Warning: This article contains spoilers aboutSee How They Run.
For 100 years, Agatha Christie has reigned supreme as the grand dame of mystery.
It’s both a comedy and a mystery, employing the best of Christie’s trademarks.
Parisa Taghizadeh/20th Century Studios
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Which one of you is the Agatha Christie super fan or is it both of you?
How did you get the idea to construct a script aroundThe Mousetrapand this meta approach to a Christie homage?
At the time, the longest-running play was a couple of months, even the big box office smashes.
So, he thought he was in the clear here.
He’s since died and the play is still going strong.
I think his son owns the rights now.
And the whodunit is synonymous with Agatha Christie.
So, you had to have a lot of fun with her at the same time.
And I was like, “Yeah, I know all of this.”
This is such rich, fertile territory, right?
You want to have a fun title, as a reference to Agatha Christie.
And there’s a lot to play with.
Tom, as you said, there have been so many adaptations of her work in television and film.
Did you want to borrow from any of those visually?
GEORGE:Not particularly.
The direction for the overall stylistic and tonal approach came from the script.
That tension between this modern viewpoint and this period film guided everything across all departments.
CHAPPELL:We did borrow one location.
The very popular David Suchet Poirot [series].
The Christie family is still very involved in monitoring her legacy.
CHAPPELL:I’m going to make it clear, I’m not a lawyer.
The family knows about this.
They’ve read the script.
How did you decide who would be pulled from history and who you would invent?
CHAPPELL:It felt like it needed to be about half and half.
There was only really one character who wasn’t obvious.
And that was the police commissioner he’s actually a real person as well.
He was the first bureaucratic cop.
There is the staple of an American copper who’s just a desk jockey.
He was like the first English version of that stereotype.
Wherever it was convenient, a real person was used.
In almost all the cases, they are real names.
And any resemblance to the real people is entirely coincidental.
I can certainly vouch for that.
But they fall into great Agatha Christie-punch in characters, like Dickie Attenborough.
And his wife was in it.
Did you reverse engineer that and decide what the climax would look like?
And then have the art department do the drawings?
What was that process?
GEORGE:I said to the first AD, “I only have one request for your whole schedule.
So, of course, that was impossible.
Instead, we shot the Leo storyboard scene first.
So, ironically, we had to storyboard [the climax].
CHAPPELL:I find Adrien very funny in his storyboarding scene.
it’s possible for you to bury plot or bury the seeding of future ideas in a joke.
There are so many Easter eggs in here for people who are Christie fans.
CHAPPELL:Which is an idea that came very late in the day.
Tell me more about that.
Were those all coming to you as you were writing or were they workshopped?
How did you figure out what you’d sprinkle in where?
GEORGE:They definitely weren’t workshopped.
I was still unpicking them in rehearsals.
The workshopping that was going on was me trying to understand just how deep the rabbit hole went.
CHAPPELL:Writing can be a lonely process.
It’s like, “Why would you bother?”
What made Sam the right choice for your Poirot or Marple figure here?
He’s so adept at bringing those characters to life.
Our original instinct was to find someone with an English accent.
It speaks to the fact of how good a fit Sam felt once we landed on it.
CHAPPELL:We also talked about his gravitas.
It’s a different combination of that insecurity that Tom speaks of but also a seriousness.
You get the comedy of Saoirse’s character feeling a little nervous in his presence.
He’s not a light-hearted character.
GEORGE:Stoppard’s the straight man in a lot of the scenes, particularly their early interactions.
He makes unusual choices in a performance that opens up the character and bring unexpected detail and nuances.
