[wistful piano music]
- Amanda Coe has written the most beautiful script,
which really goes behind the headlines
of one of the most iconic stories of the 20th century.
- It's a tale as old as time,
and yet it feels like a very contemporary story.
- It's a very well-known story,
involving many, many characters,
and many sides and facets of society Britain at that time.
- And the story encapsulates a woman
who was trapped by
society's restraints.
- How, you know, high members of our society,
they do abuse this power that they have.
- It's looking at the sort of perfect storm of scandal.
- 1963, the counterculture revolution is happening,
the hippies and the status quo,
and they have an amazing clash of temperament and attitude.
- On the one hand,
there was this world that was establishment,
and on the other side,
there was this world that was a bit more free.
- This is a story about a young woman,
and she is the catalyst for change.
- You have old world meets new world,
media witnesses it,
media manipulates it and uses it to their own ends
in order to create change in society.
- She was a young girl who was really trying to survive,
look after her mum, have some fun,
and became the pawn
which lead to the resignation of John Profumo,
and the sort of downfall
for all the people who were involved.
- She's this
angel of chaos,
where destruction just seems to slightly follow her.
[laughs]
- [Man] Here we go.
And action.
[airy piano music]
- It's the story of politics, sex and power,
with a young woman at the heart of it,
who, I think, young women and young men will relate to
in the modern world.
It doesn't feel dated, it feels like a very modern story.
It's gripping drama, but it's also funny,
and also, it just has the most stellar performances in it.
And that's what really jumps out,
it's the writing, the performances, and the storytelling.
It was very important to Amanda
that all of the characters around Christine
were three-dimensional,
and Andrea's done a beautiful job
at bringing that to life on screen,
as well as the actors who we chose,
who were all, I think,
all loved the story
and loved the fact that they were playing real people,
but real people with flaws and sides and darkness and light.
And they've all brought that to the screen in abundance,
and it's beautiful.
- It's so interesting because, playing role like this,
because everyone has an opinion about her already.
Say the name Christine Keeler,
and they're like, "Oh, wow, wow,"
and they see her as a sex object.
She had an incredibly tough childhood
growing up in a converted railway carriage
that had no electricity, no running water.
You know, she self-aborted her child
when she was still a teenager.
Like, she had the most tragic life.
I definitely feel a huge amount of responsibility
to do Christine justice.
I think Christine was so determined
that she did not want to be ever portrayed as a victim.
Christine was not allowed a voice.
There were so many men
that were imposing their views onto her and their opinions,
and they decided who she was.
She was constantly manipulated,
and I think, with the amazing kind of third wave of feminism
that we've got going on at the moment,
it's such an exciting pivotal moment
to be looking at history fresh through a woman's gaze.
And we do get to see every single ugly part of her,
the beautiful stuff,
and Amanda has written it with such grace and dignity.
Yeah, the script just blew me away.
- The journey in writing the script started with
just absorbing some of the huge amount
of material that there is,
and what happened to who and when,
which is a big part of crunching down
just the chronology of the story
so that you can begin to find
the really good dramatic moments.
There was this affair,
and you know, that world affair which brings with it
a rather, sort of whiff of another era
that you just imagine people drinking martini glasses
and smoking a lot, and looking very chic.
And, you know, in truth, it was an affair
between a middle-aged powerful man
and a teenage, powerless young woman.
- The terminology we use for Christine is,
you know, she was a prostitute, she was a call girl,
and poor Profumo, you know.
It was all that sort of rhetoric
surrounding this particular story,
that she was the kind of wanton woman
and he was the fallen angel,
and that's obviously just not the case.
And what's kind of fresh about this story
is we take it through the girls' eyes.
And it's through Mandy and Christine,
and they are young women,
and no one ever talks about the fact
that Profumo was in his late 40s
and Stephen was in his mid-40s,
and they were teenagers.
And that's never really been addressed.
- Christine's story as written by Amanda
is very much about somebody who refuses to be contained.
She had a vulnerability because of her upbringing,
but just such a tremendous strength.
Visually, we came up with slightly different ideas
for how we would handle the different worlds in the show.
So, Christine's world,
the aesthetic was that it should feel quite
intimate, subjective, realistic, in a way,
within the confines of the genre and the period.
And then, with the other worlds that we were creating,
like Profumo's world, Profumo at home with Valerie,
and Profumo in the House of Commons,
we took a slightly more elegant approach,
and the camera tended to be more on track and dolly,
and sliding and gliding.
I think when you go from world to world,
hopefully, those choices have a nice effect
on how you experience the character as well.
- We are predominantly handheld with Christine.
