It started the way so many things do for screenwriters: with a call from a producer. It was three years ago, during the pandemic, and the call was from Gareth Neame, CEO of Carnival Films, who asked if I would consider adapting Frederick Forsyth’s iconic 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal for longform television. It wouldn’t be a remake, he stressed, but a contemporary reimagining.
I was flattered by the approach and that night sat down to rewatch Fred Zinnemann’s brilliant 1973 film adaptation. But when considering any offer, I always ask myself four things: is it interesting, does it feel substantial, is it a project I can bring something to? Then, will I get on with the producers?
Developing anything for screen is likely to take at least a couple of years, and usually longer. If you’re going to commit, as a writer you need to know that you’re going to be supported over the long term.
I also weigh up the chances that it will actually get made. Getting paid to write a script is always nice and nothing is ever guaranteed to get the fabled green light to production, but if it doesn’t end up on screen it always feels to me like a waste of time. And finally, will I be paid correctly? This is, after all, how screenwriters make their living.
I was already a fan of the novel and of Zinnemann’s adaptation. I had also worked with Gareth, a hugely experienced producer. He’s calm, consistent, and delights in storytelling and filmmaking, and is always supportive of the creative talent he assembles on his different projects.
So what chance did this have of getting made? Increasingly these days, IP (intellectual property) is king. Studios tend to play it safe by financing projects already familiar to audiences, whether it’s a book, a video game, a play or an earlier film. Cast your mind over what you’ve seen this year: Gladiator II? Slow Horses? Small Things Like These? One Love? All are based on existing IP.
I understand this in business terms (inasmuch as I have any understanding of business), although creatively it’s depressing because original ideas get squeezed out. But The Day of the Jackal was undeniably a classy piece of IP, so although you can never be certain of getting into production, the chances looked promising. Once my agent, Charles Collier, agreed the deal, all the boxes were ticked and it was time to dig in.
Forsyth’s story is inspired by real events in 1960s France when a group of ultra rightwing military officers, the OAS, attempt to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle for what they saw as his betrayal in conceding independence to France’s former colony Algeria. The plot fails and the OAS contract a professional assassin – a mysterious Englishman known only by the codename Jackal (played by a pitch perfect Edward Fox in Zinnemann’s film).
We follow the Jackal’s ingenious preparations in detail, and much of the pleasure comes from watching a consummate professional at work. He’s not just a sniper but an actor who disguises, deceives and seduces, bending useful idiots to his will before ruthlessly disposing of them. Few who cross the Jackal’s path live to tell the tale. We know we shouldn’t be siding with this stone-cold killer, but such is the Jackal’s determination and quick thinking that we can’t help willing him on, even as we recoil in horror from his actions.
But even though I quickly said yes to Gareth, initially I wasn’t entirely sure of what I was saying yes to. How could I both honour and update the original? Because one thing was immediately obvious: written more than 50 years ago, the novel is analogue and we now live in a digital world. This would rule out repeating some of the Jackal’s most loved tricks.
In one sequence, for example, Forsyth gives a step-by-step guide for anyone wanting a British passport in a fake name. First, the Jackal scours cemetery headstones looking for a child born around the same year as him but who died young and was therefore unlikely ever to have applied for a passport. He identifies a suitable candidate named Paul Duggan and, armed with the date of Duggan’s death, his next step is the registry of births, marriages and deaths, then located in St Catherine’s House in London, where he applies for the dead child’s birth certificate. Once he has this document, he applies for and obtains a passport in Duggan’s name.
It was a clever exploitation of a bureaucratic loophole and was much copied, including, as revealed by the current “Spycops” inquiry in London, by undercover Metropolitan police officers who, from 1968 to 2008, infiltrated legal but what they considered “subversive” activist groups. Thanks to Forsyth’s novel, it’s just not possible today. I would have to find alternative ways for the Jackal to show off his tradecraft. But first I needed to find a way into the material. After watching the film twice, back to back, and rereading the novel, as an exercise I stripped out the detail, characterisation and political context in order to get to the story’s DNA.
What I was left with was this: the world’s best assassin is hired to kill the world’s most closely guarded man while being hunted by a tenacious and clever policeman. Just identifying this simple framing device helped me get started.
The next step was how to open the show. The novel and film start with the OAS’s failed attempt on de Gaulle’s life. I wanted to open with the Jackal himself. There’s a throwaway line in the novel about the Jackal having assassinated Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic. In fact, Trujillo was ambushed and shot, in 1961, not by a professional killer but by amateurs, but the line gave me an idea: let’s grab the audience’s attention from the get-go with a spectacular opening set-piece in which the Jackal lures his victim into his crosshairs with a plan that initially looks like it has failed, only to reveal that the Jackal, like the chessplayer he is, is looking many moves ahead and has everything plotted out.
Once I got the opening under my belt, it was time to figure out who our three principal characters – the Jackal, his target and his hunter – were going to be in this updated version of the story.
In the novel and film, the Jackal is an enigma. Cold, ruthless and solitary, we never learn his real name. My first inclination was to go with this stripped back version, the assassin as ghost.
