Peter Kosminsky

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0:11Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading creative figures choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the writer and director Peter Kosminski. Having started out as a current affairs journalist, he made his name by telling contemporary social and political stories in the form of television drama. Warriors was about British soldiers in Bosnia. The government inspector dramatised the events surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly. The state explored the radicalisation of British Islamists.

0:46But Kosminski is also acclaimed for his television adaptations of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. He's won six BAFTA awards, including one for his outstanding contribution to British television. This is so weird, you know. This is the drama studio. Have you worked in here? I have. That's so bizarre. Of course, it looks a bit different now, but I have not been in this room since 1981. Take one. This I know. Peter Kozminski, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you, John. You're renowned for telling hard-hitting, sometimes brutal, sometimes controversial, contemporary stories, either as documentaries, more often as dramas.

1:30How do you decide which genre to work in when approaching a new project? Well, it's sometimes dictated by the material and sometimes by availability. I made documentaries for about ten years and I wanted to do something about the so-called shoot-to-kill incidents in Amar in 1982. and the truth was when we looked into it there was nothing to film. The people that were prepared to talk to us would only do so off the record. The people we had hoped to talk to were either unavailable, almost impossible to track down or dead, so there wasn't much to film except what we used to call guilty buildings, exteriors of buildings that were relevant to the story.

2:17So sometimes it's necessity, but what do you gain from dramatising real events? Well, audience, for one thing. You just get a much bigger audience and a much more competitive slot on terrestrial television for a high-profile drama than you would for a documentary on a similar subject. And in the end, if what you're interested in is talking to your audience and perhaps even changing minds, and certainly alerting people to things of which they might not have been aware, then the size of the audience is not insignificant. So you've been able to explore contemporary issues, contentious political issues, through the medium of drama that you may not have been able to even start approaching if you had been working purely as a documentary maker, do you think?

3:06Unquestionably. And as a matter of fact, the BBC is about to retransmit a show I worked on with an amazing writer called Lee Jackson called The Project. This was about what was going on behind the scenes in New Labour in the run-up to its famous 1997 landslide victory and then in its first year in government. The people we spoke to would never, ever have been prepared to go on camera. They only spoke to us on the basis that we would never reveal their identities and that we would use what they told us in such a way that it couldn't be attributed to them. So there was no way that could have been a documentary.

3:46The only way to reveal the things that we discovered during that research period was in drama. There's one clinching point. Why did John Prescott refuse to come on this programme? He was in the BBC studios and he's run away. This is a disaster. We've completely lost control of the presentation. Now you people need to get on top of your job! Get a grip! We want an on-air apology now. And the project, that drama that you made, was a sort of hybrid form, wasn't it? Because there was real news footage used there, there were speeches made by Tony Blair or interviews by Peter Mandelson or whoever, and yet there were other characters behind the scenes, possibly Alistair Campbell and Derek Draper, some of those people that were working for New Labour that were portrayed by the actors as sort of composites of the spin doctors and the people behind the scenes.

4:36Exactly. That's a technique I've used from time to time. So we're able to say that pretty much entirely all the events depicted are true. They have happened. But the characters are fictional. They are exactly, as you say, composites of people, partly to disguise identity, where people have spoken to us in competence, and partly in an attempt to give an audience, in quite a short time frame, a sense of an overall that you couldn't contain or convey if you just told the story of one or two real characters.

5:20on this cultural life peter kuzminski i usually start by asking my guests to talk about their upbringing and their parents and you've handily pre-empted my question by choosing as your first major influence your parental home so tell me about your mum and dad my father was a journeyman Taylor. He was the oldest of a large family and he felt the responsibility to help provide for that family. So he left school at 14, went into a manual trade, tailoring in London. He was a self-educated man. He read and studied all his life and he was extremely left-wing. He was a member of the British Communist Party.

6:03And although I didn't agree with the specifics of his political views at all. In fact, we disagreed completely. I was very influenced by the left-wing environment in that house. It was also a completely atheist house, although both my parents are Jewish. And you say atheist rather than secular. So it was... Well, my father was militantly anti-religion, so atheist is the word that jumps to mind, but it was certainly secular as well. There was no religion of any kind, although interestingly, my father sent me to a C of E school which was intensely religious. So in fact I did have a fairly extensive Christian upbringing but always felt apart from that.

6:50Was this at Haberdasher's Asks in Elstree yes. Which is a public school isn't it? It's a public school. Scholarship boy? No as a matter of fact my grandfather paid for me to go. He had earned a bit of money as a salesman and he was prepared to spend that money educating me, for which I obviously will always be grateful. My mother had a very different background from my father. She was a kindertransport child. She is. She's still living. Absolutely sharp 93-year-old. She arrived in this country with a label round her neck, speaking no English at the age of eight, having lost all her luggage, never knowing if she would see her parents again.

