‘Saoirse Ronan was brilliant at improv and running with the moment’: Tom George on See How They Run

As director of all 19 episodes of the award-winning TV comedy This Country, Tom George expertly calibrated the mockumentary framework, showcasing Daisy May and Charlie Cooper’s inventive writing and performances as amiable Cotswold layabouts Kerry and Kurtan. Few industry observers would have guessed that his next move would be See How They Run, a knowing 1953-set serio-comic whodunnit based around the premiere run of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap the year before, boasting lush vintage settings and a marquee-name cast including Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan, David Oyelowo and Adrien Brody. George himself, however, sees the underlying connections in this seemingly unlikely progression. 

Q: Charlie Cooper plays a lugubrious theatre usher in See How They Run, but otherwise were you trying to make a swerve from This Country?

A: At first glance they do look like chalk and cheese, but what it amounts to is that they’re both character comedies, even if one of them’s a murder mystery wrapped up in a film about murder mysteries. And that meta layer is another common thread. You have the form in play next to the comic element beneath it, but it has to be tuned just right so it doesn’t take over. That was true on This Country and also here.

And ultimately one of the mysteries it explores is why there’s never been a film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s most famous play, right?

Actually, our producer Damian Jones did at one point inquire whether the film rights to The Mousetrap might be available, and he was told that wasn’t possible because Christie stipulated the film could only be made six months after the play had closed in the West End. Seventy years later, it’s still going strong! But Damian also had the realisation that there was the kernel of another movie in there and commissioned [the writer] Mark Chappell, who took it and ran with it. We did two or three redrafts together – a pleasure working with a writer whose impulse was always to improve what’s there.

You’ve got that meta layer, complex procedural plotting and a historical element too – were you ever worried it would all get too congested for the comedy to come alive?

Yes, it was a tightly wound script, but I make a point to have elements of improvisation and play on set, which not only embellishes what you already have on the page but allows the actors to bring truth and specificity to the performances. A number of these roles were written as very obvious tropes – world-weary detective, over-eager constable, demanding commissioner – but through a sense of play you could also root the characters in something real. I’m so excited for audiences to see Saoirse in this as Constable Stalker. The surprise for me wasn’t that she absolutely got the tone of it, but that she was so brilliant at improv and running with the moment in rehearsal and on set.

What will startle British film nerds is the presence of significant real-life individuals like Dickie Attenborough and producer John Woolf. Does it matter if much of the audience doesn’t necessarily know who they are?

Commissioner Scott [played by Tim Key] was a real person; those are Dickie and Woolf ’s actual wives, too. Maybe some viewers will come in with the memory of Dickie in Brighton Rock [1948], but probably more likely it’ll be “Oh, it’s Dickie from Jurassic Park [1993].” For the vast majority of viewers they won’t register at all, so we couldn’t get too caught up in that. It was liberating for us not to be making a biographical film. They had to come to life as characters.

Where did you find the line visually between the grimy reality of 1953 London and some retro-cute Wes Anderson-style confection?

That tension you describe, between a clear historical reality and a contemporary take on that setting, was written into the script. We wanted the film to feel like a version of 1953 but not to be beholden to some sepia-tinted idea of that era. The West End was this incredibly vibrant locale, and the rather drab police investigators have to feel like interlopers, out of their depth.

Did landing this job give you the sense you were taking the creative surge in British TV comedy forward into the broader canvas of cinema?

Armando Iannucci is a huge influence, moving from character-driven TV comedy and proving that he could also deliver on the big screen with The Death of Stalin [2017] and The Personal History of David Copperfield [2019]. For me, whether it’s TV or film, it’s always about story, character and comedy with performance tying everything together. I always had a clear idea how to make this film, and I’m just glad that made sense to the studio.