The Watch - ‘The White Lotus’ Season Finale and Barry Jenkins on ‘The Underground Railroad’

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

Chris and Andy break down the season finale of ‘The White Lotus’ and reflect on why the season worked so well (1:00). Then they are joined by Barry Jenkins to talk about the challenges of creating ‘The Underground Railroad’ (40:49) and what’s coming next (1:17:41). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Barry Jenkins Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He's finally been moved into the pineapple suite. It's Andy Greenwald! Too little too late, buddy. Yeah. What's up, man? It's Monday morning when you're hearing this or Sunday evening when you're hearing this. We're recording this a little bit early so that we can get this out right after the White Lotus season finale. I say season and that series because it's been renewed for another installment, another adventure and another, I'm sure, luxury resort.

where everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong. Andy and I are going to be discussing the White Lotus season one finale going forward today. So all spoilers included, if you haven't gotten a chance to watch it yet, just wait until you do because we spoil a show. And then in the second half of the show, Andy and I are joined by one of the great filmmakers, great working filmmakers in World Cinema right now, Barry Jenkins, who joined us to speak about Underground Railroad, Amazon's Underground Railroad, the multiple Emmy nominated limited series, limited drama based on Colson Whitehead's novel. that is an astonishing piece of filmmaking and astonishing piece of storytelling. And we were so happy to talk to Barry about this, this monumental achievement. It's pretty amazing. I really encourage people to check out as much of the show as they can, if not all of it.

And I love the opportunity to talk to Barry because we are obviously huge fans of his work. Moonlight, if Beale Street could talk. And also very excited about future projects of his, which we did talk briefly about in the course of this interview, including the upcoming, hopefully someday soon, upcoming season three of the Nick. So we'll get to that in the back half of the show. But first, this is a response pod. Starting right now, we're going to start talking about stuff that happened

in the season finale of White Lotus. Sorry to producer Kaya, who has not seen the episode before recording us and what's becoming a hallow tradition on the watch is Chris and Andy's spoil shows for Kaya. But let's turn it into the clue game that I think some people were kind of thinking in terms of for this show. and it was Shane in the pineapple suite with the knife

and the body at the beginning of the series that we see being loaded into the plane. Turns out to be Armand, played by Murray Bartlett, the hotel manager. Who was my pick on Bovada or whatever to be the only recurring character in season two. So thanks so much.

This is why you don't go to Vegas with Greenwald. Andy, let's start with the quote-unquote mystery the who-dudet element. Yes. There's always an element, a part of this that felt like paying the bills, like you start with a body so that there is just sort of like a compelling reason

to keep going if for some reason you find resistance otherwise is that people will want to see what happens to lead to this to this dead body. Did you find this to be a satisfying plot line? And what did you think of the sort of resolution of that particular part of the show? Well, for me, my answer goes back to something that I was trying to articulate last week, which was just that what shines through to me, shown through to me after, the penultimate episode, and now even more so after the finale, is that Mike White is really good at this. He is an exceptionally talented and, you know, exciting and surprising writer, television writer, but he's also a phenomenally professional television writer. So it's one thing to dangle a body

in episode one and then coast a little bit because you know you've hooked a certain type of fan who will want to know a certain type of answer to a certain type of question. The question that has, to your point over the last few weeks, dominated prestige TV recently. But it's another thing to be like, okay, so this is the path that I've set us on. Let's enjoy it. Let's take advantage of what it's given us, as opposed to thinking of just, you know, hiding behind it. And that really kicked in for me in this episode.

I've said before how I felt like the White Lotus was very challenging, at least for me to view week to week or even for us to consider a week to week. Now that I see the totality of it, I really have appreciated. the craftsmanship along the way a lot more, mainly because all of the, it's sometimes digressive seeming character work that we either enjoyed or laughed at or endured over the previous five weeks, all of it pays off with an excruciating finale in the best way of suspense and anticipation because we know. And not just we know that there's a body and that there will be someone will be shuffling off the mortal coil before the end of the episode.

We know these people, and we know them in a way that is almost painfully intimate at times. Yeah. And so here we are. And then tip, but you're the one wearing a hat, so I'm going to ask you on my behalf to tip it to Mike White, because what he does with knowing that his audience is in the palm of his hand to the degree that it is in the finale, he has fun with it. I mean, the little misdirects, like Quinn's beautiful experience

and then being like, I don't want to go scuba diving, my arms are numb. And you're like, right. Okay, well, R.I.P. Quinn, he's expendable. That's clearly where we're headed.

To Shane introducing a knife during or right near an enormous fight, existential fight with Rachel. We're like, well, she's not going to kill him because he's there in the first episode. Okay. to then the Coudegras, the Chef Boyardie, kiss emoji,

which was Jennifer Coolidge's characters, just really wiry and muscular swimming. Later arriving out of the bullpen, yeah, boyfriend. Suddenly coughing to a degree that in all other recorded instances of storytelling leads to a handkerchief to the mouth that is removed, daubed with blood. Uh-huh. And then you see him there with Shane there and he's going to have to save him, but he dies.

And that's why he looked at it. It's great. And then having the character be like, I've had some health issues. And she's like, this should be a grand adventure. Like, that's not manipulative. That's being like, okay, I know where I, that's dressing for the occasion. You know what I mean? And so that made this episode gripping in a way that the others weren't.

And I think that's okay. I think that was fun. That was leaning into it. And I really, really, as I texted to you, right up into the moment of visually depicted defecation was all in and thought this is a phenomenal episode. Yeah, you know, I wanted to talk about the death of the Armand character in a very specific way, because something that I've been thinking about a lot with TV recently, especially as I think that limited series come with a preloaded sense of,

not self-importance like they're pretentious, but feel like they are, well, there's some kind of like significance to the fact that they're only making a certain amount of episodes and that there's got be some sort of significance to the story. And I guess what I'm really reaching for is like, is there a subtextual reading that should go along with almost any show like this? Like, is there something that's more than just what's on the surface that we can see from the story? And so I was kind of probing, like questioning, like, why Armand, right? And what does his death mean outside of it's a convenient punctuation mark at the end of a sentence that is, this show. There's something about it that I think is, you know, sad. The way that that guy's life

spins out of control and then is almost like disposable. I mean, by the end of these series, obviously, Shane gets to just go about his life. You know, Armand is probably viewed as like kind of a drug-addled guy who just went off the rails. And everybody gets to go on the plane and go on with their lives. And this guy is not even memorialized on the show at all. It's just sort of like this was just sort of this disposable human being, which when to kind of go back to my larger point about what's the subtext of this of the White Lotus here. And there's a lot of different like, you know, schools of thought out there about this. I think it's ultimately about the transactional nature of relationships specifically in this place, but maybe in life itself, that

your happiness always has to cost something from someone else. Yes, I think you're exactly right. And I think that the pathos of that moment was well delivered and powerful. And I think I think that I have given the show short shrift in a lot of ways. Because whether it's because I, myself, am to a degree, one of the show's targets, I think that the, I think that I downplayed the significant- Target audience or target of, like, you're the kind of person that would be satirized. Well, as an upper middle class married white person who would love to vacation in Hawaii as soon as possible, yeah. And I think that any sponsorship deals, get at me.

