Ripley writer-director on his Netflix series starring Andrew Scott, based on Patricia Highsmith’s serial killer books

Andrew Scott plays Ripley, a scrappy cheque fraudster in grimy New York who is hired to locate a rich dilettante in Italy, but kills him and then impersonates him, leading to more murders and scams.

“Like with any sort of iconic literary character like that, people have very strong opinions – he’s a psychopath, he’s a serial killer,” says Scott.

“Part of the challenge was how do you make an audience feel like what it’s like to be Tom Ripley, rather than what is usually done, which is to want to feel like to be a victim of Tom Ripley.”

The eight-hour canvas allows viewers time to watch him figure out how to get out of jams in real time, like a murder he commits in his flat in the fifth episode.

He needs to find the victim’s car, clean up the crime scene, move the body and make it all seem like an alcohol-induced accident.

“I think because we sort of see every little step of how he figures things out and does things that we take part in them,” says Zaillian.

“He often doesn’t know what he should do next, and neither do we. And so we become part of the process in that way.”

Scott, known for his stage work, including the Emmy-winning Fleabag and recent film All of Us Strangers, says it may take some viewers raised on TikTok a little while to adjust to a more sedate, deliberate storytelling pace – one in which characters climb staircases, look at waves and make small talk.

There is time to watch where an ashtray is bought before it’s later used to bludgeon someone to death.

“You have to teach the audience how to watch it to a certain degree,” he says. “There are certain times the pacing is really quite fast and there are certain times where you think this would take time and you have to stay with the agony and the thrill and the tension when things aren’t going right. That’s the way life is.”

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Zaillian, an Oscar winner for his screenplay of Schindler’s List, refused a suggestion to update Highsmith’s book series and is careful to keep everything very early 1960s, even filming it all in black and white, like Schindler’s List.

“It puts us in that time period effortlessly and immediately. But more than that, I did not want what I would call a colour postcard sort of Italy for this story, with sunny blue skies and lots of colourful outfits.

“That was not something I saw in my mind when I read the book and not something that I wanted to do in the show,” he says.

If other TV shows are dialogue-driven, Ripley is more interested in the spaces between. It’s all about suspicious looks, wary interactions and putting on a brave face with police inspectors and hotel clerks.

“I was so excited by getting to communicate so much with micro-movements in the face and a look – that thing where you can read someone’s thoughts through their eyes,” says Dakota Fanning, who plays the suspicious girlfriend of the rich dilettante Dickie Greenleaf.

Zaillian is faithful to Highsmith’s novels, but adds some of himself into the series, like making Ripley a fan of Italian painter Caravaggio, who worked with intense and unsettling realism and was also a killer.

“I found as I was writing it there’s actually a connection between him and Caravaggio. They were both these sort of rascals and both ended up killing somebody.

“So it sort of grew from a personal moment that I had into a motif and then kind of into an aspect of his character,” he says.

Like Caravaggio’s paintings, the series is grounded in realism, from the rusty shower heads and the gritty, screeching subways of New York to the crumbling walls and pigeon-poop-streaked statues in Italy. Cleaning up blood takes what seems like hours.

Zaillian thought of Scott for the role very early in the casting process, aware of his work in Fleabag and as Moriarty on the BBC series Sherlock. He was smitten.

“I just found him really sort of watchable,” Zaillian says. “I knew that since we spend so much time with somebody alone – there’s a lot of scenes where it’s just us and him – that he has to be watchable.

“We have to be able to see him think and express himself in a way that lets us know what he’s thinking. And I found that Andrew was able to do that.”

Johnny Flynn, who plays the golden boy Greenleaf, says filming in Italy took him to some of the most beautiful places on the planet, that got darker as the summer tourists left and the sun got lower, perfect for a noirish vibe.

He and the cast were also reminded that many small Italian towns built on cliffs have many, many steps.

“We were just out of breath all the time,” he says, laughing.

Which is what can be said for lots of people who meet Ripley.