‘Ifeltthediversity of Scotland had notbeenseen enoughonscreen’
Producer Beth Willis’s love for our scenery
Perched on the craggy Ayrshire cliffs, Culzean Castle represented exactly what Beth Willis was looking for while scouting for filming locations for a major new television series.
One of the country’s leading TV producers, she had seen her dream project – an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s unfinished 1938 novel, The Buccaneers – finally green-lit, and wanted the series to feel and look different from period dramas that have come before.
“I did a scouting recce in Scotland and when I saw the castle hanging off the edge of the cliff, I thought it represented what we wanted to do with the show,” Beth explained.
“It’s not just about having a beautiful, symmetrical and neatly-lawned country house that we’re familiar with from period adaptations.
“We’ve all seen those houses in Bath, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire and, while they’re stunning, they’re also a little familiar. We wanted not to feel familiar; we wanted to feel extraordinary.
“The scenery in Scotland is so diverse and incredible, and I didn’t feel this incredible resource had been seen enough on screen. We used Culzean Castle for the rocky cliffs of Cornwall, we used Drumlanrig Castle and the east coast beaches, we used Edinburgh for London, and we used Glasgow for New York. I vividly remembered Glasgow being used as New York for The House Of Mirth, another of Edith Wharton’s novel adaptations, about 20 years ago.
“In one incredible country, we got to look like we had gone to all sorts of different places and that felt very exciting to me. Right from the beginning, we wanted this to be a show about locations. We wanted to create a world where we wanted to be, as well as the girls who feature in the story.”
Those girls are five wealthy and ambitious young American women of the 1870s who are sent to Britain by their families to participate in the London Season – when members of the social elite hold balls and dinner parties. The Buccaneers are the daughters of America’s new rich who are looking for status, while the English aristocrats have low funds but are high in class, making it a perfect match – or is it?
The final novel written by Edith Wharton, who was the first female to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Age Of Innocence in 1920, was loosely inspired by real-life buccaneers. Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough, Jennie Jerome married the Duke’s uncle, Lord Randolph Churchill, and was the mother of Winston Churchill, and Maria Consuelo Clement married the Duke of Manchester.
“I’ve been carrying a copy of the book around in my bag for at least a decade,” revealed Beth, who was previously head of drama at Channel 4 before joining The Forge Entertainment, producers of The Buccaneers. “I think you sometimes have a glint of an idea in your eye and have to wait for the timing to be right.
“There was a freshness to Wharton’s writing, particularly in young people, that felt truthful and exciting to me; it didn’t feel like a traditional period Sunday night drama. There’s a sense of fun and cleverness to these girls which you often don’t see in period dramas and although they are excited by the idea of romance and what will happen in their lives, they are articulate and clever and observant, and it isn’t the only thing that drives them.
“I had been looking to find something to work on with screenwriter Katherine Jakeways. It felt like Katherine’s writing and the culture clash between America and Britain in the book would be a delicious combination and I think she’s realised that beautifully.”
Filming for the AppleTV+ series went on for six months in Scotland and the cast features Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks.
It wasn’t just Scotland as a filming location that appealed to Beth, but also as a home.
She moved to Skye from London with her family three years ago, after visiting the island in 2019 for a mentorship scheme benefiting young screenwriters.
“It was an inspiring trip and somehow or other it was the start of a journey that led me here,” she smiled.
“My kids are now fluent in Gaelic and attend a Gaelic school, and I’m very proud to live on Skye.
“I’m hoping to develop as many things as possible with Scottish talent, but The Buccaneers has taken up a huge amount of time over the last couple of years. It was wonderful to film for six months in Scotland and to get to know it better and discover different parts of the country.”