Truelove

for Channel 4, and Clerkenwell Films

Production Design

Jonathan Paul Green was Production Designer on Truelove, the Channel 4 drama starring Lindsay Duncan and Clarke Peters.

The series follows a group of old friends reunited at a funeral, where a drunken promise to help one another avoid a prolonged and painful death develops into something far more serious. At its centre are Phil, a retired senior police officer played by Lindsay Duncan, and Ken, an SAS veteran played by Clarke Peters, whose renewed friendship takes them — and the rest of the group — down an increasingly dangerous path.

For the production design, I wanted to create a world that felt completely authentic and recognisable, while giving each of the principal characters a strong and individual visual identity. Their homes became an important part of the storytelling, revealing character, history and circumstance before anything was necessarily said.

This was particularly important in Tom’s Cottage, Ken’s flat, David and Marion’s house, and the interior of Phil’s house. Each had a distinct design language, with considerable thought given to architecture, colour, furniture, artwork, objects and set decoration. Rather than simply dressing attractive interiors, we wanted every choice to feel as though it belonged specifically to the people who lived there — accumulated over years and reflecting their personalities, relationships and different ways of life.

The level of set decoration was especially important. These are characters with long histories, so their homes needed to carry that history in the details: possessions, furniture and objects suggesting lives already lived beyond what we see on screen. Although each environment had a strong design identity, the intention was always that it should feel discovered rather than designed.

Another challenge came with a hotel-room sequence involving a bullet hit and blood effects across the walls. This clearly wasn’t something we could achieve practically in a real hotel room, so rather than compromise the sequence, I designed and built the hotel bedroom as a set within one of our locations. This gave us complete control over the environment and allowed the physical and special effects to be incorporated into the walls from the outset, while still creating the convincing appearance of a real hotel interior.

One of the more unusual practical challenges involved a sailing boat that needed to work for real at sea — and then subsequently sink on screen. We had to find and buy a suitable boat that could genuinely sail for the open-water sequences, while also considering how we would ultimately achieve the sinking safely and controllably.

For the sinking sequence, we used an outdoor seawater lido with an uninterrupted view towards the horizon. This gave us the visual impression of being out at sea while providing the controlled environment needed to sink the boat. The challenge was to bring together the real boat, the lido and the horizon so that everything appeared to be part of one continuous seascape.

Throughout the series, the visual world needed to accommodate significant shifts in tone — moving between warmth, humour and friendship and the much darker consequences of the pact the characters have made. The strong individuality of the homes helped ground those changes in something recognisable and human.

That grounding in reality was central to my approach to Truelove. Whether creating the intensely personal detail of the characters’ homes, building a hotel room specifically around the demands of an effects sequence, or finding a practical way to sink a sailing boat while apparently out at sea, the production design was always about finding creative solutions that remained completely believable on screen.

Explore more of Jonathan Paul Green's work as a UK Production Designer across film, HETV and television.