Inside No.9 - Q&A with Line Producer, Roopesh Parekh

The interview with Roopesh Parekh has been removed from thecallsheet.co.uk.

The full updated version is available in the book, ‘Breaking into UK Film and TV Drama’, available on Amazon.

The book contains 11 other interviews with talented crew members of John Higgins’ calibre. It also contains 50 exclusive pearls of wisdom from the likes of the Oscars, BAFTA, Lord David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire) and many other talented members of crew, as well as a comprehensive guide to starting your career in UK Film and TV Drama.

There is a sample of the interview below, the full interview is available in ‘Breaking into UK Film and TV Drama

 

Inside No. 9

Roopesh Parekh is the Line Producer on Inside No. 9 and a member of thecallsheet.co.uk. We asked him about how the hit series was made...

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What is Inside No. 9 and what makes it different?

Inside No. 9 is a series of stories from Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. Each story is a different comedic tale, with a very dark tone. The only connecting factor is that all the action takes place behind door number 9. We had an incredible cast, crew and facilities on this job that needed to rise to the challenge of doing six different stories with lots of characters and sets.

How did the production process happen?

I was first offered Inside No. 9 in October 2012. I had just come off the back of serving as Production Executive on Red Dwarf X and was delighted to be working with Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. I’ve always been a fan of The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville and it was a really good project to move onto after Red Dwarf.

We shot the series in two blocks. One at the end of 2012 and the other in the summer 2013. In the gap between blocks, I went off to Swansea to work on the big US drama, Da Vinci’s Demons. When I originally came aboard on Inside No. 9, we had 5 out of the 6 scripts, with the silent comedy “A Quiet Night In” being a surprise package. As you would expect, the scripts were excellent.

Although Inside No. 9 is a mixture of drama, horror, comedy & suspense, it was commissioned out of BBC comedy so the budgets were a little tighter than if it were a BBC Drama.

 

 

The rest of this interview is available in the book, Breaking Into UK Film and TV Drama, available on Amazon