11/24/2023 0 Comments And then there were none movie 2017“‘Why not? Of course you can, it’ll be brilliant for the character.’” ![]() “He went: ‘You cannot have “cunt” in this.’” She entertainingly recounts the subsequent exchange she had with an executive from the BBC who told her: “Sarah, we’re not having that.” Phelps, who started out as a polo groom and worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company before joining EastEnders, was given a pretty free rein, although “at one point I had some pretty strong language in there and you’re not going to get away with a particular word which I thought would’ve been a brilliant payoff.” I think I’d be bouncing off the walls at some point.” They’re a whole lot less so in the adaptation because I kept thinking ‘what would you do if you were on an island and people kept dying?’. She says she has “ramped up” some elements: “Everyone in the book is quite polite and clipped. With the support of Christie’s family there have been a few “tiny” changes, including how some of the characters die or their locations when murders occur. “You have to be faithful to Christie because she’s making you think about really important moral points.” and the loss of status - the posturings of Empire are over and they are the last gasp of it.”Īlthough she changed how The Casual Vacancy ended, Phelps says it was important to stay faithful to Christie’s plot and “not do something like Big Brother”, keeping the author’s principle that death “had to mean something.” ![]() She was also aware of the timing of the story, written in 1939 “a few short weeks before war is declared” and that the characters “are products of the first world war, of that madness. It’s a portrait of a psychopath, even you might say a portrait of the writer as psychopath but that’s another meta-question.” the most forensic examination of guilt, transgression. “At what point does judgment stop being dispassionate and start becoming psychotic? Does anybody really deserve this? Are we really this entertained by the concept of murder? And there’s a real dark, murky, curious, difficult undertone which just makes you think about what it means to take a life. “Marple and Poirot are giants of characters,” Phelps adds, “but I think this book has a worrying purity to it because of the beauty of the plot. Merry Christmas viewers! “Exactly,” she laughs and mimics an announcer’s voice: “Anyway boys and girls, now it’s time for Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. “When I was writing I kept thinking of the Greeks, thinking of the remorselessness and the poem as actually a Greek chorus: ‘You’re not going anywhere, you’re pinned, you’re fixed, here is the eye of God, it doesn’t blink, look at you squirm.’ It’s terrifying.” Phelps, who translated JK Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy to the small screen last year and is currently distilling her detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling, sees parallels in Christie’s most popular novel with dark, remorseless plays such as Euripides’ Medea or Sophocles’ Electra – which she saw performed as part of a trilogy at Edinburgh more than 20 years ago. While cut off by bad weather they are reminded of murderous sins they have committed and carefully killed off one by one in the style of the American poem Ten Little Indians. The plot of And Then There Were None (slight spoiler alert) revolves around 10 people invited to an island off the south coast of England by a mysterious host just before the outbreak of the second world war. She continues: “What this does, and the Scandi dramas do, is they go, ‘This is what murder is. In this book you take all that, murder as entertainment, and you turn it on its head ‘this is an abomination, this is the wrath of God’.” “Those shows are kind of ‘Argh, I’ve been killed with a letter opener to the eye’, it’s the unravelling of the plot and the life is irrelevant. Phelps, who previously wrote the celebrated 2011 adaptation of Great Expectations starring Douglas Booth, Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson for the BBC, explains: “Whenever we think of Murder She Wrote, Midsomer Murders, Poirot, Marple, murder as entertainment – teatime entertainment – isn’t that weird? It is “searing” in the same way as Scandinavian dramas such as The Killing and The Bridge are, in contrast to other dramas that use death as an entertaining plot device. ![]() ![]() Although her scripts contain humour, she says the book, which she had not read before, “profoundly shocked” her and is more “terrifying and brutal” than she expected.
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