“Recreating a US prison in the UK was one of the biggest challenges,'' says producer Basil Iwanyk

‘The Informer’ is a British crime thriller which revolves around Peter Koslow(played by Joel Kinnaman), a former special operations soldier working as an informant for the FBI to help dismantle the Polish mafia’s drug trade in New York. But when the FBI’s operation goes wrong, resulting in the death of an undercover NYPD cop, Pete is coerced into returning to Bale Hill, the prison he previously served time for manslaughter, to take down the cartel from the inside. 

The film was entirely shot in the U.K and most of the portions are shot in a prison setting. 

One of the biggest challenges that the production faced while shooting the film was finding a jail in the UK where they could replicate the film’s fictional US penitentiary, Bale Hill which is modelled after the Sing-Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in New York State.“The prison was a huge thing. How do you find a prison in the UK that feels applicable to a prison in New York? And then, when we’re in New York, how do you find a prison that somehow matches the one we have in the UK.”

Another big challenge was finding the right faces along with the accents in and around London, that one would find in a New York prison.

“Populating a prison two hours outside of London and being able to find the faces that you would find in a New York prison was probably the greatest challenge” says Producer Erica Lee. “We modelled it loosely after Sing-Sing, and if you know Sing-Sing it’s Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. That, for me, was the hardest part, the faces and the accents, alongside the production value.”

“Being the only American on set, it’s the thing I’m most proud of on this film, pushing extras casting, pushing our ADs, pushing everyone to find those faces, because it wasn’t easy. Then really listening to the accents to make sure they felt authentic. Even the way the actors moves, played basketball, the physicality, a lot of time and effort went into planning all of that, to make it ring true.” concludes Erica.

‘The Informer’ releases in India on 3rd January 2020 by PVR Pictures.