But I think that I gave short shrift to the significance of a major week-to-week HBO series being this incisive and insightful about issues of race and class in the contemporary, in contemporary capitalist economy. You know, I think that you and I, maybe because we're extremely online or whatever, like some of the stuff that was in Mark's mouth, for example, or that played out with Paula, I'm like, yeah, these are issues that we either grapple with when we talk to people or read the Atlantic or whatever, but like these ideas are hopefully present in our minds. It is incredibly difficult, I think, to articulate them in a generous, creative storytelling way, the way Mike White did. And I think that. when the show premiered, there were people who were correctly saying, oh, it's very much a contemporary upstairs downstairs, which has become a catch-all term for a certain type of storytelling, Cosford Park, downtown. But it refers to literally a show with that title that was about a British manor house, I believe, and the rich people who lived upstairs

and the serving staff who lived and worked downstairs. And what this show does that advances the narrative quite considerably, I think, and sometimes savagely, is be like, there isn't upstairs and a downstairs, but only one of those flights matters. Ultimately, upstairs stays upstairs. Upstairs people can take a couple steps down into the basement. They can look around. They can befriend people, to use my favorite Titanic metaphor, they can even check out

the Irish folk dancing happening in steerage. That's cool. But at the end of the day, when the boat's going down, they're helping themselves to the rescue vessels. You know what I mean? And they are doing it together and for each other. and there is a base to return to. Yeah, that's a very effective part

when Paula is just like, this is your tribe at the end of the day, like, this is your family and this is your tribe, and like, don't pretend you're my friend. And what the show did, I think, very well, that I was not fully cognizant of because I hadn't seen the end of it, was that genuinely characters like Olivia

returning to her mother's embrace, there's nothing, quote, unquote, wrong with that. Like Olivia has behaved in ways that we may view negatively or we may have feelings about how she acts towards everyone. But her crying and being held by her mother, like that's objectively, and her trying to reach out to Paul in the same way,

like these are kind gestures. But I think what the show forces us to consider, and I really admire this, is of what value are individual small kind gestures in a completely broken system that choose people up and spits them out? And the people who got spit out are uniformly not white or in the case of Armand, you know, in the service industry on the wrong side of the stairs.

Yeah, I guess I'm curious as to whether or not you thought that that perception, that Mike White's kind of worldview was limited to people on vacation or people. Well, I think that there's something really remarkable about when you're on vacation, you're incredibly vulnerable, right? And you're in this weird thing where you're like, especially if you do something like this and you're like, I'm spending a lot of money. And because I'm spending a lot of money, instead of being relaxed because I've spent this money

and I'm just going to let it happen and let myself be taken care of, there are people who become Shane's. There are people who are like, how am I being screwed, how am I not getting what I thought I was paying for? How am I not getting the experience I thought I wanted? I thought there was going to be a plunge ball. I'm not saying like Shane is right, obviously.

I'm saying that that is a common pathology that you see when you go on a vacation. You see people who are like, I just got back from vacation. And let me tell you, like, people are very agitated with customer service in a way that's pretty disturbing out there in these streets. Which is why we all respect the fact that you duct tape yourself to your seat on your flight back.

That's right. I was just preemptively doing it. Yeah, right. I wore six masks and then just duct tape myself to my seat. Not on your face, weirdly, which would probably led to the duct tape. But yes. Yes. I kept trying to, like, make someone an air marshal, like a citizen's air marshal, siring.

just like. No, it didn't go over. No, it didn't work. I think that that's right. And I think that it's, again, just a very cany framing for a show like this because the thing about vacations is they are at once, you know, radically freeing, but also that can be terrifying. And in a way, only Quinn had the type of vacation experience that everyone lies to

themselves about wanting to be transformed, to step outside of who they were, and to to embrace it and to choose it and to be freed. What most people want out of vacations, whether their vacations are, you know, coddled and luxurious, like a White Lotus property, or if they're like, I'm going to go sleep in the jungles of Nicaragua for two weeks or whatever. There is a level of it which is controlled by its definition as a vacation, right? It is a, it's jumping off a bridge with the bungee attached.

It's going on a roller coaster to be. scared, but also to be safe. And we saw that play out, I think in ultimately kind of compelling ways with the Mossbockers and with Shane and Rachel, because they went right up to the edge of themselves, of their fears, of their, you know, loneliness or their everything, honestly. And at the crisis point, they did what most people would do, which is retreat to the safety. Yeah. And I, and I think that the amount of time spent with them gave them some measure, almost a surprising measure of dignity, or at least empathy in the audience for them. You know what I mean? Like, of course, there is love in the Mosbacher family. What we see when they arrive is how they're behaving on vacation. That's exactly right.

With the detritus and calcium deposits of all the resentments and everything, in a way, it's an incredibly successful vacation for them. They shook it off. And they are back to not necessarily a healthy place, but they're back to a pre-existing place that they had deviated from, right, where they are protective or respectful or loving or at least all on the same page. And it's a page that excludes Paula. And it's a page that functions in a very introverted way. Yeah. I mean, I think that you hit the nail on the head there where it's like Mike White's genius is the ability to satirize the behavior of characters while still. having you care about the characters themselves. And when I say care about, I don't necessarily

mean like, you know? I don't know, I think this is an important thing to me. And I, and, and, and I don't necessarily mean like, would love to hang out with, you know, or like this person is my avatar. I just think, like you said, if you spend six hours watching people do something, you're probably emotionally invested or psychologically invested on some level, even if you're not fans of their work as people. Yes. And I think that what was crucial in this, in this episode, I mean, I texted you, Alexander Didario's like, I'm leaving you. I mean, she nailed it. It's a beautiful performance.

And it is satisfying as a viewer in a way that the show has, you know, doesn't really give you very often. But that moment, while important, was not as important, I think, to the project of the show as Jennifer Coolidge's speech to Belinda, which is entirely about her needs, which is what a resort is meant to service, right? where she says, and again, we have empathy for this character. We have seen the depth of her cane. For Bolina. For Tanya. We understand. You know, we've seen it.

We have empathy for her. We also have enormous empathy for Belinda. And so when Tanya stands in front of her and it's just like, I need to take better care of myself. Yeah. I love you and I'm grateful to you, but I cannot enter into this type of relationship with you to protect myself and to break old habits. Does she say like I don't want to make all of my relationships

transactional? Yes, literally that. And that is legitimate. And she gives her a bunch of cash. It is also devastating and completely lacking an awareness of the moment. Similarly, we see Rachel and we feel for her and we are, if any, you know, if there is any subjective hero in many ways through these last few episodes, deterred, mainly because Shane is the most villainous. But because of the screen of vacation, we've only seen her here as victim. We forget, or at least I forget, I think it's partly intentional, that, you know, when she's back in New York, she's writing venomous and or vacuous listicles about people. You know, she is, she deserves humanity. She's also not this great martyr.

