From left: Bill Camp, Jeannie Berlin, Riz Ahmed and John Turturro

Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Robert Ascroft
Fill 1
Fill 1
August 08, 2017
Features

The death of a beloved star threw the future of a promising series into question, but some 18 months later, production resumed on HBO’s The Night Of, with John Turturro replacing his friend, the late James Gandolfini, in the lead.

Tatiana Siegel

Throughout his 40-year career in Hollywood, Steve Zaillian never had much interest in TV.

But in 2009, the Oscar-winning writer of Schindler’s List became intrigued by a BBC limited series called Criminal Justice, something between a procedural and long movie. Jane Tranter, an executive producer of Rome, had presented Zaillian and his producing partner Garrett Basch with the five-episode series from Peter Moffat as ripe for a London-to-New York transfer.

Zaillian sparked to the idea of following a suspect through the justice system from the night of a crime through arraignment and all the way to trial. “I found the premise very interesting that somebody’s life could be changed so quickly,” he says. “A few wrong decisions and their life might be over.”

Zaillian enlisted gritty author and screenwriter Richard Price to co-create the series, with Price writing the pilot and Zaillian directing it. They came up with a short list of actors to play the low-rent attorney John Stone, who drives the narrative from jailhouse to verdict. The list included James Gandolfini and John Turturro.

Gandolfini — one of the most iconic TV actors of his generation, thanks to his eight-year run as Tony Soprano — had been itching to return to episodic TV and was game to tackle the hustling New Yorker with the catchy come-on: “No fee ‘til you’re free.” Next, Bill Camp signed on as Dennis Box, the detective working the grisly murder case at the heart of the story.

“I was looking for the best actors I could find, whether they were ‘quote’ a name or not,” says Zaillian, who spotted Camp in Mike Nichols’s Death of a Salesman on Broadway. “I thought, ‘Oh, this guy is really good.’”

Filling the most prominent role in the pilot, that of Pakistani- American college student Nasir “Naz” Khan, who is accused of murdering a young woman in her Upper West Side brownstone, happened to be the most challenging. “I knew so much was gonna be riding on that actor’s ability, and there aren’t a lot of Pakistani actors of that age with that much experience,” Zaillian says.

But after auditioning some 100 hopefuls for the role, he saw British actor Riz Ahmed in the film Four Lions. “I thought, ‘Yeah, he can do it,’” Zaillian recalls.

HBO, eager to get back into business with Gandolfini after their Sopranos collaboration, boarded the project — envisioning it as a traditional series — and gave the go-ahead for the pilot order in September 2012. A month later, they were in production.

But like the plotline of the series — a young man’s life veers off course after a single event — the same suddenly held true for Criminal Justice. Six months after production wrapped on the pilot, Gandolfini died of a heart attack, throwing the series’ future into question.

“The hope was that it would still be made and that Steve would find somebody to replace Jim,” Camp says. “Though he’s kind of irreplaceable, right?”

Even before Gandolfini’s death, HBO had cooled on the project and decided not to order the pilot to series. But Netflix and FX were ready to pounce, prompting HBO to reevaluate. Not willing to lose the project to a rival, HBO reentered the fray and bought it as a limited series two weeks before Gandolfini died. Alas, on June 19, 2013, the project seemed permanently derailed.

But out of the ashes sprang forth a new phoenix, now titled The Night Of, and the hunt began for a new lead. Ironically, it was Turturro — one of Gandolfini’s closest friends after having directed the actor in the 2005 film Romance & Cigarettes — who stepped in as the eczema-plagued, sandal-wearing Stone.

Turturro and Zaillian had never collaborated before, though the actor nearly costarred in 1993’s Searching for Bobby Fischer, which Zaillian wrote and directed, and the two had remained in touch ever since. Even better, Turturro had worked with fellow New Yorker Price since the mid-’80s, having appeared in The Color of Money and Clockers, both of which were written by Price.

Gandolfini appeared in only one brief scene in the pilot, walking past Naz’s holding cell, asking, “Who’s that kid?” Nevertheless, 18 months had passed since the pilot was shot, so they began anew in April 2014, giving Turturro a chance to make the character — a sad-sack lawyer navigating the lowest rungs of the Manhattan justice system — entirely his own.

He spoke with Gandolfini’s widow, Deborah Lin, and the late actor’s representatives and received their blessings before he acquiesced.

“I felt weird about it,” Turturro says, “and then I looked at the pilot — I really didn’t want to watch it — but then I realized that James was barely in it. He didn’t even have a scene actually with Riz. So I was a little relieved when I saw that and was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to erase anything from my brain.’ When you play Hamlet, you know, you gotta make it your own.”

Though Price and Zaillian had initially planned on only doing the pilot, both stayed on for the eight-episode arc, with the latter directing all but one of the episodes (James Marsh directed episode four). As for Price, a former writer on HBO’s The Wire, there was nothing particularly tricky about nailing the dialogue inside Rikers Island or 100 Centre Street’s criminal courthouse with equal authenticity.

“For research,” he says, “I did what I always do: just hang out with people.”

Though they don’t appear in the pilot, other characters play pivotal roles in the drama, including Rikers inmate Freddy Knight (played by Michael Kenneth Williams, best known as Omar on The Wire) and the no-nonsense district attorney Helen Weiss (played by Jeannie Berlin, an Oscar nominee for 1972’s The Heartbreak Kid who has been working almost exclusively in film ever since).

“Jeannie Berlin is another not obvious choice,” Zaillian offers. “She’s been around a long time but hasn’t worked a lot in the last several years. She came in and did an audition, and that was it. I cast her. Immediately.”