7:34And I was and am profoundly moved by her story and by the story of her wider family, which was decimated in the Holocaust. She came from Austria, from Vienna. What effect do you think that sense of her knowing her story and knowing that she arrived here at such a young age as a refugee, as an outsider? How do you think that story has informed your own storytelling on behalf of other people? It's informed it hugely. First of all, I'm still quick to say this because it sounds so old fashioned and pompous now, but it has bred in me a tremendous feeling of gratitude to the country that gave my mother's family refuge.

8:22If it hadn't been for England's hospitality, for Britain's hospitality, I wouldn't exist. And I feel an obligation as a result of that to this country. In terms of the content of programme making, it's always made me focus on the outsider. It gave me that perspective. I've had this sort of weird dichotomy in me. On the one hand, that typical refugee immigrant desire to dig in to society, and in particular to its cultural institutions. Of course, I came straight to the BBC from university. and to just be accepted, to be absorbed, not to be different. And yet, on the other hand, weirdly, the rebels' desire to overturn the apple cart, cause trouble, to ask difficult questions.

9:16And it's this battle that continues to rage in me to this day, and I actually ended up dramatising it in a drama I made for Channel 4 called Brits. Have I told you that most of the families that were currently under surveillance were Muslim. Would that trouble you? No, not if the intelligence that identified them was sound. Why do you want to work for MI5, Mr Wade? Because I suppose I think there ought to be more to life than just a fat paycheck, and also because I want to give something back. My parents came to this country. They had nothing. Britain took them in, fed them, housed them. I owe this country everything.

9:57Brits was a contemporary story. of course. That was the one starring Riz Ahmed as a young British-Asian man who was co-opted by MI5 and then is very conflicted about his professional role and his place in his community. How did your mother's story inform that, do you think? I grew up surrounded by anti-Semitism in my school, although there were quite a few Jews there. It was strongly evident and you just kept your head down really and tried not to do anything that would provoke it. And around the time I was making shows like The Government Inspector and Brits, I looked at the country governed by Tony Blair and his party and I thought I bet growing up as a second generation Muslim in Britain today feels in some ways similar to the way I felt as a second generation Jewish immigrant growing up in the 60s.

11:03That's why it seemed at least arguably legitimate. I could see there were counter arguments to try to frame something of the push-pull that I felt as a human being growing up, to reframe it in the world of British Islam. I suppose all of this just combined for me into a feeling of wanting to be the voice for the disenfranchised, the disaffected, the outsiders, the people who stand on tiptoe outside the windows of society trying to peep in.

11:47Your next choice is a television drama, one directed by Ken Loach and written by Jim Allen, and it was called Days of Hope, and it's set in that decade between the end of the First World War and the general strike in 1926, telling stories of working-class struggle. You would have been about 18, I guess, then, when you saw this. Where did you see it? On television? I saw it on television at home. My parents had gone to bed, so I was sitting alone in our sitting room in Stanmore and I was watching Days of Hope as you say it was a four part series a kind of drama sometimes called kitchen sink drama I don't like it's incredibly patronising but it was really the story of ordinary people ordinary people in these extraordinary situations the First World War, the General Strike I remember one particular sequence that impacted particularly on me.

12:45It's in the First World War, and it's set in a pub in Ireland. And a group of English squaddies have sort of taken over the pub, and it's a very aggressive atmosphere. And the landlord has a young daughter, about sort of 17 years old, and she's being pushed around by these guys. They're all drunk. and you think she's going to be gang-raped. And suddenly somebody shouts, give us a song, give us a song! And they hoist this young Irish girl up. So I'm quite affected remembering this, funnily enough. It always has an impact on me, this. They hoist her up onto a chair and she starts to sing and she has a little but exquisitely beautiful voice.

13:40They're marching and drilling I walk in the glen side And the atmosphere in the room changes like that. And of course these are all young conscripts, young volunteers about to go out to the trenches where most of them will die. And the mood evoked by the song exactly captures what they're feeling deep inside, buried deep under the bravado and the aggression. Some died by the glenside Some died met the stranger And wise men It's remarkable seeing how it still moves you, just even thinking about that scene. It moves me, but what struck me most of all, John, about it, watching it as an 18-year-old doing his A-levels, was the power of the medium.

14:43The way it had been able to make me feel frightened for this young girl and in a moment turn it on a sixpence. I remember sitting there watching it with tears running down my face and I remember thinking, I want to do that. I want to be involved in that in some way. Ken Loach famously helped bring about political and social change with regard to homelessness and abortion rights with Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction in the 1960s. Has that ever been part of your professional ambition to affect social change through the work? I'm hesitating because I don't want to seem like I'm getting above myself.

