Chris Chibnall

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2014 issues of World Screen and TV Formats.

When the crime drama Broadchurch premiered on ITV in the spring of 2013, it quickly became a sensation. In an age of sophisticated special effects, eccentric antiheroes and law-enforcement agents grappling with mental illnesses, the straightforward—yet brilliantly written, well-acted and beautifully shot—investigation into the death of a boy in a small town drew huge audiences and critical acclaim. The show’s success was so great that FOX and Shine America have done a U.S. version called Gracepoint. Creator and writer Chris Chibnall spent time in California to make sure the American series maintained the roots of the British hit while developing into a show of its own.

WS: Where did you get the idea for Broadchurch?
CHIBNALL: It was a long-gestating idea in my head. I had always wanted to do a really big ensemble drama. I’m a really big fan of murder mysteries. I’ve been living in Dorset for seven or eight years, where the show is shot. I live a mile from that beach. It’s so beautiful. I had been thinking somebody should really film something here and then I thought, Oh my God, I’m capable of writing something that can be set here! Actually, there is no greater community than a small town, like the small town where I live. It’s a beautiful cinematic landscape and I really fancied doing a good old-fashioned murder-mystery whodunit in the Agatha Christie tradition. But there were also two American shows that were a big influence on me in my 20s and have stayed with me ever since. You can see them in Broadchurch—they are Twin Peaks and Murder One, the Steven Bochco show that is one legal trial over 22 episodes. All that stuff was in a creative cocktail shaker and out comes Broadchurch!

WS: Do you have a routine when you write?
CHIBNALL: The great Sam Hoyle, my script executive, and I sit and discuss stories endlessly and repetitively, we rub stuff out and start again. We have three double-sided eight-foot white boards, which actually I learned about from two great U.S. writers, Rockne O’Bannon, who worked on Revolution and created Farscape and seaQuest DSV, and one of his colleagues, Richard Manning. They taught me how to break stories on white boards. I owe them a lot. Sam and I break the series down into episodes; we break the episodes into acts. We do big, long characters arcs. We just put everything on a white board and after a few days there is usually an episode there and you have a go at that.

WS: Do you write all the episodes before production starts, or are you writing during production?
CHIBNALL: I’m writing as production is going along. On the first season we were greenlit into a particular slot, so it was quite a fast turnaround. I was writing as we went along. With the schedule for the second season, it’s a bit the same. But I like the active process of calibrating the show as you’re watching dailies. You end up tailoring characters to performances. It’s a really inspiring thing if you can keep finessing the show as it’s shooting. Because what you write is different from what ends up on the screen. You have to enjoy and use what ends up on screen and feed that back into the writing. That’s where the great symbiosis is.

WS: Did you know from the beginning who did it, or was that something that revealed itself as you were writing?
CHIBNALL: I wrote one very early draft for myself, because I wrote it on spec, it wasn’t a commission. I wrote that first draft and then I can’t remember if it was a few days or a few weeks later I woke up one morning, literally doing that thing that people only ever do in movies of sitting bolt upright and saying, Oh my God! I had an idea! My subconscious kind of solved it! It worked its way out of my system and onto paper. It just suggested it to me, and from that moment on I thought, Well, it can’t be any other person because it made sense of what I wanted the show to be about. That was way before we started shooting, so I knew from very early on.

WS: I was so pleased there were no superheroes, no antiheroes! Is Broadchurch’s huge success a sign that the audience is happy seeing “normal” people in everyday settings?
CHIBNALL: I don’t know, but I really hope so, because what you want are stories to help you make sense of your life. What I was interested in in Broadchurch was to say, if this really happened, how would it feel for all the people involved? How would they respond emotionally? It was really taking that genre structure of the story and then applying emotional truth to it. But that’s not a new thing. Joss Whedon was doing that a long time ago in sci-fi with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What people want are real emotions.

WS: You have written for Doctor Who, one of the most successful franchises ever. What did you learn from that experience?
CHIBNALL: That you could always do the impossible. You should always think big when you are writing and you should always try to ground it through emotion. I did one called “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” and that was an impossible brief! Steven Moffat, the showrunner, just gave me the title and said, “Do you want to do that?” I thought, Well, there is no way we can do that on a 45-minute BBC budget! But we did, and I think what you take from that is there are some really talented people working on that show. Like a lot of British people, [Doctor Who] is part of my DNA! So it’s always great to drop in and do an episode of that. It’s even more fun working on it than you can possibly imagine! Everybody is great. Everybody loves the show. What’s really exciting about it is you feel that everybody wants it to be constantly excellent, day in and day out. That is a great environment to work in.