Once production began in October 2014, Zaillian and Price (the show’s executive producers, along with Tranter, creator Moffat and the late Gandolfini) treated the project like an extended movie, as opposed to episodic TV. They weren’t even sure where the episode breaks would fall until Zaillian was in the editing room.

That’s why the episodes clock in at different lengths: the pilot at roughly one hour and 20 minutes, the finale at one hour and 36 minutes and the remainder around an hour.

“We had 450 pages of script and one long story, as opposed to what you typically think of as a series,” Zaillian says. “Ours was more like, ‘Okay, we’re making this long movie, and we’ll figure out how we divide it up later.’”

During the writing stage, Zaillian stayed in Los Angeles, while Price was in New York. “We were never in the same room at the same time, but it was a nice collaboration,” Zaillian says of the first teaming of their careers.

They brought in Richie Roberts, a real-life character depicted by Russell Crowe in the Zaillian-penned film American Gangster, as an adviser. Roberts enjoys a broad perspective, having worked as a cop, a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. Turturro also worked with Kenneth Montgomery, a Brooklyn-based lawyer, who frequently appears on local TV.

“I took on a lot of good people — a sound here, a legal gesture there,” the actor says. “It’s not like you’re creating Frankenstein, but you are borrowing from different sources.”

Others embarked on their own character deep dives. Berlin pored over similar cases and studied procedures. To capture Naz, the did-he-do-it-or-didn’t-he working-class kid, Ahmed brushed up on subjects far afield of law and order.

“I got to know everything about the Knicks and basketball,” Ahmed says. “It sets up this idea that he’s always a spectator. I mean, the first scene we see with Naz, he sat there watching the players play basketball. He’s not a player. He’s someone on the sidelines. He doesn’t want to be a spectator, but there’s that sense of resigning yourself to watching your heroes from the sidelines while being the hero of your own story.”

As for understanding the prison experience, Ahmed met with a dozen or so people who had been through Rikers. He recorded the interviews, which lasted several hours each, probing his subjects about what it’s like to try to survive in prison.

With the bulk of the scenes being one-on-one interplays taking place in small rooms, the bonds formed between actors became key. “I’m someone who always likes to be open to all kinds of ideas and suggestions,” Ahmed says.

“On my first day on the set, I went straight up to [Turturro] and said, ‘I want you to tell me whatever you think about what I’m doing. Don’t worry about messing me up. It’s okay.’ John Stone takes Naz under his wing and kind of guides him through this new experience, and to some extent that was also the on-set dynamic where, you know, [Turturro] is a more experienced actor.”

Turturro likens the initial back-and-forth with Ahmed to “two dogs sniffing each other.” He adds: “We got along really well. It was a very easy rapport. There had to be some kind of real chemistry between us for it to work. Because there’s a lot that’s unsaid between them.”

In fact, Price and Zaillian often cut exchanges to a bare minimum — sort of the anti-Aaron Sorkin approach. The lingering exhale as Naz and Freddy freebase cocaine together somehow conveys more than a monologue on what it means to be human in a cage. Similarly, Turturro points to the final scene between Naz and John Stone, in a diner, as the most satisfying for him.

“There’s something about that scene I really, really like,” he says, “because we cut a lot of the dialogue out. We revised it so many times and we finally cut it down to the bone. You see these two people who’ve had this tremendous experience together. They really don’t have that much to say to each other anymore.”

For Camp, everything he needed to know about Dennis Box could be summed up by John Stone’s take on him when he tells Naz to be wary: “Subtle beast,” he warns, which also is the apt title of episode two. “An actor couldn’t ask for a better character spec than that,” Camp says. “Steve was always around, and he would sort of remind me which way to go: subtlety, or show the beast a little bit.”

Subtlety prevailed in the scene that Camp calls his favorite: the arrest of Naz in the pilot. Naz struggles to get free and Detective Box approaches him gently, angling for a quick, neat confession. “It was very, very delicate, and I remember that,” Camp says. “I think we got it, and of course Steve’s directing it and I’m acting with Riz and Robert Elswit is shooting it, so it was kind of like, ‘How can I mess it up?’ But I think that that was an essence moment.”

It is also a scene with Ahmed that Berlin cites as the most memorable for her: the cross-examination of Naz in the final episode. They did the scene in one take, unrehearsed.

“We were forced into battle,” Berlin recalls. “I knew my job was to kill him, and he was going to die. Riz and I traveled through many intense emotions together. Steve had us where he wanted us, and the scene, as written, was silk. After it was over, there was total silence on the set. Then a huge round of applause. I think both Riz and I were still stunned at what we’d been through.”

For Turturro, the most challenging scenes involved John Stone’s eczema, complete with Crisco, Saran Wrap and chopsticks (a subplot that takes up considerable screen time and is, for some, harder to look at than the blood-soaked crime scene and victim). For Ahmed, the most draining sequences took place in the first few episodes, when the scope of the catastrophe becomes clear.

“Most of us haven’t been through that kind of experience where you see your life ended before your eyes in a slow-motion kind of car crash,” he says. “I once heard someone say that sometimes when you’re doing intense scenes, your body doesn’t know it’s not real. In a weird way, going home after those days I’d be more exhausted and tense than the days when I had to do 1,000 pushups or something else physical.”

Ultimately, Zaillian, Price, Ahmed and Camp — and later Turturro, Berlin and others — were on a long journey that in some ways mirrored Naz’s months-long descent into the abyss.

Says Zaillian: “When you’re shooting, say, a low-budget feature that shoots in 30 days, you’re almost like a prisoner, crossing off the days as you finish one because you can see the end coming. But this was like 150 days of shooting, and there was no way I could even think about it ever ending.”

And that’s to say nothing of the years it took to get to that second shot at the pilot.


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 5, 2017

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