#CHARLES SOBHRAJ DOMINIQUE RENELLEAU SERIES#
Their reaction says less about HBO’s series than a changing culture.Ĭharles Sobhraj was a killer, by his own admission Farrow’ premiered, Allen supporters came out against it. Television Commentary: What Woody Allen’s defenders are really upset aboutĮven before ‘Allen v. “And the other thing is, he’s a compulsive liar, so whatever he had to tell us wouldn’t have been true.” “He is constantly trying to monetize himself and his story, and we were adamant that we would never pay him,” Warlow adds. We were able to listen to those tapes from a more objective standpoint.”
It felt like the only use of engaging with Sobhraj directly was to see how he’d lie to you and to see how he’d try to pull the wool over you. Julie gave us access to those tapes, which meant we could hear Sobhraj’s account of that period without having to engage with him directly. “Julie and her husband, Richard, spent hours and hours and hours in prison interviewing Sobhraj and taping them. “We chose not to speak to him,” Testar says. (Neville and Clarke’s book was originally released in 1979, which means the interviews took place shortly after the events of the series.) Neville and Clarke’s interviews with Sobhraj, conducted while the killer was in prison in India, were essential to the writing of “The Serpent,” especially since the production team didn’t want to involve Sobhraj directly. The series is based on interviews with Sobhraj - just not by the producers Knippenberg provided Leclerc’s diary, and journalist Julie Clarke, who cowrote “On the Trail of the Serpent” with her late husband, Richard Neville, gave the production hours of taped interviews with Sobhraj. He worked closely with Knippenberg, who gave the team access to his extensive files on Sobhraj, as well as with Sobhraj’s former neighbor Nadine Gires his captive employee Dominique Renelleau (whose escape from Sobhraj is documented in the series) and Interpol’s Lt. He calls it a “fact-is-stranger-than-fiction-to-the-power-of-about-100 situation”: “ to do what you always do when you’re researching stories, which is do some conflations, light a fire under certain things and also - and I’ve never experienced this before - pedal back on some of the strangeness.”Ĭoproducer Paul Testar, who joined the development process in 2014, was tasked with accumulating research to support the storytelling.
“Real life is infuriating, because it doesn’t behave in the way stories do,” says writer and producer Richard Warlow, who began working on the series in 2013 alongside director Tom Shankland. His pursuit leads him to Sobhraj ( Tahar Rahim) and his accomplices, including Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) and Ajay Chowdhury (Amesh Edireweera), who have been drugging, robbing and killing tourists on the so-called Hippie Trail. Set in 1970s Bangkok, the series, which first aired on the BBC earlier this year, follows Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle) as he investigates the disappearance of a pair of Dutch backpackers.
#CHARLES SOBHRAJ DOMINIQUE RENELLEAU SERIAL#
In fact, we got in just in time as we were told when we were filming it was about to be knocked down, too.’ For Knippenberg’s villa they took over an old house in Bangkok’s northern limits, near to the ancient city of Ayutthaya, using the real-life Knippenberg’s own photographs to dress it, as they did for his embassy, recreated in a building in Samut Sakhon on the western edges.Netflix’s true crime drama “The Serpent,” premiering Friday, may seem unbelievable - but the creators actually had to temper the bizarre real-life history of con man and serial killer Charles Sobhraj. We spent a lot of time looking in the older quarters and used a local production company to hunt down locations.’įor Sobhraj’s apartment complex, Kanit House, the team needed one of the Forties blocks that used to fill the city but have now mostly been demolished: ‘All our research told us he lived in this kind of building and we found one on Sukhumvit Soi 4, off the main arterial road where all the nightlife is. ‘It’s a completely modernised city,’ says Testar, ‘so the challenge was to find the pockets that haven’t altered as much or where the modernisation could be disguised. The production’s first problem was dealing with the enormous changes Bangkok had undergone since the 1970s. Much of the series takes place in the Thai capital, where Sobhraj made his base and where Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle) was stationed at the Netherlands Embassy. Bangkok apartment BBC/Mammoth Screen BANGKOK
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