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- We just need to acknowledge the unprecedented
times we're in, between the Coronavirus
and the outcry about social injustice, and I'm curious
how this current time is affecting you creatively.
- Initially, partly 'cause I got sick,
I got the virus very early on,
and it completely knocked me sideways
and trashed about four weeks,
but I didn't have to go to the hospital,
so it was unpleasant, but it wasn't dangerous.
It's gonna sound perverse to say it,
but I think there are positives within this pandemic,
and one of them is that it shows up
all of the populist leaders around the globe,
Boris Johnson in my country, Trump in yours, Bolsonaro,
it just shows what frauds they are.
It's uniquely the populist leaders
that have failed to deal with this virus.
It's very, very specifically them,
and it's because they lie,
and their lies don't work against reality.
And they've managed to push away reality with their bullshit
up to this point, and this has penetrated it.
- It just feels sort of different,
the way you're looking at character arcs
and stories and themes, and there's just certain things
that feel like, "Oh, you know, we can't do that anymore."
It just changed the whole perspective on certain things.
I'm kind of glad for the change, honestly.
I feel like there's been a lot of talk
and a lot of pushing to get here,
but I'm glad that things feel different, and I welcome it,
even it's been sort of a very difficult way to get there.
- You know, for me, it's interesting,
because when we first got shut down on season three of Pose,
when I was directing the premiere,
I was like, "Okay, good, I can take a breath,
"I can go home for three weeks."
You know, we thought it would be a cute little three weeks,
and I felt a deep sense of creative energy,
and then the news headlines were hitting
more and more and more about who was being
disproportionately impacted by the Coronavirus.
And I found myself as an artist and a creative
not being able to concentrate on the actual work,
and I found myself being called
to pay more attention to the news, to Twitter,
and of course, George Floyd happens, and Ahmaud Arbery,
and Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and then of course,
black trans women being killed, and all of this stuff
is bubbling up in my various communities,
and when I look at the work that I've done
on Pose and on Hollywood,
oftentimes, it's about outsiders looking in,
coming in and wanting to change systems,
surviving and having resilience
despite these systems pushing them down.
So for me, I don't think that it's going to change my work.
I think it's just a more urgent call to get to work.
- I think even beyond sort of our jobs, too,
our own personal lives, talking to our families.
A lot of us have little children,
and explaining to them from the ground up
what is happening and what that means.
We were here in West Hollywood
when police cars were being burned next to us,
but also, the protest was around us, and that energy.
So we had to talk about all those things,
and I think as artists, as we all are,
we're very sensitive to where we are as human beings too.
- I moved to New York.
I was in the middle of a move to New York in March,
nine months pregnant,
with a five-year-old, (Anna laughs)
and really, the first part of the time was just like,
trying to figure out how to have a baby during a pandemic,
trying to get myself situated
in a house where I could really shelter-in-place.
I find myself kind of struggling with every day,
"How am I gonna be a good mom?
"How am I gonna be (Anna laughs)
a good parent right now?"
I haven't even really arrived
at how to deal with it creatively yet.
- I've been kind of fascinated for many years
with the structure of our society, the way that it works,
and we've talked a little bit about this.
We have the luxury in a science fiction show
where you get to talk at a certain remove.
I think one of the other problems
that we're beginning to realize is a certain complacency
amongst people who might not think of themselves as racist,
a complacency in saying, "Oh, well, I've done my part.
"I've done a little bit,"
and it's clear the little bit is not enough.
So it feels like there's a moment here
to take stock of the things we're all doing
as people and as an industry and say,
"The depth of the problem is much more significant."
- The creative effect that had on me
was that I was writing about civil disobedience.
I was looking back in time,
and I was thinking about civil rights and Stonewall
and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations
and AIDS activists, the ACT UP people.
It wasn't a march with an Instagram photo or an angry tweet.
It was going out again and again and again and again.
So I was writing a thing
about the importance of civil disobedience.
And then, civil disobedience started again,
real, real civil disobedience.
So I just instantly stopped writing.
I'd written a quarter, two episodes of an eight-part thing,
and I just thought, "Well, never mind that,
"because it's already started."
