Historical TV drama Wolf Hall may have won critical acclaim when its second series debuted on the BBC last year, but its director has shared that many editorial decisions had to be made due to lack of funds.
Peter Kosminsky, who previously directed the first series of the award-winning adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s bestselling novel about the life of King Henry VIII and his wives, told the BBC that almost all the exterior scenes in the second series were cut, and the show became instead “conversations in rooms.”
The director explained to the BBC that other cuts had to be made too – costumes, props, locations – due to gaps in funding:
“We had a whole joust, an extraordinary scene as conceived by Hilary Mantel, the original novelist – and we had to cut everything.
“That’s not something that has ever happened to me before, in all the years I’ve been making programmes, that you actually have to stop six weeks from production.”
Kosminsky previously shared that he, his lead actor Sir Mark Rylance and his screenwriter Peter Straughan (who won an Oscar this year for the screenplay for Conclave) also took significant pay cuts prior to filming to get the project across the line.
Kosminsky, who has BAFTA and Golden Globe awards to his name, is calling for a 5% levy on UK subscription streaming revenues, with the proceeds collected for a British cultural fund. He says that, without change, the British TV industry is in danger of being squeezed out of the market.
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