Farren Blackburn has built a strong reputation as a director from his work on episodes of The Fades, Doctor Who, Marvel’s Daredevil, Iron Fist and The Defenders, as well as the movie Shut In starring Naomi Watts. His biggest project was unveiled on Netflix last month – the eight-part supernatural series The Innocents, starring Percelle Ascot and Sorcha Groundsell as young lovers Harry and June caught up in a world of shapeshifting and experimentation. Greg D. Smith caught up with Blackburn shortly after the series was released to discuss the whole season…

How early did you come on board The Innocents?

I was on pretty early. I started in April last year and we were shooting in July, so I had a good four months prep, but the scripts came to me sooner than that.

In March I was flying out to New York to do the season finale of The Defenders for Marvel and Netflix; I got the scripts the day before and read them on the plane. I then had to pitch for the job while I was trying to prep for another job so I went through various Skype calls with the producers. Then eventually I found myself in front of about ten or twelve people on a massive Skype call with Netflix and had to pitch my vision for the show. Very soon after that – within a week – they let me know that they wanted me to go ahead which was great.

As the director, how much impact did you have on the shape of the storytelling and how it all came to be?

I would say that my imprint and my DNA is all over it. It’s rare these days to be able to author a series to this extent, certainly a show of this kind of scale. But because I was asked to set the whole show up, that meant that the directorial vision was mine. That’s not just about the sort of world you’re creating, the tone and atmosphere and the visual aesthetic, but establishing a time and place, and character and the nature of the storytelling. That opportunity is something that I guess all us directors are constantly searching for. It doesn’t come along too often, and certainly not in the earlier days of your career so it was something that I really leapt on. Directing six episodes out of eight and being one of the exec producers of the whole show meant that I could really author every sort of aspect.

Scripts are very much a blueprint, words on a page, and you have to lift that and make it real.

So how involved were you with the casting?

All those major decisions were my own, obviously. I worked with the casting director, Daniel Edwards who was fantastic. Ultimately I was in the room with every cast member: I was auditioning people that we’d shortlisted, people that we felt were right for the role and then I went into the room and I worked with them. We read some scenes and I gave them some notes and direction and we took it from there.

With the main roles, I presented my choices to the exec producers at New Pictures and then to Netflix and they had to be approved, but they very much trusted me and I think pretty much everyone that I felt was right they agreed with. There was a discussion process around certain actors, we had some disagreements, but ultimately we worked until we found someone that we all felt was right.

Certainly casting the roles of Harry and June was a very key and lengthy process.

Which of them came first, Percelle or Sorcha, or was it simultaneous?

It was Percelle. To be very honest with you I think we knew very early on in casting Harry that Percelle was our frontrunner. He really resonated with me. I felt that he had all the attributes to play that character, and he was very much in the forefront of my mind early on.

We continued to see other actors just to make sure that we weren’t missing somebody out. In order for Percelle not to get the role someone had to come along who was even more amazing, so he was very much a frontrunner from the first few weeks of castings. But he was recalled quite a few times because I worked with him a few times just to be sure and while we were still trying to find our June.

We were shortlisting actresses and then the key thing is to try to pair certain combinations up, so we had Percelle back to do various chemistry reads with a shortlist of actresses.  Eventually we settled on Sorcha, who came in quite late, even though she’d done a self-tape very early on before I even joined. Daniel Edwards, our casting director. had put lots of actors and actresses on tape just reading a couple of scenes and I didn’t see her tape initially. There were so many fantastic actresses but none of them I felt quite had everything that the character needed, so I went back through some of the old casting tapes. With Sorcha’s tape I just saw something in there that I felt was really right so we got her back in to do some work with me quite late in the casting process and almost instantly I just felt this was our June.

Finally we paired Sorcha up with Percelle. They did a chemistry read and it was just fantastic – and we knew that we’d found the two leads.

Were there any specific or unique challenges shooting The Innocents that you’d not come across in your previous work?

It’s a very complicated series to shoot. Trying to really get the love story at the heart of The Innocents to resonate was the key thing and that’s something that couldn’t be overlooked – but then you’re combining that with shapeshifting and some complicated adult relationships, in amazing looking landscapes… but landscapes that were really very difficult to facilitate and were very demanding physically.

We were hit with all kinds of weather which made filming incredibly challenging, so the project as a whole was full of challenges!

Really for me what was crucial was to try to ground the whole series in truth and in character. I’m a big fan of genre filmmaking because it allows you to hold a magnifying glass up to everyday issues and really examine them in imaginative ways. But high concept is nothing if it’s not grounded and real – if you don’t care about the characters it’s literally just a concept – so my approach from day one was to ground The Innocents in character and, as crazy as it sounds, to try to make it feel real and believable, even though it’s a story about young love and shapeshifting.

I think we managed to achieve that, so I would say that was a huge challenge.

The way that it’s filmed, I always felt as if the show was inviting me to have a certain amount of sympathy with everyone. There didn’t really seem to be any bad guy in it, just a lot of people with differing views on various things but all feeling that they were acting for the right reasons. Did you ever feel like that was a risk and that you might end up skewing a character a little too much who needed to be a certain thing?

I think you’re absolutely right, there’s always a risk with an approach like that but I think that’s going back to what I was just talking about, about trying to make everything feel real and truthful. Characters – we as human beings – all have different intentions, different motivations and we’re complex. What I particularly wanted to try to achieve was a sense that most people were trying to act out of the right intention but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their actions weren’t skewed in a dark way, even though they may not be conscious of that.

Someone like Halverson, played by Guy Pearce – when you get to the end of the show what he’s trying to achieve is really quite dark and twisted but he’s doing it out of a desperate desire to save Runa, who’s his love and life partner. I think it was something that we all discussed in terms of the script: we didn’t necessarily want an arch-villain, somebody that you immediately point to and go, ‘He’s the bad guy, this is all going to turn out wrong’ and you’re just sitting there waiting for it to happen. We made a conscious effort to avoid that, to try to be slightly smarter in the storytelling and to credit the audience really with some intelligence – and hope that if we do that they then will stick with it, they will be intrigued and they will wait for that payoff. I think so many shows just spoon-feed the audience information and patronise them to a certain extent.

Also I think there are so many shows that are incredibly plot heavy and it’s just nice to have a show that allowed the story to breathe a little bit more. Yes, it may have been a risky approach, but I very much wanted to do something different and make it feel like a show that you hadn’t necessarily seen before.

What particular element of the show do you feel proudest of, now that it’s done?

I have to say I think I’m delighted that in all the reviews, everyone seems to have picked up on the mood and the atmosphere and the tone – that’s something that as a director I set out to establish firmly from the outset. I think you have to know the world that you’re setting up, that you’re inviting your audience into, so I’m delighted that that’s been recognised.

The visual aesthetic, because that all comes from me. Hopefully it’s not a conscious thing, it’s just the way I felt that was the appropriate way to tell the story.

And also the performance: ultimately if you don’t believe in the characters and you don’t care about the characters, it can look amazing, a million dollars, whatever, but no-one’s really going to care – so I think ultimately working with all those fantastic actors to get great performances has been a real thrill.

Thanks to Marine Monnier and Chiara Ceccolini at Organic for their help in arranging this interview.

The Innocents is streaming on Netflix now. Read our review of episode 1 here