Neil Cross has had a writing life of spies, spooks, sleuths, and psychopaths. The English novelist-turned-screenwriter’s best-known show remains Luther, the 2010s psychological thriller detective series he created and which made a star of Idris Elba. Its success also ensured Cross could pick and choose his projects and stop being a gigging television writer – and that he could do that while continuing to live, not in London or Los Angeles, but on the mean streets of Khandallah, Wellington.
After an earlier home in nearby Crofton Downs, the affluent, leafy suburb above the central city is where he and Kiwi wife, Nadya Kooznetzoff, have raised their two sons. He tells the Listener he’s spent a fair amount of time on the sidelines of his kids’ football games with other Wellington dads for whom working-at-home possibly involved less time listening to troubled imaginary characters in their heads.
“The few people that I know who know what I do don’t care what I do, which is extraordinarily healthy,” Cross says of life here. Kooznetzoff, who Cross met in London when both were involved in the UK book industry, is a script producer at Wellington’s Libertine Pictures, the production company in which Cross is creative director and part-owner. It specialises in decidedly un-Cross-like G-rated shows like Under the Vines, Mystic, and Secret at Red Rocks. His new series The Iris Affair was made for Sky Atlantic in the UK, which of late has been pumping out Englishman-abroad ballistic thrillers like The Jackal and Atomic.
Iris is another, though its lead is Irish and a woman and played by Niamh Algar. She’s a genius code-cracker and puzzle solver, enjoying life in Sardinia. She is lured to Florence by shady venture capitalist Cameron Beck (Tom Hollander) to help him with an IT problem.
He has an existential quantum-computer nicknamed “Charlie Big Potatoes” (it may have something to do with the size of his chips). But Beck needs someone to work out its restart sequence which its inventor, who seemingly wants to destroy the machine after he’s seen what it can do, has hidden in a fiendish device called “a book”.
That might sound like a very tech-nerd set-up. But The Iris Affair does like its Italian piazzas and its summery Sardinian scenery. As well as writing it, Cross acted as showrunner meaning he got to spend a chunk of 2024’s Wellington winter swanning about Italy. A late evening zoom call, however, finds him in London on publicity duties for the show.
You’ve referenced Hitchcock in the publicity notes about the kind of show you wanted to make. So, we should assume the code book is the show’s MacGuffin?
Oh, it’s absolutely the MacGuffin. There’s no getting around it. When I first talked to Sky about the show, my one sentence description was, it’s a show with a MacGuffin. Their first question was:” What’s a MacGuffin? To which my answer was “by definition, it doesn’t matter. We’ll work it out.”
At the same time, you’ve got a supercomputer in there – is this your reaction to the era of AI?
It’s my kind of general reaction to the alarming transformative nature of rapid technological change. AI, in and of itself, doesn’t really interest me, because I don’t think there’s any point in telling a story about AI, because AI is developing so rapidly and in such surprising directions that the world will have changed by the time you broadcast that story. What interests me is how our relationship with technology changes our relationship with each other and the world.
Talking of which there’s a funny line where character quips they should be a subscriber to [popular tech monthly] Wired but they’ve just found it too exhausting as a layperson to keep up.
Yeah, and I still am [a subscriber]. It’s only because technology has moved on so much that I no longer know how to cancel a subscription. That’s a different complaint. I don’t have a background in engineering or science, and I don’ see myself as being a kind of science populariser. I don’t understand the mechanics of the machines. My youngest son, who’s in Christchurch right now studying mechatronics, can quote me chapter and verse about that. But I’m just as interested in, say, the invention of the printing press, which, seen on a long enough timescale, is an unalloyed good. But it created an immense amount of disruption, violence, misery, and bloodshed for 200 years. I think we’re perilously close to a not dissimilar situation now.
It’s amusing that the code to getting this thing started again is in a book.
Quite. That is me being cheeky, because books are the best technology that there has ever been. Books by their polyphonic nature allowed any individual human being to commune with the ideas or the experience of another human being in another time, another place, another culture, on the other side of a war. It was the most extraordinary engine for creating fellow feeling among human beings and the book was the apex of that. But extraordinarily enough, the more access we have to each other, the more we’re being separated from one another.
