“The Deal,” the sprawling Gaumont show charting the 2015 behind-the-scene nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, won Series Mania‘s first annual Buyers Choice Award in part due to the timeliness of its geopolitical themes. Yet, Jean-Stephane Bron, the critically-acclaimed Swiss screenwriter and filmmaker of “Cleveland Against Wall Street,” started developing the six-part series more than six years ago.
Bron, who also produced the series with “Anatomy of a Fall” banner Les Films Pelleas and Gaumont and co-created it with French director Alice Winocour (“French Couture,” “Próxima”), told Variety ahead of Series Mania that he first pitched it in 2018 as part of a contest launched by Swiss broadcaster RTS (which he won).
The script, penned by Bron, Winocour, Eugène Riousse, Julien Lacombe, Stéphane Mitchell and Valentine Monteil, was finalized in the last two years, after Bron consulted a diplomat who took part in liberating the journalist who was taken hostage during the negotiations. The filmmaker says he also read the memoirs of figures like Wendy Sherman, the former U.S. deputy secretary of State who played a key role in the nuclear pact.
The idea for “The Deal” stemmed from an article in a Swiss newspaper “about a head of protocol and the title was: The one who is never in the photo,” said Bron. He said that gave him the idea to tell “the story from the point of view of the one who is never seen, who would be our main character and who would help us to be at the heart of negotiations.”
As such, “The Deal” revolves around a Swiss diplomat, Alexandra Weiss (played by Verlee Baetens), who leads rocky negotiations between Iran and the U.S. that are threatened by multiple hidden agendas. In the real world, those weeks of negotiations in Lausanne led to the enactment of a nuclear agreement with Iran (known as as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) in Vienna in 2015. But three years later, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from it. And yet, as recently as this week, reports broke of Trump’s outreach to Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to discuss a possible new nuclear deal.
Marking Bron’s second incursion into TV after his 2018 mini-series “Ondes de choc,” “The Deal” took a “huge amount of documentation time,” as well as an “understanding of the political issues, of what a negotiation is, and of who the main players were, where the conflicts lay,” said the writer-filmmaker who produced through his banner Bande à Part Films and Paris-based Les Films Pelleas, the company behind Oscar-winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” alongside Bidibul Productions and Versus Production.
Les Films Pelleas’ Philippe Martin, who started working with Bron in 2006 on the movie “Mon fràre se marie,” says “The Deal” proved challenging to finance because of its ambitious scale and high budget of €12 million ($13.1 million).
While the initial funding came from the Swiss Television (RTS), Martin said it wasn’t sufficient to cover such a substantial budget which is considered “huge” for France or Switzerland. With no streamer interested in co-producing the ambitious series, Martin and his team had to engage in extensive co-financing efforts and navigate co-production agreements across multiple countries, bringing in partners from France, Luxembourg as well as Belgium, on top of Switzerland.
A crucial turning point in the financing process was the involvement of Gaumont, the venerable French film and television studio behind “Lupin,” which joined as a co-producer and also took international distribution rights on “The Deal.” Martin noted Gaumont’s involvement at this later stage was “unusual, as they typically focus on producing their own series rather than co-producing and selling projects they didn’t initiate.” But after reading the scripts, the French banner invested €1 million ($1.1 million) in the project.
Bron also went to great lengths to depict the backdrop of the negotiations as accurately as possible. “We ended up using six different hotels in Switzerland and Luxembourg to represent one,” he recalled.
“It was very complicated to have a hotel available during the 72 days of shooting,” said Bron. “We really wanted to film in Geneva but we couldn’t have the hotel in Geneva for as many days as we wanted.” But Bron said it so happens that one of the six hotels where “The Deal” filmed was “where some of the negotiations took place.”
“So obviously I pounced on the hotel concierge to get as much information as possible about how the actual negotiation locations to find out how the spaces were divided and how the security was, among other things, to inform our set design,” he says.
While the series is inspired by real negotiations, the personal lives and internal conflicts of the main characters were fictionalized, and as such, names were changed, Bron says.
The central character of the series, Alexandra, is mostly a fictional creation even though she’s inspired by the real-life negotiator. Similarly, the backstories and personal struggles of characters like the Iranian foreign minister and the U.S. Secretary of State were invented. Beatens stars opposite a high profile cast, comprising Juliet Stevenson as the U.S. Secretary of State, Arash Marandi, who plays the Iranian foreign minister, alongside Sam Crane, Anthony Azizi and Alexander Behrang Keshtkar.
“We changed names so as not to be ambiguous on this question of fiction. The thing is that every time we came across something that could be very anecdotal or, on the contrary, very important, we tried to bring it back into the fiction and explore it, to push it to the maximum for purely dramaturgical purposes,” he says, adding that the most important aspect for him was to be faithful to the descriptions of the political dynamics at play during the negotiations.
“We knew from talking to a diplomat in Switzerland and reading the documentation that these negotiations were incredibly difficult, sometimes violent, exhausting, that the Iranians were taking one step back and one step forward, that they were very difficult; and that’s what we show in ‘The Deal.’”
Bron says he also condensed a real event revolving around the journalist who was taken hostage in Iran into the timeframe of “The Deal,” even if it actually occurred at a later time, between two rounds of negotiations.
One of the most compelling aspects of “The Deal” is the psychological depth of the main characters who all face some kind of moral dilemma or loyalty conflict throughout the series.
“What was particularly interesting about this negotiation is that there is the main conflict, which is Iran-United States, but also within each delegation, there was also a lot of tensions,” he says. “Looking at the Iranian camp, for instance, there was an opposition between reformers and conservatives that reflected the debate within Iranian society as to whether they should even go to these negotiations, whether it was right to do so, whether they could put ourselves under the tutelage of the U.S. and Europe.”
“And on American side,” he says, “there were those in favor of a negotiation in the Democratic camp, wanted by Obama, and there was also reluctance because at the time there was a war in Syria, and Syria is an ally of Iran, and some Democrats were saying: ‘Do we really want to negotiate with people who are allies of a bloodthirsty dictator?’”
For a series about diplomacy, “The Deal” also shows a large amount of trash talks between the protagonists, which Bron says is 100% authentic.
“This kind of diplomacy is not a classic political job, because at a certain point, classic political work is exposed to the public and is done in full view of a parliament, the media, etc. Whereas during such a negotiation, many diplomats have told us that once the doors are closed, words are not always very diplomatic,” he says.
Bron argues the violence in language was also tied to a “sense of emergency” because U.S. President Barak “Obama was eager to reach an agreement with Iran at all costs during his term in office to end with a diplomatic victory.” He also believed, Bron said, that such an agreement would bring Iran closer to the Western world and keep it at a distance to Russia and China.
Ultimately, Bron feels the series conveys geopolitical themes in a way that’s “not black-and-white” but rather shows that “negotiation like this one is actually in a somewhat gray area. It’s a bit of a special place where, in fact, everyone takes a step towards the other, tries to understand the other, how far they can go politically.”
Bron and Winocour, as well as the series’ cast, Stevenson, Fenella Woolgar and Marandi, composer Amine Bouhafa and Julien Guilhem-Lacombe are attending the world premiere of “The Deal” at Series Mania on March 26.
