Working Title are probably best known for movie rom-coms like “Bridget Jones” and “Notting Hill” but their latest project – “Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole” – is sure to astound audiences as they swap big knickers and Chardonnay for semi-automatic weapons and increasingly wild screen deaths.
Based on Nesbø’s crime novel series about an obsessive but flawed detective named Harry Hole (pronounced Hoo-ley), with Nesbø adapting the books himself, the 9-episode series is not only a highly-polished yet gritty local language Norwegian drama but delivers plenty of bombshells as Hole (played by Tobias Santelmann) and his team try to track down a serial killer stalking Oslo’s streets while at the same time dodging corrupt officers inside his own force.
“There’s some pretty shocking stuff in it, but one person’s shocking is entertaining, another person’s shocking is depraved,” says Working Title co-chair, Eric Fellner in an interview with Variety.
Read on to find out more about how the production team brought the action-packed show to life, what Working Title learned from their first (less successful) attempt to adapt a Harry Hole novel and why audiences won’t be able to anticipate who’s behind the grisly murders.
What can you tell me about the show?
I don’t want to give specifics but basically, as the show progresses, you start to go deeper and deeper into Nesbø world, and Nesbø world — I don’t really know how to describe it but it’s pretty tough and [has] pretty dark influences. Our characters have genuine human flaws and they are there for all to see and magnify, because it’s a TV show, and it gets really quite exciting.
Episode 1 is pretty dark. Does it get darker than that?
I don’t think it’s darker. It gets maybe more — there’s some pretty shocking stuff in it, but one person’s shocking is entertaining, another person’s shocking is depraved. It’s strong and it’s good because of that, in the same way people perceive the violence of Tarantino films; they love it. Because you’re in the hands of a proper storyteller (or with Tarantino, a proper director) and with Jo, he’s a proper storyteller. And the beauty of this series is it’s his version of his books. You get double Nesbø. You get the Nesbø who wrote the books and the Nesbø who created the TV show.
How did Working Title get involved in the project?
About 10 years ago, maybe longer Amelia Granger [Working Title’s head of film and TV] brought the books to me and said we should make this into a TV series. And at the time, Jo was more interested in making a movie, but we took the rights, and it’s taken us 10 years to now.
What did you learn from your experience of adapting Nesbø’s “The Snowman” that you brought to this show?
That to do a Jo Nesbø adaptation you need Jo Nesbø front and centre!
The series is based on the fifth book in Nesbø’s “Detective Hole” series. Is there a reason you didn’t start with the first?
This was the story that Jo really wanted to tell, and he felt it would be a great way to start what hopefully might be a number of series. So he’s taken a few bits and pieces from various other books, and then, if people like this and they want to invite us back for more, then we’ll find another one to do.
[The number] five becomes a really critical thing in the show. He peppers these clues through Episodes 6, 7, 8, and hopefully you will have no fucking idea who the killer is. And you kind of go, “it’s that one!” “Oh no, it must be that one.”
Was it commissioned out of the U.S.?
It was commissioned out of the U.S. and then transferred to the Nordics.
Joel Kinnaman in ‘Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole’ (courtesy of Netflix)
Was there any discussion about doing it in English?
Yeah, initially we were going to do it in English and set it — firstly, we were thinking of setting in America, then we thought, “No, we need to be culturally specific” and set it in Norway but have everybody speaking in English. Then Netflix, at quite a late moment during the process, went, “If we’re going to be culturally specific, let’s be culturally specific and let’s be local language.” and I think they were totally right.
How did it work in terms of Working Title being able to look over the scripts?
We ran it, rightly or wrongly as we would run a movie. So we were all over every aspect of it creatively. The only difference was the language, and so we had to trust — and because we had Jo in the center of it, it wasn’t really that worrying — we knew that the translation would be pretty much exact to what we were reading in English. It’s quite challenging, when you’re sitting on set and you see a take and you don’t understand a word that’s being spoken, to fully appreciate whether or not you’ve got it. But we trusted Jo.
