Poldark: A Q&A with Executive Producer Debbie Horsfield

Poldark, based on the historical novels by Winston Graham, premieres on PBS's Masterpiece later this month. Chronicling the fortunes of a landed, mine-owning family, the story centers on Ross Poldark (Aidan Turner), a redcoat in the American Revolutionary War who returns to his native, windswept Cornwall and its copper mines to find life dramatically changed.

Helming Masterpiece’s second adaptation of the series (the original series aired in the 1970s) is writer and executive producer Debbie Horsfield. She shared a few secrets from the set, such as how the production team managed to recreate life in 18th-century Cornwall thanks to stunning locations, a team of historical advisors and unusually good summertime weather.

BH: What type of research did you do on the post-revolutionary war period in Britain in preparation for the production?

DH: I did a lot of research into the period and looked at a lot of art, but I realized it was all there in the book. Winston Graham researched meticulously. There was a portrait painter, John Opie, who did a lot of the gentry and he was mentioned in the Poldark books. It was a kind of mark that you’d arrived in society if you could get your portrait done by him. I also looked at paintings by George Stubbs to get the sense of place and costume.

BH: This is your first costume drama. How different was it from writing contemporary pieces? 

DH: Obviously, the language is different. I’m from the north of England and everything I’ve done has been set in Manchester, so obviously the speech and the idioms are very different. When you’re talking about 18th-century Cornwall you’ve got the Cornish dialect which is quite a challenge to get your head around. There’s also the more formal language the gentry would speak but that wasn’t so much a stretch as I expected. I studied 18th-century literature and it’s only about 25 years or so before Jane Austen. One never thinks of Jane Austen’s language as being impenetrable.

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Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark and Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza
(C) Robert Viglasky/Mammoth Screen for MASTERPIECE[/caption]

BH: Television often "modernizes" some aspects of an historical period as dramatic license. What did you do?

DH: We had historical advisors who were always available to me and the costume and makeup departments. We had two people who were on hand for the cast: Amanda Vickery, who wrote The Gentleman’s Daughter, which was one of my source books and Hannah Greig who [lectures on] 18th-century studies at the University of York. I was emailing her all the time about things like: How much physical contact was there between the opposite sex if you’re not married? You would think people could happily go and give each other a peck on the cheek, but then you realize was not the done thing, to embrace or kiss if you’re unmarried  It just wouldn’t happen and we assumed that it would. It was the details like that we had to check up on.

BH: What was the most important thing you wanted to convey to the viewers about a post-Revolutionary War Britain?

DH: We are looking at a period where Britain is suffering the after-effects of their investment in that war. In the first couple of Poldark books, [the country] was in crisis. There was economic decline, high taxes and huge poverty across the board.

BH: Was there anything that surprised you about the period? 

DH: There was also the rise of bankers and financiers. There were characters, the villains of the piece [whose] grandfather was a blacksmith! This was the period where you could go from being  just a worker to the wealthiest in society in just two generations. I had no idea that money lenders, bankers, used to set up in a corner of a pub, in a public house somewhere, and conduct their business in the corner.

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Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark
(C) Robert Viglasky/Mammoth Screen[/caption]

BH: What did shooting in Cornwall bring to the production?

DH: Cornwall has a very distinctive coastline. It’s very wild and rugged on the north coast and I don’t think you can really replicate that anywhere. We wanted to shoot as much as possible there because it’s very pertinent to the story. There are a lot of shipwrecks and disasters at sea and the fishing industry had a huge impact on the story. We spent seven weeks filming in Cornwall and most of it was around the coast where the derelict tin and copper mines are. They are spectacular even in their ruins. We had to rebuild them in CGI  [Computer-Generated Imagery] later on and we added some bits as we were filming. To have a working mine, we had to do that in post-production.

BH: There is such a romantic feeling to that part of England, which works well for the story. 

DH: There is a sense in the novels that Cornwall is a land unto itself. We wanted to capture it being something like a Wild West frontier. Even now, it will take you four or five hours on the train from London. In those days, it could have taken five days to a week to get there. There’s a sense of isolation there where people needed to take care of their own. It’s very strong in the novel, so geographically it was important. In terms of the look of it, there’s a kind wildness to it and the coastlines are so spectacular. We never really considered anywhere else.

BH: Where did you shoot the village scenes?

DH: We had our production base in Bristol where we did a lot of studio work. We needed to be out towards the west and Bristol was the biggest city that had all of the facilities we could use. A lot of the towns in Cornwall don’t look like Truro, which is the main town in the story, so we had to find a place that we could make it look like an 18th-century town. We found one near Bristol–a little market town called Corsham. We were able to take over a small part of the high street and make it look as it would have in the 18th century. We did everything in three days.

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Aidan Turner as Ross Poldark (C) Robert Viglasky/Mammoth Screen[/caption]

BH: How did you shoot the shipwrecks?

In the book, there are two shipwrecks on the beach in one night and we couldn’t even begin to think of doing that. I decided the most creative and cost effective way of doing that was to show the story from the perspective of our protagonist, Ross. It was all through his eyes so you see everything as very chaotic and blurred because it happens at night. There are no ships that were around from that time that we could afford to wreck on the rocks, so the ship is CGI but we had a lot of authentic cargo rolling in on the tide. In terms of creating that sense of chaos and destruction, we shot on the beach in Cornwall at night with a lot of fire and smoke and lights. We called it hell on the beach because it looked like Dante’s "Inferno".

BH: The series makes the coast of Cornwall look like one of the most beautiful places in the world. 

DH: We were incredibly blessed last summer because I don’t think there had been a summer like it in Cornwall for years. You write something is set at sunrise or sunset but you truly, never expect to get it. Day after day we got the most spectacular sunsets setting across the shimmering sea. Sometimes the weather was too nice to us. In one scene, Ross comes home after spending night with a prostitute and dives into the sea as if to cleanse himself. In the book, it’s described as a scene with crashing waves and everything all grey. Of course [during filming] it was blue sky and a turquoise sea that looked like the Greek islands with not a wave in sight. I’m sure the Cornwall tourist board thinks it’s wonderful. I can’t imagine we’ll ever be that lucky again.

Poldark premieres on Masterpiece on PBS on June 21. For more information visit www.pbs.org/masterpiece.