15:29But obviously the honest answer is yes. And I know for a fact that it has, because right back at the start of my drama career, I made a film for ITV called 15, The Life and Death of Philip Knight. And it was about a young Welsh shoplifter called Philip Knight, who was sent to adult prison and hanged himself in his prison cell. and I've been told and I've no reason not to believe it that as a result of that film and the press attention it garnered the law was changed and you now can't hold children in adult prisons. So that was one very concrete effect of a film I had made. Many years later you made a drama starring Mark Rylance about the death of Dr David Kelly.

16:21It was called The Government Inspector. Do you think that had an impact on public discourse surrounding the Iraq war? That's a very interesting question, and obviously one that I've thought about. Television works best, I think, when it speaks to the individual, not to nations or bodies politic. And I'm much more concerned the effect that a drama that we might work on has on an individual. but I always used to think that the ultimate sign of a success of one of the things I'd worked on was that somebody at the end would be moved to write to their MP or go and pick up the telephone in the hall and ring someone up and complain and want to do something.

17:09I am not trying to make dramas that send people off to bed comfortable and happy and never cross their minds again. I'm trying to make dramas that make people think perhaps slightly differently. Can the medium still have that impact, do you think? I think it's harder. When I started making drama, when Ken Loach was making his television dramas, you could have a significant proportion of the nation watching at the same time. I remember hearing from a friend who was travelling home on the top of a London bus and the two people in front of him, one of them said, oh, just time to get home, have a shower and watch the second part of Shoot to Kill.

17:55This was the first drama I made, Shoot to Kill, about the stalker affair. And it gave me more pleasure, evoked a greater sense of pride in me than almost anything, certainly any sort of glowing reviews or anything like that, because I felt that there was somebody who was so affected by that drama that they were rushing to get home so that they could watch it. Now, of course, people watch when they want, under the circumstances they want. It's a more disparate experience. Is that frustrating for you? No, I still think I'm right at the end of the period when something on the BBC or Channel 4 that's given a good publicity launch, that has a good slot, can still elicit excitement and cause significant attention.

18:43but we're right at the end of that I think. You started out making documentaries, you moved into dramas, you still blur the lines between the two stylistically and particularly in the use of the handheld camera in your dramas. We even see it in Wolf Hall. How did that approach first come about? Well it came as a result of utter despair. I had a series of bad experiences early on in my drama career. I was asked by Paramount Pictures to make an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It became my second ever job of work with actors. This was with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as Kathy Earnshaw. Correct.

19:24Unlikely Yorkshire woman. Yes, yes. Another previous This Cultural Life guest, by the way. Ah, well, a wonderful actress, not necessarily well cast in that movie. it was not a good film I did not do a good job and I was rightly criticised publicly in the press for doing it but then I meant on making my television dramas as a matter of fact it's a good job that I was contractually committed to make The Life and Death of Philip Knight immediately afterwards for Yorkshire Television because I think I would have quit filmmaking as a result of Wuthering Heights if not. I was in such a state of despair at the end of that film.

20:08I was a documentary director and now I was a drama director and I wanted to prove I wasn't a stupid documentary maker who was just playing, didn't know what it was. So I had to use all the gear. I had to have tracks, steady cam, circular tracks if possible. I did all the kit to prove I knew what I was doing. And it was awful. It was stultifying. I was in pre-production for another drama, which was called No Child of Mine, which was about child abuse. And I was in despair. I really didn't know what I was doing. I wanted to pull out. And I was walking along the river near Southampton with my then wife, Helen, and I was sharing my despair with her.

20:57And she said, well, why don't you just shoot them like you used to shoot documentaries? You know, just do exactly the same. And it was like a revelation. I thought, well, why don't I? Of course, I did exactly what we all used to say. Well, I can't because. It's not the way you do it. Exactly. That's not how you direct drama. It's not the same. You know, there's a script, dear. You know, you don't know what you're talking about. But then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, she's right. So we shot No Child of Mine like a documentary. And it was a liberation. Thank you, hell and marriage.

21:36And I've shot pretty much all my drama that way since. I believe that it makes it feel real or more real.

21:49Your next choice, an inspirational moment in your career, was a letter written to you by a former British soldier in response to having watched your 1999 Balkans war drama, Warriors. Probably the single most important letter I've ever received. I've still got it, actually. And it was from an old soldier, and he had watched Warriors, as you say, which is a drama about British soldiers keeping the peace in Bosnia. And right at the end of quite a long and thoughtful letter, he said, I was a British soldier in the Second World War, and I went on to be part of the much earlier peacekeeping force in Palestine between 1945 and 1948.

22:37But you won't want to talk about that because no one remembers us. It was a humiliating defeat after a famous victory in the Second World War. There's no memorial to us. We're not allowed to march to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. No one wants to remember us. And of course, this was a challenge. I couldn't not respond to that. And 11 years later, after an extensive period of research and speaking to many of the then surviving veterans of that peacekeeping campaign in Palestine, we transmitted a four-part series called The Promise. And The Promise involves two timelines, one contemporary and the other pre-1948, the time when Palestine was still under the British mandate.

