Set in Nantucket, “The Perfect Couple” portrays a rarefied, 1% version of America in which people have staff and use “summer” as a verb. Which is precisely why director Susanne Bier turned down the offer to direct Netflix’s adapt tion of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel when producer Gail Berman first approached her.
“It’s not my world,” says Bier, the Danish director whose films “After the Wedding” and “In a Better World” were nominated for Oscars, and who won a directing Emmy for the 2016 Tom Hiddleston spy thriller “The Night Manager.”
Berman and screenwriter Jenna Lamia persuaded Bier to change her mind. With the show set to start shooting in a few months and no cast attached, the director wasted no time reaching out to Nicole Kidman. They’d worked together on the HBO limited series “The Undoing,” and now she offered her the role of moneyed matriarch Greer Garrison Winbury. “She’s a very busy lady, Nicole. But we had a lot of fun doing ‘The Undoing,’” Bier recalls.
Bier and I meet on a sunny summer morning in central London. She’s petite and stylish in an understated way (the viral phrase of the moment “very demure, very mindful” definitely applies), but her Scandi cool belies a single-minded disposition that thrives on challenge.
Knowing she would have a short window to bring “The Perfect Couple” to life — to cast the show, prep the crew and familiarize herself with Hilderbrand’s beachy New England milieu —ultimately made the project irresistible. “I’m very attracted to things where you go, OK, this is virtually impossible,” Bier says.
She’d similarly passed on the chance to direct Season 2 of “The Night Manager,” currently in production. Bier points out she’s never directed a second season of any show. “I’m only really good at doing anything if I’m not quite sure how to do it,” she says.
The other thing Bier looks for in a project is fun. In fact, the word is peppered throughout our conversation: Lamia’s pilot was “really fun, really witty,” while Hilderbrand was a “very generous, fun, inspiring presence.” In Bier’s first conversation with Kidman, she told her the show “needs to be fun …. fun was my main thing.” It’s also why she insisted that the cast participate in an ensemble dance sequence for the opening credits (which is guaranteed to light up social media). Because, yes, “I wanted to see all the characters having fun.”
Bier even sees the light side of “Bird Box,” her 2018 horror film for Netflix, which stars Sandra Bullock as a blindfolded woman shepherding her children through a post-apocalyptic world where demonic entities drive anyone who sees them to suicide. The film’s instant, widely memed success came as a shock to both Bier and Bullock. “I remember Sandra texting me, and it was like, Whoa, this is kind of out of control,’” she says of the response, which had fans doing “‘Bird Box’ challenges” to re-create scenes from the movie (including driving a car while blindfolded). “We were like, ‘Guys, can you please not do idiotic things because you’ve seen a movie?’” Bier says, laughing.
What Bier also appreciated about “Bird Box” — and what she thinks resonated with audiences — was that it was a “thriller with horror elements which essentially is a movie about motherhood.” Bier, who has two adult children, is open about the reality that directing and motherhood are not always compatible. When she meets aspiring women directors at film schools, they often ask how she has managed both. The answer, she says, is that for the first decade and a half of her career “I spent all my money on child care.”
“That was a conscious choice,” says Bier. “But it was also a conscious choice to recognize, ‘No, I cannot [direct and also] bake the bread rolls for parents’ evening.’”
The key, adds “The Perfect Couple” director, is letting go of perfection. “You have to embrace that you are not going to be the way society sees a perfect mom. And you might not be the way society sees a perfect director. You have to balance the things.”