And when she's just like, the one black lady who's nice to me, now save me, now you're the person who's going to save me. And Baldwin is like, I'm not going to do this. And then she returns to Shane. Is it because of Belinda's rejection of her? or is it because of a deeper awareness of who she is in her own weaknesses? I don't know. Do you think that there's a scene missing, not a scene missing, like they didn't get it on the day or something?

But is there a scene missing that is the jump from, I'm leaving you to I'm back at the airport waiting for you and saying, like, I'm going to be happy now to Shane? Not for me because I think that both because of performance and writing, we understand her struggles with self-confidence and place. in the world. I mean, you could look, there's another thing that I think you could look at as a missing piece that's kind of a criticism, but I actually think it works to the show's favor, which is she seems to have no support system. If you are on a honeymoon with someone who is

revealing himself to be Patrick Bateman, like an absolute monster, one might expect to see her furiously texting with her BFFs or bridesmaids. Or instead we have one scene where she tries to call her mom and her mom fades out. There's a bad connection or whatever. And I choose to think of that as intentional to say that she is very much alone. And there is a particular type of loneliness that is really well expressed in the show where she says to the most devastating thing she says to him is, I feel alone when I'm with you. Yeah, yeah.

But being alone with someone else there is still maybe preferable to the alone, the type of alone as she feels when she's totally alone. And so I bought it. And I think it also plays into a point that you made me really. too. I was just curious whether it was about like this guy almost died. So I almost feel... I think there's a piece of that too. Yeah.

It's like the Mossbacher thing again. Like you performed a male ritual and so I must pay tribute. But I think that it also ties into a really smart point you made a moment ago, which is how Mike White doesn't want us to like these characters. He wants us to understand them. And that does run counter to what people expect out of television, right? And I think the hero arc of the White Lotus or in less expert hands or confident hands would be at least we get her leaving Shane.

at least we get this gift. But the way that he conceives of the show is these are deeply flawed people like people are. And it's not going to work that way. We've seen the extremes because he's shown us the way people behave on vacation. And then then we move on. I'm very grateful that we're not going to spend more time with these people because I think that we've seen it. We have, you know, it's like if there's a, like a compost pile or something, it's school. at my daughter's school, and you lift up the lid, and you're like, oh, there are all the creepy

crawlies, like, that's what happens to the coffee grounds. I'm going to put that back. You know what I mean? You don't need to then pull up a chair and watch it for multiple seasons. It's cool that they're going to do another one of these. I'm glad they're not bringing back this cast in any capacity. Like, this is the same group of people decides to go on vacation again. I do think that if they had known that they were making multiple seasons of the White Lotus, I wonder how that would have impacted the writing of the White Lotus. Do you know what I mean? like if he knew I was going to do two or three seasons of this and maybe it was all set at this particular hotel or not, I don't know.

Would Armand or Belinda have been more clearly the lead through which we see the show because he would be like, this is going to be the consistent thing. These two people are going to work at this hotel and people are going to come in. Or do you just kind of like, because I think that the sort of, the liberty that he has to kind of leave these people to know that. he is leaving these people, allows him to be a little bit more pointed about how he sees them, I think. Because I think that if you're like, God, I got to like, people are going to need to watch 22 episodes of this or 45 episodes of this or spend three years of these people, you might

soften the edges a little bit, you know? A million percent. I think the, the baked in narcotic slash lie of episodic serialized television is, can people change? And The lies that in TV is that they kind of do in ways that are accelerated and not quite at all like the way it happens in real life. And that can be transporting and exciting. And it allows you to invest because I want to see if these people are capable of changing and what not just because of how it reflects upon us, but what might become of them. And the power of this show is that Belinda, who is the moral center of the show, does not get a

happy ending. Instead, she doesn't really get an ending. that's her end. She's even going to get a grace note. Yeah, she just gets like... She's back and she has to put a smile on again. And that is her life. And we have understood that and we've agonized over it with her and we feel her hope and we understand that she's a beautiful and kind person. But this is also the world. And to extend that would, I think, be a disservice to what he did achieve. And it made it honestly, I mean, I realize I'm coming at this finale with a different tone than the past five weeks. But I was, I was definitely moved and affected by the finale. Different tone because the last five weeks, you were kind of like, this is real good and kind of like moving through it because that's how I was I think. Yes, I didn't really, it really did feel like it was a journey that you couldn't understand until the destination for me because I didn't quite know where we were going, which may have hampered my full throated investment in a way, which is great. But there's also that thing that he does very well.

but like when you're in it week to week some of the kind of like sidesteps from comedy to drama or you know like comic things that are the scenes that seem entirely constructed for a joke

even if the joke is very like sort of scabrous kind of like it's a very like you know ooh like that's like a very pointed joke if a scene feels like it's kind of all building towards that then it's it's a little bit of an adjustment when those scenes start to when they ask you to sort of, say, Paula and Olivia,

get very emotionally invested in two characters who seem almost like sociopaths for the earlier part of the season, you know? And the Paula Olivia relationship is one that I found really hard to figure out just because they are kind of like this Greek chorus for some of the series, and then they become kind of like the dramatic fulcrum for a moment with the Kai hotel robbery stuff, What did you think of that last Paula Olivia scene?

And did you want any more like backstory as to like who Paula was and what her character's sort of set up was? I don't think so because I think that what was made incredibly clear by the storytelling and by Brittany O'Grady's performance, which really shown in the last few episodes, I think, is just how profoundly tenuous her position upstairs to continue that metaphor is. in ways that other characters aren't sympathetic to. I mean, I think it was intentional and well-drawn that Connie Britton's character constantly is questioning the validity of Paula's ailments, and at the end says,

I guess something is wrong with her. Yeah, she really does have issues, yeah. Have issues. That's a bigger, I mean, that is, to my mind, Mike White, it is best, where she stumbles on a profound truth without understanding at all what she's saying. and also the fact that privilege when accrued, and this is, again, this is a more artful expression of it than the Steve Zahn speech that I kind of bagged on a little bit last week.

