The Perfect Couple’ Director Susanne Bier Unpacks Netflix Show’s ‘Magical Group Dynamic’ And Winbury Family’s ‘Undercurrent of Compassion’
Bird Box and The Undoing director Susanne Bier sees the Winbury family as what gives Netflix’s The Perfect Couple adaptation its distinction.
Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand and adapted for the screen by Jenna Lamia, the six-episode series watches a luxurious weekend of wedding festivities spiral out of control when a dead body is found on the shores of its Nantucket setting. Nicole Kidman stars as mother of the groom Greer Garrison-Winbury, and Liev Schreiber plays her husband Tag. Rounding out the cast is Eve Hewson as bride-to-be Amelia Sacks, Billy Howel as groom-to-be Benji Winbury, Meghann Fahy as Amelia’’s maid of honor, Jack Reynor as Benji’s older brother Thomas and Dakota Fanning as Thomas’ wife Abby among others. There are many players in the guessing game, and everyone has a secret that gives them motive.
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“You have to have an amazing cast. You have to have a super talented enticing cast where each character is incredibly different, so that that’s sort of the first thing. For me as a director, casting is the single most important thing that I do: figuring out how that’s going to work,” Bier old Deadline. “In this particular case, it was like this amazing summer camp on Cape Cod where everybody in the cast became so creatively involved. They would improvise. They would really take on each character as being themselves. It got contagious. Liev and Nicole [were] improvising, but the rest of the cast were improvising and doing crazy things. It became this magical group dynamic.”
The director of all six episodes, who also executive produced the series, further discussed the family dynamic, the outsider perspective and other details of the show in the below interview.
DEADLINE: Were the scenes where Liev sings improvised, or was that planned?
Bier: That was his idea. He had a thing that he wanted to do. The first time we did it with him, it was pretty improvised, but also, you know, you can’t just use a song in a TV series. So it was like, he started singing, and I was like, ‘Okay, can somebody please check the rights to that song? Because otherwise you’re gonna have to improvise another song. And then I think we actually did a few, just to be sure.
DEADLINE: This show does have some actors who have overlapped into shows like The White Lotus, Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers. What sets it apart from those shows?
Bier: Look, we’re talking about great shows. It’s not like, “Hey, let’s do something which is very, different.” I don’t have that feeling, but what I thought was important was that this show needs to be its own. It needs to have its own language. It needs to have its own way of of telling the story. It needs to be a world on its own. And Nantucket is very different from the locations that those shows are taking place in.
Essentially, I think that this is more, it is a murder mystery, and there is a whole guessing of who did it. There’s a police investigation going on the Ientire time. There’s a strong family. It is about a family. There’s really a lot of love between the characters, which, even if they are at times horrible, and even if they are at times like weird and entitled and annoying, there’s still an undercurrent of compassion, which I think makes it quite its own.
DEADLINE: For outsiders to this family like Abby or Amelia, who’s enter the family, how did you balance that familiarity and newcomer tension?
Bier: Amelia, who is played by Eve Hewson, is the person who, in a way, brings us into the show. She’s also the only one who’s not a humanly, really messed up person. She’s confused. She’s a young person, probably getting married for the wrong reasons, like her mom is very ill. There’s an undercurrent of she she knows her mom is dying, and when her mom dies, she wants to make sure that her moms knows that she’s going to be happy, that everybody is taken care of. There is a kind of thing where she wants to satisfy things, which does not necessarily mean that she should really get married. It’s very kind, and it’s very cute in a way, but probably the wrong reasons. She’s the one character whom we feel as an audience that we can identify with. I think the rest of them are flawed in a number of ways, and as the series moves on, we actually see how flawed they are and how much fun it is to be with them on that voyage where they are super flawed.
DEADLINE: Another person entering kind of this dynamic is Detective, Nikki Henry, whose character was a guy in the book. What were conversations like with Donna Lynne Champlin, and how did she add to the show?
Bier: Donna Lynne is the magnificent actress. She has a kind of comedic timing which is just brilliant. The weird thing is that whoever you put next to Nicole [Kidman], or whoever you put next to Liev [Schreiber] is going to easily feel intimidated because they’re so strong, both of them. Donna Lynne completely holds her and you do feel that that that Greer and Tag are threatened by her. They pretend that they’re cool, but she actually does embody something which they feel is a threat. She also represents that whole thing of, “I don’t care about your entitlement. I don’t care about your privilege. Whoever has done that is going to be taken to court. I’m going to find this murderer. And I don’t have a a glimpse of respect for all your money. I’m just going to do my work.” She does that in not a noisy way, but in a very funny and self assured way.
DEADLINE: How did you approach framing the story with cuts back and forth within the six episodes?
Bier: “You’re kind of asking what was challenging about this. Because it was. It is hugely challenging. It’s always hugely challenging cutting back and forth in time because I quite often watch shows where I would rather be in one time period than in another time period, or we want to be with a certain character rather than other certain characters. You need to avoid that trap. You need to avoid audiences not enjoying getting into another time, space or another group of characters, and so it takes meticulous editing and the script did always cut back and forth in time, but the way it does in its current shape is pretty different from the way the script did it. I don’t think you can actually anticipate it before you shoot it because once you do the scenes and once the actors embody all those moments, that balance switches, and then you need to to invent another structure while editing, which I think needs to happen.
DEADLINE: My last question was about the dance sequence in the beginning. I know for the first five episodes they’re dancing in the intro, and then we see you get in there in the end of the finale. What was that like?
Bier: I forced those actors, because all the actors, other than Liev, he wanted to do it, and he’s a great dancer, but everybody else were like, “No, we’re not doing it. We’re not doing it. We’re not doing it.” They even they had a WhatsApp group, which was in order for them not to do that dance, and so I felt that they had to get the satisfaction of of seeing the director attempting to do the dance so we could see how great they were and how bad the director was. So that’s why I did that.
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