Was the script about the nurse inspired by specific cases, newspaper articles?
The Suspicion scenario was one that one collects material for a lifetime without knowing. My mother worked for forty years as a nurse in a department similar to the one we describe in the miniseries. When I was little, I went to the hospital to see her, and even though I was always a little scared there, at the same time I was attracted to the environment. At home, since childhood, I listened to stories from my mother at work, often very colorful, maybe too much for a child.
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Sensational reports of murderous nurses and nurses who appear regularly in the media have always touched me on this personal level. I tried to imagine what it would be like to blame my mom like that. How would her colleagues at work, patients, suddenly treat her? Would they believe her innocent? I searched a lot of those real cases very closely to gather as many interesting details as possible. It’s one of the most fun stages of work for me.
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From those little fragments, the outlines of the future story begin to emerge for the first time, you begin to think about the characters, you think about the relationships between them, what their motivations are – at that moment it’s all one big promise, everything looks promising and in pink. Then you start writing and most of the time it gets complicated.
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Did something about the nurse’s character have to change during the preparation or filming?
At first good I tend to say not much. But the truth is, the moment the work is done and has some success, remembrance optimism immediately begins to work – that success seems to make sense, because everything was right from the start. You’ll forget how long and arduous search usually preceded it, how many times you got lost and were in a dead end. For a long time, we tuned the right relationship with Hana, the main heroine of the Suspicion, so that she would not act on the one hand as clearly evil and on the other as an innocent victim. It took several versions of the scenario before we reached the ideal balance. Once we had this, it was more of a careful calibration, millimeter to the right, millimeter to the left.
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Did you understand the character differently at the end than at the beginning of writing?
When Hana and I went through her whole story, I felt a much greater empathy for her. I felt sorry for her. For me, one of the worst ideas is that you will live life without fulfilling your potential. I don’t think about creation now, everyone doesn’t need to realize themselves this way. By that I mean some basic human possibilities as you approach the world and people. That you have the opportunity to live happily, to have full, functioning relationships, to enjoy ordinary things and to be grateful for them. But instead you destroy everything completely unnecessarily, you slowly spend everything around you and yourself poisoning what you release.
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Klára Melíšková
Photo: Czech Television
I think this is hell, not just the afterlife, but on earth. This is exactly what Hana has done to her life, and I feel sorry for her. He’s exactly the person I want to help. The problem is that these people usually don’t want to help or aren’t able to.
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Have you done any research on how healthcare works?
As I said, thanks to my mother, I had a fairly “collected” in this direction. Thanks to that, I also knew about various things that do not appear in official reports issued by hospitals. Mom was also the first person I read the script for. Of course, I also interviewed my fellow doctors and drove in the depths of the Internet. And specifically, we had two professional advisors in this area, specialists from renowned hospitals. So, as the athletes say, we did not underestimate the training.
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It is also important because the viewer knows this unmistakably. As soon as you write about something you only know from overhearing, or from other films on a similar topic, viewers will immediately reveal it with their sixth sense. And at that moment, the whole story loses credibility for them. Suddenly, they start contradicting things they would not otherwise question.
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I think that Klára Melíšková in the main role is a 100% hit. Did you affect the casting? Did you wish Klára Melíšková for this character?
What Klára performs in the main role is, in my opinion, a perfect acting metamorphosis. This is exactly the case when, in a moment, you forget that you are watching a famous actress hung by the Czech Lions and you only see the character. In addition, it acts absolutely credibly within its environment. She is a lady in a dilapidated house in a small town and a nurse in a suburban hospital, not an actress from Prague who tries to work like that.
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In addition, Klára did not hesitate to change physically, including such details as the type of walk. When you know all this Klára is a supportive and empathetic person in your personal life, you will appreciate it all the more.
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The selection of actors for the things I write takes place in such a way that we have to agree on them together with the producers and the director. We work in a team with the producers, we have a company together in which we also did our previous things together, Burning Bush and Wasteland. So, for our joint projects, I’m always from start to finish, from the first thoughts on the topic to the premiere. That’s great, I really appreciate it and I wouldn’t want to work differently. Not because of my vanity, although of course I am vain, but because I can be one hundred percent behind the final result. I can’t blame anyone else for any failure, because I’ve been to all the major decisions. That is a liberating feeling.
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