Hello.
Ready?
Night, take 1.
Wow, that's-- that's a great question.
I was very lucky to have been born
when I was born,
and had the filmmakers
that were telling stories to my age group at that time.
Meaning Steven Spielberg and George Lucas,
making Star Wars and E.T.,
and it just felt like religion watching those movies.
And so it was a beautiful moment to be awakened in that way,
in a visual form.
And I think I just started to play with my dad's cameras.
And it just... started as a hobby,
then became an obsession.
And then went, "Hmm, who's this guy, Spike Lee?"
And then it started to become,
"Hey, maybe you could go to school for that."
-All right, let's do it guys. -Back it up.
Let's try to straighten him out.
There were certain filmmakers
where I understood what they were doing,
and it was kind of built into the way I could understand the image.
And so, as I was looking at more formal filmmakers,
maybe even kind of older filmmakers,
like Kurosawa and Kubrik, and Hitchcock,
their formality spoke to me.
My mind worked better when I slowed things down.
So where it wasn't action-y, and it was more about the dinner table.
If I take any scene, and lean its suspense,
and lean it to mystery, and it feels right.
I don't know what that is,
why some people are drawn to one genre over another.
I love to do drama, so I think that the two of those
work really well together.
You know, I take great pride in the fact that...
I was born in India.
America gave my dad a chance to follow his dream, you know.
He was a doctor.
He came to the United States, left his family,
did the immigrant dream thing.
And this country is an idea,
and the immigrant is the symbol of that idea.
And I want to make sure that people understand
that the thing they like about my point of view
is it's-- 'cause, it's a l-- it's different.
And it's from a different place with...
My grandma believes in ghosts and spirituality,
and you know, it's not a coincidence
that I made those stories about what I make them.
That's the way I grew up, and that's where my culture is.
Earlier, I wasn't ready to commit to thrillers.
I didn't even find the genre 'til I was 25 with Sixth Sense.
My primary genre is thriller, but I can still do these other things.
You know, I wrote Stuart Little
And there was a part of me that could've done that,
just gone and done kids movies, you know,
and movies for families.
There was a period of time
where I was trying to straddle both a little bit,
where I wasn't doing children's movies, pure children's movies,
like Stuart Little, nor was I doing, you know, my thrillers.
You can drop the act, brother.
It's just the two of us.
Okay. All right.
This thing that I love, that I didn't really acknowledge,
which was, I like dark humor.
This is something that I really love doing,
and I think audiences are ready to hear that dark humor note.
Servant has a lot of this kind of inappropriate dark humor.
I love that, and I want it to be throughout my work from now on.
Since film school, I was relating to European cinema,
and then Japanese cinema,
and slowly realized,
maybe my pacing wasn't American necessarily,
but was coming from other influences.
It was speaking a certain cadence, and a certain language,
and even I have those conversations with my partners now
when they go sell my movies.
"When you're doing the trailers,
don't make them look like the cadence of the other movies that are made.
Make it minimal and slower,
and make people stop getting on their, working on their computer
or looking at their phone, and they have to look up
because it's rhythmically new to them,
and they're forced to look."
There's a reason that the shot's taking that long
and there's no music, or you're just listening to breathing.
And it causes everybody to stop.
It's kind of visual meditation a little bit.
Okay, rehearsal's up.
Quietly, please.
When we say, "Oh wow, that's cinematic,"
what we're saying actually is, "You really cared about the frame."
"You really cared about the visual storytelling."
"Oh, that lighting has a meaning. It's making me feel something."
"Wow, the camera's is exactly the right distance from the subject,
with the exact right framing.
It's like a painting or a singular photograph
that's evoking something in me."
Again, when we don't say that, it's because it's generalized.
When we say "cinema", we're aware that there's--
care has been taken for every art form:
the costumes, the sound, everything, the blocking, the dance of it,
all of that,
has been thought out, and it's evoking something very specific in us,
that usually is reserved for cinemas.
Leanne?
Leanne Grayson?
Hello, Mrs. Turner.
When we watch something that is generalized,
and you don't need to look up to know,
you know, roughly where you are or what's going on,
you don't have to commit of yourself because I didn't commit to you.
And slowly over time,
we've seen examples where that has broken that form.
And it is hard to look away.
And it's hard to define what you're looking at.
For us, as time went on and the 24 episodes per season
shrunk down, and it became 20, and then 18, and then--
"Oh, wait, 10 episodes per season."
