Tony Grisoni, screenwriter

I’d been writing screenplays with Michael Winterbottom and in 2006, his producer Andrew Eaton said: “There’s this quartet of novels by David Peace. Are you interested in adapting them?” I read the first, 1974, and was drawn to it and repelled at the same time. It was strong meat, full of anger and injustice. It’s anchored in reality, especially the Peter Sutcliffe and Stefan Kiszko cases, but heightened and stylised. “Fiction torn from the facts,” David called it.

I was scared stiff because the novels were so experimental but I desperately wanted to do it – even if adapting all four would mean waving goodbye to several years of my life. The books span a decade with a huge cast of characters, so I condensed a lot.

Eaton was keen on a different director and format for each film. It meant each had its own reference points. I thought about Chinatown a lot with 1974. The design and costumes were all smoky and brown, like the 70s. The cast went for the material big time. David Morrissey really did his research and Sean Harris is nothing if not method. It’s a very masculine story but we wanted strong female characters too – we had Maxine Peake and Rebecca Hall. I kept the most horrendous violence off-screen. Violence you imagine is much worse than anything you’ll see. Your mind does the work.

The police interrogation scenes, where they torture suspects, are terrifying and deliberately so. Stefan Kiszko, on whom Daniel Mays’s character is based, was released in 1992 and died 18 months later, having been wrongly imprisoned for 16 years. A man with a mind of a 12-year-old who just wanted his mum. The corruption and brutality in Red Riding are bleak, but so is the real world. While I was writing, the headlines were full of cases like Stephen Lawrence, Madeleine McCann, Natascha Kampusch, Shannon Matthews, Josef Fritzl …

I was warned that Sutcliffe was litigious, so I should use what he actually said in his police interview. That was fine. I couldn’t have made it up anyway. Red Riding was compared to James Ellroy and described as Yorkshire noir, which is spot-on, although David said it was a pity they used a French word. He preferred Yorkshire dark. I added some redemption at the end because I needed to save somebody and finish on a note of love.

We made 1974, 1980 and 1983 but, for budgetary reasons, not 1977, which broke my heart. It was always intended as a quartet, so it felt like vandalism. I hold out hope that somehow we’ll get to do the missing fourth. The films got a theatrical release in the US, screened back-to-back, which is full-on, but a cult audience went for it. Critic David Thomson called it “better than The Godfather”. Nic Pizzolatto said it influenced True Detective. People are still discovering it. They tend to say: “But you seem like quite a nice guy!”

Mark Addy, actor

My agent sent me the scripts but said: “Just to warn you, there’s no money in this.” I got halfway through the first episode, phoned her back and asked: “Who else is attached?” She said: “Sean Bean, David Morrissey, Paddy Considine, Peter Mullan and Maxine Peake.” I said: “Put my name on the list please.” The scripts were so well-written, it was a no-brainer.

Everyone was on Equity minimum, there were no trailers, not even a green room area. It was a tremendous experience to have a cast of that calibre, throwing their all into something that wasn’t going to buy them more than a pair of shoes.

David Peace’s books put you inside the mind of each character and are dense with detail. They were a major resource for building my character, washed-up solicitor John Piggott. In one scene, he flashes back to finding his father’s body. They literally strapped a camera rig on to me, so viewers see it through Piggott’s eyes. He becomes the unlikely hero, despite being a dope-smoking, heavy-drinking loser. He takes on the might of the crooked West Yorkshire police and partly succeeds. Amid the darkness, he’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

Piggott’s a shoddy, unkempt idiot – he sleeps in his suit and at one point, he eats a raw Findus Crispy Pancake – but he saves the girl at the end. He carries her out of a mineshaft in his arms, like a Bruce Willis action hero. Shooting scenes in the underground paedophile’s lair was grim. There was a room with the dentist’s chair in it, mattresses on the floor, a child’s shoe. It brought home the horrors of what these monsters were doing. You needed a shower at the end of the day.

I grew up in York during the 1970s and vividly remember the Ripper era. I used to cycle back from my then-girlfriend’s house in the pitch black. Tension on the streets was palpable – you’d pedal home as quickly as you could. Everyone felt Sutcliffe’s elusiveness and how the police were overwhelmed. The show’s hardly a tourist advert for Yorkshire. On location, set dressing would be a burnt-out car on the grass verge, maybe an upturned shopping trolley. Locals were like: “Can’t you put a nice floral arrangement there instead?”

Red Riding is an extraordinary achievement. Three different directors and formats. It’s hard for me to fault it. It had ripple effects on my career. Ridley Scott had just started work on Robin Hood with Russell Crowe. The casting director gave him a Red Riding DVD because it had so many British actors. He watched it one weekend and, on Monday morning, phoned up to acquire the US rights, then cast me as Friar Tuck. He must’ve seen me eat the frozen Crispy Pancake and thought: “That’s my man!”