Steve Lightfoot and Angela LaManna’s adaptation of Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes, directed by Erik Richter Strand, has hit #1 on both sides of the Atlantic in the days after it was released by Netflix. Paul Simpson chatted with the author about seeing the characters coming to life and her delight at how close the TV serial is to the book.

NB Major spoilers for Behind Her Eyes (book and TV) follow. If you’ve not seen or read it yet, proceed at your own peril.

 

I’m pleased it’s going down well.

You know, it’s so weird, the disconnect between some of the mainstream press like The Guardian and then actual viewers. If you go and look at the hashtag it’s just people with their minds blown saying ‘Everybody’s got to watch this, it’s such a good show’. The Twitter hashtag is just exploding, it’s so good to see. It’s amazing.

The most important question is all of this, how is Ted taking the fame?

(Laughs) Well Ted’s quite used to fame since he’s been Stephen King’s favourite internet dog. So yes, Ted’s just chilling, he’s on a diet so he’s not getting any extra treats but I’ve made him watch it through twice now, so he’s quite bored of Behind Her Eyes.

Are you still spotting things that Steve and Angela found in the book that you hadn’t realised you put there?

I don’t know because I’ve seen it quite a few times now. I saw it a couple of times last year and then obviously I’ve seen it a few times now because I went and saw it in my ‘bubble’ with my Mum.

Because they were so faithful to the book, it’s less that but it’s more the fun things that Erik’s done in the direction, like so many doors and so many people inviting each other in. There’s these little hints that no one’s going to really pick up but they all add to the tone of it which I was really impressed by.

Erik said they spent a lot of time trying to work out how they were going to do it.

Wow, I can’t imagine how hard it was. I remember being asked ages ago if I wanted to adapt it, and I was like ‘God no’. There’s dreams, there’s all the weird stuff, so I was really curious how Steve was going to do it. And when I read it at the readthrough I was a bit ‘Is that going to be a bit obvious? Or is that…’ But between them they got it perfectly I think, they did it really well.

Did you consider that it was effectively unfilmable?

I didn’t think it was necessarily unfilmable to start with but then we had so much interest in the film and TV rights – quite a lot of it went to top people who were like ‘How they hell are they going to do this?’ and then occasionally ‘We really loved this but we literally have no idea how this would be done’. At that stage, I was quite early on in my screenwriting career so when someone said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ I was like ‘No, I think it would be really difficult.’

And also I wanted it to get made so…(laughs) better to have someone like Steve come on and it was greenlit immediately.

What was your reaction when you heard it was him doing it?

It was really funny actually because I was checking my emails and there was an email from Left Bank, but I missed the really important part because I was so excited about Steve being on board. It said ‘We’ve got Steve Lightfoot on board, come in and let’s do lunch blah blah blah’. And I just didn’t read the ‘blah blah blah’ because I was like “Yay!” I loved Hannibal and the aesthetic is similar, it’s very arch and all that sort of thing.

When I went into the lunch, I hadn’t looked at the email again, and I’d missed the bit where they said, ‘Because Steve’s on board, Netflix have greenlit it without seeing a script.’ So I totally missed the whole reason we were having lunch, I thought we were just celebrating Steve (laughs). Which I’d have been happy to do, so yes, I was super excited.

Hannibal, The Punisher and Adele, it’s quite a trio.

I know, it is. But I think that Hannibal would approve of the Behind Her Eyes cast.

Well yes, he’d probably have them for lunch, literally.

(laughs) Yes.

When you were working on the book itself, did you have the twist in mind from the start?

Yes. I always have the ending of every book in place. Because now obviously I sell it with a pitch, so I have the ending; if you’re going to sell a book on a twist, you have to know what the twist is. So yes, I had the ending in mind and then everything worked towards it. I think otherwise you’d go mad if you’d have to go back and seed all that in.

I can’t write without knowing what’s going to happen at the end. In the pitch for the book, I think I even included the last chapter.

Which is pretty much word for word in the screenplay.

You know, the screenplay is very faithful to the book. Quite a lot of the dialogue is quoted. I’m much more brutal, if I’m adapting [my own books such as] The Death House, for Denis O’Sullivan and Compelling Pictures who did Bohemian Rhapsody. I’d been really brutal with the book and he said, ‘Sarah, can we maybe put some of the book in this?’ (laughs) I said ‘Yeah, alright’. I think there’s about four lines from the book…!

But I think Steve’s been really faithful to the story and just made it better.

They couldn’t have done it without the base there in the first place. The interesting thing is that it does pretty much follow not just the dialogue but also the actual plotting through.

Yes, the beats throughout are there but what they’ve been really good at is externalising so much that was internal. It’s told entirely in the book from these two women’s viewpoints, and then the flashbacks in the past, so they’ve been really good at externalising all the action.

On TV David becomes as sinister a character as Adele and Rob and I absolutely loved the casting of Tyler Howitt as Louise’s kid.

Wasn’t he great? Isn’t he just adorable? He’s adorable without being too adorable, if you know what I mean.

He’s a believable whatever he is, eight or nine year old.

I loved him. The first time I saw it I thought, ‘Oh my God, that kid’s amazing’ and is brilliant because you want to care about Adam, you don’t want him to just be some cheesy kid.

I went back and re-read the last chapter of the book just before we spoke and there’s Louise/Rob’s thoughts about accidents happening to children and I couldn’t remember if they actually used that line in the TV show or was it just in my mind from seeing it?

No, there’s a look from Louise. I think they’ve done that so well. When I finished watching it the first time I was like, ‘Oh my God’ and then I went and had a shower and I was still, ‘Oh my God, that’s so weird and dark’ like it was fun but at the same time… “Woah!” I went to bed and I was still thinking about it.