As the demand has shrunk, the quality level is rising at the same time.
And here, with Servant, we halved it again!
We said, "We're gonna do half-hour thrillers."
Shh!
It's just me!
-What the hell are you doing? -He's gone AWOL, Uncle George.
We're getting close to the equation that film has.
In this situation, if we stay in the same location like a play,
it's getting close to--
you're not just running around and getting things done
because you have this laundry list of things to get done.
You can actually do this at a very, very high level.
After the first season, I knew roughly where I wanted to go.
And I was at my house for 4 months, I just put up a board and I said,
"I'm just gonna figure out where it's going,
and how long it's gonna take there.
And that will seep into everything we're doing."
Every choice, every camera angle, every casting decision.
It'll start moving, and you'll feel it as an audience member,
"Wow, they know where they're going.
And I can feel where we are,
and the GPS inside me is telling me we're here,
on the road to the end."
I'm drawn to knowing the ending in a long form situation.
When I started the show, I think that Apple didn't realize
I absolutely meant it when I said we weren't leaving this house.
I think after I handed in the first episode,
they were like, "Wow, that was great, that was all in the house."
And then the second episode and the third episode,
and then the fifth episode, and then the eighth episode,
and then the tenth episode...
And then we started season 2, and they were like,
"Are you staying in the house?"
I'm like, "Yeah, we're staying in the house."
Now I've kind of worked out every episode in my head,
all the way to the end of the show,
and how does our world expand, and being very meticulous about
how we're expanding the world, but keeping it essentially in the house.
-We're rolling on this now? -Yeah.
Okay, here we go. Ready?
And... action.
I get to work with wonderful people,
that I never get to work with,
'cause it's so myopic making movies.
I go and make a movie, it takes me two years.
Most of it's in an editing room, or in a room alone writing,
and storyboarding.
So that's most of those two years.
And so you're-- I'm almost isolated with either one other person
for a majority of my life.
Making a show, I get to work with all of these wonderful people here
and try new people, try to work with new people,
learn new things from new people. I can take risks.
Um, costume designers, and production designers, and actors,
and writers, and editors, and composers, and it's like film school.
It's just a wonderful experience for me.
I'm taking full advantage of it, and it's affecting my movies.
It's just a wonderful experience for me to go
from this isolationist way of making my career
to kind of being with others and learning and growing.
We either will do one of two things as human beings.
We either calcify or we expand.
You don't have the option to stay where you are.
It's not an option. That's not... that's not life.
All right, here we go. Roll, please.
A only, mark.
I love supporting other filmmakers.
This is an opportunity for me to grab somebody
who maybe wouldn't have had this opportunity before
and giving them the opportunity and teaching them to follow their voice,
and showing them how amazing they are.
And they're doing things that I could never do,
because they're doing it in their own singular voice.
And... action!
When we get directors,
I pick the directors 'cause I saw their film at a film festival
or I saw their short film somewhere,
they're from some country somewhere
and I brought them here and I said, "Don't change.
Be exactly as weird and different.
Don't try to be me, and don't try to please everybody.
Be you, specifically.
And I want you to do an episode that no one else could've done...
just you."
I want that specificity.
And I think hearing someone's voice unadulterated is a very powerful thing.
I love that.
That if we have different voices from around the world...
I want Servant to feel different.
It wasn't a cookie cutter show.
Dorothy Turner.
Do I know you?
They're all people that have connected with me
very deeply as artists.
So you're already starting at a common language.
They're not doing things that I don't get.
I get what they're doing, they're doing it differently than I'm doing it.
I'm not asking them to change who they are.
I'm really celebrating who they are.
My hope is, you know,
I keep on growing this family of artists.
It's slightly different than me,
but it's still in a value system that is mine.
Why haven't you told her?
No, no, no, no. Follow her!
You follow Leanne!
What I want for Servant is to be hard to define.
You don't know whether to laugh, whether to scream.
Is this a farce? Or is this a tragedy?
As long as we understand our language and we're very specific,
we don't speak like anyone else, you have to listen to us.
And I believe when you do art like that,
you're giving everyone permission to be individuals.
And to learn about who they are themselves.
Nothing matters if I don't have my son.
My goal is for this show, when we get to its last episode,
we have not lost its quality level.
In fact, you're gonna know instantaneously,
"Wow, there is no show like it. Period."