Privilege when accrued is both, I'll use the word again, tenuous or fleeting, but also must be even more zealously protected because of how slippery that slope is. And so when she attempts to go further downstairs, basically, to Kai and offer him something, when he is swallowed up by the forces that she's unleashed, she has a choice, right? I mean, she could continue her journey and jump off the stairs and be down there and admit what she did or defend him or whatever, or she can cling to her station. And the anguish of that was palpable and also visceral

in that she was literally vomiting her guts up throughout. For me, that was the right amount of that story. I thought that was artful. And every time, I really like the U.S. that question. And we texted a little bit about it yesterday too. And every time I tried to game out

what more we could do, it started to become unwieldy or almost. Yeah, I got that like these two people are friends at college and that they have a complicated relationship where obviously they have like a pose that they show to the world. They have like their own behind closed doors

or at least internal emotional relationship with one another. And then there is, going back to the sort of main theme of the show, this transactional nature to their relationship where Paula may get some fringe benefits of being Olivia's friend to get to go on a trip to Hawaii, but Olivia basically takes whatever she wants of Paula's life and that it can fall under this kind of nihilistic, free love, like, or the world's ending, so who cares? I'm so over it attitude. But like she obviously has taken romantic interests of Paula's in the past. And that was why she was sort of trying to hide the Kai thing for a while. Yeah, I mean, it's not an easy answer. I don't know necessarily that Paula being like,

you know, I lost my father or not, would explain anything. The big question I think is there are a lot of, I guess throughout the, when I think about it now, throughout the episode, there is that lack of that extra note that you would expect to be there. Paula never says, she never had, she never has a moment where she's like, maybe I should go explain my role in this crime so that Kai possibly doesn't get as bad of a sentence. Like, that's not going to happen. Belinda never gets to kind of have any kind of, we don't know what happens that goes that that goes from when Armand gets killed to what she's doing by the time she's back on the rocks, waving at the next group of guests. You know, we don't really know what happens to Quinn after he runs away from the plane. Like,

we really don't know what happens to a lot of these people in a way that I guess is obvious. a very conscious decision. Yeah, I think at a certain point, the show moved into, left took off from the ground, like the plane from reality in a sense, which I'm fine with. Again, this is when you leave

one person in charge of writing everything and then there's no time for notes and I think that can be a good thing. Example one, one, I'm not going to qualify it for me, is whatever the Mossbockers flaws, I do not think they would let a plane take off with them on it and they're underage them. Yeah, I mean, I imagine that like his dad was

like the next person out of the plane being like, where the fuck are you going? Like, I don't think he literally ran out into becoming... Similarly, the Hawaii PD do not seem to cover themselves in glory with their incredibly liberal attitude towards comings and goings of, you know, people who are deeply involved in serious criminal cases. Sure.

But that's fine. That's the nature of its TV and I accepted it because it worked thematically. I think it's worth shouting out a couple last things before we end this. Really, really sterling performances across the board. I mean, Steve's on I think it's never been better.

Sidney Sweeney as a non-euphoria watcher, I didn't know what she was capable of, and I thought that was really impressive needle threading throughout. Freddie Hedginger plays Quinn. Connie Britton was my favorite. Connie Britton is just solid. I mean, a performer who can play,

basically lay down the baseline for five of six episodes and then take a wild electric guitar solo in one and be good at both. I want to shout out Fred Hackinger, who is the connective tissue between the White Lotus and Underground Railroad. He's phenomenal on Underground Railroad and very different. This is,

kid is an actor to watch. I love Murray Bartlett. I hope he gets a hundred more parts from this. And Natasha Rothwell, who did so much with such a, so much of that character is not on the page. You know, there are the words,

but then there's the emotion behind the words. And like her, her centering herself after like a, when she gets dirt kicked in her face and kind of be like, fuck, okay, I'm going to keep my face on here. You know, it's really, it's really impressive.

Really special. Last quick things, I just want to run by you. When you are fortunate enough, Chris, and I won't, you know, who knows how often this has happened in your life, but if you're staying, if you've ever stayed at a place like a resort, not necessarily the six-star resort, but whatever, resort. Are there six-star resorts? I'm making it up. I don't know. But do you eat every meal at the hotel? Depends on where it's located, man. I mean, I will say that the one time I went to Hawaii, we did not on purpose because we really, this is overpriced and, and like,

we're just going to go to Mommy's Fish House. You know, like, this is like nine years ago, yeah. But the breakfast bar, overpriced, but like there's a lot of fruit. I get it.

You don't want to, you know, you want to get to the beach or whatever. Every dinner. Yeah. Every dinner? Really? Yeah.

Is the, is the seared, oh, no, that good? You know what I mean? Like, get out. Go see the town. Then you,

yeah, you know, you got to drink and drive, you know, It's tough. You got to? No, but like, if you go out for dinner and you're like, bring me my car or whatever, we rented a car, I'm going to go out and go.

Like, this is a stupid conversation. But, like, I find that there are advantages to keeping it local, you know? Last thing. Why did it take us until our last point about the show in the finale to realize that Mike White named the show after himself? Like, it could be called White Lotus. That's true. And it is a, you know,

incredibly probing and intelligent investigation and criticism of whiteness. It's all, Mike. Yeah. This is Auteur theory on a whole other level that I don't think I appreciated or realized until this moment. Let's talk briefly about Underground Railroad before we get, speaking of whiteness and some of the problems with it. Let's talk about Underground Railroad. So, Andy and I obviously mentioned this series when it debuted kind of in passing. We talked about the pilot, I think.

Yeah, we talked about the pilot. And, you know, it's fair to say that this isn't like something you watch casually. It's a project. I think it's worth pulling back the curtain. I say, Andy and I watched a lot of this season in a huge, like a race across the finish line, which is a, it's a choice, you know, to watch all of Underground Railroad over the course of a couple of days, which there's no right or wrong way to do. I've seen some people suggest you should do the first three, the middle three,

and there's like a kind of like not a bonus episode, but a shorter 20 minute episode is seven, and then finish it. And like you should watch it in these three chunks. There's no right or wrong way. But it took a little while for us to kind of get to the end point. And we, you know, when we did,

I think we both feel like different people after having watched it. I don't really know, we want to really like let Barry Jenkins talk about the show. but do you have anything you wanted to kind of add before we get in there? Well, I would say this first and foremost that like it's incredible to live in an era where we have this on television.

This is some of the best filmmaking that I think either of us have seen in a long time. It is repeatedly the most beautiful thing I've ever seen on my TV, the direction, the production design,

the cinematography, the lighting by James Lxton, who is, as Barry calls him, his best friend and collaborator. It is like nothing else I've ever seen and is absolutely transfixing and elevating and transporting. And at the same time, the images and the story are some of the most horrific and challenging that I've ever seen on any screen.

And it is, I think to your point, I mean, to watch, and it's also, it's quite, it's lengthy. I mean, it's 10 episodes. I think the probably total runtime is probably like, there's more than 10 hours, 12 hours maybe, because the majority of episodes get up for like 67. 105, 110, yeah. It is overwhelming for the senses in so many ways. And I think that both of us are still processing it. There are things that linger in the mind beautifully.

I talk to, when we talk to Barry, there's a moment in the later episodes in Indiana where the characters, there's a corn shucking party, and it's just, it's sort of haunting me in the romance of it. And there are other more haunting images, like in the middle Tennessee episodes of a land that is literally on fire. Yeah. You know, that there are moments, images for your dreams, images for your nightmares,

and it is almost too much to unpack, certainly too much to unpack in a glib way. I feel like, you know, the performances from William Jackson Harper, from Joel Edgerton, from Tussow, who's the lead of the show. I mean, it is, it's an incredible thing. And so I, but to what you said at the very beginning, I'm so glad we got stuck to about it because I think a lot of our questions were from a how do you do this? How did you see this for us and then show it to us perspective? And he was very generous in describing all that. And also, by the way, as someone who may and may not have had some issues with directors in the past on a personal, professional level, hearing a director talk so beautifully about collaboration. I mean, he talks as much about his act. He talks as much about a camera operator, nicknamed Possum in this interview that he does about like any actor. He is, I just think this guy is one of the good ones. in life and an art for the way he talks about a film crew. But ultimately, I just really liked the way he talked about this as what it meant for him personally

to complete this project and how satisfying it was, but then also how it being a television show is essential to its existence, not just because Amazon gave him the time and money to do it, but because you can control your engagement with it. And we get into that in the later part of the interview, but I do think that's important because I think that when we think about important filmmaking or all caps, the idea is, that we are meant to subsume ourselves to the vision and sit there and take it and take it in. And he's saying specifically this is on TV because he knows that there are aspects of this program that can be traumatic to any type of audience members.

