Paul Schlesinger interview
In 2015, Paul Schlesinger co-directed Ballot Monkeys and this year he returns for Power Monkeys. He will be directing the behind-the-scenes look the Donald Trump presidential campaign plane.
Before you co-directed Ballot Monkeys, you were more of a producer. Is that fair to say?
Absolutely. They took a real punt hiring me! I worked in radio for six or seven years, in radio comedy, and when you work in radio, the producer/director roles are kind of rolled into one. In television, those roles are separated out, and since moving into television all that time ago, I've been a producer, predominantly.
So going to work on a show like Ballot Monkeys, where a lot of material is shot on the day of transmission, must have been a pretty hardcore baptism of fire?
I think the main directing challenge is to make sure you get the performances that serve the very funny script. You elicit those performances in a relatively short space of time. But it was a pretty new thing for me, and everyone worked incredibly hard.
Everyone's working together to the same end, and is very supportive of each other. And it also puts a lot of pressure on getting the casting absolutely right, because there's not a lot of time to build something from scratch.
When you're doing the casting, do you have to bear in mind how the actors like to work, so that you're hiring someone who can perform under pressure and turn things around very quickly?
The first thing to say is that Andy and Guy lead the way on casting, but yes, absolutely, we need people who can work well under pressure in every department, not least the actors.
It's not just a question of absorbing and learning the script really quickly, but also being able to work in that way. That's almost unique to this project.
I think Andy and Guy are very good at having a hunch about people. That's very important.
Give us an idea of how a day on set goes...
The first thing that happens is that the writing team are working very early in the morning. This is something that is show-run by Andy and Guy, so they're in a writers' room, and the crews are all standing by as the pages come off the press. They're literally handed over to a script supervisor and printed out, and then the actors are on standby, and Design [the art department] are on standby, because obviously there may be some graphics and visuals needed to sell a gag. So things are staggered in that way.
The scripts are brought down to the unit, and actors are learning, while directors, including me, are working out how to block it in the most effective way. And you're literally shooting it as things come in. Then stuff gets taken from the set up to the edit suite, and the editor is starting to choose the takes with your notes. Then, as soon as we've wrapped on the set, I and the other directors will go into the edit and put it together. So every step of a normal production is mirrored, but it's condensed into half-a-day, really.
It's an extraordinary amount of work. Is it hugely pressurised?
It's exhilarating, actually. It's just joyous. There's a buzz about it, an energy that you get from doing a show in this way. Sometimes the protracted nature of location filming over a number of weeks can be a challenge, keeping the focus and the enthusiasm and the energy going through the shoot. Here, of course there's pressure, but it's very exciting.
What are the principal difficulties in the process?
I don't think too many things spring to mind. Andy and Guy would have answers for this, but they're so good at concealing things that might be more challenging. They're very good at taking the pressure off the team - certainly off me who, as you correctly pointed out, hadn't done much in the way of telly directing before.
Is it frustrating that you don't get to showcase all of your talents, because you have to direct the show with one eye on the clock?
The thing that interests me most as a director is performances. I'm not so interested in the panning shots or whatever. I think the prime objective is to make sure the joke or the moment works, and to make sure the performances are rooted in reality and believable. I think that is possible to achieve in the limited time we have.
The other thing to bear in mind is that there isn't much scope for very ambitious shots because of the geography of the set. In Ballot Monkeys I filmed everything in a bus, and on Power Monkeys all of my scenes take place in a plane.
Tell us about the Trump plane please...
I think that's going to be tremendous fun. I'll be working with Amelia Bullmore, who I worked with on Twenty Twelve. She's a tremendously nuanced and clever actress. When you have someone like that, you're just making sure they're hitting the right notes, and that the tone of it feels real.
Will you get any sleep during the run, or will you exist on adrenaline and caffeine the whole time?
I think there's a lot of caffeine. And there's a lot of adrenaline. I get enough sleep. It's great fun going up to Pinewood to film. Last year when we were there they were filming Bond and Star Wars - a slightly different scale of filming. But some of that rubs off, in a way. It's more adrenaline than panic. Andy and Guy have to do the panicking. They really don't sleep. I've got it quite easy, by comparison.
Power Monkeys airs on Channel 4 every week at 10pm from Wednesday, with two special episodes bookending the EU referendum, airing on 22nd and 24th June.