Apple TV+ dropped the first two episodes of their thrilling 7-part new series Hijack this week, and Cherry the Geek TV attended a press conference before the premiere featuring writer George Kay, director Jim Field Smith, star and Executive Producer Idris Elba, and actors Archie Panjabi and Max Beesley.
In the series, twenty minutes after Kingdom Airlines 29 (KA29) takes off from Dubai bound for London Heathrow, it is hijacked 30,000 feet over the Persian Gulf. On board, the passengers and crew are thrown into crisis-mode, fearing for their lives, desperate to summon help and contact loved ones; arguing amongst themselves over if, when and how they should attempt to fight back.
At the center of it all is Sam Nelson (Idris Elba), a businessman heading home to London with the hope of winning back his ex-wife and seeing his son. Sam attempts an audacious plan to negotiate with the hijackers from within the plane itself. On the ground, in Dubai, London and across the European continent, debate rages between governments, air traffic controllers and counter terrorism teams over how to deal with a problem fast heading their way – a ticking time bomb in the sky.
As events escalate on board, investigations reveal just how dangerous the organized crime group behind the hijacking is and it becomes terrifyingly clear just how catastrophic the situation is becoming as those on the ground and in the sky race against time to attempt to regain control of the plane.
We’ve seen all seven episodes (which are fantastic. This is THE series that will be talked about all summer) and the real-time element creates a tension that elevates the series. We asked Kay and Smith why they decided to do the show in real time over seven hours.
“In terms of the-the real time of seven hours and maintaining tension, what I realized when writing was that in the hijacking situation, it’s not immediately life or death,” said Kay. “There’s time and the tension is suspended because until you know what those hijackers want, where they’re taking the plane, what they intend to do–these are all unknowable things at the start of our story, and so we have a kind of… we’ve got a tension built in. And there’s no point breaking that–from a writing perspective–there’s no point breaking that tension. You want to unfold the mystery really carefully and slowly because you should have people’s breath held in their chests at that point. You’ve got seven hours to play with–that’s all they know. And I think at the end of the first or second episode, it becomes clear that they’re going to go to London, I don’t know what we can say in terms of the story, but the seven hours is the size of the football pitch under which Sam Nelson can plot his strategy around and get to his goal. So, the tension is going to be there throughout because you’re edging all more incrementally towards a more intense situation the whole time.”
Smith added that he noticed that the time of the fiight distance and the length of a TV series were very similar. “The thought then popped up–well, hang on, why don’t we just play it–why don’t we just run it for real, because we’ve all been on what would feel like interminable plane journeys, that it would not feel interminable or it would be suddenly a short, intense and magnified experience if you were under a hijacking so it just felt right that the length of the show seems to be the length of a flight.”
He then quipped “What you don’t want to be is on a flight that gets cancelled by the network halfway through,” eliciting laughter from the panel.
“One of the bits of research we were doing early on–I was listening to this testimony from a hijack survivor, and she said this thing that really, really stuck with me the whole way through the show, which was that she had been in a hijack situation and she said, ‘during a hijack, time ceases to exist and all you’re left with is decisions’. And that… I sort of had that in my head the whole time because it is real time, it’s potentially more real time for the people on the ground as it is for the people on the plane. As George has said, for the people, you’re sort of suspended, I mean, you’re literally suspended but you’re sort of in suspension and you’re just trying to figure out how to sort of live through to the next moment. For the people on the ground, they’re scrambling for answers, they’re trying to figure out what’s going on, and of course, this plane is heading essentially towards them,” Smith said.
We then asked once they committed to doing it in real time, what were the challenges and were there any surprises.
Smith noted that they shot all of the plane sequences in order chronologically. “Some of the challenges of making it sort of perversely became, I think, some of the benefits of the show,” he said. “So the problem with making a real time drama is that you are wedded to every single decision that you make in production throughout. Normally, if it’s like–‘oh, we hate this jacket–oh, don’t worry, we’ll get rid of it in the next scene’ or, you know, ‘we’re going to jump to this or we can cut around this or we can go there’–we can’t do that in our show. So we had to live with all of the decisions that we made, and that’s the reality of what would happen in that situation. We weren’t able to do the convenient thing of jumping ahead in time or sort of swerving around something–we had to just take everything head on. We made decisions about characters in episode one that we then had to essentially live with. I think–hopefully, that’s to the benefit of the show.”
Smith continued, “The material on the plane we found could actually expand, because once you’re in those scenes on a plane–we, hopefully successfully–went for it. I really wanted to feel the tension of moments that in any other situation would be completely inconsequential–feeling like the most important thing ever– like, you know–Sam’s character waiting for someone to move slightly so they’re not in his eye line anymore and they can go this way. You know, I wanted those moments to feel like they lasted forever almost–and conversely–wanted the stuff on the ground to feel relentless.”
Kay added “We didn’t want to do any flashbacks or give the audience any irony or any knowledge that Sam and the characters on board didn’t have. Everything has to be earned for people on the ground and for the people on the plane. TV is full of shows that are mixing timelines and flashing back and giving audience better knowledge than some of the characters in the show, so it felt fresh to try something just linear, everyone learning at the same time.”
Idris Elba jumped in. “Just quickly, as an actor though, it felt like I was flying to Mars,” he said, as everyone laughed. “I was just like, am I still on this flight? Six months later I’m still on the flight, or three seasons of the show, are we still here? What’s going on?”
You can watch the press conference by clicking on the link below:
The first two episodes of Hijack are available to stream now on AppleTV+, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday through the end of July.
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