Yeah, he wanted to show the things that he wanted to show and he knew that if you do that in a movie theater where people are basically trapped, that that might just be too traumatic, you know, to really. So he's encouraging the use of the pause button. Sure. the or the stop button to get up and walk around your house and come back in a couple weeks when you're ready for Tennessee button. That's all fine. There are some light spoilers for the series in our conversation, but again, I don't think that's really what the show is about. So I don't

think it matters. I hope you've seen it. But it's remarkable that he obviously adapted a a critically beloved and critically acclaimed book by Colson Whitehead. So it's it's Whitehead's novel. It's a it's obviously a dark stain on American history. It's one that I think that we're still trying to learn how to reckon with as a country. But he still managed to

make this very personal. The thing that really unlocked this show for me is Barry talking about it being part of an informal trilogy with Beale Street and Moonlight about mothers, you know, and about the inheritance that you

get from a parent and the way that he talks about and the sort of the mother figure of of Cora, the main character of the show, her mother is sort of a ghost that kind of hovers over this entire show. Played by an exceptional actress

named Sheila Atim, who I'd never encountered, who was one of the leads of the, you know, the basically DOA Game of Thrones spinoff that was supposed to happen. I hope we see more of her. She was really stunning.

She's extraordinary, but it's pretty remarkable to see somebody make something so deep, personal. And not, I don't mean like it wouldn't be personal, but I mean something that is of a piece with his other works. That is also something that is so necessary and something that everybody should should take heat of. I think that's exactly crucial. That's right. I mean, we are fans of this guy. And, you know, we're fans of what he's going to do next. He's going to make an Alvin Ailey biopic. He's got Nick Season 3. We talk about at the end, he's making Lion King 2 for Disney.

it's a very special kind of artist who can do exactly what you said, which is Underground Railroad, the novel, Pulitzer Prize winning novel, exists. And it's important that it exists. What he's doing as an artist is chasing his own muse and his own creativity. And that is why, for example,

the Sheila-At-him character, Mabel, from what I understand, I wish I'd read the book, I should. Her story is almost an aside in the narrative. What Barry did was made it the bedrock of the last episode, which is totally, discomforting for people who are expecting a TV show, frankly. You know, it's not the story you expect to have happened there. But that's true to his project, which is ultimately what we are engaging with, right?

And I think that once, I'm just going to repeat what you said, the idea of unlocking it as something, because there is a part of me. And I would imagine a lot of our audience, too, who enters into it and being like, acclaimed filmmaker Barry Jenkins is coming to this medium on the medium's terms. And I'm going to get a certain progression of episodes or storytelling that will scratch some familiar itches as a TV viewer that will make me more comfortable. And that's not what we have. No. This is Barry Jenkins making his next project that happens to be a 12 or 14 hour or whatever it is exploration of the themes that animate him in the service of telling this deeper story historically and beautiful story from the book.

Yeah. So yeah, that's kind of where we're at with it. We just, I can't believe we got him to come on the podcast. I feel like I hope we hooked him in to come back for next season three. But we'll have to wait on that. But for now, once was more than enough, it was honored to talk to Barry Jenkins on the podcast. We'll take a quick break.

And when we come back, Barry Jenkins from Underground Railroad. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something? Like a last minute beach day, a spontaneous hike or an outdoor movie night you didn't plan for. That's when Prime's same-day delivery as you're back. getting you exactly what you need fast and reliably so you can actually join the moment instead of watching from the sidelines.

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Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. We're just incredibly honored to be joined by Barry Jenkins, the director of Underground Railroad. And honestly, the last good sports tweeter on Twitter, who for the last few weeks, I have been learning so much about the systemic problems

with U.S. track as he tweeted through the Olympics. Barry, thank you so much for joining Andy and I today. Thank you for having me, man. We wanted to start with Underground Railroad. We wanted to start with the text, with Colson Whitehead,

because Andy and I have done a lot of pods about adaptations and I think it's always fascinating to talk to filmmakers about when in the process of reading, they start seeing the story. And for you, is it a compulsion?

Like when you read, anything? Do you all like immediately start thinking in terms of images or scenes or blocking or shots or do you kind of still have the reader inside of you that you protect from Barry the director? No, I definitely try to protect the reader from Barry the director because it's not enjoyable to then be reading but also be trying how how we do this, how can we do that? How do that? How we do that? So no, I try. And also too, it's just too much material. You know, if that was the case, than every book I read, I'd somehow be trying to get the rights to adapt. But I think what happens is there's got to be a sustained consistency of the imagery I'm able to see as I'm reading.

And so with this book in particular, the first chapter is so immersive. I mean, it's just intense. And then you get to South Carolina and you think, oh, am I still with this? Am I still seeing it? And every time Cora advanced to a new state, it was like, not only am I still seeing it, I'm seeing it through a whole new lens. And so that's how I knew, oh, this is one that I should actually chase. I think we have a lot of questions for you about seeing, mainly because Chris and I have no qualms about being enormous fanboys.

We both just think the most incredible director responsible for some of the most beautiful images on screens in the last, you know, however many years. And Underground Railroad is no exception. And this may sound extremely basic, but I almost want to start from a basic place so that our listeners can sort of understand. things the way you do. And the question I wrote down as I was watching the show and losing myself in it, and I have a follow-up, I won't leave it this basic. But the question was, how do you know what to look at? And the reason why I asked that is because, you know, you have, especially with this project, you have the most stunning locations, you have the most charismatic actors, you have sumptuous production design throughout. But within that world that's been created, your camera stays curious and

alive and surprising. And that is such, I mean, it makes it such a thrill for the audience, but it also makes it seem almost magical, to be honest, because there's a confidence to where the camera is looking. And I'm wondering how you center yourself on the day. Yeah, it's interesting. It's kind of the same as when I'm reading the text and I'm initially beginning to see the imagery. You know, this word adaptation is really cool.

