Perfect Couple Opening Credits Dance: Susanne Bier Interview
A choreographed beachside dance is hardly the opening credit sequence one would expect from a glossy Nicole Kidman murder mystery. But for director Susanne Bier (“Bird Box”), there was no other way to open “The Perfect Couple,” the six-part limited adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel.
“I’ve gotten so bored with title sequences,” Bier told IndieWire. “There was, at some point in the script, a nightmare sequence where there was a dance. I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ But there was something about the word ‘dance’ that stayed with me, and I was like, ‘We are going to do the title sequence as a dance with everybody.’ First of all, it’s going to be really joyful and fun, but it’s also going to suggest to the audience, ‘Hey, you are allowed to laugh here. You don’t have to think this is very dark and very serious because it’s not.'”
“The Perfect Couple” follows Greer Garrison Winbury (Nicole Kidman), a famous novelist, who alongside her husband Tag (Liev Schreiber), is hosting a lavish wedding for their son Benji (Billy Howle) and his fiance Amelia (Eve Hewson) at their enormous Nantucket home. When a murder in the wedding party occurs, everyone is a suspect. Bier was initially hesitant about signing on to direct the project because she didn’t feel like she knew the world of Nantucket. But once she agreed, she went to Netflix to see if Kidman, with whom she worked on 2020’s HBO drama “The Undoing,” would be of interest to play Greer. Netflix was interested, and from there, it was easy to build out the cast. Once they had everyone in place, Bier said, “The Perfect Couple” set was a veritable improv playground. Bier said Schreiber was particularly game: Tag’s constant weed smoking was his idea. “Between [Schreiber], Jack Reynor, and Dakota Fanning, every time they came onto screen, I was laughing so much. At some point, the sound engineer was like, ‘Would you mind stop laughing this loudly because we actually need to be able to use the take.’”
That joy Bier felt on set helped to inspire the opening credits. When the director first suggested this, no one wanted to do it — not the producers and not the cast. “The cast formed a WhatsApp group in order to avoid doing the dance,” Bier said. “The only one who was keen to do it was Liev, and he’s a great dancer. Charm La’Donna, the great choreographer, designed the dance, and then we sent the tape out. I cannot say how many calls I got from the cast who were like, ‘I can’t do it.’ And Nicole, who’s a great dancer, came to the set and she was like, ‘I can’t dance. This dress is way too tight.’ I was like, ‘Guys, we are just going to try it. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.’”
There’s no sign of reluctance in the cast when watching the sequence. It’s gorgeously lit, bathing them in golden hour as they dance to “Criminals” in their bright outfits — bold colors were important for Bier within the series. “I did think that there was a visual richness to having this amazing cast with different color clothes on a beach dancing,” she said. “I imagine that at some point at the rehearsal dinner, they would all go out and do that dance, and it’s just that scene you don’t see other than here.”
The dance was shot in 90 minutes, mostly because of timing. “We were hit by the strikes, so we were like five weeks out of shooting, and then we had this cast, so reassembling everybody to find five weeks was virtually impossible after the strike. So we shot a little bit in London, and then the rehearsal dinner was all shot in Los Angeles in January, and that was scheduled for five days, but we only had three days. Then I squeezed the dancing into those three days, which is why everybody was like, ‘Hey, are you sure about this? It should really take two days to shoot a dance sequence,'” Bier said.
Once the cast got into it, they got into it. Bier was able to spot who may have fibbed about their dancing abilities, but the credits also tap into what makes the show so fun. “Eve is a great dancer. I feel like they all are. Even the ones that said that they weren’t, I feel that they were just really all in different ways,” Bier said. “Dakota is dancing around with that big tummy, and Isabelle Adjani, who was adamant that she was not going to dance, is great. It was a group that really enjoyed playing with one another, and they also enjoyed dancing with one another.”
Besides getting to see some of the best actors working today having a blast doing a silly dance, the dance establishes the tone of “The Perfect Couple.” “I felt that this was a real opportunity to signal to the audience that this is not going to be pretentious. Just enjoy the fun of it. The show has a dark underbelly. It is a murder mystery, and there are things that are sad and are real issues. I wanted those things to have breathing room. It was important then to do a title sequence, which said, ‘We are going to have the darker things, but we are also going to have fun with it.'”
“The Perfect Couple” is now streaming on Netflix.
