Gabriel Range: Director

By Gabriel Range Writer/Director of The Day Britain Stopped

The director of the drama The Day Britain Stopped explains the lengths he and the production team had to go to so viewers would believe in the film.

Firefighters tackle a blaze in a scene from the programme

The fake documentary is an incredibly powerful way of exploring possible futures, but it poses a very different set of challenges to making a real documentary or straight drama.

As in any contemporary history documentary, the backbone of our film is made up of interviews, in which people describe events in the past tense, which itself lends a degree of pathos and credibility.

But fake documentary interviews are notoriously difficult - in part because they're so unforgiving of an actor's performance.

In a conventional TV drama, the audience is engaged by a world in which everyone is acting. What we're watching is not life but a highly stylised representation of it.

In a documentary, there's no similar suspension of disbelief.

If there was one slip it could blow the illusion and the film would collapse

Director Gabriel Range

So it was clear very early on that the performances, the vocabulary and the factual content of each interview would be absolutely critical.

If there was one slip, one line that didn't quite ring true it could blow the illusion and the film would collapse.

Actors couldn't simply learn their lines, to get the spontaneity and the feel of a real interview, they would need to inhabit the world of their characters, learn every aspect of their lives and their role on the 19 December, and then improvise answers to genuine interview questions.

Traumatic event

For Joanne Griffiths, the actor playing Nicola Evans, this not only meant learning the hundreds of acronyms and the jargon of air traffic control, it required a thorough understanding of some very difficult concepts, from the division of airspace around London through to Instrument Landing Systems.

Joanna effectively had to learn how to control air traffic, and spent many hours watching real controllers at work.

Actor Steve North read about bereavement for his part

For others, like Steve North, whose character lost his wife and children in the mid-air collision, it meant an enormous amount of reading about the experience of bereavement through such a disaster, and again an incredibly clear memory of how his character spent 19 December, 2003.

After this intensive research, we rehearsed the interviews in a series of workshops, comparing their performance with interviews with their real-life counterparts.

When an interviewee describes a traumatic event they have specific gestures, mannerisms and a very particular intensity, almost constant eye contact with the interviewee.

Powerful interviews

The other huge constraint of the fake documentary form is the need to justify the source of anything you choose to dramatise. We decided to avoid the use of reconstruction in our film, relying instead on specially created news archive, amateur video and documentary evocation.

At every point in the writing process, we had to ask ourselves "Who could have witnessed this?" and "Who would reasonably have caught this on video?"

Gabriel conducts the action on set

Fortunately, we are now in a world of 24-hour rolling news, with dozens of news crews roaming around the country everyday.

Our lives are monitored more and more by CCTV, whether in a supermarket car park, on the motorway, or in our workplace. But more importantly, amateur video has become cheap, accessible, and very common.

Watching the news of any disaster break on television is incredibly powerful, so we strove to use a combination of every kind of news source to help describe the unfolding disaster.

Recreate chaos

During September 11, there were some incredibly powerful telephone interviews from eyewitnesses right at the centre of the disaster on both TV and radio.

They are the simplest way for a rolling news channel to keep their audience up to date - but they offer an incredible immediacy.

Given limited funds and resources, the scale of what we set out to achieve - mile after mile of motorway gridlock, two planes colliding over Hounslow, the resulting disaster on the ground and the response by the emergency services - was daunting to say the least.

The motorway was built by the Fire Service to practice on

After an exhaustive search for a stretch of motorway that was either under construction or out of commission, we eventually found the M91. Little more than a mile long, this eight-lane motorway was built at the Fire Service Training College in Gloucestershire to train emergency services.

We then worked out just how many cars, vans and HGVs we would need to create gridlock around our characters.

For the aftermath of the collision, we focused on a just a few streets, placing a specially constructed fuselage at the end of a narrow terraced street.

Using a combination of home video, fire service video and news footage, we were able to recreate the chaos that would follow such a disaster.

But the key to creating an impression of scale was the combination of our own footage with carefully chosen archive and computer generated images.

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The Day Britain Stopped was broadcast on BBC Two on Tuesday, 13 May, 2003 at 2100 BST.

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