“The Day of the Jackal” producer Gareth Neame has admitted he initially balked at making the Eddie Redmayne reboot, which was released last month, because he was such a fan of the 1973 movie starring Edward Fox.
The film is itself based on Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel. The new series, which also stars Lashana Lynch, began broadcasting on Sky in the U.K. and Peacock in the U.S. last month. It has already been renewed for a second season.
“It came up in a creative meeting before the pandemic, and I just immediately [said] ‘No, we’re not doing that. I love the movie, nope, we’re not,’” said Neame, who is CEO of Universal International Studios-owned Carnival Films, during a panel at TV industry confab Content London on Thursday. “And colleagues kept bringing it up as, you know, ‘We have the rights.’ And the [Universal Pictures] film group weren’t doing anything with ‘Day of the Jackal.’ It was a dormant piece. Again this is an example of how the integration of the studio…when you go to these studios and say, ‘Please can I have an option on this?’ they’re going to say no, but when you’re within the family, they will do it.”
“So I think eventually the business imperative took over, and I said, ‘Well, alright, we need some business, so we’ll [do it].’”
Neame, whose production company is perhaps best known for British period drama “Downton Abbey,” said once they realized “we’re just absolutely not doing a remake, we’re going to do a contemporary series” over ten episodes it became more “interesting” to him.
He revealed that the series sold “pretty quickly” to Sky, who, like Universal are also owned by Comcast, with Sky Studios boss Cecile Frot-Coutaz picking it up because “it’s exactly the kind of piece she was looking for to make the kind of statement that she’s been trying to make at Sky.”
Carnival Films managing director Nigel Marchant, who joined Neame on the panel alongside Universal International Studios president Beatrice Springborn and Margaret Schatzel, SVP for global scripted series, also addressed the changes made to the source material, including giving Redmayne’s character the Jackal a family.
“When you first looked at it we settled on the fact that we wanted to tell a contemporary version of it and then you lean into long form television. You know, why are we making this? What do we want to do? What can we tell differently? A ghost — the Jackal character in the movie and novel — holds up over two hours, that’s not going to hold up over 10 hours,” Marchant said. “So what can we bring new to it? What can we explore that’s not been seen before? Whilst retaining the DNA of the original piece, the cat and mouse, the kind of central European-ness of it. So yeah, keeping certain easter eggs across the series if you knew the original, was rewarding, and yet leaned into long form television.”
Earlier in the panel Springborn said of the decision to reimagine the book: “There’s no reason to do a reinvention unless you can take a point of view that’s going to bring it into something that resonates today.”
During a Content London panel on Tuesday Sky scripted exec Meghan Lyvers also addressed the question of whether the series, which departs significantly from the book and film, needed to be based on the “Day of the Jackal” IP in the first place.
“The big thing for us in terms of the tentpole series that we do, which are often based on IP, they have to be equally as compelling as the IP,” she said. “It’s almost more of an uphill challenge and task, but it does give you a playbook in some aspects.”
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