Washington DC [US], March 23 : The historical TV drama Wolf Hall may have won critical acclaim when its second series debuted on the BBC last year, but its director Peter Kosminsky has shared that many editorial decisions had to be made due to lack of funds, reported Deadline.
Peter Kosminsky, who previously directed the first series of the award-winning adaptation of Hilary Mantel's bestselling novel about the life of King Henry VIII and his wives, told the BBC as quoted by Deadline that almost all the exterior scenes in the second series were cut, and the show became instead "conversations in rooms."
According to Deadline, the director also revealed that other cuts had to be made too - costumes, props, locations - due to gaps in funding:
"We had a whole joust, an extraordinary scene as conceived by Hilary Mantel, the original novelist - and we had to cut everything. That's not something that has ever happened to me before, in all the years I've been making programmes, that you actually have to stop six weeks from production." said Kosminsky as quoted by Deadline.
Kosminsky previously shared that he, his lead actor Sir Mark Rylance and his screenwriter Peter Straughan (who won an Oscar this year for the screenplay for Conclave) also took significant pay cuts prior to filming to get the project across the line.
According to Deadline, Kosminsky, who has BAFTA and Golden Globe awards to his name, has called for a 5% levy on UK subscription streaming revenues, with the proceeds collected for a British cultural fund.
He claimed that without change, the British TV industry is in danger of getting squeezed out of the market.
'Wolf Hall' is a British television series adaptation of two of Hilary Mantel's novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, a fictionalised biography documenting the life of Thomas Cromwell.
It stars Mark Rylance and Dyman Lewis in the lead roles.