Tobias Menzies and Maggie Gyllenhaal – in the SundanceTV original series “The Honorable Woman”

It is a sad irony that “The Honorable Woman” (July 31, Sundance TV) debuts as news of unrest in the Middle East is exploding across front pages.

Among the more important elements in the gripping, 8-part political thriller starring Maggie Gyllenhaal is the desire of her character Nessa Stein, a British civic and business leader, to use her family’s business empire to foster Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. A strong leader who has acted on her beliefs, Stein has created and funded a technical college where Israeli and Palestinian students matriculate together; the institution is run by Israeli and Palestinian academics. She’s taken enormous risks to make this dream become reality. A second project calls for her company to bring broadband to the campus, a task that seems relatively straightforward but is fraught with political difficulties.

Nessa’s motivation for reconciliation is complicated. Her father, who died when Nessa was young, made his fortune founding a company that manufactured arms, some of which were used in the Middle East. His death continues to color Nessa’s personality, hardening her resolve to work for Middle East peace.

The writer, director and producer of the self-contained series, Hugo Blick began working on the project a couple of years ago, during “a quiet time” in Israeli-Palestinian relations, he told us during a recent conversation. While we didn’t discuss politics, Blick’s script ladles out hearty portions of blame to multiple parties, including several countries, their politicians, military and intelligence communities. Whether or not “there’s blame on all sides” is Blick’s personal view of the Middle East, it makes for an excellent plot device, giving characters limitless motivations and alliances. It also enhances the discussion of trust, as in “Whom can you trust?” Questions of trust and secrets are recurring themes in the series, which brings viewers inside the offices and homes of global power brokers, businesspeople and government officials.

MIDDLE EAST A BACKDROP ONLY

Yet reconciliation in the Middle East is a vehicle for Blick, not the series’ genesis. “[Nessa] is looking for the possibilities she can control within her business affairs, the promotion of the idea of reconciliation [between Israel and the Palestinians], no matter how difficult those ideas are. But when somebody takes a position like that on the world stage, I was really intrigued to explore why,” Blick said.

“Often leadership is not facing up to a vacuum [in your personality] that’s made you take that position as a leader…here’s this fantastic, cool, calculated, calm leader of a woman. [Yet] underneath she is unreconciled to something [in her personal life that] she’s yet to face up to. That’s what we wanted to really examine.” As Blick noted during another interview, “I’m intrigued at the vacuum…that may exist in [a leader’s] personality that needs to take a world-stage position because they are disoriented about themselves…in a strange way, they’re looking outward, not inward.”

There it is in a not-too-easily-digested nutshell. The Honorable Woman is a thriller, with plenty of intrigue, violence, male aggressiveness and international settings. But it’s much more focused on female characters than your garden-variety thriller. More important is that the motivating factor is an investigation of female leadership when the leader has taken a controversial public stance that springs from a personal issue. The powerful women include Nessa, but also Julia Walsh (Janet McTeer), who heads Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, and the wonderful Eve Best of Nurse Jackie fame playing Monica Chatwin, a high-ranking British spy intent on advancing her career. Although Blick acknowledges the series is an unusual mix—a thriller and an investigation of a female’s psyche—he feels viewers may grasp its concept easier if they think of Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect. “There’s a genre in there, but what we’re really interested in is scrutinizing the collapse of the central female role.”

FEMALE-FOCUSSED

While The Honorable Woman makes no obvious statements about female vs male leadership, the men in the series generally are weaker characters, epitomized by Nessa’s brother Ephra, played by Andrew Buchan. Despite his official role as her business partner, he’s of little help to her; Ephra’s dealing with his own issues. “The sibling relationship, the family relationships and the prism of tensions and tests that this family has to go through is the front-center part of the story. Against this backdrop, unfortunately at this point, is an intractable conflict. And that was the tension of the story.”

While the Middle East is a backdrop, its presence isn’t a complete coincidence. Blick has had a lifelong interest in the region and visited it often.

Blick also had a stint in U.K. politics during an earlier life, so the internal workings of political machinery is a subject known to him. “I find political speeches fascinating.” Indeed, Nessa’s speech in episode one sets the scene for the rest of the series. He’s also interested in the “rhythm and construction” of the political personality. “When you meet a big public figure, a politician who’s incredibly engaging on the public stage, and then they walk off the public stage and there’s some light that goes out. Now, why is that? How do you deal with that? So we explore that also” in the series.

The micro story, about a public figure and how her internal struggle influences her public position, required less formal research. Once he began exploring that characteristic “the character revealed itself,” Blick said.

A one-man band, Blick’s done all the writing and directed this project. As Sundance TV chief Sarah Barnett says, the series “sprung from one visionary brain…Given our roots in independent film…we find our place in this busy landscape with what we call auteur-driven television. That’s a singular vision often characterized by a desire to say something a little different and maybe go a little deeper…To the best of our abilities at Sundance we really do try to let the creative lead, and never more so than with” The Honorable Woman.

MODERN-DAY DICKENS

For Blick the idea of having one person writing the story harkens back to Victorian London, when chapters of Charles Dickens’s novels were published monthly. With The Honorable Woman, “It’s important that it’s authored and comes from one angle,” he says. “An audience can engage in that because it doesn’t feel amorphous. So this is a thriller from an attitude…it’s a new way of looking at the pattern of a thriller because it comes from an attitude of one viewpoint in its construction.” In truth, Blick admits, hundreds of people collaborated on this series, but it helps the audience orientate itself “because it seems if it’s coming from one particular place.”

And since Blick is the writer, director and producer, the script is finished before shooting starts. “The last period on the last sentence is done,” unlike so many series where the actors begin filming and are unsure where their characters are headed.

But the progression in this series is hardly straightforward. Blick has created a number of “moving targets,” in terms of who’s doing what to whom and with whom. While this can become confusing for viewers, “what they can be reassured of is that as the story grows and goes out it absolutely knows where it’s going, I know where our destination is, so it’s a diamond-shaped story” in that it begins, grows out wide and then tapers down to a fine point, where characters who’d been marginal in earlier episodes become central at the series’ end.

The process of writing the script took Blick about 18 months. During that time he avoided thinking about casting particular actors. “I deliberately avoided doing that, absolutely nobody [was in my head]. When I get to the end, we start” thinking about casting. For the lead role, “I was looking for an actor who was other. I didn’t necessarily want a U.K. performer. My word was I lucky” to get Maggie Gyllenhaal. “She did fabulously well. She also brings a sense of internationalism with her, which is another thing that I was looking for with this character.” Incidentally, her British accent is fabulous.

While Blick lists some of his TV influences as the British versions of House of Cards and State of Play, as well as Edge of Darkness and the Danish series Borgen, which also features a powerful female political leader wrestling with issues in her personal life, he believes influences should “fall away” when you’re creating a series. The goal, he says, is to create “a distinct, authored story about these characters that really doesn’t feel entirely like anything you’ve watched.” Mission accomplished.

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