I REALIZED HE ARRANGED HIS OWN KIDNAPPING.

at four-per-cent interest.)

Beaufoy, who collaborated with Boyle and Colson on the Academy Award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, said in a telephone interview that he had become fascinated with the kidnapping after reading an article a few years ago. “I started delving into the mystery about how no one would pay a ransom,” he said. “The more I delved, the more interesting it became: The complexity of these ridiculously wealthy people who were so locked in their own pain that they couldn’t just write a cheque.”

Although Beaufoy was about to embark on another project for FX, he proposed the Getty kidnapping as a and not another story that idealizes the wealthy and powerful of this world.” After seeing early scripts, Balian said that it was “an easy decision” to green light the show.

Boyle had begun casting — signing up Hilary Swank as Gail Getty, Paul’s mother, and Brendan Fraser as former CIA operative James Fletcher Chace, who was Getty Sr.’s security specialist — when it emerged that Scott was making a movie on the same subject. Although FX ultimately pushed back the series release date from January, to put some distance between Trust and the December opening of All the Money in the World, there was no erosion of confidence from network executives, Boyle said, adding that they felt that a 10-part series was quite a different beast from a two-hour film.

It’s definitely a lot more experimental. Episode 8 is spoken entirely in the Calabrian dialect of Paul’s kidnappers. In several episodes, Chace speaks directly to the audience (shades of House of Cards), offering an epochspanning perspective on the events depicted during the rest of the show.

“I mentioned that it’s like Chace has a prescience, like he is a time traveller,” Fraser recounted in a telephone interview. “That developed into a touch of magical realism.”

In the first three episodes, the plethora of characters, split screens and montages of often-puzzling, non-linear events eventually begin to resolve into a coherent storyline: Paul, badly in debt to drug dealers, has planned his own kidnapping to raise money from his famously tight-fisted family, then becomes a helpless victim as events spiral out of control. (This offers a different perspective to All the Money, which paints Paul as a victim from the outset.)

“The more research I did, the more I realized he arranged his own kidnapping,” Beaufoy said. “It was a huge attention-seeking device; they’ll pay because they love me. It became an extraordinary metaphor for the third generation saying, ‘Pay some attention to me, show me some love.’ ”

Ultimately, Boyle said, the story is about willpower. “It’s the willpower of each of the individual characters, the willpower exercised between old Paul and his grandson, first as one tries to get money from the other, then extending into different arenas, some tragic,” he said. “The joy of working in this format is that you can show how complicated any narrative can be.”

Or as Sutherland put it: “To try to capture the truth of a human being, la condition humaine — it’s the most extraordinary business in the world.”