‘Better than The Godfather’: how we made brutal Yorkshire crime classic Red Riding

‘The show’s hardly an advert for Yorkshire. Sets would have a burnt-out car and maybe an upturned shopping trolley. Locals would say, “Can’t you put a nice floral arrangement there instead?”’I’d been writing screenplays with Michael Winterbottom and in 2006, his producer Andrew Eaton said: “There’s this quartet of novels by David Peace. Are you interested in adapting them?” I read the first, 1974, and was drawn to it and repelled at the same time. It was strong meat, full of anger and injustice. It’s anchored in reality, especially the Peter Sutcliffe and Stefan Kiszko cases, but heightened and stylised. “Fiction torn from the facts,” David called it. Continue reading...