Sarah Pinborough’s new Paramount+ series, Insomnia, based on her 2022 novel, begins this Thursday, 23 May. Starring Vicky McClure, it follows solicitor Emma Averill who finds that as her 40th birthday becomes imminent, she’s having serious problems sleeping. A couple of weeks before the first two episodes dropped, Paul Simpson chatted with the author about Insomnia, insomnia and executive producing the series…

Let’s start with the book itself and the whole concept; where did the idea for this one come from? Was it triggered by something particular?

It’s the oddest way round for a book and a TV show in that I had been to the read-through for Behind Her Eyes – this is how far back we’re going – and Jess Burdett (who was at Left Bank and is now at Netflix) and Suzanne Mackie (who was at Left Bank and is now at Orchid Pictures), who were the executives on it, were saying, ‘We need to come up with another show. How about we come up with something together and you write it?’

People always say these things, but because she’s classy, Suzanne said, ‘We’re all so busy, I’m going to book us into a really nice hotel in Oxfordshire and let’s go away for the night and just talk.’ So we went to this beautiful hotel.

I had a half outline for a book about a career woman with a stay at home husband because I was quite interested in that dynamic. It was kind of cool in the 90s and it’s sort of cool now but it’s still the weird way round. It’s reverse feminism almost, where we think feminism has progressed and it hasn’t really; the same with that kind of situation.

Then we started to talk about sleep because, obviously, Behind Her Eyes was sleep related. I was saying that I don’t sleep well and they didn’t sleep well, and we were all women in different positions in our lives. So then I said, ‘OK, what if it was about a woman who doesn’t sleep and she’s got a career and there’s some trauma with her mother, maybe she’s got a sister, they don’t get on so well…’ and you start to put the layers in.

All our rooms in this hotel were in different buildings. My room was at the top of three flights of stairs, the attic room in one building, I couldn’t hear anybody in any other room and because I’d been watching Marianne which was really creepy, on Netflix, I was quite creeped out. I couldn’t sleep so the next morning I was like, ‘OK, she can’t sleep and she starts to do things that remind her of what her mother did…’ an inherited trauma. We were like ‘What can we call it?’ and Jess went ‘Insomnia’.

So I was working on episode 1 but then I said, ‘I want to write it as a book as well’, because that made more sense rather than trying to do two stories in my head at one time. Left Bank were fine with that but it was insane trying to write both. I think you could probably do a movie and a book at the same time because you do one whole story, you do one draft of the film and then you’d be changing it but it would be done. But doing one episode over and over and over… I looked at the first episode [as written] and it was so different to the final first episode. So I said, ‘Listen, maybe I should just write the book. We’re in the pandemic now, let’s just write the book.’ We were at that stage of ‘is any filming going to actually happen?’ So I went away and wrote the book and then came back to the TV.

I’ve been feeling a bit discombobulated with work and life recently and I thought, ‘God, it’s probably because Insomnia’s been part of my life for such a long time. It’s pretty much done now, it’s out in the world and done.

Watching the first three episodes after re-reading the book, it feels like there’s a lot of the same beats but not presented in the same way.

Yes, the book is all Emma’s internal monologue, and obviously you can’t do that. So my key for adapting, which I learned very much over the Insomnia process, is strip out your main beats and think, ‘OK, what are the bits we really want to keep?’ But then you’ve got six episodes, so you need to add more.

We’ve narrowed the amount of nights [leading up to Emma’s 40th birthday]; there are a lot more nights in the book than there are in the show, but we’ve added more to each night, so she’s doing more strange things. There’s more numbers. The numbers drove me mad! Right to the last minute we were like ‘What is the sequence?’ And we got it right!

We’ve expanded some of the character stuff: Phoebe, the sister, her character is expanded quite a lot.

The husband was the hardest part because in the book the husband is quite suspicious but in the show… Sebastian Cardwell [at Paramount+] by episode 3 was saying, ‘Can we have at least one nice man in this show?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a menopausal woman Seb, there’s no such thing.’ So we softened him but yes, it is recognisably the same story but different.

With the husband, there’s a crescendo of his suspicion. I particularly like the moment when he’s looking at the iPad and Emma’s in the doorway. I thought that summed up the story so far, the mounting paranoia and…

…trying to hide it all from your family and then it’s almost like an affair reveal, like you look at someone’s phone and you see something you shouldn’t see.

The casting on it is incredible, particularly the two sisters.

They’re amazing. Obviously I was really excited to have Vicky McClure. I knew she was going to be great at it, and once we’d met and I’d spoken to her, I kind of re-wrote dialogue because I could hear how she would say it or she would bring it.

When we did the read-through, I hadn’t met Leanne [Best, who plays Phoebe] before, and when they started doing the first hospital scene, me and Charlotte, the producer, we just looked at each other like, ‘Oh my god, they could not be better cast.’