So now I'm sort of hunting around for something else to do.
But in both instances,
I'm kind of pleased, and it's a pleasure
that comes out of something very, very dark.
Both of these things are very, very sinister and dark,
but there's a part of me that takes a grim satisfaction
at the response, at the result of showing liars
that they're liars and getting people to fight
about things they should fight about.
- Janet, you have so much work you've done
over the last year, but I'm especially curious
about Hollywood, because it does explore
if different diverse people
had really gotten to have more moments in this industry.
- I've always been fascinated with 1940s star-making machine
of the studio system, and the films at that time period
were kind of like building blocks for me and my own kind of,
you know, my obsession with glamor
and the way that people move their bodies
and a lot of the things that you kind of see in my work.
And so I think that the revisionist history of it
was interesting to me as a fan of that time period,
and I had made a pitch to Ryan.
I said, "What if the one colored girl on contract
"ends up fighting for a screen test, and she gets the role?
"How does that change everything?"
How do the people outside the studio system react?
And so for me, that was the interesting part
about working on Hollywood.
- John, with Home Before Dark,
I read that you were finishing up Crazy Rich Asians,
and you were looking for something meaningful to do next.
Can you tell me what about that project
you felt was meaningful and drew you to it?
- Crazy Rich Asians changed my whole perspective
of what kind of stories, you know,
when you make a movie like that, and that energy on set
of everyone having a higher purpose,
I remember hearing Hilde Lysiak's story
of this nine-year-old who broke a story in her hometown,
and I remember seeing her YouTube videos
of people having all these bad comments on her,
and rather than shrink back, she made a video
where she read all the bad comments out loud.
And that had stuck with me for years.
And so when they brought that up,
that they got the rights to that,
and that this was not gonna be a kids show,
"kids show," this was for the whole family,
and that this little girl
is seriously as any hero in any superhero movie.
That was very exciting for me.
The idea of the search for truth
is the thing that really got me.
- Anna, you went from Captain Marvel,
which was the first female-centered Marvel movie,
to working on Mrs. America,
and obviously that's also a story centered on feminists.
So I'm curious, were you aware of sort of gravitating
towards feminist stories back-to-back like that?
- Honestly, I wasn't.
I didn't choose it because I wanted to keep making
feminist stories, but it did end up being, like,
I'm kind of working, I'm in post on Captain Marvel,
in a very, very intense period,
and I don't wanna read anything.
I'm not interested in my next project.
I just wanna take a long nap.
And the script came in,
and it was like these real-life
female superheroes, (Anna laughs)
all these people who I kind of grew up learning about
and having so much admiration for, and yet,
it was told from such a different point of view, I mean,
really told through the anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly,
and it piqued my interest and made me keep reading.
(Anna laughs) And it didn't hurt
that Cate Blanchett who was also
kind of a female superhero was involved.
But I don't think it was,
I don't think about what I'm gonna do next
as part of being a theme of something I'm exploring.
It just is whatever I can get passionate enough about
to focus the next couple years of my life on.
- Deborah, I do wanna hear about, you know,
stepping into Mandalorian, of course,
there were multiple directors on this project,
and I'm curious how that affects
the way you worked on your episode.
- It was an interesting experience,
because it was like nothing
I'd ever done in television before,
just 'cause the process was completely different,
because we were in there so early.
I was there two and a half months ahead,
and we pre-vis'd everything going in,
'cause obviously we're doing the volume technology,
which, we had to do the pre-vis for is.
As a result, what was really interesting about it
was that all the directors got to really know each other,
because we'd all be doing pre-vis
or prep at different times.
So, as oppose to sort of regular TV
or traditional TV where you kind of maybe just overlap
a little bit with somebody, ships passing in the night,
we really got to know each other,
and we actually started I think, in a lot of ways,
leaning on each other and sort of collaborating
to sort of figure out, "Okay, movement.
"How are we defining this character my movement?"
So it was an interesting process,
because it was almost like a team,
which I have never been part of in such a way.
- So you have to pre-vis every shot in the volume?
Or can you riff on the day?
- To an extent.
I mean, you do have to pre-vis, 'cause basically,
they're going out to get, they're doing the photogrammetry
and they're building the environment.
