It all started when Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) boarded flight KA 29 from Dubai to London. Hijack, the title of the gripping TV show, indicates what happens next.

“George was on a train journey and it became stuck in a tunnel. While he was stuck in the tunnel, he started to look around all of the passengers that were in the carriage with him,” says creator Jim Field Smith (Stag) of his co-creator George Kay (Lupin) and the origins of the idea for their television series.

Kay didn’t originally envisage a hijack situation, but instead pondered wider questions of what if the train was really stuck and how would each person react.

“That was the beginning of it. You can have a bunch of people who are expecting to be together only for a short period of time, and suddenly thrusted into this extreme set of circumstances. And it’s always interesting to see how the ordinary people react under pressure and how the social dynamics of that group change under pressure as well.”

Jim Field Smith directed most of the series, because he was unavailable to co-write due to scheduling conflicts on another TV show. The lion’s share of the writing duties were therefore handled by George Kay. Rather than delay Hijack, they decided to move forward into production to capture the excitement of the idea.

A Thriller Of Sorts

Although Hijack lends itself to the thriller genre, Field Smith describes it more as a sociological or character thriller. “It’s about how different types of people react to different pressures being put upon them. If it was a ninety minute movie, you would focus primarily on the story and the plot of the hijack and how Sam Nelson overcomes it.” In a seven-part TV series, there is more time for character exploration.

Hijack is told in real time over seven hours to emulate the seven hour flight. “What immediately becomes available to you is the real estate and the time to be able to explore the character’s stories more. And ultimately, you look to transcend the initial concept of it being a hijack thriller and you push it into a slightly different territory, which is about people and humanity.”

The energy of Hijack is tight, restrained and simmering with relatively few thrills and spills.

Pilot Episode – Final Call

Building out the world and Sam’s backstory is a vital part of setting up the show. “What you want people to do is to lean into their expectations of a show called Hijack and then you need to support those expectations. What we were looking to do in Episode One was to set out a lot of dogs running,” he continues.

Field Smith enjoyed playing with the conventions of the genre and subverting them with red herrings and false leads. Since the audience knows what will happen from the title, Hijack isn’t so much a whodunnit, but rather a “who’s about to do it.”

“I give them the tease of where the story is going. You’ve got to do that in little bite-sized parcels. You have to kind of say, this is where it might be going. And then it goes somewhere else.”

All this story needed to unfold over seven hours.

Who Is Sam Newman? Master Manipulator

Sam’s character begins as an enigma from the opening sequence when he’s boarding a place. Is he a good guy or bad guy? What does he know or not know? This was done by design. “That’s one of the traps that was set in Episode One. Does he have a hidden weapon? Does he have a past as a special forces guy? There’s also an expectation of Idris because of what we’ve seen him do in the past. Perhaps he’s going to get super physical or he’s going to be violent or he’s going to be more of a classic hero?” All of these are viable options in Sam’s character trajectory.

Sam’s greatest superpower is his mind. He plays a three-dimensional chess game with the hijackers. Sam asks, “How can I get under these people’s skin? How can I turn these people against themselves?” As the story unspools, we see Sam moving from self-preservation into more selfless character terrain.

One might draw parallels between John McClane (Bruce Willis) in Die Hard and Sam Newman in Hijack – both men forced to face the breakdown of their marriages. In both cases, this story can stand on its own as a dramatic narrative.

We wanted to tell that very human story against in a very heightened setting.

Sam Nelson boards his flight with expectations. He believes he can fly to London and reconcile with his estranged wife and catch the next return flight to Dubai. But he’s over-estimated his control over the situation. “He’s a guy that feels he can fix situations with words and get people to think what he wants them to think. That’s what he does in his job and that’s what he’s good at.”

Therein lies the metaphor in the story. Sam needs that disruption to his routine, via a hijack, to help him readjust his attitude to his wife, to himself, and to his environment.

“The Sam Nelson that leaves the plane in Episode Seven is a Sam Nelson that has realized he needs to access a different part of himself and to be more of an empath; someone who connects with people on a human level, actually listens to them and understands their position, even if that means losing the conversation and the argument.”

Sam doesn’t undergo a massive external character transformation, but he does have a self-realization. “You can only move a character so far. You can’t move them up a mile, but you can move them a few inches and those can be very important inches.”

Sam is a confident business negotiator; a skilled manipulator to seal the deal. Negotiating his marriage is not the same thing.

“His job is to use NLP to force people to come around to his way of thinking or to put words into their mouths by planting ideas in their heads. He explains this to passenger Amanda (Holly Aird) in Episode Seven of the show.”

“Marsha (Sam’s wife played by Christine Adams), says to Daniel (her current boyfriend played by Max Beesley), ‘This is what Sam does, he plays games.'”