Right now it's evolved to, here is. something that's a book and now it's a film or it's a show. But I think we're adapting all the time. You know, the script is being adapted by the actors and the cinematographer and the crew, and in particular by the locations. And so when I first get on set, you know, I'm looking for that same feeling. You know, I'm trying to allow myself to have that same feeling rather than having an image in my head that the crew is here to manifest. It's okay, we're all here. We're in this place. You know, what are we all manifesting together? What is the thing that's happening in the space, now. And I think because of that, curiosity is kind of the bedrock of the process. And with this

show, it was really cool. Everything's driven by perspective. And so how is Quora experiencing these characters and these environments? Every episode or every chapter, everything's changing. You know, she's kind of the constant. But the whole world, the color palette, the soundscape, everything's changing around her. So how was her perspective reorienting how we need to film this, how the audience needs to receive these images. But then even beyond that, there's just, I mean, we had this camera operator named Jared Morgan, aka DePossum. The possum.

Yeah, I nicknamed him DePossom because one, you know, you were talking about the sports tweets. I'm kind of like a football coach on set. And there's just too many damn people. And the way you remember everyone or you know exactly how to refer to this person, you give them a name. And, you know, it's 2021. I have to make sure people are okay with the name.

Do you mind if I call you the possum? And he was like, why? I was like, oh, where are you like this little thing? You're always scrumming away into all these cool places. And he was like, yeah, I will call myself the possum. And he actually had these stickers by the end of the show that he was giving out to people. He had created this cartoon of a possum. But this guy, he just had a very interesting way of, again, for him, it's completely new.

You know, he's not been inside the book. He didn't write the scripts. You know, he didn't cast the actors. Everything's new. So he's bringing an inherent curiosity. And we would have these conversations and you'd be like, oh, is it, are am I in the movie or am I Cora or am I omniscient? You know, is this the eye of God sometimes we would say?

And it was really lovely understanding that the way the camera moved, it always had a point. You know, there was always something driving this floating camera or this fixed camera, depending on what we were doing on that day. But the curiosity was always the key. and not getting to set, dictating what the camera or the audience would see and being open to the process. I love that you mentioned camera operator because it speaks to how collaborative filmmaking truly is, but also because I did want to just to maybe frame it a little bit more specifically to two shots in the beginning of episode two, South Carolina. Because I am curious about how that curiosity ends up finding things on the day.

But there are also a lot of just beautifully constructed shots with camera movement. that are breathtaking that also tell us a lot, you know, about story and about the character. And the shots I wanted to mention were at the beginning of South Carolina. It's right after the gentleman at the museum says Fubu and shakes his hand. Amazing moment. And they're both choracentric shots, you know, and the first time we see her in this world of South Carolina, she's in Canary Yellow, she's exiting onto the street and Nicholas Bertel's score is suddenly calm.

And when we take her in, the camera suddenly sweet. whoops around and moves low and kind of puts her in the center of the action, right? You see the statehouse, the Palmettoes, all the things we think of as South Carolina, but she's in the middle of it untroubled. And then you have a second beautifully constructed shot as she turns the corner. And it goes from being part of the natural order of the state to the human life. And she's also equally at home there. There's the gentleman who tips his cap and the father and son buying pretzels.

And all of this is giving us information. and all of it is so beautifully choreographed and staged. And I guess I just curious granularly how you went from saying, here's what we need to accomplish, just as Barry with your collaborators, before you get to the day and then actually executing it. Well, those is interesting. We've gone from one extreme to the other because both those moments are very,

as you said, very well choreographed. Because of the process of making this show, you know, it's television's intense, man. It's like 116 days in every day. there's six pages. And so you have to move. You know, you don't have time to, you know, to sit there and kind of get in your malag zone. Yeah, you got to be Eastwood.

You got to be two and done. Exactly. You got to be two and done. And because of logistics, there were some things with the budget where we didn't plan to shoot the entire show in the state of Georgia. We ended up realizing we can't leave the state of Georgia. And so we only got to shot list the first three episodes that we filmed, which were Georgia, Mabel and South Carolina.

South Carolina was actually the first episode that we filmed. So that one's very rigorously planned and choreographed. And we knew the imagery of the first episode would be to use the word relentless. And it was about visually communicating the feeling of reading the book. You get to the South Carolina chapter in the book and you're like, what the hell is this? Who's Bessie and everybody's so beautiful and I feel like I can breathe now. And it was about, well, how do we visually translate the site data? That Cora, as you said, is now the center of things.

And she, for a moment, can breathe now. And having these two master shots of her coming out of the, coming out of the door of the museum and being centered in the frame very large. Now the skyscraper is even larger, a little bit of foreshadowing. And then bringing her around the corner into that market and just seeing how free her shoulders, everything about the way Tussol is performing is different in that frame. And so that was very, very intentional and pointed and choreographed.

That was something where on the day, we have to do exactly best in this way. And James is actually operating both those shots on the wheels. It's just amazing, though, to hear you say something that I think is just always true in TV, which is there's never enough time. And here I am prepared to say to you, you seem so prepared. You seem to have captured these moments, these insert shots, these almost mundane glimpses of people living their lives. There's a whole other video essay of stuff that's not.

in the show that you did. Yeah. And you can use them later, you know, when you flash back in later episodes, I'm like, how did he know to get that? How did he get it? You know, he must have had so much time. Jeff Bezos must have been just making it rain days for him. From space.

Absolutely. Absolutely not. It wasn't raining from space. It wasn't raining from the parking lot. It wasn't raining from Seattle. It was not raining. I mean, we had more than resources, but not any more resources. Okay.

Yeah, it was one of those things. where James and I, James Lacks in the cinematographer, my best friend, Otis collaborator, we just had this feeling we had to trust the process, trust our instincts. And even though we had to stay on schedule, there were moments where we understood this image is calling to us. Let's capture it and we'll figure out where it goes later. Case in point, the opening of the show, these people are falling and people are running backwards, all these different things, all that coalesces into this very,

a gorgeous shot that just floats towards Cora, and she looks back at the camera, and the camera just sits there. She's looking at the audience and the sound envelopes us, and then we slowly drift away. That shot is not planned. It was not scheduled.

We filmed that on the same day as when Cora and Ridgeway go into the lake. And so we get there as a film shoot. Some people are ready, some people aren't. You know, the stunt team's getting ready, the cranes out in the water's getting ready. And I looked over, and Tussau was already through the work. So she was standing on set,

and this mist was naturally coming across the lake. And so I said to Possible, hey, get up on the steady cam. And I just yelled out too, so stay there. And when I call out to you, I want you to look directly into the lens. And we just did it. There's no slate, nothing. We just did it. I had no idea.

This was maybe in February of 2020. I had no idea that in May of 2021, that would be amongst the first images anybody would see of the show. and the first time they would fully see our character because she's not technically air quotes performing in that moment. But at that point, she had so fully become the character that I have all these elements, let's get it. Let's just capture something.

And as you said, we'll figure out where it goes later. And in this case, it ended up at the opening of the damn episode. Well, you know what you said, you kind of think of yourself as a football coach sometimes on the sets. Isn't that what you're describing almost sounds like the difference between plays and concepts. No, no. It's like you, what a go route right now.

But it's just like, hey, like, there's a couple of like read option things here. Like you have your first second. But like once you get on the set and you have a language that you're speaking with your collaborators, if a mist comes in, we have the play to run. Exactly. But if we have the play to run, I think it's messier than that. It's like we're running a hurry up. You know, the RPO game is in.

