speaking to a crisis in the middle of a crisis. But I felt at the time that the voice of writers and directors and actors needed to be in the midst. News channels do a great job, but there’s not much on the reflective side that drama gives you. Our only driving principle was to make it about the lockdown during the lockdown, and transit it to screens while the lockdown is still going on.
On the notion of drama, I usually think for a creative type, you need to let the drama sit for a while, in order to sharpen it. What was the pressure on you to fine-tune that drama so quickly?
You’re right in that’s normally how it works. The lead times on the stuff I work on is two or three years. What happened was, my wife was very ill with the virus in the early days, in March. I was sitting outside the bedroom counting breaths per minute because of the fear that her breathing was getting too shallow. It was awful, but she’s made a full recovery. But I was talking with friends then about the way the lockdown forced people to be together who didn’t want to be, or that people were apart who wanted to be close to one another. It was like a game of musical chairs, and you just had to sit down wherever you were.
All those things – jealousy, love, longing – were put into aspic. One of the things it brought home was that there’s no substitute for contact. So my vision was not to tell the whole story and understand everything, but to have a fragmented view, and focus on small, vivid stories. It needs to be something that reflects your personal view, but has a foot in the real world, too.
Once you decided that this was the route that you were going to go, did you not need to become a technical and logistical expert overnight?
We picked that up as a necessity as you went. It was throwing yourself off a cliff and then checking if you had a parachute. The first priority was figuring out if we could do it safely. I thought we could script something and have actors shoot it on their own iPhones or tablets. But we did something more sophisticated. We delivered sterilized equipment to actors' doorsteps, then gave them a crash course on how to operate it. The technology was such that we could remotely control the cameras: the focus, the aperture. We also had some rudimentary lights and filters, which the actors positioned for us.
Do you think there will be a hunger from audiences to watch stories about the pandemic, while made in the pandemic?
That's what we were driven to do, to tell these stories now. Where we are today, the ability to dramatize our lives now, I think there will be an appetite to reflect what we went through, and make sense of the wider context of what it was all about. For us, though, we wanted to hit on those key things of being forced together, and a fear of where we were going.
On that question of where we’re going, what is the on-the-ground reality of film and television production in Britain?
They are just starting to sputter back to life, but the big thing is insurance. You can’t be insured if the virus disrupts your production. And until that is worked out, nobody wants to take the plunge. At the moment, costs on normal shoots are 20 per cent higher than they should be, due to health and safety regulations, too. But you can see small windows of recovery.
Isolation Stories is now available to stream on BritBox Canada