Latest news with #Kosminsky
Evening Standard
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
‘Ridiculous' for Channel 4 to start making in-house TV shows, says Sony
Mr Kosminsky told the BBC Two current affairs programme Newsnight that Adolescence, which explores themes such as incel culture and bullying and has been a global hit for Netflix, is a 'fantastic programme', but the streaming giant would not make the show if it was not successful outside the UK.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Skyrocketing costs nearly sunk 'Wolf Hall.' So key players took a pay cut to save it
A second season of 'Wolf Hall' was inevitable. The first, based on Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' arrived in 2015, before the third and final book existed, but producer Colin Callender optioned Mantel's entire trilogy from the outset. What wasn't inevitable was the wait. 'I always knew that we would come back to it at some point,' Callender says of 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which premiered on 'Masterpiece' on PBS in March. 'Although I never imagined it was going to take 10 years.' 'Part of it was that Hilary took a long time to write it,' adds director and producer Peter Kosminsky. 'The first two novels were phenomenal successes. She became a celebrity almost overnight. But it was also a difficult book to write.' Mantel sent sections of 'The Mirror & the Light' to Kosminsky as she was working. He says she was daunted by the idea of reaching the end of her story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Her writing was affected by the 'Wolf Hall' TV adaptation, which was nominated for eight Emmys. 'She was very open and honest that she was very influenced by the first season in writing,' Kosminsky says. 'Particularly the character of Henry.' By the time 'The Mirror & the Light' was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Peter Straughan had already adapted it. The production faced a delay due to the pandemic but was gearing up again when Mantel died unexpectedly in 2022. 'It was incredibly sad,' Kosminsky says. 'It also made me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to bring her final novel to the screen.' 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' follows Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the tumultuous court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) after the death of Anne Boleyn. Although none of the actors had been contracted for a second season, the hope was that the ensemble cast would reprise their original roles. There were a few obvious hurdles: Tom Holland, who played Gregory Cromwell, was now too famous, and Bernard Hill, who starred as the Duke of Norfolk, died before production (he was replaced with Timothy Spall). 'It was particularly complicated because we wanted to bring back as many people as we could,' Callender says of scheduling the production around cast availability. 'We knew at some point that we weren't necessarily going to get everybody back, but we did pretty damn well.' 'I was always anticipating coming back,' Lewis confirms. 'Being an actor is like being an athlete: You're the sprinter and it's the 100 meters. You're going to come on set for a brief amount of time and you're going to nail it. But there might be a lot of waiting before you get to the starter's block, all coiled and energized. I was like that for 10 long years.' Everyone had aged, but Kosminsky says 'that wasn't necessarily a bad thing' because the show covers 10 years of Cromwell's life. 'Across the series the actors age by exactly the right amount,' he notes. 'In a different world with a far larger budget and a lot more time for prosthetics and CGI, we might have been able to graduate that change.' Budget constraints were a huge challenge. Over the last decade, the proliferation of streamers has meant that public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC have to fight for crew and locations and can't match their competitors' budgets. The producers had to figure out how to tell the story in a way that felt like a continuation of Season 1 'without anywhere near enough money to do it,' as Kosminsky says. 'We cut and we cut and we cut,' he notes. 'Eventually it was either shut the show down, or the producers and the screenwriter and the leading actor essentially give back most of their fees.' So, weeks out from production, Kosminsky, Callender, Straughan and Rylance gave back significant portions of their paychecks to get 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' off the ground. 'The reality is the cost of making this second season was literally 100% more, twice the amount, that it cost to make the first,' Callender says. 'It's a challenge that informs the whole of the British television industry in the high-end drama sector.' Kosminsky reassembled his original department heads, including cinematographer Gavin Finney, production designer Pat Campbell and costume designer Joanna Eatwell. The costumes had been sent back into circulation, which meant starting from scratch. 'When we came back, we all came back from a position of experience, rather than from a starting point of zero,' Eatwell says. 'That was actually quite liberating. It meant we could enjoy the project more. And not having the costumes meant we could move on and grow because the story is so different.' Ultimately, Eatwell's team made as many of the costumes 'as the budget could stand,' including all of Henry's sumptuous ensembles. 'He has to be the center of the universe, and that's what I always tried to achieve with him,' she says. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' was shot over 84 days entirely on location in Tudor-era structures around England. The schedule was adjusted based on when the historic homes had less tourists. Some locations had been used in the first season, but others were newly accessible. Hampton Court Palace, an actual home of Henry VIII, said no to filming for 'Wolf Hall' but allowed Season 2 to use its Great Hall. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' marks the end of the road for Cromwell, whom Lewis refers to as 'the JD Vance of the time,' and for the series itself — an experience that left everyone involved proud of what they accomplished despite the financial constraints and long time gap. 'We worried that maybe there wasn't a place for this kind of show in this TV landscape,' Lewis says. 'But, happily, we've been proved wrong. That, actually, if something's good people come and find it. It's been one of the things I've enjoyed most doing. The subject matter is intrinsically interesting. The material is endlessly deep. Aesthetically, it was so pleasing to be part of. And at the center of it is the reimagining of a very well-known, very well-documented piece of history through another man's eyes.' Get the Envelope newsletter, sent three times a week during awards season, for exclusive reporting, insights and commentary. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Skyrocketing costs nearly sunk ‘Wolf Hall.' So key players took a pay cut to save it