But would an enigma work over 10 hours of television? Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and director Sidney Lumet used to talk about the “rubber-ducky” school of drama: “Someone once took his rubber-ducky away from him, and that’s why he’s a deranged killer.”
They were pushing back against a – not entirely unfair – generalisation about studio executives wanting things explained. Like Chayefsky and Lumet, I prefer to avoid explaining why a character is the way he is. But the more I thought about it, the more I discussed it with Gareth and his team – Nigel Marchant and Marianne Buckland – the more I could see that it would be interesting to watch the lone wolf in action – no name, no identity, no family, no lovers – only to slowly reveal that this is a man with an identity, a history and psychological and emotional needs. In reality, no one is totally alone. Even Forsyth’s Jackal had working relationships.
Our Jackal, played by Eddie Redmayne, combines ruthlessness and obsession with glimpses of something more vulnerable: a man whose unique skill – killing very closely guarded people and getting away (an important consideration, as he emphasises) – exhilarates him and gives him a very good living, but ultimately brings chaos to the order he so profoundly needs.
Satisfied that I had my version of the Jackal, I then had to consider who he would be contracted to kill. In an early conference call with Gareth and me, Forsyth himself asked who the target would be?
It took some time to figure out but – with suggestions from my old comrade in arms, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jeremy Pikser, who came on as script consultant, from Brian Kirk, who directed the first three episodes, and from my old friend. the veteran journalist and former editor of the Observer Roger Alton – we came up with Ulle Dag Charles (UDC, played by Khalid Abdalla), a tech bro who has turned his back on the billionaire club and is about to launch software that could seriously damage the financial interests of the super-rich.
Creating UDC gave me the opportunity to say a little about the world we live in. In her warm-up speech before UDC appears on stage in Tallinn, Estonia, the activist Rima Buttons (played by Lourdes Faberes) tells the audience: “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The world as we know it is fucked. You have stuff. I have stuff. But just because we have stuff doesn’t mean you’re not fucked. We’re fucked and we know it. We have to change and we know it. And that change has to start with money because money equals power. And when has power ever wanted change? Change is like kryptonite for people with power.”
UDC felt much more interesting than inventing a politician who would never have anything like the status or name recognition of de Gaulle. And his ambition – full financial transparency – while not exactly practicable, at least might resonate for many in the audience.
The Jackal, of course, isn’t left to his own devices. In the novel and film, he is pursued by British and French police and intelligence agents. Looking at the depiction of the law enforcement from half a century ago, it’s interesting to note that crucial information about the OAS plot is elicited through torture. However, the people doing the torture are French, so that’s OK then. The British, on the other hand, are portrayed as dogged and honourable, as is the Jackal’s chief antagonist, Claude Lebel, played by a wonderfully hangdog Michael Lonsdale in Zinnemann’s film. Lebel is a dedicated public servant, a team player who gets on with the job even as his aristocratic superiors treat him with the condescension they might reserve for a servant.
I wanted to make the Jackal’s antagonist more complex. Bianca (Lashana Lynch) is, like Lebel, an outsider (she’s Black, he’s several rungs below his masters on the social scale). Bianca shares Lebel’s determination to get her man, but instead of being a team player is “a pain in the arse”, as her colleague Osita (Chukwudi Iwuji) describes her to their boss Isabel (Lia Williams).
Bianca knows she should play the game better but can’t bring herself to mouth the necessary platitudes. She knows she should be a better wife and mother, but there’ll always be another parents’ evening and there won’t necessarily be another chance to run the Jackal to ground.
When it comes to her job, she’s prepared to do whatever she has to. This includes not just the lying and deceit that are part and parcel of the intelligence agent’s job, but, as in the original, torture. Bianca is every bit as ruthless as her prey.
Once I had my opening and my principal characters, I could write the pilot. After the usual number of drafts, edits and tweaks, we went out with the script and very quickly had a full-season order from Sky and Peacock.
That’s when Eddie came on board. I’ve never seen an actor throw himself into a role with such commitment. He and the Jackal share – and I mean this in a good way – an obsessive attention to detail. He needed to know exactly what went where and why. Rather bashfully, he admitted that, apart from a couple of words of French, he spoke no other language. In our show, the Jackal speaks German, French and Spanish fluently. Eddie worked with voice coaches and native speakers to get the accents and intonations right. He worked with a movement coach and a sniper instructor. He hit targets at distance. If acting ever goes south for him, there’s another career waiting.
Throughout the long process of development and production, I was aware that there would be fans – and possibly even the author himself – who might dislike the changes I’ve made. But I couldn’t have them on my shoulder. I couldn’t stop and check for their approval. An adaptor, especially for a work half a century old, has to say, “we’re going to have to kill some darlings, but this is my vision, this is how I’m going to do it”. Fortunately, I was supported by the producers from the get-go.
It was an honour to write this show, and a privilege to work with so many talented people in front of and behind the camera.
The Day of the Jackal is streaming now on Sky Atlantic and Now TV.
