In 2018, when began writing a first draft of — his TV adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel — one item in his office made its way into his screenplay: the heavy crystal ashtray that (spoiler alert) kills Freddie Miles in the fifth episode. But Zaillian’s foray into the story of con man Tom Ripley started long before 2018. Ten years ago, a unique proposal popped up on his radar — a TV series.
“If it had been proposed as another movie, I would’ve said no,” he tells , “but as an eight-hour series, I thought, ‘This could be interesting.’ ” For starters, he wanted the limited series — about a grifter, Tom Ripley, who covets, and then kills for, the lifestyle of his wealthy former classmate Dickie Greenleaf — to be in black and white. “When I first read the book, it’s how I felt it should look.
Later, it was important to the story that it not be some kind of Technicolor Italy, that the story was more atmospheric than that, in a darker, more sinister way.” was promptly cast as Tom Ripley, says Zaillian. “I’d tried to cast him in a part in [the 2016 Emmy-winning limited series] , but I didn’t know what he looked like because I’d only heard him in a movie called : He played a character whose voice was on the telephone, and he created a rather full-rounded character with just his voice.
He was my first choice.” Scott received the entire series of scripts, a “highly unusual thing,” from the get-go. “I knew it was going to be very.