And you just yell out four verticals. Now I'm in, now I'm at NCAA 2014 on the Xbox 360. Four verticals. RIP. Please bring it back. You just see what happens. And most of the times it's an incomplete pass. Sometimes it's a touchdown.

Very rarely it's a pick. But when we score in those moments, I made it ends up being the opening of the entire show. And I'm glad that I, especially on this one, I was working with the crew, where rather than going, hey, 100 to 16 days, six pages a day, we have to do what's on the schedule. Everybody would just drop what they were doing.

Okay, now we're going to capture this moment. And we'll just figure out where it goes later. I wanted to ask a little bit about the construction of like the show structurally, but also how that manifested on set and how you worked through it. Because obviously this is a series that sort of adheres generally to whitehead structure in terms of its sort of geographic movements. But for you, how much were you thinking of ins and outs of episodes? How much were you thinking of like, I need to get certain things because I want to pace like quote unquote episode in a certain way versus this idea of this being this. gargantuan, you know, 10 plus hour experience. And we can get into the, how are people watching this and all that stuff later. But I was very curious how that manifested both on set and in the editing room. Yeah, I was thinking on set, we were thinking of it quite a bit. You know, in the edit room, at that point, you're kind of handcuffs a bit by what you're able to capture on set. You're dealing with a very finite set of stimuli or a set of images to work from.

Whereas when you're on set, you can create anything. And so it was something we were very conscious of, especially knowing the tone would shift, you know, from episode to episode, from handoff to handoff. And yet we were also trying to always have that eye open, you know, on what this other avenue might be. Part of that was because we started the shoot. We didn't have a location for North Carolina when we began.

Oh, man. We didn't. You know, we didn't have the hub that Cora goes into at the end of the first Indiana episode when we began. And despite that on day 17 in production, because Aaron Pierre was leaving us and we were losing the location, that little platform that spins that she walks out to when she sees him reading the poem, it was just this thing that was there. And I thought, I have to do something with this because this guy is going away. And he and Tussau are just so bonded. And so we created this image.

And then I've got to figure out later, how the fuck do I write my way into that? And so we created this whole thing with the hub and her going underground and the train station. So it was something we always had to be aware of, but we didn't want it to be limiting. We wanted it to be something that would create all these different avenues. The one place where it bit us in the ass a little bit was the transition from South Carolina to North Carolina. We went back and forth on whether she should arrive in North Carolina at the conclusion of the South Carolina episode, or as we ended up doing, having her arrive in North Carolina at the top of the North Carolina episode. It's the only place where you see her arrive at a new state and depart that state in the same episode.

So that was the only place where it got tricky. I think one of the hardest things for any filmmaker, and particularly a filmmaker who's directing every moment of a show and is also responsible for it and the de facto showrunner in every way is keeping things under control and moving within the limits that you have. but also not losing touch with that sense of playfulness and curiosity and discovery that you've already said are necessary for good work and certainly necessary for you to make the work that you want to be making. I'm curious about how you managed that tone during this process that went on for quite some time and then also had to deal with COVID in the middle of it. And if I could add

one more wrinkle on top of it, just in terms of the managing the psyches of the cast who had to be prepared to not just lose an actor, you know, on day 17 that they've become close to, but also toggle between the emotional intensities and horrors of Georgia, say, and then the joy of the corn shucking scene in Indiana. I mean, it's your same crew. It's your project. It's day whatever of whatever. And someone has to keep that consistent tone so that the possibilities are the same, right, on day five as they are on day 105. Yeah, you know, part of that was, you know, our line producers. This guy Richard Hughes, also does Man in the High Castle.

Really smart cat. Part of it was logistics, but we built, we scheduled a shoot in a way that took the actor's psyches, as you say, in mind. We kind of came in hot. We came in hot and went South Carolina for about 10 days and then right into Georgia and Mabel

back to back, which are two of the most difficult shows in the run. And then Tennessee was on the back end, all the work with the character, Jasper, and Ridgeway and Homer. And so we were sort of riding this wave a bit with the actress Psyche's in mind. There was always a guidance counselor on set.

And our first AD, this woman Liz Ton, who was fucking rock. She's amazing. And I mean, she works all the time. Reservation Dogg. She also did. After she did this show. But she was just very diligent. You know, I have this quote I've been saying where, you know, we wanted to unpack the work.

have the work unpack us. It's a quote from Hilton Owls' review of Moonlight, where he says, when Mahershal Ali's character asked Alex Hibbert's character, what's a F pejorative, I'll say, of the total. I shouldn't say that word, even in an interview. He said, Juan unpacks the word, but he doesn't unpack the boy with it. And Liz, our first AD, was really diligent about us unpacking these images, but not unpacking ourselves with it. So even in the day-to-day work, we made sure that the psyche of the actress came first, but in the scheduling of the show, because the corn shucking came,

it was right about day like 70. And so we had done like 40 days in Savannah, which was South Carolina, Georgia, and Mabel. Then we shipped it to Atlanta, and we went right into Indiana autumn. So right away, everybody got a little bit of a breath, a little bit of a breath. And then we did Indiana winter,

and the shucking was the first thing we did there. And it was lovely to see, one, for Tuso, So every time we go to a new chapter, there's a whole new group of actors. She gets to refresh. She gets re-avit herself at a certain degree. And also let some of these other people shoulder some of the burden of this imagery. But also, too, I think Liz did a really great job of helping us ride these waves to where it wasn't just all heavy subject matter for 40 straight days. And now we're in the sunlight.

You know, we got to wrap those waves a little bit. It also, you can feel it, though. And I know things are shot out of order and we experience them in a different way than you film them. But like when you get to the corn chucking, which I keep mentioning because it's just so ecstatic and such a beautifully composed sequence, you know, one of the things that I think that I'm not alone in saying this, I love about your filmmaking is you're just unapologetically romantic at times. You know, there's a joy and a beauty that lights up your characters from within and to see Cora gifted with that moment, you know, in the scenes with Royal and see those characters have that. I wonder if that was something that you as a filmmaker were looking forward to too, if that's a place that you. seek, you know, that you move towards. It was something I was looking forward to. I just wanted to see it. I just wanted to see it.

And we did that all in one day. The competition of the shucking, the big portrait, everything at night with people by the fire, the lovely shot, one of my favorite shots of Tussau with the camera just drifts down and pushes towards her. That was all one day. And it was a really joyous day and much say. And we did that before we did the assault on Valentine Farm.

It was a way of getting, a whole new group of background actors join the crew. And their first day, we're all just like, just ripping corn apart and drinking fake wine. And, you know, typically everybody's got to be quiet. It's like, no, have fucking fun. Yeah. People are clapping and dancing. You got little kids running around.

And, you know, this is a tangent. But we finished, we wrapped the show. And it was a complicated rap because we shut down in March. We went back in September. We never got to have a proper rap party. But, you know, a bunch of the crew getting. me these little letters. And one of them was from this wonderful young woman in the camera department.

