Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky calls bringing Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels to BBC2 “the most daunting thing I’ve ever attempted”, because “people love these books”. Adding to the pressure was a desire not to let the double Booker prize-winning author down and the fact that screenwriter Peter Straughan’s scripts “were the best I’d ever read in any medium, so then it’s like ‘this is really going to be good unless I screw it up’”.

It was something of a surprise choice for Kosminsky, as his reputation is for contemporary dramas that have taken on some of Britain and the world’s thorniest social and political issues over the last four decades, ranging from child abuse (No Child of Mine) and the National Health Service (Innocents) to the role of British peacekeepers in Bosnia (Warriors) and soon, Islamic State.

His quest to “work on things that have something to say” led to a death threat while making Shoot to Kill, about the Stalker inquiry into the shooting of three IRA men by RUC officers in Northern Ireland, while other dramas, such as the Bafta award-winning The Government Inspector, have brought to light pieces of new evidence and spoken truth to power.

Why, then, did the quietly spoken Kosminsky decide to direct Wolf Hall, a costume drama that also incorporates Bring Up the Bodies, the second novel in the Tudor trilogy? “It was something that never happens to me. I got a call from my agent saying somebody would like you to direct something.”

He usually generates his own projects but had enjoyed Mantel’s study of the rise of Henry VIII’s consigliere Thomas Cromwell. “I love Hilary as a writer, I love her iconoclasm. She’s a true rebel and I admire her for it.” This was enough to trump what he calls “a bit of a confidence crisis about period drama” previously, as a result of having directed “a truly terrible adaptation of Wuthering Heights” in the 1990s – “It was pretty much the first film I made and I was totally out of my depth.” Yet the result shows why Colin Callender, the co-executive producer who optioned Mantel’s novels, wanted Kosminsky. He has brought his trademark authenticity to Wolf Hall and given it the contemporary style that both he and his leading actor Mark Rylance (below, with Kosminsky), who plays Cromwell and starred as David Kelly in The Government Inspector, wanted.

He has sought to be as truthful to Henry VIII’s times as possible, using hi-tech cameras to shoot by candlelight and filming in Tudor buildings – in one case pausing every half hour to let tour parties through.

“In a strange way you might think that atmosphere would push people towards a theatricality but it did the reverse,” says Kosminsky, who has worked before with all three of Wolf Hall’s main stars – Rylance, Claire Foy (Anne Boleyn) and Damian Lewis (Henry VIII). “Being able to be in the real places or things akin to the real places, in costumes that were real not held together by Velcro, using the right materials, using a handheld camera – all that meant that they relaxed and the performances were very natural and contemporary, which was certainly what we were setting out to achieve.”

Kosminsky says the shoot was probably one of the most enjoyable projects he has been involved with, due to the material’s quality and the people he was working with. He describes the series as “dark, quite serious, it’s quite intellectually-challenging [with] understated performances by some of the best actors we have, where our watchword has been authenticity. I hope it will be an experience that’s complementary to the book.”

Mantel has declared herself pleased with the six-part BBC2 drama, and Kosminsky looks in line to direct an adaptation of the final novel of her Cromwell series, The Mirror and the Light, which she is expected to complete this year.

One of the key themes Kosminsky has brought out in Wolf Hall is “the relationship between Thomas More and Cromwell, between pragmatism and principle”.

He says: “There’s no question, my sympathies lie with Cromwell. He’s an underdog, he’s a person who has risen from absolutely nothing, purely by his own efforts. If I can be honest for a second, I started from not much, my parents did everything they could but we were not well off. So as a human being I sympathise with Cromwell, though of course his journey was far more extreme.”

Kosminsky is precise and exacting, as you might expect from the meticulous mind of a man who read chemistry at Oxford. He directs and writes without fear or favour and does not shy away from asking important, awkward questions. There have only been three occasions when he has felt under pressure not to pursue projects. They were during Shoot to Kill and The Promise (about the Israel-Palestine conflict), and when research led him to claim in The Government Inspector that the reporter Andrew Gilligan had altered a memo after his meeting with Dr Kelly in May 2003.

A decade on from that drama, Kosminsky reflects: “The powerful people went on with their lives and the Kelly family’s lives were destroyed. But there was one other casualty of that terrible time and that was the editorial balls of the BBC, which to my mind has been through a 10-year period of hibernation.”

He thinks there was “a massive over‑reaction by the BBC” and “why they felt the consequence of that should be that they pull their horns in editorially on every front is a question that, to be brutal, [former director general] Mark Thompson needs to answer one day”. He adds: “What was singularly lacking during his time as editor-in-chief of the BBC was people who were rocking the boat and asking awkward questions.”

He also queries why the BBC stopped making “politically boat-rocking drama”, saying it now makes it understandable, though regrettable, that the corporation might move its in-house drama department to a commercial subsidiary. Although once sacked by the BBC – he was then a drama script editor, and moved first to BBC current affairs and then Yorkshire TV – he is a staunch defender of it and the licence fee, pointing out that the BBC trained him. In a speech at the launch of Wolf Hall in December he said of the BBC “don’t let us piss it away”.

Disarmingly he says: “When I was young I was very ready to stand up publicly and vent my views in front of an audience who had no choice but to sit there and listen, being an arrogant little shit. I now take the view that I should sort of shut up really and if I do speak, speak through the programmes I make. [But the BBC is] worried about the licence fee. And I do genuinely think what [director general] Tony [Hall] is trying to do at the BBC is good.” He has been an admirer of Hall since he met him on his first day at the BBC and believes that under him the organisation is beginning to find its feet again.

At the moment, Kosminsky’s main project is his “very difficult and quite dangerous” Isis drama for Channel 4. It focuses on why people “might be tempted to go and join a very fundamentalist interpretation of Islam as represented by Islamic State”. Film4 has pulled out of funding his film Young Mandela due to the rival project Long Walk to Freedom, but he is thrilled that after 20 years of trying to tell the story of Dr Pauline Cutting, a volunteer doctor in the 1980s at the Palestinian camp of Bour al Barajneh in Beirut, the project is “finally under way” thanks to BBC Films.

Despite his awards, Kosminsky likes to steer clear of the limelight, saying there is a danger of being co-opted by the establishment. He still wants to “form the grit in the oyster”, saying: “I shuffle back off to my funny little house in a village in Wiltshire and I don’t do all that huggermuggering with the rich and powerful, the glitterati, it just doesn’t do it for me. That’s not why I’m doing this really.”

Curriculum vitae

Age 58

Education Haberdashers’ Aske’s school and Worcester College, Oxford

Career 1980 BBC general trainee 1982 BBC TV Current Affairs 1985 Yorkshire Television documentaries 1995 Began life as freelance drama director (Shoot to Kill; Warriors; The Project) 2000‑02 Directed movie White Oleander for Warner Brothers 2003 Began writing and directing TV drama, (The Government Inspector; Britz; The Promise) 2013-15 Directing Wolf Hall for the BBC

Wolf Hall begins on BBC2 on 21 January