WS: How involved were you with Gracepoint?
CHIBNALL: I was heavily involved in setting it up. I wrote the pilot episode and I spent time with Anya [Epstein] and Danny [Futterman]. We chose them as showrunners because they are terrific writers and producers. I was there throughout that initial process, helping it all come together. Then they took the ball and ran with it. It was a really nice experience. I’m proud of what they’ve done.

WS: Did you scout for a location in the U.S., a setting that lent itself to this kind of storytelling?
CHIBNALL: I had one in mind because I had spent a lot of time in Northern California and knew the area north of San Francisco quite well. I really thought that this area was quite analogous to the West Country in England [where Broadchurch is set]. When there was interest [in doing the show in the U.S.], my brilliant script executive Sam Hoyle and I spent two weeks in Pacific Grove, which is a small coastal town in California. We talked to a lot of people there. We talked to the editor of the local paper and the police chief and all kinds of people and asked, could this [the plot of the show] happen here? They all said, Oh yeah, it’s far more likely to happen here! There’s such beautiful landscape there. It’s full of interesting people, so that choice of location felt quite straightforward. It was part of my pitch to FOX right at the start; I said [it takes place] here.

WS: How did you walk the line between remaining true to the original and creating a show that would feel appropriate for the local audience?
CHIBNALL: A lot of that depends on employing great people and giving them the space to make the show they want to make. So a lot of that [responsibility] was in Anya and Danny’s hands, and they’ve done a great job. We talked and we started from a very similar place, and Gracepoint soon became its own thing. What I wanted to do was protect the tone and pace and emotional language and visual language of the show, which is very different from a lot of other television shows. We wanted to have all that in place and then allow Gracepoint to grow into its own show. You set up the parameters and say, This is what I think is important about the show, and now, within those parameters, make your own thing. That sort of collaboration is really interesting.

As soon as you bring in a new cast and go to a different landscape, everything becomes fresh anyway. For all the success of Broadchurch for us in the U.K., in America it had a very small audience. It’s not that well known a show publicly, so it presents a great opportunity to do an American version that can speak to the audience there.

In addition, there are two extra episodes in Gracepoint. It happens quite organically. It has a movement away from the original; it’s a really nice thing to behold.

WS: Having worked and produced for both American and British television, what are the main differences between the two production systems?
CHIBNALL: In the American system, the machinery and the industry are paramount. And it’s how you get your idea through that system unscathed that is a challenge, whether that is at a network level or cable level. In the U.K., it is slightly more of a cottage industry and everything has a slightly smaller scale. What you tend to have is a slightly more authored environment where there is less industrial structure to the process here. You can craft these slightly smaller, very bespoke series. Obviously the big difference is the number of episodes ordered. Eight episodes for Broadchurch is a huge order for ITV, whereas in the U.S. eight episodes is a very, very small order. You don’t have writing rooms in the same way [in the U.K.], although some people have tried it. I like writing in a room. I think it’s a really good system, particularly on episodic stuff. There are more lone writers here in the U.K.

WS: There are a lot of Brits coming to work in the U.S. and a lot of Americans going to the U.K.
CHIBNALL: What’s happened in the last five years is that the world has become so much smaller in that shows are traveling more and people involved with the shows are traveling more. It feels like the talent pool is much more interchangeable, and that’s really exciting. There is a bit more cross-pollination going on in a very exciting way. I’ve spoken to a lot of American writers and they are jealous of our shows, and if you speak to a lot of British writers, we’re all jealous of American shows, so there’s a sense that the grass is always greener!

WS: You began your career writing for the stage.
CHIBNALL: Yes, I started in fringe theater in London writing for audiences in a room above a pub in southwest London. That’s where I did my unpaid apprenticeship, if you like. I was a writer in residence at a fringe theater and was supported by the artistic director there, who is really responsible for my career—a guy named Martin Richards. I owe him everything. He said, Well, we can’t pay you anything, but if you can write plays, we’ll put them on. I’d write them and then sit in with the audience; I learned what worked and what didn’t and what landed and what missed. Then I got an agent from that and began to work in television as well as theater. It all took off from there.

WS: I imagine there are different challenges and satisfactions writing for the stage and writing for television.
CHIBNALL: Yes, in theater I tended to do more comedy. Actually, I just had a comedy at the Salisbury Playhouse called Worst Wedding Ever earlier this year about a disastrous wedding. There is something really joyous about writing a two-hour event where people are just laughing and laughing. That feels very rewarding, but it’s about as polar opposite from Broadchurch as you can get!