Jim Field Smith cites Stuart (leader of the hijackers played by Neil Maskell) as an example. Sam’s able to convince him to get the pilot out of the cockpit by seeding doubts about what he’s doing, in order to speak with the pilot himself.

Sam says to Stuart, “You’re leaving the pilot in the cockpit, but his plane can fly itself. So what are you doing? Why have you left him in there?”

“And so, the hijackers are thinking, ‘Okay. This guy’s smart. Although he’s not on our side, he’s making some good points, so we should trust him.” In doing so, Sam has gotten the pilot out of the cockpit.

Many such scenes exemplify Sam’s resourcefulness, but they need to be offset against his personal story with Marsha to make the series more satisfying.

Creating Tension

Much of the tension in Hijack is based on slow-boil anticipation more than high-octane action. “Half the trick I find in filmmaking is about perspective. I think from whose perspective is the scene, and if you take that all the way back to what’s on the page, it’s the same concept.”

“Who do we want the audience to be sitting in the brain of during the scene, rather than taking an objective position, which is sometimes a tool as well?”

“In a show like this, you want to be in a subjective position. You want the audience to be with Sam, but not necessarily understanding exactly what it is that Sam’s doing. So, because it’s Sam, you ultimately trust him and feel like he has a plan. But what you don’t want to do is tell the audience what that plan is.”

“It seems a little bit crazy what you’re doing, but I’m trusting that at some point, I’m going to discover that there’s some ingenuity here, even if what I’m seeing right now is counterintuitive. I think there’s a huge amount of suspense in watching a character who is one step ahead of you as the audience. You never let the audience get ahead of the character.”

Telling the story in real time allows the audience and the characters to exist in the moment. In many scenes, it seems that Sam is improvising as he responds to immediate events.. Jack Bauer, Kiefer Sutherland’s character in the TV series 24 acts similarly.

“It’s about experiencing things as they happen live; seeing, feeling, Sam calculates all of the possible outcomes, but not telling the audience which outcome he has arrived at in his head. And then, seeing his plan play out in a way that you don’t realize what his goal was until it arrives.”

Another technique in creating tension is to alternate the balance of power between the hijackers and the passengers. Although Sam is a skilled negotiator, he doesn’t always have the upper hand.

“He has some short term gains in the first hours of the hijacking. He’s able to make some good moves. He’s able to get under their skin. He’s able to gain the trust of the lead hijacker, albeit begrudgingly. And he’s able to become the sort of de facto spokesman for the rest of the passengers. But it only gets him so far.”

Then people start getting hurt or dying. “Sam realizes very quickly that he’s going to need to access a different level of himself in order to make any real progress. There’s a middle section of the story where one of the hijackers dies in his arms. And he realizes that it’s not a game. It’s not a business negotiation. It’s a real human situation. He’s going to need to think a little bit more laterally and a little bit more empathetically in order to achieve real success.”

Sam realizes that his confidence is really arrogance that has been hampering his ability to connect with himself.

Jim Field Smith doesn’t slot his characters as heroes or villains. “It’s about choices that those characters have had to make and what circumstances have put them into the situation they’re in. It’s not about choices that you make as a filmmaker.”

“I’m not interested in having this binary situation where good characters are good and bad characters are bad. Sam is not a 100% good character. He’s maybe a 60%, 70% good character, but he has this side of him where there aren’t particularly nice characteristics.”

“Stuart is stuck in this impossible situation where he’s born into a life of crime. He can’t go any other direction. We learned through the scenes where the detectives go to visit his mother that Stuart’s father was killed by the crime family, and in fact was killed by Terry (another hijacker played by Jasper Britton) who’s on the plane.”

“He’s got his little brother Lewis (Jack MacMullen) with him because his little brother’s desperate to be taken seriously, desperate to be given a real job in the crime family, but then he ends up dying and that’s Stuart’s responsibility.”

“Stuart also discovers that he’s being thrown under the bus by his bosses. And so, you can empathize with him because, even though we’re not all caught up in crime, we’ve all been caught up in similar situations where you’ve been asked to do something that you’re not that comfortable with doing, and then you start to see the repercussions of what you’re doing and you’re thinking you didn’t even want to be here in the first place.”

Tying It All Together

The plane needs to eventually land. “A plot has to come to an end and a plane has to come down. We wanted to do it in a way that felt fresh and emotional rather than calamitous,” notes Jim Field Smith.

“I didn’t want it to feel like a crash landing. I wanted it to feel like a requiem where you really care for all these characters. The “special effects” for me are a mother gripping her small daughter’s hand rather than a big, expensive crash sequence.”

That shot of someone gripping someone’s hand should have much more impact than metal striking concrete.

In ending the series, Sam lets Marsha go in order to move forward in his life.

“Stuart realizes that maybe he’s not really in charge and there’s another plan afoot that he’s not been told about. We wanted that to linger beyond the end of the series.“