A second season of 'Wolf Hall' was inevitable. The first, based on Hilary Mantel's award-winning novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies,' arrived in 2015, before the third and final book existed, but producer Colin Callender optioned Mantel's entire trilogy from the outset. What wasn't inevitable was the wait. 'I always knew that we would come back to it at some point,' Callender says of 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,' which premiered on 'Masterpiece' on PBS in March. 'Although I never imagined it was going to take 10 years.' 'Part of it was that Hilary took a long time to write it,' adds director and producer Peter Kosminsky. 'The first two novels were phenomenal successes. She became a celebrity almost overnight. But it was also a difficult book to write.' Mantel sent sections of 'The Mirror & the Light' to Kosminsky as she was working. He says she was daunted by the idea of reaching the end of her story about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell. Her writing was affected by the 'Wolf Hall' TV adaptation, which was nominated for eight Emmys. 'She was very open and honest that she was very influenced by the first season in writing,' Kosminsky says. 'Particularly the character of Henry.' By the time 'The Mirror & the Light' was published in 2020, returning screenwriter Peter Straughan had already adapted it. The production faced a delay due to the pandemic but was gearing up again when Mantel died unexpectedly in 2022. 'It was incredibly sad,' Kosminsky says. 'It also made me feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to bring her final novel to the screen.' 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' follows Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the tumultuous court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis) after the death of Anne Boleyn. Although none of the actors had been contracted for a second season, the hope was that the ensemble cast would reprise their original roles. There were a few obvious hurdles: Tom Holland, who played Gregory Cromwell, was now too famous, and Bernard Hill, who starred as the Duke of Norfolk, died before production (he was replaced with Timothy Spall). 'It was particularly complicated because we wanted to bring back as many people as we could,' Callender says of scheduling the production around cast availability. 'We knew at some point that we weren't necessarily going to get everybody back, but we did pretty damn well.' 'I was always anticipating coming back,' Lewis confirms. 'Being an actor is like being an athlete: You're the sprinter and it's the 100 meters. You're going to come on set for a brief amount of time and you're going to nail it. But there might be a lot of waiting before you get to the starter's block, all coiled and energized. I was like that for 10 long years.' Everyone had aged, but Kosminsky says 'that wasn't necessarily a bad thing' because the show covers 10 years of Cromwell's life. 'Across the series the actors age by exactly the right amount,' he notes. 'In a different world with a far larger budget and a lot more time for prosthetics and CGI, we might have been able to graduate that change.' Budget constraints were a huge challenge. Over the last decade, the proliferation of streamers has meant that public broadcasters like PBS and the BBC have to fight for crew and locations and can't match their competitors' budgets. The producers had to figure out how to tell the story in a way that felt like a continuation of Season 1 'without anywhere near enough money to do it,' as Kosminsky says. 'We cut and we cut and we cut,' he notes. 'Eventually it was either shut the show down, or the producers and the screenwriter and the leading actor essentially give back most of their fees.' So, weeks out from production, Kosminsky, Callender, Straughan and Rylance gave back significant portions of their paychecks to get 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' off the ground. 'The reality is the cost of making this second season was literally 100% more, twice the amount, that it cost to make the first,' Callender says. 'It's a challenge that informs the whole of the British television industry in the high-end drama sector.' Kosminsky reassembled his original department heads, including cinematographer Gavin Finney, production designer Pat Campbell and costume designer Joanna Eatwell. The costumes had been sent back into circulation, which meant starting from scratch. 'When we came back, we all came back from a position of experience, rather than from a starting point of zero,' Eatwell says. 'That was actually quite liberating. It meant we could enjoy the project more. And not having the costumes meant we could move on and grow because the story is so different.' Ultimately, Eatwell's team made as many of the costumes 'as the budget could stand,' including all of Henry's sumptuous ensembles. 'He has to be the center of the universe, and that's what I always tried to achieve with him,' she says. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' was shot over 84 days entirely on location in Tudor-era structures around England. The schedule was adjusted based on when the historic homes had less tourists. Some locations had been used in the first season, but others were newly accessible. Hampton Court Palace, an actual home of Henry VIII, said no to filming for 'Wolf Hall' but allowed Season 2 to use its Great Hall. 'Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light' marks the end of the road for Cromwell, whom Lewis refers to as 'the JD Vance of the time,' and for the series itself — an experience that left everyone involved proud of what they accomplished despite the financial constraints and long time gap. 'We worried that maybe there wasn't a place for this kind of show in this TV landscape,' Lewis says. 'But, happily, we've been proved wrong. That, actually, if something's good people come and find it. It's been one of the things I've enjoyed most doing. The subject matter is intrinsically interesting. The material is endlessly deep. Aesthetically, it was so pleasing to be part of. And at the center of it is the reimagining of a very well-known, very well-documented piece of history through another man's eyes.'
