MIPCOM: Writer and director Hugo Blick and Drama Republic’s Greg Brenman were in Cannes this week to debut their latest collaboration, full-blooded Western series The English.

Chaske Spencer as Eli Whipp and Emily Blunt as Cornelia Locke in The English

The English is a new six-part drama for the BBC and Amazon Prime Video from writer and director Hugo Blick, and Mediawan- and Leonine Studios-owned UK production company Drama Republic, co-founded by Greg Brenman.

An epic Western starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer, the series its being sold around the world by All3Media International and had its premiere here at Mipcom in Cannes this week.

The English is Blick and Brenman’s third collaboration, following tremendous success with The Honourable Woman and Black Earth Rising. They spoke to C21 about the new series and their relationship.

You’re here in Cannes to launch The English. Why a Western and why now?
Blick: It was the great Jimmy Stewart who said the Western is the purest form of cinematic art. He meant that if you put a man in a landscape then the bigger the landscape, the greater the pressure upon that man. And that pressure is usually revenge. Then you have a very elemental visual palette.

It’s the ambition of many filmmakers to engage with this genre. But the swap-out here is that instead of having the great Jimmy Stewart as our revenge motif practitioner, we have a woman, played by Emily Blunt. It’s pretty rare to have a woman in this genre. Normally women in this venerable genre have been harlots or card sharks, people of suspicion. So to have a woman with the agency of revenge is unusual.

But perhaps unique about this show is the second part: we have a Native American – above the title, as it were – playing a Native American in a lead role within the genre. The genre doesn’t have a great history of Native representation. So the opportunity to evoke a Native experience within the Western genre was one of the main purposes of making this picture.

What was the genesis of the story?
Blick: The genesis, from my experience of life, was when I was a young man, I was sent out to Montana. I experienced the last vestiges of what you might think is the West, the Old West. And what I saw was both the best of that and some of the worst aspects. And as a consequence, I knew it was a story. I loved Westerns. I wanted to engage in the Western, and I knew I wanted to engage in it in a particular way in the ways I’ve just described. But technically, it’s a very demanding aspect to do that.

You take people out to the middle of nowhere, you have a circus, horses and all the things that come with it logistically. I’m glad that I approached this in the later part of my career rather than the first part of it.

L-R: Hugo Blick, Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer and Greg Brennan at the launch of The English in Cannes

What are the common themes that you address here and that the fans of your work will recognise from previous series?
Blick: I’ve explored the relationships between Israel and Palestine in The Honourable Woman, post-genocide Rwanda in Black Earth Rising and neo noir in The Shadow Line. And here I am in a Western. So they’re all very, very different. But there’s a uniting theme, which is identity, the loss of identity and the reclamation of identity. And in The English, that is personified in these two lead characters, their loss of identity and their reclamation of it.

What is it about the limited series format, rather than the returning series, that appeals to you?
Blick: The limited series gives a very finite destination. The audience knows they’re not going to be cheated out of an exit. As my colleague and the show’s exec producer, Greg Brennan, says, if you leave the door open at the end of the story in order for it to continue, you’re letting an awful lot of air out of that doorway. And I love to keep that door shut. And shutting it means we really hit a final note. The contract is clear: it’s just this tale. I hope that gives great satisfaction to the audience.

How do you embrace the tropes that make Westerns so popular while avoiding the cliches?
Blick: The cowboy part of the Western format is very clear: it’s revenge. They’re about a guy who’s had some wrong done to him and he’s going to go out and find a bad guy and sort it out. That revenge motif is very much present within our story. But what’s unusual is that it also has this other element, and it’s kind of an epic element, the thing that you would normally see in Doctor Zhivago or some such. That’s the love story.

There’s an intimacy between our two lead characters, who support each other in their various vulnerabilities and strengths, to take this survival journey with each other and fall in love or express ideas of what love is. And that makes this story epic and intimate. It just shifts it so it isn’t just about the linear shooting ’em up, which could become a little clichéd.

This is the third Hugo Blick project with Greg Brenman and Drama Republic. How did that relationship originally come about?
Brenman: Along with lots of other people, we were huge fans of Hugo’s work and we stalked him for many years until, as luck would have it, there was an opportunity for us to be given the script of The Honourable Woman and we jumped at it.

Native American actor Chaske Spencer

When The English script came to you, what were your first thoughts? And how did you visualise that together with Hugo?
Brenman: When I read the first episode of The English, I was just struck by how extraordinary it was. I was absolutely compelled and bowled over and desperate to find out more. So, obviously, we needed to make sure that the series got made. But as ever, it presented us with an interesting challenge: where would we make it? How could we get it financed? And the thing that we all agreed very early on was that, unlike the other two shows, we would probably need to cast it quite early, because financially it was going to be fairly big.

We needed someone to help us find a home that could support the vision. And so Emily Blunt came on very, very early. Within two weeks, Hugo, Emily and I were racing around Los Angeles, meeting potential buyers. Actually, Amazon was our first port of call and they bought it in the room. So Emily’s been fantastically important, both creatively and as an exec producer, helping in the heavy lifting in terms of bringing finance to the project.

There has been a lot of discussion over the past five years about streamers taking global rights to shows. But that’s not the case with this one – All3Media International is distributing it internationally. Why did that feel like the right structure for this project?
Brenman: Both Hugo and Drama Republic have a history of working very closely with the BBC. They have been very important for all three of Hugo’s shows. And so it made sense to have a broadcast partner very early on and to know that we were going to have that support. It’s quite nice to be able to broker a deal with Amazon and give them all the rights they needed, which doesn’t mean taking the whole world. And it’s very nice also to know that in your home country – the UK – it is going to be shown on a terrestrial broadcaster. So you get the best of everything.

The full interview with Hugo Blick and Greg Brenman can be heard in the C21Podcast on Friday this week.