Tom George (“See how they run”) explains how the pandemic has opened the doors to London’s grand buildings for them

DoHow do you go from directing two miniseries for the BBC to leading a Searchlight and Disney project with a huge cast led by Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan?? Not even Tom George himself explains it in this exclusive interview for eCartelera. His big screen debut, ‘Look how they run’, a thriller or thriller of manual murder, is already in all Spanish cinemas. But it had something in common with his previous works, “This Country” and “Defending the Guilty”: “It’s also a character comedy, it’s a performance piece and that’s what thrilled me and made me believe it could fit.”. In our review we confirm that this was the case, and in these 5 minutes let’s find out all the challenges he faced in his first film. Among these, of course, the coronavirus.

The story of his shooting is full of lime and sand. On the one hand, being a very theatrical film with an ensemble but small cast, they didn’t see their limited technical means when filming in the midst of a pandemic. His main focus as team captain was “create a space where people can come to work and forget what was happening in the world”. Of course, this close contact also raised tensions: “everyone was stressed, it was a very strange time to live alone and make a movie”. In particular, That moment was the second quarantine due to the spread of COVID-19 in London and across the UK.

This anomaly in the film’s central location also had its advantages and disadvantages. “We were able to record in some great locations around London that we normally wouldn’t have had for as long as we needed them. Like the Old Vic theater, where we were able to be in the stalls and on the stage “. This is, without a doubt, one of the great incentives to enjoy ‘Watch Them Run’ in the biggest cinema or on the best television when it arrives on Disney + in less than two months. “It gave us the opportunity to show these places to the audience and to financially help those theaters”. Herein lies the paradox: all those scenes of interrogations and conspiracies so well lit are now a reminder of the crisis that the theaters suffered during the quarantine. For the manager, “It was bittersweet, because we could have been there because their doors were closed”.

Follow the rules or break them?

Besides being a story of a character, what most attracted Tom to Mark Chappell’s script was that “It’s a crime solving thriller, but it’s also a murder thriller movie”. Given this approach, instead of following Kenneth Branagh’s classic pattern in “Murder on the Orient Express”, he sought to emulate Rian Johnson’s revolutionary style in “Daggers in the Back”: “was not interested in doing a simple whodunnit”. Of course, the director of “Watch The Way They Run” warns him “You have to build those guidelines before you put your interpretation into it. You can’t get rid of all the rules, because then it’s no longer a whodunnit”. She tries to satisfy them with the murder of a member of a theatrical adaptation of Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery. All the clues and literal reflections on how they unfold are already in those 98 minutes of footage. Now it’s up to the viewer to discover them to answer the question that every whodunnit poses, even those who try to be more disruptive in this way: who did it?