Tomorrow marks a very special day. Tomorrow is the end of an era. I only came in for season 2, and three episodes escaped my grasp for scheduling reasons, yet, they all feel mine. And tomorrow is the release date for Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, and then it’s all over.
It’s been over 10 years of my working life. Only six episodes per season, but since the series has been on one network or another ever since, it feels like the Peaky Blinders have been with me for this entire decade. I couldn’t escape them, and I didn’t want to. You don’t get a lot of chances to write dialogue for the likes of Cillian Murphy, Helen McCrory, Paul Anderson, Sophie Rundle, Tom Hardy, or Stephen Graham. Rarely have I read writing that was as brilliant as the one for season six, after Helen McCrory died. The way in which her character, Polly Gray, remained the core of Peaky Blinders even though she wasn’t there anymore is nothing short of amazing.
Writing a dubbing script can be an all-encompassing enterprise. I could almost smell the cigarette smoke, and I was really looking forward to the end of the day when I could finally have a whisky myself. I have had a playlist with music from the series almost from the day I started working on it. Leonard Cohen. Nick Cave. Awesome stuff.
Writing a dubbing script can be humbling. Finding German equivalents for the idiosyncratic monologues that Tom Hardy delivers as Alfie Solomons, or for Sam Neill’s moralizing rants as Chief Inspector Campbell, was an enormous challenge. Challenging in a different way was trying to write Sir Oswald Mosley’s disgusting Nazi speech while sitting in a rented apartment in Tel Aviv, hoping that the neighbors wouldn’t hear me. Enormously challenging, from an emotional standpoint, were scenes in which Polly Gray allowed herself be tortured by the man she despises (she had reasons). She remains one of the greatest characters ever written for the small screen, or any screen, really. Depicting a world full of testosterone and violence, Peaky Blinders was very much about the women who held the business together and who used their brains while the men acted on instinct – with usually disastrous results.
The biggest challenge, with the most satisfying outcome, was the fact that Tommy Shelby’s heritage was something of an afterthought in the original production, developing into something bigger and more important from season to season. In early episodes, the Blinders speak some form of garbled Romanian, and it took the dubbing team years to find out that this wasn’t, in fact, Romani at all, and that the Peakys were actually a kind of conglomerate of different gypsy traditions. More problematic was the fact that we originally used a translation of the word “gypsy” (a controversial term in English) into German that is, in fact, an insult, and is never used as a self-designation. When the show moved to Netflix, it lost some of its original music due to licensing issues, but at least in German we got the chance to undo the racist language we had used, going over every single instance, finding alternatives and creative solutions – a chance that I will be forever grateful for.
Every time my work on a season was over, I went into a minor depression. Sometimes I had to wait for two years for the next season, and there were three years of torture between seasons 5 and 6, never knowing for sure whether I’d get to do it again. But every time I started a new series, I had a brilliant excuse to binge the old ones again. I watched every single episode again before I began working on the film and it remains as fresh and engaging as it was the first time I ever saw it.
If anyone ever had any doubt that we dubbers love the original as much as the original creators, just ask me. Ask me to identify Tommy Shelby’s breathing among a group of WWI soldiers in a tunnel. Ask me how often I cried writing this film. Just because I knew this was going to be the last time.
The film was made for the fans of “Peaky Blinders.” It was made for me.