Sky News
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News
Wolf Hall director on streaming levies: 'The government needs the guts to stand up to the bully in the White House'
The director of hit BBC period drama Wolf Hall says the government "needs to have enough guts to stand up to the bully in the White House" to protect the future of public service broadcasting. Peter Kosminsky told Sky News' Breakfast with Anna Jones that calls for a streaming levy to support British high-end TV production was urgently needed to stop the "decimation" of the UK industry. His comments follow the release of a new report from the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee, calling for the government to improve support measures for the UK's high-quality drama sector while safeguarding the creation of distinctly British content. Specifically, the report calls for streamers - including Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+, all of which are based in the US - to commit to paying 5% of their UK subscriber revenue into a cultural fund to help finance drama with a specific interest to British audiences. Kosminsky, who made the case for the levy and gave evidence to the committee in January, called global tariffs recently introduced by Donald Trump"the elephant in the room". He said he feared they would make the government reticent to introduce a streaming levy, but said it was a necessary step to "defend a hundred years of honourable tradition of public service broadcasting in this country and not see it go to the wall because [the government are] frightened of the consequences from the bully in the States". Kosminsky also noted that the streamers would be able to apply for money from the fund themselves, as long as they were in co-production with a UK public service broadcaster. Earlier this year, a White House memorandum referenced levies on US streaming services, calling them "one-sided, anti-competitive policies" that "violate American sovereignty". In response to the call for streaming levies, a Netflix spokesperson said such a move would "penalise audiences" and "diminish competitiveness". They added: "The UK is Netflix's biggest production hub outside of North America - and we want it to stay that way." The Association for Commercial Broadcasters and On-Demand Services (COBA) said such a levy "risks damaging UK growth and the global success story of the UK TV sector," and "would risk dampening streamers' existing investment in domestic content and would inevitably increase costs for businesses". COBA said it welcomed the committee's support for targeted tax breaks for domestic drama. Kosminsky also told Sky News the second series of Wolf Hall was nearly called off just six weeks before it was due to start shooting due to financial pressures, adding: "It was only because the producer, the director, writer and the leading actor all agreed to take huge cuts in their own remuneration that the show actually got made." He said that both he and the show's executive producer, Sir Colin Callender, had "worked on the show unpaid for 11 years on the basis that we would get a payment when the show went into production", calling it "a bitter blow" to see that disappear. Working in public service broadcasting for his entire career, Kosminsky said it was "absolutely heartbreaking for me and others like me to see that the industry we have been nurtured by and we care about is being decimated". While he said he was a "huge fan of the streamers", he said it was their "very deep pockets" that had "driven up the price of what we do", to the point where the traditional broadcasters can no longer afford to make high-end television. Just this week, Adolescence, created by British talent Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham, became the fourth most popular English-language series in Netflix's history with 114 million views. But while some very British shows might get taken on by the streamers due to universal appeal, Kosminsky said dramas including ITV's Mr Bates Vs The Post Office and Hillsborough, and BBC drama Three Girls about the grooming of young girls by gangs in the north of England were examples of game-changing productions that could be lost in the future. He warned: "These are not dramas that the streamers would ever make, they're about free speech in this country. That's part of what we think of as a democratic society, where we can make these dramas and programmes that challenge on issues of public policy that would never be of any interest in America." The CMS report comes following an inquiry into British film and high-end television, which considered how domestic and inward investment production was being affected by the rise of streaming platforms. Chairwoman of the CMS committee, Dame Caroline Dinenage, said "there will be countless distinctly British stories that never make it to our screens" unless the government intervenes to "rebalance the playing field" between streamers and public service broadcasters (PSBs). A DCMS spokesperson said: "We acknowledge the challenges facing our brilliant film and TV industry and are working with it through our Industrial Strategy to consider what more needs to be done to unlock growth and develop the skills pipeline. We thank the committee for its report which we will respond to in due course."
