What would you do if the person you loved...
...walked out of the front door and never returned'?
What would you do if the next day
you found that the business he was running
was bankrupt?
What would you do if the next day you were
pulled into the police station
and interrogated quite aggressively,
under suspicion of murder'?
And what would you do if your kids were taken away
and put into foster care
and you were accused of being a bad mother?
What would you do'?
It's a story that's set over ten days.
It's a family that run a family business
in Laugharne.
Um...and... "Abercorran" is what we're calling it.
But we're filming the exteriors in beautiful Laugharne.
And it's about a family - a husband and a wife
with three children - and he goes to work one morning
and never returns.
So, Faith is his wife. That's who I play.
And it's her hunt to find out where Evan Howells is.
But in so, she uncovers his... his secret life.
Alec: Fenian?
Puck's going on here, Evan'?
I'd actually been writing novels.
I'd stepped away from TV for a few years,
gone away to write novels and then...
Pip Broughton, who's the producer/director,
she persuaded me to come up with some ideas for TV.
We just came up with this storyline
of a woman whose husband disappears
and how that would impact on her life.
I wanted to write a story in a small town
and this character of Faith...
...she did son of materialise and took me over.
She was very much someone who'd come to live
in this small, coastal Welsh town
in order to escape from the world.
But idea was that the wickedness of the world
would catch up with her
in this place that she'd tried to escape to.
And I wanted to tell a story within a very small community,
like that in which I've lived for many years.
We are setting it in Wales but it could be Australia,
it could be New Zealand, it could be anywhere.
Because you never really know the person you live with.
All of us have secrets. All of us carry a darker side.
And a lot of the, son of, metaphors of the series
is the light side and the dark side in all of us.
And yet it's a very warm-hearted series.
Nice guy. Slightly repressed.
- Repressed? - Yeah, he is.
A little bit repressed. But he worships you
and he just can't admit that he's got his own needs.
- Sex famine. - (Laughs)
Seriously, babe, a bloke, he can't be getting it
and still be stressed, that is a fact of life.
Shh. Oh, Lisa.
The sub-title of it for us
is In The Name Of Love...
and what actions you take and what decisions you take
in the name of love,
and is that the right thing'?
Evan, the husband, has taken a lot of decisions
in the name of love, wanting to protect his family,
protect his wife.
And the fact that he's kept things secret
has then led to the fact that he can't talk about them.
He's not a bad man
but he's done some bad things for the right reasons.
And a lot of us do the wrong thing for the right reason.
MARION: Every marriage has its ups and downs, Faith.
BETHAN: Even Terry and me.
Uh...he's had his share of disappointments.
But we've weathered them.
We're all family, Faith, we all love Evan
and we have a right to know.
We had a short pitch document
that we took to a few broadcasters,
but it was 84C who actually decided to...
put some money into the development of it.
So, over about three years, we developed eight scripts.
The first series is eight hours.
And...
...it's been a long, long haul.
Well, the casting process is interesting.
You're up against this particular issue,
which is that it's a bilingual production,
so the pool of actors who can speak both English and Welsh
is quite small.
So it meant I was very conscious of that
in creating the characters in the first place.
I had to create a limited number of them.
And Pip, the director, had worked with...
most of the actors who are bilingual in Wales,
so she had quite a good feel for who she was after.
But when I saw the actors at the read-through
and heard them reading,
you then get very different insights
into the characters you've written.
Suddenly you've other people's interpretations of them.
And, without being too specific about it,
some of the actors were really rather different
from the characters I'd had in my mind,
but after a short period of adjustment,
I think my writing has changed
and I've become very much...
very, very much geared to writing for those actors now.
Obviously, cos each actor has to speak Welsh and English,
it means the pool is slightly narrower
than it would normally be
if you were just casting in English.
But we've got great talent here in Wales,
so it's been a joy, really.
Got fab actors on the show.
- Faith! Any word from Evan? - No.
That's brilliant! Arthur Davies needs bail.
He's up in 20 minutes. And We got a sentencing.
- What do we do? - He'll be there.