So, in her world, that's one of the decisions we made,
really just to,
so that the camera was representative of her energy.
And when we're in the House of Commons,
or wherever it might be, we're on track,
and you know, we're a little bit more considered
in the way we're moving the camera.
And again, it was just to sort of represent that energy.
And also, we tend to tilt the lens up a little bit,
become a little bit more, kind of objective
with the establishment.
And then when we were in anti-establishment,
we would be sort of in closer, handheld, and moving around.
It'd become a little bit more subjective.
And then, obviously, as we get later into the series,
the energies of those two worlds have collided,
and we're seeing the aftermath.
- There was a romance.
She was very impressed,
but I think, from someone from such a low social standing,
she had no idea who Jack Profumo was when she first met him.
She just happened to
kind of get involved with the wrong guy.
- I play Jack, or John Profumo.
The title's really fantastic, I think,
"The Trial of Christine Keeler,"
it's not "The Profumo Affair."
It's chiefly a story about how young women of that time,
particularly Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies,
were treated when they tried to get on in life
and better themselves,
and try and take control for themselves over their destiny.
I think what he found in Christine
was a sort of closeness and a sense of fun
that I think he may have found
lacking in his and Valerie's marriage at the time.
- I think Valerie shows such dignity throughout the series,
and she holds it all in for so long,
and there is so many things which are unspoken,
that after the scandal,
she sort of survived the infidelity,
but it was the exposure, obviously because of the media,
that's what she found difficult,
because it was humiliating.
There's a sort of female empathy
for how Christine was treated,
and that she was a sort of pawn
in a power game, and that's professional power,
but also sexual power that men had over women at that time.
- What was really interesting in the drama
was seeing how many of the themes
that are very current at the moment with MeToo,
just playing out, you know, to the power of 10 at that time,
which has to do with
shutting people's stories down.
One thing that really struck me
about revisiting this material and making it now
is how young those girls were.
And that, at the time, was not seen as anything, really.
- What the drama as a whole shows
is that 1963 was a very explosive year because
the strange and bizarre things that happened to Christine
to mean that this scandal happened
meant that the press were never the same again.
People no longer treated politicians
with the level of kind of respect or deference, really,
they just didn't sort of,
they started to question them all,
and the government changed.
You know, it did bring the government down largely.
- Christine and Stephen first meet
when she is dancing at Murray's Club.
I don't think Stephen was an out for her,
but she was definitely attracted by this man
who seemed to have a lot of power, incredibly charismatic,
and that was his skill, kind of bringing people together.
She was definitely used by him to kind of entertain guests
and things like that, but she did love him.
- So, when Stephen arrives in her life,
her assumption is that he's one of these sugar daddies,
and what he sees in her
when she's this unformed, crude, young 17 year-old,
but inside is this power,
and this, as we said, this femininity,
this beauty which exudes from her,
which he kind of wants to have himself,
he wants to be a part of, he wants to channel her power.
It's such an extraordinary and complex relationship
to excavate, and it's what most actors crave.
It makes total sense for us
to hear this story from Christine's point of view.
We know what it was like to be a man in the 1960s,
we know the old boys' club, and the ins and outs of it,
but we don't know what it was like for a young woman,
partly victim, partly vanguard, partly trailblazer.
Right now, whilst women are being empowered
in the modern world,
we need to understand that
and Christine's journey is a wonderful, delicate,
complex way of understanding that.
- Mandy always knew that she wanted to be,
you know, married to a millionaire, living in Chelsea,
with a Jaguar.
Whereas Christine was much more of a survivalist,
and I think that's what kind of attracts
the two girls together.
But also, ultimately, what kind of makes them
have a lot of friction.
- Mandy, [chuckles] she's crazy.
She has this incredible hunger
for success that kind of leads her through life.
These were two young girls
who kind of turned on its head
what was socially accepted of them.
They said well, no, why can't we have fun, too?
Which I think was so brilliant.
And because of that, they were punished by the government,
and so was Stephen Ward.
Mandy and Christine have this such close relationship
that is so gorgeous that we see at the start.
You know, how they become, they're kind of two young girls
who are so free-spirited and who run about together,
just having fun.
And particularly the Wimpole Mews
when they have the most fun with Stephen.
- When we meet Christine and Lucky in the show,
they've broken up and now it's quite volatile and violent.
Lucky's appearing where he's not wanted
and trying to talk to her, trying to get back with her,
and so, yeah, it leads to an altercation.
That story develops,
and then spills into the other story with Profumo,
and becomes a massive, massive scandal.
You know, when these things happen,
they're easily forgotten about
with the generations that come on if they're not read,
the stories aren't retold.