Leanne is a little bit woo woo in herself and Vicky’s very funny and very lovely but she’s kind of an old soul in herself and I feel like Emma is as well. I’m not so great at writing warm characters, nice characters, I find it really hard, but she brought a real warmth to a character that isn’t always likeable, who’s not always doing things that you think are good. But the dynamic between them and Lyndsey Marshal is amazing.

We had two actors that we had whittled it down to for Robert and they had very different takes on the part. Tom Cullen can do fun and he brings a depth to the character which is why we went with him in the end, because he just really owned that character.

There’s a certain amount with him of eye acting.

Yes! It’s all going on under the surface.

How much did you go back to the book?

The dialogue changed a lot. I don’t tend to even look at book dialogue when I’m adapting because I feel dialogue is so different in TV. Behind Her Eyes used a lot of the book dialogue and it really freaked me out, because although Steve Lightfoot did a great adaptation it was weird to me to hear the book words.

But I did go back to couple of the more heated scenes [in the book of Insomnia] and think, ‘OK, what was the point… what was she trying to say there?’

On Behind Her Eyes, Steve said to me there’d be days when they’d be like ‘How do we get out…’ and he’d go ‘Right, let’s just look back at the book’ and then go back to the book. To be fair, there were many times in the Insomnia room I’d say, ‘Well, in the book…’ this this and this. ‘I know it’s an awful thing to keep saying it’s in the book but I have already spent hours figuring this story out.’

What have you learned creatively from being an executive producer on Insomnia?

Oh my gosh, I’ve learned so much. Obviously, there’s all the casting, everything like that and locations, but it was the edit, I’ve really learned a lot. At first I was quite nervous at giving my notes but then I’ve gotten more and more confident because it is just like editing a book, moving bits around and saying, ‘no that’s in the wrong place’ or ‘that should be there’ or ‘put that scene back, take this scene out.’ The music has been a real eye opener: I really struggled with giving notes on music cues but I’ve really learned that quite well.

But so many battles! The battles go on and on and on until the final mix, even picking clips for promo, but I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been a real learning curve and I would definitely want to be that hands on again. If I had not had any hand in the edit, who knows whether I would have liked the final show? Even having written it and created it!

I remember people saying, ‘Oh, are you writing the whole thing?’ And I was thinking ‘Yes, what’s the problem with that?’ But it’s such a great process until four weeks before you start filming and then everybody’s got notes and you’re kind of rewriting episode 3 while doing notes on episode 1 and tweaking episode 6…!

Is it still feeling like an organic whole at that point then?

Yes and also having one director throughout means you’re not filming in blocks. It’s one block. We did everything in the house in the last six weeks. It’s not like someone’s doing episode 1 and 2, someone else is doing episode 3… stuff from episode 1 was being filmed in the last week of the shoot!

That was quite fascinating and there were some scenes, like the party scene in… well, it’s not really a party, the lunch scene in episode 1 –  that has been a firework party, that has been everything – and when that was filmed, me and the script editor and the producer were like, ‘Yes! No more party scenes.’

I’m working on a couple of other adaptations at the moment and we’ve talked about would I get other writers in? I think I would, if it were a series 2 of something definitely, but for a series 1, I think you want to establish the voices and the characters as your own and then other people can come in and write them. Because otherwise you’re just going to rewrite whatever someone else writes. They’ll do a skeleton draft and then you rewrite it.

So, what else are you working on at the moment?

I’m just waiting for the notes to come in on my next book, which is called We Live Here Now, which is out next June. I’ve got the fairy tales, coming out in October. There was Poison, Charm and Beauty? So, there will now two more. They’re bringing them out, I think as a three and a two, very quickly in October. It’s going to be Magic, Beauty, Poison, Charm, Blood. Blood will be the finale, as it were, where everything ties up. Magic is a prequel.

Magic is written, I’m nearly done with Blood. But of course I have to edit the other three and change bits, to make everything fit. People keep saying just write the other two but actually, it’s a 200,000 word novel, when you look at it. It’s a lot of unwieldy pieces. I’ll be glad when that’s done.

I’m really enjoying the screenwriting, to be honest. Books are great at keeping you in the public eye but I actually think I might be a better screenwriter than I am a novelist. It is really tough, so many people trying to get so many things made and there are so few slots and everyone’s still in a bit of an ‘argh’ after the strikes. But yes, I am doing quite well, I can’t complain.

Producers want people they can rely on, people who are actually going to deliver the goods.

I hear a lot of novelists saying, ‘Oh yes, I’d love to write for TV.’ And some of them I just look at and I think, ‘You’d last a day. You’d be crying in the corner of a room in ten seconds because the gloves are off.’ Me and Andy Harries get on really well and we’re going to look for something else to do together, but we have had some humdingers of rows over a script, in a way that an editor would never speak to you in the book world. There’s so much more money involved.

Insomnia begins on 23 May on Paramount+; click here to read our review of the novel.