If he's not, the client gets banged up and sues us.
- What, Arthur'? I doubt it. - Faith.
It's a bail app, 10:30.
Evan said you're back any day soon.
- Thank God. - Cerys.
- Cerys. Hey! - I'm late!
Cerys is a fiercely ambitious junior lawyer.
She works at the Howells family firm.
Faith and Cerys are slightly suspicious of each other
at the top of the series, but by the end of the series,
they have become firm allies.
I like to think of them as a modern-day Cagney and Lacey
by the end of the show.
We're filming in Wales and...
so, you know, you do find that you...
When you come back home to film,
you work with a lot of the same people.
But there are people I have never worked with before.
I've never worked with Eve before.
I didn't really know her.
But it's been brilliant.
It's such an energised set.
Already, we're nowhere near halfway through
and it's a family already.
It's great. I think we're all really geared up
and excited for it.
It's a terrific cast.
It's a very, very talented cast.
To be able to get a cast like this together,
that can do Welsh and English,
the two languages fluently,
is just...l think it's wonderful.
There's a great family feel.
Do you think it's something at work?
Well, he's never liked to talk shop at home.
You're his father. He said anything to you?
Come on, come in. Come on, come in.
Tom is the founding father of the firm,
a firm of lawyers,
and it's a family business.
So, his son works for it
and his son's wife - that's the main character-
Faith, works for them as well.
Part of the fact that we have worked together before
is useful, I think,
in creating a community thing.
Because there's a shorthand and there's no kind of,
"Oh, I don't quite know this person,"
everybody's comfonable with everybody straightaway.
I think that helps.
And everybody's lovely, and everybody's great.
And it's really boring to hear.
You want to hear, "This guy's an idiot."
"This woman's a pain in the backside."
But they're not. It's really dull.
Everybody's lovely- and that's cast and crew.
The uh...missing-persons report gets filed first thing.
So as soon as the 24 hours are up, they'll be straight on it.
- AH right? - OK Thanks, Terry.
OK Oh, and if you do fancy doing the pub quiz, you know...
Terry!
Terry is the local bobby.
Uh...he's been doing it for probably about 20 years.
He went in as a young man.
He's got a big heart, he loves his family,
he loves nature.
He's decent.
He's upstanding. He's moral. He's quite old-fashioned.
He's a pretty good guy.
I've worked with most people in Wales before.
Particularly this cast and Pip, the director.
I've been lucky enough to work with Pip before
and I think she's fantastic.
She's already... I'm getting the sense of her...
really pulling and pushing the characters out,
giving us a lot more than... is there on the page.
You know'? That we're exploring, in all the scenes,
different dynamics, I guess, between the characters.
And that's making them more and more
three-dimensional, I guess.
All the contradictions,
character contradictions, that go with that.
And I have to say, too, our leading lady,
Eve Myles, is a great glue to all this.
I'm convinced she's connected to the National Grid sometimes.
I mean, she's so... so full of energy and brilliant.
The prosecution is concerned
that your client will abscond and reoffend.
(Takes a deep breath)
Yes, well, I don't recall Mr Davies
having ever strayed further than the late-night Spar
on Carmarthen Road.
And as for the risk of him committing further of fences,
well, now and then, even the most unexpected people,
they surprise us.
Who knows? This could turn out to be
the first day of the rest of his life.
The character was conceived around Eve Myles, really.
So...l mean, she's always been in our minds from the beginning.
Quite early on, I knew that Faith
had to be played by Eve Myles.
There was no question. We never considered anyone else.
Because she has all of the sides of the character
that we wanted to bring out.
She is incredibly funny, incredibly sexy,
incredibly smart.
Um, incredibly directable.
It's the joy of my life working on set with Eve.
Because she's fearless
and she's trusting.
And we have fun exploring different nuances in the scene.
We're filming...
These are scenes that we've started filming
down on Pendine Beach, actually,
which is a fantastic beach down west.
We've done all the dialogue scenes
and all, kind of, the meat of it.
