Actor Riz Ahmed has spoken of his disgust at the US criminal justice system after research for his newest role, as the lead in HBO mini-series The Night Of, brought him face-to-face with those imprisoned in New York jail complex Rikers Island.
British-born Ahmed, best known for roles in Chris Morris’s dark satire Four Lions and in Nightcrawler, described how he had visited the prison where those who can’t make bail are kept until their trial to get inside the head of his character – but said it left him haunted.
The Night Of tells the fictional story of Nazir Khan, played by Ahmed, who lives in New York and borrows his father’s taxi for the night. He later finds himself the prime suspect in a vicious stabbing of a woman, and over eight episodes the show follows his arrest, detention and trial, and the close relationship with his lawyer, played by John Turturro. The show is loosely based on the 2009 BBC drama Criminal Justice, which starred Ben Whishaw and Maxine Peake.
Ahmed said his experience at Rikers, the place his character is detained in the show, has proved very difficult to forget, citing the length of time people were detained while awaiting trial and the “predatory atmosphere” as examples of the flawed system.
He said: “People are in for a year for quite small, petty offences ... like the story of Kalief Browder, which came out when we were filming. He was a young man accused of stealing somebody’s backpack. He was detained, awaiting trial, for three years just because of the backlog of cases. He came with no previous, came out and killed himself from the PTSD of that ... it’s crazy.”
The Night Of’s co-creator, Oscar-winning Steve Zaillian – whose screenwriting credits include Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York and American Gangster – said he and co-creator Richard Price, former scribe of The Wire, had drawn directly from what they had witnessed first-hand at Rikers and written it into the show’s script.
Rikers, which grapples with around 100,000 admissions a year, has become notorious for incidents of systemic abuse and neglect of its inmates, particularly the use of solitary confinement and the mistreatment of the mentally ill.
“There are 10,000 male and female detainees each day,” said Zaillian. “You come away from that with this feeling of, ‘Please God, I don’t ever want to get arrested and not make bail and have to go there.’ It’s scary. A lot of the things Richard and I were writing about came from talking to people who had been there.”
The show’s commitment to an authentic representation of the US criminal justice system is partly the reason it took over seven years for it to finally be completed. The idea to do a US version of Criminal Justice was first brought to HBO by Jane Tranter, former head of BBC commissioning and now executive editor on the show. She admitted the five hours the BBC had given the drama had been “mean” and felt “there was more that could be said in the US”.
Zaillian and Price agreed to take on the project, but took an unorthodox approach to both writing and filming.
“Richard and I had never really done any TV, so we approached it as a movie,” he said. “Things like episodes weren’t determined until the whole thing was written. We had 500 pages of script and now we had to start trying to parse it up and make it into episodes. In our minds it was one long movie, basically.”
The show was also beset with difficulties. The role of long-suffering attorney John Stone was initially supposed to be played by James Gandolfini, who was said to describe the show as his passion project. They filmed the pilot with Gandolfini in 2012, but the show’s future was put in jeopardy after his sudden death in 2013. Robert De Niro was signed on as his replacement, but withdrew after a scheduling conflict, and finally the part was taken by Turturro.
As well as the cast visiting Rikers Island, in Zillian’s quest for the show to be as evocative as possible, part of The Night Of was also shot in Queens Detention Facility, a functioning prison in New York.
Ahmed described it as a “crazy” experience. “We’d be finishing a take and you’d take a wrong turn and someone from location would be like, ‘You don’t want to go down there,’” he said. “Sometimes, we had to stop a shoot so prisoners could file through hallways, dressed in really bright orange and black striped things so you can spot them.”
Tranter said that though it had taken longer than she ever expected to get the show on to the screen, The Night Of had developed into a very unique series.
“I think this is just different from other television pieces,” she said. “The results really show that meticulous attention to detail that you are able to provide if you have that space and that approach ... I’ve yet to see that happen in the UK.”
The Night Of premieres on HBO in the US on 10 July and in the UK on Sky Atlantic on 1 September.
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