Filming has started in Jamaica for Get Millie Black, a novel by 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James, which is being made into a six-part series for television.
The United Kingdom’s Channel 4 announced last December that it had commissioned the crime drama and that HBO, the WarnerMedia-owned premium network, is also part of the deal.
The series, a Channel 4 release stated, comes from Motive Pictures, the British production company run by Simon Maxwell, who is “a former Channel 4 international drama boss and co-creator of Fox’s international drama series, Deep State”.
Last Wednesday, the film crew was seen in Barbican, St Andrew, and on Thursday, they were filming in downtown Kingston.
CEO of Motive Pictures Simon Maxwell was on set, with a name tag that identified him as executive producer. He directed The Gleaner to Justine Henzell (who was not on set) but took time to share why exactly the film crew is here in the island.
“My company is making this film,” Maxwell explained. “We are here filming Marlon James’ first TV show, Get Millie Black. It is set here in Jamaica, and it was really important to us that we come to Kingston to film. We are filming here for a number of weeks, and only in Kingston.”
According to the series’ synopsis: “[ Get Millie Black] follows ex-Scotland Yard detective Millie-Jean Black, who returns to Kingston to work on missing persons for the Jamaican police. However, Black soon picks up the trail of an investigation that begins in the steaming streets of downtown Kingston and works its way up to the hill plantations of the postcolonial elite. She soon finds herself on a quest to save a sister who won’t be saved, to find a boy who can’t be found, to solve a case that will blow her world apart and prove almost as tough to crack as Millie Black. Events eventually explode onto the international stage, propelling Millie back to the UK, where, pretty soon, everyone is out to get Millie Black.”
WHISKED AWAY
The character playing Millie Black was actually on set wearing her Jamaican police uniform when The Gleaner arrived, but was soon whisked away into a tent.
A Channel 4 release last year had given some insight into the festive and colourful cast of Get Millie Black, which “explores the troubled legacy of racism, slavery, sexuality, classism and cycles of trauma in the postcolonial landscape of Britain and Jamaica”. Among the characters are the transgender ‘gully queen’ Hibiscus; the sibling Millie left behind; her brilliant partner on the Jamaican police force, Curtis, who is forced to keep his love life secret from his colleagues; game-playing Scotland Yard Inspector Luke Osbourne; and Hit Girl, go-go club owner and underworld entrepreneur.
Marlon James has stated many times that his mother, who was one of the first policewomen in Jamaica to be promoted to detective, was the inspiration for the character, Millie Black.
“Storytelling has always struck me first and foremost as a mystery to be solved – which I’m sure I got from her. Millie, from the second she appeared in my imagination, was a brilliant, mercurial, hilarious, unpredictable force of nature; someone who was always there, just waiting for her story to be told. I didn’t create her, I found her,” he is quoted in the release.
James won the Man Booker Prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. He is fully involved in the writing and the production of the series.