But the day that we were filming them,
the girls were really poorly,
had become very poorly overnight,
so we couldn't use the girls.
So we do pick up shots today
of all scenes where we get cut-aways of the girls
playing down at the beach,
and linking them into the scene that we've already shot.
And we're in Swansea, my home town, which is lovely.
Yeah, it's funny when you've got to play a parent
to children you've just met.
It's kind of like the greatest acting job, really.
You've got to bond with them, it's got to be really natural.
The baby's got to be really happy.
Otherwise it can turn into a nightmare.
The little ones that came in - twins - two little boys,
they were absolutely beautiful, gorgeous.
And the little girl playing the little boy at the moment-
because they grow so fast you've got to change
and things like that, so it's lovely.
Not that I'm broody at all, or wanting twins...
When you're a screenwriter, you don't think very much about
whether you're writing a male or a female character.
You just have to write characters.
But the novels I'd been writing before this series
are all from a female perspective.
And I think, actually, that
if you want to write emotional characters,
it's easier and you have a richer palette
if you're writing through a female character.
We still want men in thrillers
to be action-driven, to be quite physically heroic...
...and I didn't want to tell the story that way.
I wanted to tell an emotional thriller story.
And so it just felt far more natural through a woman.
PIP: I wanted to see how, particularly for a woman,
decisions you make - placing your family first -
hovv that impacts you and your personal growth.
Faith, you know, she...
many years ago, used to be a very successful,
high-flying barrister in London.
She fell in love, came to West Wales to bring up her family...
...happily making that choice.
And then when Evan disappears,
and she's suddenly thrust back into it,
she goes through the most enormous
personal learning curve over ten days of her life.
And I think that...
exploring also how that crisis
has rippled through the rest of the family
and the rest of the community, is a good story.
It's exciting to have someone like Eve
play this charismatic character that goes...
She's a strong female lead
and she plays it really, really well.
That's massively appealing.
EVE: Pip and I - the director-
we worked together years and years ago
on something very small, and it clicked,
and we knew we'd have to work with each other again.
I'm blessed to have her as my producer and my director.
She's very encouraging and she gives you an environment
that you can...
you don't... you're not afraid to mess up
and get it wrong -
not that there's a right or wrong -
but you don't feel like you're gonna fall very far.
She's always gonna steer you in the right direction,
pick you up and go, "Yeah, that's good, actually."
PIP: I'm not the son of director
who goes in knowing exactly what I want from a scene.
I'll have a sense.
But I love working in front of the camera,
drawing the performance out,
provoking with different suggestions,
so that we find out about the scene.
And it's been very important to me
that we've been working in quite a free way with the cast.
I don't like blocking and constricting actors.
I think my job is to offer freedom and...
give pointers.
It means that the unexpected happens.
The best work is when you find out, when you discover together,
rather than, "I think it should be like this."
So...
I try to do a lot of invisible creativity.
I wanted to place the audience
in a place of moral ambiguity,
in that we have two parallel stories happening.
We find things out about Evan that Faith doesn't know.
By the end of the series, we should be able
to stand up in court and defend him...
and defend her...
and...I'm interested in people debating -
what is right, what is wrong'?
Thematically, family, loyalty.
Identity.
All the universal themes
that often dramas don't explore with sufficient depth.
I would say, because Keeping Faith is a thriller,
and because it takes place over ten days,
I think one of the big challenges
is to keep that momentum...
to be able to deliver the pay-offs in that time.
Also to chart that emotional story
that Faith's going through.
I think balancing all those things
within ten days of story is quite challenging.
But I think... I think we've achieved that.
I think it's working.
So, no, it's all looking good so far.
It's pretty populist. It's pretty universal.
It's pretty accessible.
But I think it's exploring some pretty fundamental themes
subtly along the way.
Series one ends with... quite a big question...
...which we want to answer.
Making the jump into series two,
I want to do something a little bit different.
I want to be a bit surprising for the audience.
And we're trying not to tell story
in a completely linear fashion.
We use flashback sequences quite a lot in series one.
And I'm developing another interesting device,
I hope, for series two.