As the Academy Award winning scribe and director of Slumdog Millionaire, respectively, Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle are obviously more accustomed to working in movies than television.
But over the last two decades the influx of supreme television shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad” and “Game Of Thrones” has led some to declare that television is now the more dominant medium.
So it was little surprise that Beaufoy and Boyle decided to move from the big to the small screen with “Trust,” which revolves around the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. Clearly the duo had a great time working on the 10-episode run of “Trust,” too, because the pair recently opened up to me about their three-season plan for the show at its New York premiere.
At first Beaufoy explained to me, “The more I looked at it the more it became a story about generations of money and what that money was doing and why someone is obsessed with money. What is that all about? Because when you get your first million or your first hundred million what keeps you going? What’s the need?”
Beaufoy then admitted that even though he found “the kidnapping fascinating” he soon realized that it was just one part of the Getty family story. “What became apparent was that was the wheel. And what revolved around it was 3 generations of the Getty family and this nexus of money.”
“The kidnapping became the perfect example of what money can and can’t do. And what it did was it threw them all. It paralyzed them in terms of empathy. They all locked themselves up. Because they said, ‘We’re not going to pay that’.”
“The one person in this story who resolutely and constantly tried to get her son released was Gail Getty, John Paul Getty III’s mother, who had no money at all. She was working in a dress shop. She was divorced and had great integrity to try and do something.”
Later I spoke to Danny Boyle regarding the future for the show, and he added, “We hope it will inspire two more seasons further down the line. One will explore how John Paul Getty got his money in the 1930s. It all depends on the response, though.”
The first season of “Trust” premieres Sunday March 25 at 10pm on FX.