As well as Hitchcock, you’ve referenced a time when you couldn’t find anything on tv you wanted to watch, so you wrote this. If in this world of supposed infinite tv choice, we still can’t find something we want to watch ... as someone who makes tv, why is that?
I don’t know. I’m not going to insult any other TV shows, but there has been a strange kind of narrative flattening in television. There are fewer odd things, strange corners, fewer authorial voices. The more expensive shows have got, the broader an audience they have to have. I was talking to my wife the other day about Edge of Darkness, which is probably the greatest thriller that’s ever been on telly. But it’s so extraordinarily singular. It wouldn’t have a hope in hell of being on TV now.
This show is mostly somewhere Italian or Mediterranean, and in the Hitchcock tradition, everyone has dressed for the occasion. Is this Neil Cross moving out of the darkness?
I would say it’s Neil Cross with sore joints moving out of the darkness, and out of the bad weather. I’m still interested in those very, very dark, very, very urban stories. But I enjoy kind of broad swathe of stuff. Hitchcock was able to articulate a level of psychological darkness, which was permissible because it was set against such an elegant and beautiful backdrop. Strangely, the more glamorous those Hitchcocks were, the darker some of the undercurrents are, and the more twisted some of the psychologies in those films … the sexual psychology of Rear Window could not possibly have been allowed were it not so impossibly glamorous.
Your lead character is a woman who’s a puzzle solver and a code breaking genius. That’s not usually a character who’s female. Was she always?
Yeah. I write telly or films like I used to write novels. The characters come to me first and it’s kind of one of the weird things. You don’t get many female women anti-heroes and I thought it really good to have a an anti-hero who’s a woman who comes with all of the complications and faults and contradictions of being an anti-hero.
So you are also the the showrunner on this as you have been on a few other things. What are you like to work for?
Oh my god. I have never been asked that question. I am really, genuinely trying to say this without sounding kind of glib or saccharine ... what I love about being on set is that you are in a place with hundreds of people, all of whom do jobs that you don’t really understand, far better than you ever could. So I really enjoy the collaborative nature of that on a day to day basis. I’m all right. I’m not a tyrant. I don’t throw tantrums and I like the environment to be a happy environment. I like to discuss problems like grown-ups. I’m sounding guarded because I’m very wary that people who work in my industry – by enthusing about the industry can come across in that kind of horrible of Gwyneth Paltrow-esque way. But really I love working with a good crew. It’s pretty satisfying the stuff they can do at the speed they do it, and with levels of expertise you can’t really guess at. I find that immensely satisfying.
You had a sci-fi adjacent series with your apocalyptic series Hard Sun. Was there anything from that, that relates to this?
No, not really. Hard Sun is really my great lost child. It was unfavourably scheduled by a slightly timid BBC, and that’s what I learned from it –don’t get your show scheduled by a timid BBC. But I am able to, I guess, compartmentalise. So one project doesn’t bleed over into another in any way. And everything I learned from Hard Sun was positive,and we had a lot of fun making it. I’m still really proud of it. But I’m bit sad about it. But it never actually occurred to me, until you asked the question that there was a sci-fi connection.
So, living in Wellington. Has it influenced anything?
It’s difficult to say, because I’m a data set of one. What it’s allowed me to do is separate my workplace from my life, which I think is very healthy when you work in a faintly absurd industry like mine. I think New Zealand’s the best place in the world to live. It’s not without its problems but even its problems right now pale into insignificance and are manageable, addressable problems. Whereas the rest of the world seems to be spiralling somewhat.
Random question: Are you a member of book club in Khandallah?
I am not. But one of my good friends in Khandallah is. It’s a men’s book club, which is quite cool.
You haven’t written one for a while.
Well, that industry has changed beyond my ken, unfortunately. I still read a great deal. It’s still my favourite thing to do. At least twice a week, I think about writing a book. But my kind of narrative voice hasn’t been very welcome on the page over the last 15 years. I write a lot about male violence and male psychology. In the publishing industry, it’s a slightly different environment. But publishing is very dynamic, and it’s always changing, and it’s always responding to market forces. Not always well, but it’s always responding.
The Iris Affair, is screening from Ocotber 15 on TVNZ+
