SkyShowtime He has a new and juicy bet on his hands. Neil Cross (Luther) business The Iris Affair, a thriller starring Niamh Algar and Tom Hollander which promises to hook you until the last episode. The plot follows the enigmatic genius Iris Nixon (Algar), who, after solving a series of online puzzles, arrives at a square in Florence where she meets the charismatic businessman Cameron Beck (Hollander).
He invites her to work for him to unlock a powerful piece of top-secret technology, which piques her curiosity and she accepts the proposal. But when Iris discovers the dangerous potential of the technology, she steals the journal containing the device’s activation sequence and disappears.
The disappearance sparks a relentless search from a remote Sardinian cabin and through the crowded streets of Rome, as Cameron races to find Iris in a risky game where trust is dangerous and failure can be catastrophic. We spoke to Cross about his new bet, now available on SkyShowtime.
Who do you write for nowadays? Do you write for yourself, for your audience, who do you think of when you have a new project to develop?
Essentially, I just write for myself. And even when I hire other screenwriters to work with me, I always tell them that I’m only interested in reading what those who do it write, regardless of whether they are going to be published or not. I started writing when I was six or seven years old, making comic pages in which drawings seemed easier to me than speech bubbles. I never knew what to write, so I turned it around, started writing dialogues and then completing them with drawings.
This series, at least visually, is brighter than other work you’ve done in your career. Do you think critics and awards will value it? It seems that prestige goes hand in hand with darkness.
Completely agree. It’s a mystery I constantly face. I think people confuse seriousness with intellectual weight. But the works that deal with fundamental ideas of our existence, the crowning works of our race, would be nothing without humor, since it is an essential part of who we are.
I have not read Don Quijote, but it is the best, the first, the greatest novel of humanity, and it is fundamentally comic. I’m going to get into trouble: in the most excellent places in our industry there are people who are not confident in their intelligence. They believe that, to compensate for this insecurity, they must be excessively serious and dark.
So create something like The Iris Affair, Does it mean that you are at a point in your career where you don’t have to prove anything to anyone?
I don’t care what all these people think. As I mentioned, I grew up surrounded by comics, at a time when reading comics was marginal, it didn’t make you many friends. In the eighties, I played non-stop Dungeons and dragons. I miss him very much. I never sought validation from a higher echelon, from an intellectual elite, their judgment does not interest me at all.
What about your audience? Do you feel like you have followers, people who follow you and get excited about what you’re going to do next?
I don’t have a relationship with them, I spend little time on the Internet, I don’t live there. I’ve never looked at Twitter and I don’t understand what Instagram is. I don’t interact with them that way. I know they exist, but if I’m honest, I think praise can carry a particular danger, just like that which comes from insults.
The only thing I can do is move forward in my solitude, in my little boat, and tell my stories. We had a premiere in New York for the movie Luther and it was great, there were a lot of fans. But beyond specific occasions like that, I remain a mystery, as far away as I can from the attention of others.
Who was Nigel Kneale and why does he continue to inspire you?
He was a British television scriptwriter who created something that today we could define as “cosmic horror.” He designed very ambitious, commercial and terrifying films and series, and he did so very successfully, he knew how to connect with the public. It had a recurring character named Bernard Quatermass, an astronaut who returned to Earth but who, in his travels, had ceased to be the man we once knew. I think he was the best screenwriter the UK has ever had. I’m not going to say it’s a copy, but Doctor Who It wouldn’t have existed without Nigel Kneale and without Quatermass.
Going back to The Iris Affair, Let’s talk about the main characters. When did you find out who they were and how the final result is similar to what you had in mind at the beginning?
How interesting, let me think. Iris, the character, I soon knew who she was. It has a lot of Hitchcock, of Patricia Highsmith, but it is very particular, contradictory. The idea of women as antihero has not been much explored. I had all these references in my head and I thought it would be impossible to find the perfect actress, until my team told me “you are looking for Niamh Algar”. We auditioned her the next day and there she was, exactly what I was looking for, we didn’t see any other actress.
Cameron Beck was the opposite system, I had a much longer process of falling in love with Tom Hollander. He offered humanity, charisma and depth to a character that a less talented actor would have wasted.
While watching the series, I thought about a Michael Caine anecdote. He made a movie called Contract in Marseille, in the south of France. When he received the script, he didn’t even read it, because who would say no to spending five weeks in the south of France? Is it easier to start writing a project if, as happens in The Iris Affair, Does it take place in Italy or somewhere sunny?
The answer is: infinitely. Before you go, I have to tell you my favorite Michael Caine anecdote.
Please.
Someone asked him if he had seen Shark: Revenge which he had starred in. And he replied: “No, but I have seen the house he bought for my mother, and it is incredible.”
The Iris Affair is now available on SkyShowtime.