Director Kenny Glennan writes for Culture about twisty-turny pharmaceutical thriller Acceptable Risk, starring Elaine Cassidy, currently screening on Sunday nights on RTÉ One.
Acceptable Risk is a thriller, a switch back ride between what you know and what you think you know; the landscape keeps changing as the knot is slowly unwound. Can you ever really know the person closest to you? What level of acceptable risk are you willing to put up with? And it posits a very simple question for each of the main characters: will they take responsibility for what they find out? Acceptable Risk is about three women who do just that, and the price they pay for daring to stick their heads above the parapet.
Watch Acceptable Risk here via RTÉ Player
Apart from the thriller element, what really interested me in Ron’s script were the characters who live and work in the shadow of the fictional pharmaceutical giant, Gumbiner Fischer, at the heart of our story. How the institutional ‘family’ shapes your behaviour, and in the case of some of our characters - defines their fate! Would you risk losing your job by daring to criticise the hand that feeds you? What level of acceptable risk are you willing to put up with? What price do you pay for shaking hands with the devil? Thwarting institutional cowardice, we follow three formidable female characters who uncover a story which has been long buried rather than acknowledged. Bravely and at some cost, they take responsibility where the ‘father’ figures of the story fall short.
It was within this framework that we first stuck our spade in the ground. Our first stop was to build the creative team consisting of Tim Fleming the Director Of Photography, Derek Wallace the designer and Kathy Strachan, the costume designer - all of whom I have worked with before. We brought our ideas and influences to the table - shapes, colours, tones, texture, old films and stories we had heard, as we clawed away at the formidable Gumbiner Fischer sphere of influence, which casts its ‘shadow’ far and wide in such a small country. Out of this emerged a philosophy of how to approach creating a ‘style’. The new Dublin of the quayside financial quarter, all steel and glass, seemingly transparent. And juxtapose that with another kind of Dublin, the peripheral housing estates which cling onto the edge of the city, and the city centre ‘heritage’ Dublin which the tourists see.
We chose Sarah’s grand family home specifically because of the slightly institutional feel to it - Sarah’s Folly, we affectionately named it. The police station deliberately felt like an office - another institution. Working closely with Derek the designer, Kathy created cuts, textures and patterns in the costumes which reflected our discussion on the character’s emotional journey. Meanwhile, Tim found a style of camera movement that felt ‘live’ and with them but without feeling documentary. We shot in what felt like the sunniest day of the year, the wettest day of the year and 18 degrees below in Montreal! And Tim magically managed to blend it all together to create a consistent palette.
Shooting out of sequence over six episodes was a challenge, especially for the actors trying to map an consistent emotional journey. So we created a sort of emotional storyboard for each main character outlining the entire journey from A to Z, marking off significant turning points and points of no return along the way which we could refer to at a moments notice. Irish, Canadian, English and Danish actors creating an exotic gumbo of performance styles.
And how did it turn out? Well, an old director once said to me - ‘There are three films you make: the perfect one you have in your head, the one you actually shoot which is dependent on money and time, and finally the one you make in the edit’. Luckily for us, we had two expert editors from the Canadian side of our crew, David de Francesco and Chantal Lussier who brought a north American influence to how the films are cut and how the story unfolds. And finally our French Canadian composer Michel Corriveau, who created such a lovely filmic score. We never spoke about instruments once, only character and story - "Tell me more about this ‘shadow’ of Gumbiner Fischer you keep going on about..." he would say.
Acceptable Risk airs on Sunday at 9:30pm on RTÉ One
