Birdhouse And The downfall Director Susanne Bier sees the Winbury family as the foundation for Netflix The perfect couple Adaptation is their specialty.

Based on the novel by Elin Hilderbrand and adapted for the screen by Jenna Lamia, the six-part series sees a luxurious wedding weekend spiral out of control when a body is found on the shores of the island of Nantucket. Nicole Kidman plays the mother of the groom Greer Garrison-Winbury and Liev Schreiber plays her husband Tag. Rounding out the cast are Eve Hewson as the bride Amelia Sacks, Billy Howel as the groom Benji Winbury, Meghann Fahy as Amelia’s maid of honour, Jack Reynor as Benji’s older brother Thomas and Dakota Fanning as Thomas’ wife Abby, to name a few. There are many players in the guessing game and each one has a secret that gives them a motive.

“You have to have a great cast. You have to have a super-talented, alluring cast where every character is incredibly different, so that’s kind of the first thing. For me as a director, casting is the most important thing I do: figuring out how this is going to work,” Bier told Deadline. “In this particular case, it was like this amazing summer camp on Cape Cod where everyone in the cast was so creative. They were improvising. They really embraced each character as themselves. It was infectious. Liev and Nicole were improvising, but the rest of the cast was improvising and doing crazy things. It became this magical group dynamic.”

The director of all six episodes, who also served as executive producer of the series, discussed the family dynamics, the outsider perspective and other details of the show in more detail in the following interview.

DEADLINE: Were the scenes where Liev sings improvised or was it planned?

Stretcher: That was his idea. He wanted to do something. The first time we did it with him, it was pretty improvised, but you can’t just use a song in a TV show. So he started singing and I said, “Okay, can someone please check the rights to this song? Because otherwise you’ll have to improvise another song.” And then I think we actually did a few, just to be sure.

DEADLINE: This series features some actors who have already appeared in series such as The White Lotus, Big Little Lies And Nine perfect strangers. What makes it different from these shows?

Stretcher: Look, we’re talking about great shows here. It’s not like you say, “Hey, let’s do something totally different.” I don’t have that feeling, but what was important to me was that this show had to be its own. It had to have its own language. It had to have its own way of telling the story. It had to be a world of its own. And Nantucket is very different from the places where these shows take place.

Basically, I think this is more of a crime thriller and you have to guess who did it. There’s a police investigation going on all the time. There’s a strong family. It’s about a family. There’s a lot of love between the characters and even though they’re awful at times and weird and presumptuous and annoying at times, there’s still an underlying compassion that I think makes the film really special.

DEADLINE: For outsiders like Abby or Amelia joining the family, how did you balance the familiarity and the excitement of the newcomer?

Stretcher: Amelia, played by Eve Hewson, is in some ways the person who introduces us to the show. She’s also the only one who isn’t a really messed up person in human terms. She’s confused. She’s young and probably gets married for the wrong reasons, like her mother is very ill. Subliminally she knows her mother is dying and when her mother dies she wants to make sure her mother knows she’s going to be happy and that everyone is taken care of. She wants to satisfy things, which doesn’t necessarily mean she should really get married. That’s very nice and very sweet in a way, but probably for the wrong reasons. She’s the only character that we as an audience can relate to. I think the rest of them are flawed in a lot of ways and as the show goes on we actually see how flawed they are and how much fun it is to be with them on this journey where they’re super flawed.

DEADLINE: Another person who delves into this dynamic is Detective Nikki Henry, whose character was a man in the book. What were the conversations like with Donna Lynne Champlin and what contribution did she make to the show?

Stretcher: Donna Lynne is a great actress. She has comedic timing that is just brilliant. The weird thing is that anyone you put next to Nicole (Kidman) or Liev (Schreiber) feels slightly intimidated because they’re both so strong. Donna Lynne completely holds her down and you get the sense that Greer and Tag feel threatened by her. They act like they’re cool, but she actually embodies something they feel is a threat. She also embodies the whole “I don’t care about your entitlement. I don’t care about your privilege. Whoever did this will be brought to justice. I’m going to find that murderer. And I don’t have the slightest respect for all your money. I’m just going to do my job.” She does it not in a loud way, but in a very funny and confident way.

DEADLINE: How did you approach shaping the story with cuts back and forth across the six episodes?

Stretcher: “You wonder what was challenging about it. Because it was. It’s a huge challenge. It’s always a huge challenge cutting back and forth in time because quite often I watch shows where I’d rather be in one time period than another, or we want to be with a certain character rather than other certain characters. You have to avoid that trap. You have to avoid the audience not enjoying being in a different time or place or group of characters and that’s why careful editing is required and the script has always cut back and forth in time but the way it’s done in its current form is quite different from the way it was done in the script. I don’t think you can really predict it before you shoot because once you’ve done the scenes and the actors are embodying all those moments, that balance changes and then you have to invent a different structure in the editing, which I think has to happen.

DEADLINE: My last question was about the dance sequence at the beginning. I know there is dancing in the intro for the first five episodes and then we see you at the end of the finale. What was that like?

Stretcher: I forced these actors to do it because all the actors except Liev wanted to do it, and he’s a great dancer, but everyone else was like, “No, we’re not doing it. We’re not doing it. We’re not doing it.” They even had a WhatsApp group so they couldn’t do that dance, and I felt like they needed to have the satisfaction of watching the director try to do the dance so we could see how great they were and how bad the director was. That’s why I did that.

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