Ransom’s Frank Spotnitz

Frank-SpotnitzAs the major Hollywood studios have scaled back their output of procedurals in response to viewers’ penchant for serialized storytelling, a host of producers and distributors are clamoring to fill the gap, among them Entertainment One Television. The company is currently rolling out Ransom, which has already attracted four major free-to-air broadcast partners: Canada’s Global, TF1 in France, RTL in Germany and CBS in the U.S. Focused on a crisis negotiator (played by Luke Roberts), the show is being executive produced by Frank Spotnitz. A veteran of the Hollywood studio system—The X-Files being among his many credits—Spotnitz has increasingly been working on projects out of Europe via his firm Big Light Productions. He tells World Screen about the idea behind Ransom and the rewards of international co-production.

WS: How did Ransom come about?
SPOTNITZ: Over two years ago, two French producers met with me in Paris and told me about this extraordinary man named Laurent Combalbert, who is one of the best private kidnap and hostage negotiators in the world. I didn’t know there was such a thing. And it turns out there are tens of thousands of these [cases] that go on all over the planet every year. They are typically resolved within 48 hours. They are life-and-death situations. But what really impressed me was that he solves these problems with his mind, he doesn’t carry a gun. And the way you solve these problems, the way you save people’s lives, is by understanding your adversary better than he understands himself. So typically they’ll ask for things you cannot give them: $5 million, the release of ten terrorists. That’s not going to happen. And I always wondered, how do they reach these people? This show captures that through the character that Luke [Roberts] plays, Eric Beaumont. And you learn a little bit about how you “manipulate”—that’s the word I would use, Laurent doesn’t use that word, “influence” is the word he likes—people. How you get them to trust you. And how you realize you can’t give them what they want, but you can give them what they need.

WS: How do you balance Laurent’s real-life experiences with your own storytelling?
SPOTNITZ: We try to use as much of [Laurent’s experiences] as we can. The hardest part about developing the show was figuring out how you make it a TV series. You can’t just have Eric on the phone talking to someone as a negotiation every week—that wouldn’t make for a drama series. So the format of the show is that there’s a crisis every week. A demand is made, which requires a negotiation, and Eric and his team are called in. In order to conclude the negotiation, there’s a mystery they have to solve, and that’s what makes it an episodic TV drama. In the course of solving that mystery, in the course of that negotiation, we use as many of the real-life strategies and tactics that Laurent and his partner Marwan Mery have defined clearly. They have a huge body of work, and we’ve seen it all and Marwan reads every script to make sure that we’re accurately representing the techniques that they have developed. For me, the more of their real tactics and strategies we employ, the more satisfying the story is.

WS: You’ve found a lot of opportunity in European television, haven’t you?
SPOTNITZ: I sort of stumbled into this because I came to Europe six and a half years ago to do Hunted, not knowing whether I was going to stay and not realizing that television was in the midst of this massive change. And now there’s a huge demand for shows from Europe in the English language that can be sold back to America and all over the planet. And that’s new. And so I say it’s the best time in television ever, but it’s even better in Europe in a way because this is a structural change for European talent that’s not going to go away. I think it’s only going to get better in the years ahead.

WS: How has the process been, having more than one production partner and multiple broadcast partners? With a great script, is it easier to get them all to agree?
SPOTNITZ: Absolutely. I think that is the key thing. The clearer your creative vision, the easier it is to marshal all these people behind it. It’s not easy—we have four broadcasters. I’ve never heard of a show that had quite so many voices on it! But it also has a lot of advantages because you know you have support, you know you have a certain budget, you know you’re going to reach a certain audience, and, if you have patience and humility, you learn. You learn about certain things that work in France and certain things that work in Germany and certain things that work in Canada. As an American, you wouldn’t know that. You do have to have the temperament, disposition and curiosity to understand what people are telling you. That’s one of the exciting things to me. Hidden in these co-productions is the opportunity for different cultures to speak to each other. And that didn’t happen before. As Americans, we send our stuff all over the world. But we didn’t watch anybody else’s. I think [international co-production] is a really good thing for America and the rest of the world.