Interview with Carolina Giammetta (Director)

9 July 2024

Can you introduce us to Suspect 2?
Suspect is an eight-part thriller based on the Danish version Face to face.
In this second series we follow the story of Susannah, who is a psychotherapist and recently lost her daughter - it's undisclosed, whether it was a suicide or a murder. One day a guy comes to her home office to give up smoking and under hypnosis unwittingly declares that tonight he's going to kill someone.  So she goes on a mission to try and find him.

How is series two different from series one?
Series one, followed the story of policeman Danny Frater, who was Susannah's ex-husband, and one night at work he went into a pathologist lab to a report on the death of a girl. When he pulled back the sheet on the body, he realised it was his daughter. So he goes on a mission to try and prove that her death wasn't suicide and that it was murder. So it's quite different in that series one was very much about trying to solve a crime where series two is about trying to prevent a crime from happening.

Can you tell us something about the writing in the series?
The writers on the series are Joy Wilkinson and David Allison, and they were so brilliant in transforming the original adaptation. Sometimes it can be really easy just to sort of copy and paste copy an original series, but they really made each episode their own and they brought much more texture and depth to the characters and layers to the characters that weren't there in the original series. Also, the plot is quite complex. Underneath this whole journey is this conspiracy story about this pharmaceutical company. So that developed a lot more than the suspects than in Face to Face.

What is it like to work with Anne-Marie Duff?
Amazing. I mean, I've wanted to work with her for years. She's such a fabulous actress and she's so brilliant with the crew. She's a real actress and one that she really dissects her role. She really looks at every scene fresh. She really digs deep to try and find the truth in what she's doing, but also in the relationship she has with the various characters throughout the show. Each episode is one location with another character, so it was really important for her to inhabit that location, but also to really get to the bottom of what the relationship was between her and the other person that she's trying to get help from.

Can you talk us through costume and how the show is set in and is important for the mood and feel of the series?
It's really important to me that with having eight half hour episodes, each episode was visually in a different location that the locations themselves were almost a stylised character. So they're slightly heightened. It's not totally realistic. Equally, like the costumes, although very real. Each character only has one costume, so it is important that costume was right and that the colour palette was right. I know that Charlotte spent a lot of time looking for the fabric for a particular coat.

How is it for you to shoot one episode in four days?
It's hard. It's challenging to shoot. But it also becomes a very concentrated environment because you're in one week with one other actor in one location. So it does become quite intense. You get great things out of the rehearsal and being together like you do in theatre. So that's how it's different. You're looking at ten pages a day sometimes, so it's quite a gruelling schedule for everybody.