EXCLUSIVE | 'The Salisbury Poisonings' director Saul Dibb defends telling the story 'soon' after real incident
When 'The Salisbury Poisonings' made news about its arrival on the BBC, there was a lot of hue and cry about it being too soon for the story. A dramatization of the 2018 Novichok poisoning crisis in Salisbury, England, and the subsequent Amesbury poisonings starring Anne-Marie Duff, Rafe Spall, Annabel Scholey and MyAnna Buring, 'The Salisbury Poisonings' tells a gripping tale of a small town seized in the middle of an international terrorist attack and a public health crisis.
At the centre of it all is the then Director of Public Health and Safety for Wiltshire Tracy Daszkiewicz, played by Duff, who races against time to contain the infection.
To all those naysayers, director Saul Dibb points to the fact that it is an important story to tell. "Some people said how can you tell their story, it's so soon, it's only just happened," he tells MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) in an exclusive interview. "Actually, in a way, you could argue that those are the stories that we should be telling, because we should be examining them in more detail. [It is about] knowing more than we would have otherwise known."
'The Salisbury Poisonings' is a fact-based, detailed insight into first responders and what goes into containing a public health crisis. But when you ask director Saul Dibb about the intention behind the story, he says it was more about telling the tale from a different perspective. "The first main intention really was to take something that could have been told as a spy story and to point the other way towards the people who are impacted by it," he tells us.
The show doesn't tell the story of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, but of the collateral damage it caused the citizens of the small cathedral town of Salisbury. "It's the fallout from a spy story. We were pointing a weapon towards the people who are running towards it - first responders, the people who were then responsible for keeping it [the town] safe and then a member of the public who stumbled across it."
The story required rigorous research which had the writers Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn spending months at a stretch in Salisbury talking to the locals and digging deeper into the crisis. While Dibb wasn't involved in the initial stages of the investigation, he met the people when filming the show.
Although entirely fact-based, 'The Salisbury Poisonings' puts a lot of its focus on human emotions and the instinct to survive. When watching the show, the facts of the incident align perfectly with the characters' struggles with the box they're put in. And that is exactly where one would differentiate the four-part series from a documentary — the details of the case aren't privy to anyone but what went behind the scenes of these incidents is a story that the BBC show tells.
"While there was forensic attention to detail in terms of how we wanted to create the world, you're still casting actors, they're [writers are] still writing lines of dialogue that are imagined, the writers certainly finding out what was the, what were the kinds of things that we're talking about, what are the events that were experienced? Obviously, there's always going to be a creative license to fill in the gaps, but you're also choosing which stories you tell and have to dramatize it."
He offers the example of Nick Bailey, the police officer played by Rafe Spall, who is the first respondent to the scene and inadvertently gets himself contaminated with the nerve agent. "For somebody like somebody like Nick Bailey, it's about understanding what it is to be poisoned by it and to try and make it more immersive - to try and get under the skin of those characters and that is, in a way different to a documentary."
This is part 1 of an interview with Director Saul Dibb. Part 2 of the interview will be out soon. Stay tuned!
All episodes of 'The Salisbury Poisonings' will be available to stream on AMC+ on October 1, 2020.