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Peter Kosminsky: UK Government Would Rather See British Drama 'Go To The Wall' Than Upset Trump
EXCLUSIVE: Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky has argued that the UK government is more worried about 'poking the U.S. presidential bear' than protecting British TV storytelling. The BAFTA-winning dramatist has been a forceful advocate for a streamer levy to support local scripted content amid a funding crisis, but is sceptical that British ministers share his vision. More from Deadline Netflix Will Hike Prices If UK Introduces Streamer Levy UK Culture Committee Officially Recommends 5% SVoD Levy & Urges Government To Take Legal Steps If Industry Doesn't Act: "It's Time For The Streamers To Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is" 'Wolf Hall' Director Says Almost All Outdoor Scenes In Acclaimed Drama Were Cut Due To Gap In Funding Kosminsky's latest intervention comes as UK Parliament's Culture, Media & Sport Committee recommended that, if the industry can't design its own scheme, the government should force the likes of Netflix to pay a 5% revenue levy into a cultural fund that supports local high-end TV production. Responding to the recommendation, Kosminsky told Deadline: 'However much support builds for the idea of a streamers' levy to support UK PSB [public service broadcaster] production, I'm concerned that the government isn't brave enough to introduce such an idea. 'They seem to be so terrified of poking the US presidential bear that my fear is they would rather see UK PSB HETV production go to the wall – leaving us with an unbroken diet of streamers' HE television in the UK – than face the prospect of countermeasures from the White House.' The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) has been approached for comment. Chris Bryant, the creative industries minister, told lawmakers in January that 'we haven't got any plans' to introduce a levy. Since then, Trump has introduced tariffs and the UK is keen to avoid measures that look like retaliation and risk sparking a trade war. In a statement about the Culture, Media & Sport Committee's recommendations, the DCMS said: 'We acknowledge the challenges facing our brilliant film and TV industry and are working with it through our Industrial Strategy to consider what more needs to be done to unlock growth and develop the skills pipeline. We thank the Committee for its report which we will respond to in due course.' Kosminsky added that the Culture, Media & Sport Committee's proposal, that the cultural fund 'support domestic HETV production,' was too vague. 'To have the effect described, to save PSB HETV production and to reinvigorate the co-production market, it's important to be clear that the fund can only be used for productions with a UK PSB commission attached. Otherwise, there is a danger that a significant proportion of the fund could be siphoned back towards the streamers themselves,' he said. A funding crisis has dominated discussions in the UK scripted community, as executives lament a perfect storm of issues, including U.S. streamers pulling back from co-production, shrinking international sales advances, persistent inflation, ad revenue declines, and BBC funding cuts. There is not universal consensus around a levy, with high-profile figures such as Black Doves producer Jane Featherstone speaking out against the proposal. Others, like Adolescence writer Jack Thorne, think a mix of solutions, including increased tax breaks, is the right way forward. Netflix has warned that it will hike prices if a levy is introduced. 'Levies diminish competitiveness and penalise audiences who ultimately bear the increased costs,' the company said. Best of Deadline Which Colleen Hoover Books Are Becoming Movies? 'Verity,' 'Reminders Of Him' & 'Regretting You' Will Join 'It Ends With Us' 'The Last Of Us' Season 2: Everything We Know So Far Book-To-Movie Adaptations Coming Out In 2025