So you need several weeks in order for them
to have that content ready on the screen.
Once you have it on the screen,
then you could riff to a certain extent.
Within the environment,
you can change the blocking somewhat or change the angles,
but you can't change what's on the screen.
So that's what you're having to commit to early on.
- Jonah, I did wanna ask you about season three of Westworld
and directing, because I know you didn't direct
in season two, but you decided
to take on this episode in season three.
What was it about this one that you had to do yourself?
- On season three, it really felt like,
look, we're reinventing the grammar of the show completely.
This was one of the things we were excited about
with the show, was that in every season,
it could subtly shift genre.
So, we had been shooting a western, and for this season,
we needed to really take a look,
and from the beginning, Lisa and I struggled with,
"Okay, well, how's this gonna work?
"What's it gonna look like?
"How do you do it on a TV schedule and budget?"
I felt like I needed to be the guinea pig.
I had a vision.
You're threading the needle here, visions of the future.
Blade Runner has kind of dominated the space for so long.
You're asking someone to invent a visual language.
Near future I think is actually,
in many ways, kind of the tallest order.
Far future, you can get out there,
and you can kind of create from whole cloth.
Near future, you need to come up with something
that also rings true for an audience.
I figured if we screwed it up, it would be my fault,
and I would have only myself to blame,
and in truth, I just love working with our cast and crew,
so it was a lot of fun to be back in the director's seat.
- I'm curious, when you were pitching devs, did people.
- I didn't pitch it. - Oh, you didn't?
- I didn't.
I come from a sort of independent film background,
a bit like Jonah, and I write it as a spec, basically.
The issue I've always had with pitches and treatments
is that I personally can't tell from a treatment
whether it will work as a script.
And so, it's actually much easier for me
to write it as a script, and then it will get made.
Sometimes people don't wanna make them.
That's the brakes.
So yeah, there was no pitch.
There was a script.
And then you've got a good creative position,
because people aren't there for notes.
You're really saying, "Do you wanna make it or not?"
- What's the most heartbreaking one that didn't get made?
You don't have to tell us the premise.
- The most heartbreaking ones
are some of the ones that did get made.
(all laughing)
I'd much rather have a bad script
not get made than a bad script made.
(all laughing)
But, you know, that would be kissing and telling.
- How are you feeling about the idea of production
starting up again, and what do you feel like
will have to change for that to work for you?
- I'll jump in.
I'm feeling very apprehensive about it.
You feel very responsible for your crew.
We have a relatively minor illness,
Westworld season three,
and it was a massive amount of money that went into that.
It's hugely disruptive.
So if you consider a disease that incubates
for 14 to 18 days, that people can be asymptomatic,
we still know so little about this.
- There is just one thing.
I understand the apprehension,
and of course it's correct to have apprehension.
And I've got it too.
But at the same time,
I don't know if we can all sit around saying,
"A vaccine's gonna turn up."
We do work in an industry,
and the people that we're talking protecting,
there's other ways they need protecting
as well as their physical health, which is economically.
And they need to work.
We do have to find a way to get back on set.
It's the only thing I've maybe ever agreed
with Donald Trump about,
which is some of the economic consequences
become quite serious in themselves, you know,
if people aren't earning, if people not have money.
I'm definitely gonna stop saying that,
'cause I really, I can feel like I'm breaking out in hives
finding myself in a point of agreement with him,
but I do think we need to get back to work.
I really, really do feel that strongly.
- So guys, we're gonna end this with one lighter question
I'm gonna have you all answer, and the question is,
if there was one director, alive or dead,
you could sit down with and pick his or her brain
about their work, who would you pick?
- Fuck.
Holy fucking shit.
(all laughing)
- That's a big question.
- I'm just gonna say a name, all right,
because it's a long list.
I was gonna say Nick Roeg.
- Robert Altman. - Kurosawa
- Nora Ephron and George Cukor.
- I was gonna say Kurosawa, so, Deborah, you blew me up.
(Deborah laughs)
- To be honest, one of those people
would be Alex Garland, for sure.
- You're really kind.
- I'll get your email later.
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