I’m glad… I guess. But this is the first time I am faced with this. It wasn’t a conscious decision. But most things are like that when you make a movie: it’s up to the audience to make sense of it.
Photography: Tom Cockram
In any case, it made me wonder: what was your pandemic like?
Well, I guess it’s similar to everyone: just stuck at home. At first, I was trying to figure out if there was anything I could do, and I selected many, many thousands of masks to send to Mexico for the hospital nurses. Then I started working on Disclaimer.
How did that project come to your attention?
Renée Knight (the author of the 2015 novel that inspired the show) and I have mutual acquaintances. She sent me the manuscript and I really liked it. I just didn’t know how to make it happen as a conventional movie. And so time passed, I went to do Romaand towards the end Knight got in touch and said, Hey, in case you’re interested, the rights are available. And that was a time when I was very intrigued to explore episodic television.
I enjoy a lot of shows and they have amazing writing and acting. But very few have a cinematic approach. So I was intrigued. How can the conventional writer-oriented program be turned into something closer to cinema?
What do you mean by “cinematic approach” here?
In film, images are taken and related to other images to convey meaning. There is a visual layer, a visual way in which stories are told. To achieve it, you must surrender to it.
Many series can’t worry about that. They need to keep moving the narrative forward constantly. The narrative leads the show; that is its amazing strength. Narratively, they’ve started doing much more interesting things than most mainstream American films. But in the worst case, you can watch many series with your eyes closed.
By the way, you can still have a good time. In fact, you can be doing things while watching your show.
My wife embroiders while watching some of these shows.
Yes, and you are talking from time to time. That is its value.
Another thing is: I had never done anything overtly narrative and I was very intrigued by the challenge. I had always preferred a more cinematic language to convey ideas, rather than a strong narrative drive.
Can you tell us a little more about what you mean by “overtly narrative”?
When you have a narrative, you can go: A, then B, then C, then D, then E, then F, and so on. In movies, you somehow have to convey everything you need (and this is what I mean by film language) to get from A to D.
But there are two principles that are contradictory and I learned them working on this program. The principle of cinema is time: it is how those images flow in time and all the emotions they transmit in time. Television, on the other hand, is used to kill time. It’s killing time to keep the narrative flowing.