And we trusted [directors] Øystein Karlsen and Anna Zackrisson. I think they got a really cool-looking piece that has the specificity — I keep using this phrase “cultural specificity” but I think it really resonates — combined with what I think we brought, which was a sense of, “Okay, let’s try to break this show out a bit and see if we can make something that is wider-looking for a global audience.” I’m hoping that audiences will really enjoy a setting that they may not have seen before.
The show definitely looks high-end. Are you able to share what the budget was?
We’re not. It’s high-end for Norway but low-end for America.
It doesn’t look low-end for America.
I know, I’m really proud of that. Øystein and Anna wanted to make a mainstream show. We had one DP for the whole thing [Ronald Plante] and he is absolutely incredible, the way he gives a very glossy, “big show” feel, even when he’s on the hoof. And then the crews are just amazing.
It opens with a helicopter, was it a real helicopter?
Everything in film is real.
Helicopters cost a lot of money.
You’re with the helicopter, and then you’re outside the helicopter, and then you’re zooming in, and then there’s a car chase and then there’s a huge car crash and then it hits a tram, flips over, ends up on train tracks, you know, big action scene. And then you cut to a bank, and there’s a guy coming in with a gun, and then a woman gets blown away. So yeah, there’s a lot going on in that opening four minutes. That’s the trick of cinema — that’s the producer’s job — is to try and make things look as big as you possibly can, engaging and entertaining enough to capture the audience. Also, with Netflix, it’s really important that you deliver drama in the first five minutes. I think we might have delivered too much.
I can’t believe you killed off [spoiler] in the first episode.
And she’s a big actress in Norway. It’s gonna blow people’s minds, because they’re settling in for her to be the third lead.
Were there any scenes or set pieces that particularly stood out for you?
The only big problems we had was there was more story than time, so we had to make some quite tough decisions about losing scenes. A lot of the episodes initially started out at an hour, hour and five minutes, it was just too much, so we slightly reordered things, we squashed things, we chose to edit out some of the elements that we deemed were unnecessary, but otherwise, we pretty much shot the scripts. There was nothing that our limited funds couldn’t achieve. We had to get creative, but Øystein and Anna deserve a lot of credit as directors, they really gave the show the feel and the look.
How did you end up with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis doing soundtrack?
I would love Nick Cave to do the soundtrack for everything. I’d like Nick Cave to do the soundtrack for my life. He’s just a genius. We asked him, and he said yes. It was him and Warren. They’re my musical heroes.
What else is on the horizon for Working Title?
So I think pretty much everything that is real has been written about. We’re busy. We’ve got a lot of films coming out. We’ve got a lot of films either in production or going into production. We’ve got “Billy Elliot” about to open on a tour, and then coming into the West End, tickets just went on sale, that’s doing great. And then there will be some other musical theater projects that are going to come in ‘27 which we can talk about nearer the time. So we’re pivoting — we’re not pivoting — but we’re focusing a little bit more on musical theater.
Has that been a conscious decision or just how things have worked out?
These things take so long, and it’s a bit like busses that suddenly there’s more than one project at the same time that that can go. And when it can go, you go, “Okay, let’s take advantage of that.” I think there is also a little bit of — it is so hard to persuade people to go to the cinema at the moment. I don’t know what the answer is. I mean, we just keep striving to try and make projects that we believe in, and make them as well as you possibly can, but it isn’t easy.
So I think the idea of doing something different, a bit more TV, doing some documentaries maybe, doing theater. We’re not going to suddenly re-emerge as WT Creator Studio. I would love to, but I don’t think that’s in our DNA. We’re looking at podcasts. We’re looking at everything. And, yeah, it’s a challenging, but an exciting time. We’re very fucking lucky, though, because we have this big library and big reputation for the company and a lot of connections with talent, both in front and behind the camera, that we’re able to keep lurching on. But it’s difficult.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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