23:28I mean, very hard to imagine you could make that drama today. Was it difficult, practically difficult to make at the time? It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and perhaps not coincidentally the thing of which I'm most proud. It caused more trouble than anything I've ever made. I remember going to Paris to publicising it with my wife and we had bodyguards with us the entire time we were there. There was a rowdy demonstration outside the offices of Canal Plus, the French broadcaster. It was a very hostile reaction to that piece. So, yes, it was very difficult. Did you understand the hostility?

24:09and I say that because although it was critically acclaimed, it was nominated for BAFTAs, it was also accused of being anti-Semitic. It was said to involve Jewish tropes and stereotypes. How did you respond to those accusations at the time? Well, to answer your question, I have to say a little bit more about The Promise. it's the story of a young girl called Erin who's played by Claire Foy in one of her earliest performances and it's an outstanding performance she has a terrible relationship with her grandfather who's grouchy and unpleasant and then dies and going through his effects after his death she finds a diary that he had written of his time as a peacekeeper in Palestine in that 1945 to 48 period.

25:02She's invited by a friend who's a British and Israeli citizen to go and spend some time in Israel. Her friend has to do her national service in the IDF and she goes out to keep her company really and she sits by the pool because her friend is quite wealthy and Erin isn't and while she's got time on her hands she reads the diary and then after a while she decides to try to retrace the steps of her grandfather as a young man. And when she starts to do that, we flash back to Christian Cook, who's playing Len, her grandfather, as a young man. Now, we interviewed a large number of veterans of that peacekeeping effort, and it was uncanny.

25:52They all said the same thing. And what they said was that when we arrived in Palestine, our sympathies were completely with the Jewish people. Some of them had been involved in the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp. They'd all heard about places like that. Their attitude was, if the Jews need a homeland, of course, given what they've been through, they deserve it. And by the end of that three-year period, during which they had been on the receiving end of what nowadays would be called terrorism and explosions, kidnappings. By the Jewish militia, the guerrilla groups. The guerrilla groups that were fighting for an independent Israel, a Jewish state.

26:34Their attitudes to a man, of course they were all men, had changed. And the British squaddy always favours the underdog, it has to be said. It's a time-honoured tradition. Their attitudes had shifted. Their sympathies had flowed through to the Arab side. Therefore, the character that I wrote, Len, had to follow that arc. Otherwise, it would have been a gross misrepresentation of what the research had suggested. And Erin, the most apolitical person you could ever imagine, this 18-year-old girl, sort of becomes politicised as a result of retracing his steps. It was immensely difficult to make. we made it entirely in Israel with an Israeli crew and all the actors pretty much, apart from those playing British characters, were cast locally.

27:30And so there were Israeli reservists playing IDF soldiers and... It was extraordinary. They were bringing all this experience of the real world, which was happening all around our filming, into this. And it made it an incredibly visceral experience. So you get a verite aspect there. But I return to those criticisms, you know, that it was said to be anti-Israeli propaganda. You're accused of anti-Semitism. How did that impact on you as a Jewish man? It made me very annoyed because, and this is my personal opinion and some are going to disagree, because I've seen indirectly the impact of racism on my family.

28:11And it seemed to me that the accusation of anti-Semitism being leveled at people who are actually critical of the political actions of a sovereign state, the state of Israel, the equation of those two things, you criticize Israel and its political actions, makes you an anti-Semite, in other words, a racist. I'm really angry about that because it seems to me it devalues the currency of racism. It isn't racist, in my view, to criticise Israel. I think if you say that the way Israel is behaving in Gaza at the moment, or the elected government of Israel is behaving in Gaza at the moment, is wrong, I don't think that makes me a racist.

28:58It means that that's my political opinion about an elected government and some of the decisions it's taking about the way it behaves in an occupied territory. But given that the power of your dramas always lies with the portrayal of the individuals, do you have any regrets in the way that some of the Israeli characters were portrayed? Would you do it differently today? I don't think so. There was this accusation of a trope being used because Erin's friend was wealthy. but we depicted lots of Israelis in the show who weren't wealthy. I thought, why would Erin come? Why does she want to go to another country where she doesn't speak the language and knows no one?

29:41She wants to go because she's being told she can sit by the pool and live a rather luxurious lifestyle. That's the reason I made that creative choice because I thought it was unrealistic that Erin would want to go in other circumstances. it wasn't chosen as a desire to somehow suggest that all Israeli Jews are wealthy, because having made the show in Israel, I know for a fact that that's not the case. And can I just say that I think these are exactly the kind of red herring arguments that are deployed because it was a powerful drama, because people were nervous about the persuasiveness of the message.