Tripwire Talks Pennyworth With Danny Cannon And Bruno Heller

Guiding Alfred’s Destiny

Pennyworth starts in the UK on Starzplay on Friday and here Tripwire’s editor-in-chief Joel Meadows takes a look at its genesis and development…

Gotham, which recounted the story of how a young Bruce Wayne grew to be Batman and how the city got taken off by a proliferation of crazy villains like The Penguin and The Riddler, ran for five seasons and did fairly well when it was shown on Fox in the US and on Channel 5 in the UK. Pennyworth was developed by writer-director team Danny Cannon and Bruno Heller. If they had had their way, it would have been a Superman-related series that we would be watching now, Cannon revealed to us.

“After Gotham, DC were looking to expand their universe and we actually talked about doing a Metropolis show which was a show about a city pre-Superman. I think that we just took it in such a strange direction that was postponed,” he revealed.

Both him and Heller were thinking about something with Batman’s butler Alfred instead.

“Alfred Pennyworth was just character that we both understood and it also talked about a 1960s London that nobody had seen before. So if they were talking about expanding the universe then going to another country and another time seemed a good way to do it and avoid just doing another crime procedural in costumes. So the world started to open up to us and we couldn’t stop talking about it, the idea of somebody coming out of the war in a post War Britain that was resisting going into the future and the future meant Americans, it meant Thomas Wayne and the story started to unravel for us then.”

For writer Heller, it was first suggested in the Christopher Nolan Batman films that there was more to Alfred that just the man who attended to Bruce Wayne and fixed him up when he got injured, he told us.

“From a personal point of view I wanted to do something set in England and from a larger point of view, that character Alfred is such an iconic part of the Batman mythology. But very little is known about him and Michael Caine suggested blessedly for all of us that he is an ex SAS officer and that just suggested a whole mysterious history. How does an SAS officer end up being a butler? Then the chronology of it suggested a story set in the early sixties in London, which is a wonderful place to be and we went from there.”

The casting of Alfred was always going to be at the heart of the show and Cannon sees Jack Bannon, who plays him as someone who brings so much to the part, he admitted.

“I think he’s still mad at me for making him come in to read five or six times,” he laughed nervously before continuing.”He was telling me recently that he got the first call in I think it was June and got the job in October. So we put him through the wringer. It’s tough when you’ve worked on something a long time like myself and Bruno did and the character had been written quite well. Everything that we talked about, Bruno accomplished in that character and that dialogue. Therefore giving somebody a part like this is like giving someone a piece of ourselves away. We just needed to know that not only could he be trusted with the part but we wanted to spend many seasons with him. And actually every time Jack came back, he always put a smile on my face and I’d missed him. So we eventually went to our American partners and said ‘Here’s the guy we want’. It took a little coaxing but for the same reason that we did, they accepted him.”

Pennyworth is set in 1960s England but a fictionalised version. It was important for the programme makers to shoot the show in and around London, Heller revealed.

“It’s a love letter to London in a way and London is a character like any of the others in the show, a big inspiration and the mood and feel and that gothic glamour of London is a big part of the show. We couldn’t have shot it anywhere else and we did want to use as little CGI and effects as possible. It helps the actors when they’re in the actual place,” he told us.

In terms of its cast, Pennyworth features many familiar faces but also some left field choices like singer Paloma Faith. Heller was very keen to emphasise that using a particular kind of actor was essential to create the tone they were looking for.

“It had to be character actors rather than big stars because you try and write to something that ideally requires that level of skill. And they’re not just well-known, it’s more that they can find the little nuances of dialogue and meaning that hopefully are in the script in the first place. From a producing and directorial point of view it makes things so much easier when you have people who can do your work for you and actually bring more than is on the page and also understand what we’re going for. Then there’s Paloma [Faith], a different kettle of fish. She’s a force of nature that immediately as soon as we saw her do the part it was obvious that she had to do it,” he said.

Heller and Cannon worked together on Gotham and for Cannon, the key to their chemistry is a simple one.

“I think what helps in that is neither of us are trying to do each other’s jobs. He’s playing the guitar and I’m playing the drums or he’s playing bass and I’m playing a keyboard. Nobody’s standing over each other’s shoulders here.”

And the material really suited how the pair work too, the director pointed out to us:

“ I think Bruno has such a great understanding of characters’ dialogue and he had a really great understanding of how we wanted to talk about class and how Alfred Pennyworth was trying to elevate himself and transcend his own class which we both understood because we’re English people from humble backgrounds who came to America. But going back to Bruno it’s like being in a band with somebody. It’s my job then to put layer upon layer and fit those characters, fit that scene into a world where I could elevate the writing in the best possible way. In other words, deliver to Bruno what the writing deserved and talk about where to set it. Create emotionally heightened scenes or dramatically impact scenes. It’s what I’ve always done as a director, and for a movie director that’s their job. I just think when I first went to television you realise very quickly that that wasn’t what directors in television did when I first started.”

Pennyworth is set in an alternate reality but it was important that it was shot in a real place, as Cannon revealed to us.

“It was to do with the fact that if we expanded the DC universe, that universe couldn’t just be made up. It couldn’t be greenscreened, you have to feel it. So we’ve enhanced things and dressed things and we have an amazing production designer and an amazing visual effects company. Hopefully a lot of those things are invisible. But mostly if you want an alternative reality, you have to start in reality. We found out that it’s one of those shows that people watch a second time. They watch it the first time not knowing sometimes that it’s a DC universe show. They watch it going ‘That just felt like England in the sixties’. Then they watch it a second time and they go ‘wait what’s that airship? Why have the police got guns?’ why are they executing people’ and we really appreciate it, that we really feel like we’ve done our jobs when they watch it for the first time and completely believe in this reality,’ Cannon stated proudly.

Gotham was made for Fox whereas Pennyworth was made for a Warner cable service and is being shown in the UK on cable service Starzplay. This made the contrast between making the two shows fairly extreme as Heller told us as we wrapped our chat.

“In simple terms …there’s two things. There’s the difference between English discourse if you like and American discourse. We’re far less polite than the Americans are and more direct perhaps. And the difference between making a show for American network TV like Fox and being on a premium cable platform is immense. On Pennyworth we could go much further in those terms than we have but it just seems consonant with the material. No one expects something like Pennyworth to be as bloody and gory and sexual as Game Of Thrones has been. But it gives you the freedom to go as far as you need to go to tell the story authentically in a real way and without commercial breaks . I could write an essay about that but commercial breaks force a certain structure and a certain reticence about the storytelling that is just natural because you’re cutting away from the story to whatever it might be, a cereal commercial. So you can’t be as heavy and you can’t maintain a talent as we’ve been able to do on Pennyworth.”

For Cannon, it is the Britishness of the subject matter that marks this out as different from something like Gotham.

“It’s also bringing the DC universe to England and allowing an English audience to own a little bit of that DC universe. England doesn’t really have a comic book character of its own. They were all American.”

I point out that Judge Dredd is a UK comic character but Cannon countered that he felt very American. Cannon of course directed the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd back in the 1990s. He feels that it will do pretty well over here as we finish our chat.

“This is somebody who we feel like we know, it’s a past that we recognise, it’s something that’s very relateable and it really cheers everybody up when they watch it. So I have high hopes for it in England. But of course you never know,” he admitted.

Pennyworth has already done fairly well in the US and omens are good that it will match this in the UK. Alfred’s more than just Batman’s butler and Pennyworth is more just another comicbook TV show.

Pennyworth starts on Starzplay this Friday 25 October.