It’s very different to see it – even the whole thing with Rob and Adele in the woods at the end. It’s all so horrible. The shocker, which I realised when I was watching it, is that in television, especially in these glossy, slick, arch shows, you don’t expect the heroine to die. Especially when her body is still alive, you’re a bit like ‘Is she in there still? Oh no no, she really is dead.’ (Laughs) It’s good fun.

Erik said he felt that the Adele of the book is darker than the Adele in the TV series. I think it’s the other way round.

I would say they’re pretty much on a par. The book one obviously killed the cat and everything, but killing a cat’s nothing compared to killing people. I think the Adele in the book maybe comes across slightly darker because we have her internal monologue so we’re watching her and we know. It’s great to see Eve [Hewson] getting so much love on the hashtag because hers is the hardest character to do, given the background. She has to play Adele in the past and still make her relatable to Adele without being too different from Adele in the present but enough so that when the reveal happens you’re like ‘Of course’.

The containment and all the little looks, she does it so well, she really does. She gets that fine line between Hitchcock and Polanski. It is crazy and it’s aware that it’s crazy but it’s still going for it.

When I watch it, every time I get to episode 4 or 5, I think of the whole team and me and everybody involved with the story, and I just think it’s such an audacious piece of storytelling, the fact that they’ve brought it so boldly to TV, in a real ‘fuck you’ way. We’re balls out and to me that’s just brilliant, so brilliant.

I thought there would be a little bit of bowdlerization on it, just a little bit of pulling back from the drugs, perhaps.

Obviously Netflix went with it in the end but they had a few flags, like Louise smoking so much, but Jessica Burdett who was the main producer from Left Bank, she has championed it throughout. She was the one who read the book and she has night terrors, so for her this was a book that really spoke to her and she battled to keep it faithful to the book.

There were questions about whether to change the end or not change the end – not dramatically change it but structurally change it – and they didn’t in the end. Danielle Woodrow at Netflix has been amazing, it wouldn’t have been such a smooth sail without her. They’ve been so inclusive of me and the whole thing, and Erik, who was such a gentleman, he’s so great. I just love his direction and the musical choices.

You can tell I just love it, can’t you?

You have a credit as consultant on it, how much were you actually involved?

Not at all really. There were a couple of things – literally after the readthrough I said two things to Jess but that was it. And they were only tiny things like one line of dialogue. I think they paid me to be a consultant if they had any queries about the dynamic of it. It’s not me supervising them, it’s them having me as a resource if they need to question something.

I’m very much of the opinion that when you sell a book option, that’s it. They asked if I wanted to read the first episode before all the scripts were done and I said no. I thought ‘What’s the point?’ It’s not my job and if I was adapting someone else’s book I certainly wouldn’t want the author looking over my shoulder. Especially when you have Steve and Erik, a great team at Left Bank and Netflix, no one needs my opinion. I think they’re fully capable of doing it themselves. But I was super pleased that they didn’t mess around with it too much.

When you think of it now, is it the book that’s in your head or is it their version?

It’s become one and the same thing, I can’t remember how I imagined them before. Someone actually tweeted me and said, ‘Was there a film of this before because in my head Louise is blonde and overweight?’ and I was like ‘No, that’s in the book’. Now I think ‘Louise is blonde… what?’ Now Simona is Louise. I think it really is now the TV, in my head, more than the book.

Would you ever be tempted to go back and find out what Louise, or rather, what Rob does next?

In my book that I’m finishing now, there is a little Behind Her Eyes coda at the end. It’s only a little nod and a wink to Behind Her Eyes. It’s not really part of the plot of the new book. For anybody who doesn’t know Behind Her Eyes, it’ll just be to do with the main character at the end of that journey. But anybody who knows Behind Her Eyes will be like ‘Oh my God!’

When can we expect that?

Well, I think it should be probably this time next year. I’m just finishing it up but Dead to Her comes out in paperback in June here. It’s out in America on paperback already, and that’s being developed by Amazon. So that’s all looking good there. Let Behind Her Eyes have its moment in the sun before whacking another book out.

Obviously this week I’ve got no work done because I’m literally just tracking Twitter (Laughs) and just feeling weird and nervous but yes, I’m going to knuckle down. I’ve got a couple of films I’m writing as well and I’m in a writers room for another show so it’s all quite busy.

It’s all coming together nicely at the moment, isn’t it?

I’m terrible, I wish I was a person who understood success better. The night before Behind Her Eyes was coming out, I dreamed that my editor Natasha Bardon sat me down and told me that no one was stocking my books anymore because I was a has-been. (Laughs)

I’m always “What’s next? What’s next?” I’m not competitive with other people per se. Obviously you see other people do well and you think ‘Oh, I’d like to have that’ or ‘I’d like to do that’ but I don’t ever think, ‘Oh my God, they must be better than me’. I just think there’s different paths. I’m really enjoying screenwriting, I think the lockdown has taught us all that we need to concentrate more on the things we really want to do.

My thing with writing was always, make enough money to write the things you want to write, rather than get on the hamster wheel of ‘Gotta write another psych thriller, another psych thriller’.

My next couple of books and ideas are psych thrillers, so that’s fine but I also miss writing weird ghost stories so I’m going to play around with things a bit more and if nobody buys them then, I’ll have made a mistake, but I just want to have fun.

That’s where the success gives you that leeway doesn’t it?

Hopefully yes. I think if you can pay your bills, then you can take a couple of years out and play with different tools, do some different books.

Behind Her Eyes is streaming now on Netflix; read our review here.

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough is on sale from HarperCollins, click here to order from Amazon.co.uk