And with distance from the time,
you get more clarity, you get more perspective.
And so, hopefully, what we've done
is found a more objective look at what happened,
how this young woman was portrayed in the media,
what she was going through, the mistakes she made.
She was a young woman who was expected
to sort of know it all and do right by everyone,
especially all these older men.
Now we're able to see how incredibly unfair that was to her.
I think the audience can expect, hopefully, authenticity,
and hopefully be moved and entertained at the same time.
- I think having female directors, with Andrea and Leanne,
and having, you know, a lot of heads of departments,
producers, involved who are female
has been the right thing to do, absolutely,
with this production, which is
so focused on the female side of this story.
[somber music]
- I think the Christine Keeler that we're unpacking,
the real Christine Keeler that we're shining the lens on
in this drama,
is a really complicated young woman.
And that's what drew me and Doug, Leanne,
and the majority of people who came to the show.
She had a kind of real sense of justice, of her own agency,
but didn't have the power to have her own agency.
And I think that particular period,
you know, women didn't have their own bank accounts,
they couldn't have their own mortgages.
It was all very much the patriarchy,
very, very kind of oppressive,
so she was a character that really rallied against that,
and she is a wrecking ball. [chuckles]
You know, and that's what's very compelling about her.
And I just think Sophie brings an incredible energy to that.
- What interests me about Amanda's script was just the,
first of all, Christine's point of view.
Being it sort of felt,
felt like a very feminist retelling of the tale,
and it felt a little bit revisionist, which was helpful.
Yeah, what I think what's sort of interesting
about the story for a modern audience today is that,
you know, back in 1962 or 1963,
when this whole scandal broke,
the idea of a powerful politician having sex a young woman
was scandalous and considered to be morally corrupt.
That sort of notion of establishment power,
I think, is still strongly there today in a different way,
because we're not so scandalized anymore by sex.
So the world's obviously changed,
but in terms of the vulnerability of people
who think that they have any sort of power whatsoever
up against very, very powerful establishments,
I think is something that is still extremely relevant.
- I think it was unimaginably overwhelming.
I mean, even if we think in terms now
of what that would feel like to a 19 year-old now.
Come to that at a time when, really,
the attention paid to Christine and Mandy Rice-Davies
in the press and in all the attention surrounding them
had been unprecedented,
so there was no model for her to look to
about what this would feel like.
- This is a story about women,
written, directed, produced by women,
and it is significant,
and it does make a difference.
- Brilliant heads of departments,
Inma doing incredible make-up and hair,
every single day with an enormous cast.
And the attention to detail,
and Pam's costumes are just magnificent.
- I think the harder challenges of the show,
I mean, we have to change
nearly all the women hair colors for this.
So, Emilia has to change her color,
Rosalind, Ellie, Sophie, like, most of them.
But then, like, the men have end up being into make up
more time than the women.
In the 60s, so the hair is really full.
Because sometimes with the ladies,
you just put a piece on and then that's done,
which the men, every single man, have so much.
- I found out that that period
didn't really have what we consider a 60s look,
it's more of sort of a 50s look.
So, having looked at images of Keeler
and what she was wearing,
you kind of got the sense
that she had this kind of 50s silhouette,
and they all did, really.
I think that we only have ever seen one side of her
through all those news reels and photographs
and stuff like that.
And what this script brought out
was kind of three sides to her, I think, really.
Which was predominantly the side we've never seen before,
was the whole life she had in Notting Hill.
And then you had the images of her sort of dressed up,
you know, when she was going out with the guys
and stuff like that, there's a rich man.
And then you had her court sort of stuff.
So, for me, there was kind of three sections to her
kind of character.
- You know, there are a lot
of very strong women leading this,
and you know, it's my job is simply,
it's not as a male cinematographer,
it's simply as a cinematographer.
To be respectful of these other filmmakers in the room,
and very much sort of
help tell their,
you know, get that voice and tell their story.
- With this interpretation, what I take from it,
is that it is not just about the scandal.
And I feel that having six parts to tell this story
allows us to highlight
those very sort of human reactions, human emotions.
- I think it's a really exciting version of this story.
I think it's the version for now, definitely.
[pensive, emotional music]
- These characters are so real and so relatable,
that I think everyone will be able
to take something from it.
- It had sex and glamor,
and lies, and
drugs, and violence, and espionage, and politics,
and hypocrisy, and race, and class.
- It's a human story that we all go through.
It's about finding your place in the world
and not knowing where you belong.
It's about having your heart broken,
having to stand up, even when you've been beaten down,
and get back up and face the world.
I can't think of any story more universal.