A WORKING MOM'S NIGHTMARE film based on THE LIE OF YOU

On Lifetime Movies in the USA

FILM TRAILER HERE

I am a writer who loves cinema almost as much as I love books.

I studied film at the Slade School of Fine Art and worked in film and TV for twenty years. This included two stints at the British Film Institute where I co-organised a complete retrospective of the films of Doris Day (really). I also did a year as Chief Executive of BAFTA.

In 2014 my first novel THE LIE OF YOU was published by Head of Zeus and it was the highlight of my career. It tells the story of two women locked in an obsessive and dangerous struggle. It is told from both women’s point of view in alternate chapters. When I was asked which writer had inspired me the most I always answered ‘actually it was a film director, it was Alfred Hitchcock the master of suspense’.

It is every writer’s dream that his or her book will have a new and different life on the screen. You can therefore imagine my feelings when I heard my novel was being made into a film starring Tuppence Middleton, Lydia Wilson, Rupert Graves and Luke Roberts.

I knew the film would be different from my novel. In a novel you have 90,000 words to tell your story. A film has ninety minutes. A novel can go right inside a character’s head and get to their innermost thoughts. A film has to externalise motivation through actions, gestures, framing, lighting and music.

THE LIE OF YOU E-BOOK HERE

I was invited onto the film set and met Tuppence Middleton and Lydia Wilson. Tuppence was playing the stalker Hannah (Heja in my novel). Lydia played Kathy who returns to work after maternity leave and cannot understand why her professional and personal life is falling apart. She puts it down to her post-baby lack of focus, whereas her colleague is actively sabotaging her. The film stays with this plot premise but the dramatic elements are heightened and the milieu the women live and work in is more glossy.

The film was shot and edited and I saw a near final edit. The cast were terrific and I was impressed with how genuinely scary the film was. The aspect I liked best was the use of the many reflective surfaces in Kathy’s house - sensor lights coming on suddenly; the use of reflections of figures in windows; seeing Kathy from the stalker's point of view. This all added to the theme of malignant voyeurism and created tension throughout.

          The film was sold to Lifetime Movies, part of Lifetime TV, an American pay channel with 94 million subscribers in the US. It features programming geared towards women. Lifetime Movies re-named the film A WORKING MOM’S NIGHTMARE and it premiered in the US in October 2019.

The film will come to the UK in due course. In the meantime, my friends in America have been watching it and sending me bulletins. It has been a happy and exciting time for a writer who is also a film lover.

Lydia Wilson, Jane Lythell, Tuppence Middleton on the film set