And it was just, it kind of tripped me up to hear this, but she was like, one of my favorite days on set and all my, in all my days in this job was the corn shucking day. She was like, it just felt so cool to be a part of that. And I love that even the crew members, not the people on camera, the people way behind camera, they felt a part of that moment. And I think it was a really smart of Liz and really. Richard for scheduling the show that way because that gave us the strength and the fortitude because from day 70 to day 90, who is that the end? Is that where you're basically

shooting the shootout? Exactly. And it all went right up to Christmas break. Right. And it was, man, it was a grind. It was a grind. I wanted to ask specifically about the end of the Indiana episode because, you know, two of the most amazing things I think you've ever shot is the sustained the debate scene between Valentine and Mingo and then this, you know, I mean, this absolutely heartbreaking, but I hope this word sounds okay, but just like on a filmmaking level impressive action set piece, which I don't think, which is probably like one of the biggest action set pieces you've done. If I'm, but yes, it's not a thing I normally do. Yeah, you don't usually do a lot of gun fights among, yeah. So I can you tell us a little bit about

the, I mean, you know, having to basically do left brain, right brain stuff. It's, it's the heartbreak of this fall in paradise, but at the same time, you're basically doing a political event and then like an action set piece and they bleed into one another. I mean, can you tell us a little bit about the day 70 through 90, I guess? Yeah, yeah. We tried to, you know, we tried to stage it the same way we staged everything else. You know, James and I have this thing we like to say it's all chopping wood. You know, one of my favorite shots in moonlight is when Andre Holland sets this kettle on the stove and we film it, you know, with the same sort of Lenghorne, style as we do, you know, two kids making out on the beach, but it's just the tea kettle.

And so in this case, you know, and again, I keep shouting at my first AD, Liz, Tom, because, you know, doing an action sequence, you've got to really slow down. You've got to really slow down. And to make sure you get it, typically you overcover the things, like a close up here, close up there. But Liz was adamant that no, if Barry wants to do this in the same style, he should do it in the same style. And we've got to figure out, you know, how to block this out that we can get enough takes

that we're sure, you know, we can hold these things in these master shots or these medium shots the same way Barry does is his lovemaking scenes. And so it was pretty cool. We storyboarded the whole thing out. Again, just like everything else, it was a very open process. The debate and the book, the characters speak in turn. John Valentine says all his thing. He's a composite of Landers and John Valentine's in the show. And then Mingo says all of his. But it was kind of dope.

I never have rehearsals on any of my shows. I do TV and now I get like two days of rehearsal, you know, between the ship from Savannah to Atlanta. And so Chuck Woody and Peter DeJerzy, who plays John Valentine, they came in and they were doing the speech. I said, oh, wait, this feels awkward. I can tell you want to say something. So I said, now you guys know your speeches. When I point, you speak. And then when I point, you speak. And so we're in this classroom, just working it out. I was like, oh, it's a debate. It's a debate. And they got so good at doing it that, and this is where our shout out. Everybody just, there was no ego in the making of the show because James in filming that, I said to him, I want it to be every time they do it, I want them to do it front to back. It's like, well, how do I cover them when they're here? How do I cover them when they're there?

I was like, I don't know, man, we got to figure it out. But the priority has to be that they can just run through the whole thing three or four times. So what you're seeing in the cutting of that debate, it's like James and Possible. I think we had three cameras. they're just dancing around and they're just trying to remember in the first take I was here at this line so maybe on the third take I'll be there on that line but what happens is they're in the scene it's almost like they have the freedom

to walk around doing this debate and from take to take they can be here because they feel this moment they can be there because they feel that moment and so it just had this really organic fill and I'll never forget the first time those guys did it because they did it front to back the church is full of background actors

they never heard the debate burst into applause I was like, yeah, that shit's going to work. And then filming the action sequence, it was kind of the same thing. We didn't have a lot of time, and I didn't want to do a lot of coverage. And so it was about Jared, aka da possum, kind of being the third character in a lot of these moments. You know, one of my favorite moments is when Royal, spoiler, but I mean, the shows are not long enough. When Royal gets shot in the back and Coral looks up and the guy behind her gets shot.

And then Ridgeway steps in the camera, grabs her. And then Jarrett's just like, he's in there with them. And they all the way over to all the way over to the wagon. Just one of those really lovely moments that you could rehearse that eight times, you know, or you have like 30 minutes. And so you shoot it three times and you just boot the rehearsal. Yeah, it was really cool. I love that you mentioned in the midst of this, the tea kettle and moonlight,

because I think that one of the things that makes your filmmaking so special and resonant is the way that you treat ordinary moments, quote, unquote, as potentially extraordinary, and that the beauty, the things that make a life beautiful are cobbled together from those moments. And, you know, oftentimes that can work on two levels. It can work in terms of filmmaking and in terms of storytelling. And I think a lot about, like, Mac going to get the whiskey, you know, where every, it's a beautiful scene. It's beautifully performed. It's beautifully shot.

And it's working both to you, in my mind, your strengths as a filmmaker is I'm watching this man in a house that he's lived in his whole life. And he's moving and we're moving with him. But it also works dramatically because, oh, my God, I just realized something that we are not accounting for a character. So it's this wonderful marriage. But I think that what makes this project so remarkable and I think so important in a lot of ways is that that constant dedication and attention to private spaces, private lives, and particularly in the case of this show, black private spaces and black private lives. And I wanted to ask you about that with the consideration also that we have these very striking, I wasn't even sure what you were calling. referred to the one a moment ago as a portrait, I guess, of characters looking to camera, whether they were accidental with the moment you spoke about that opened the series or staged,

as they were at other times. And the look that the characters give us, these characters whose extremely private moments we've been privy to, and then they see us, I guess somewhere in there is a larger question that I'm struggling with, but I guess part of it is what was the communication with the actors about what they think of this intrusive camera? There wasn't much communication at all. And I'm not directing those moments. I'm kind of just deciding that they have to exist. And again, shout out to Liz especially.

I keep saying the name of my first AD, Liz Ton, awesome lady. Because, you know, we got to stay on schedule. We have to stay on schedule. You know, and when you watch and the crew was just so good, the first episode, when Big Anthony comes off the porch and he does his long walk as he's deciding that he's going to run, we're filming all the other portraits at the same time, literally at the same time. The work of set is getting big off, Anthony off the porch and sort of around the corner.

And shout out to Possum, because Possum found the way that he could still have full movement, work 270. The one place he's not looking, that 190 degrees, we're over there doing all these portraits that compose the gaze at literally the same time. And so everybody was really good about allowing the space for those moments. And because of that, all I said to the actors, both actors in the background extras, is just show me yourself. I didn't tell them, be mean, be angry, be beautiful, be prideful. Just show me yourself. Just show me yourself.

And it was really wonderful to see how quickly people would relax and to themselves. Because when I saw them, this kind of corny to say, but I was legitimately seeing my ancestors. And they weren't orchestrated. We were doing the corn shucking. the same way that young woman wrote me that letter saying it felt just so wonderful to be a part of this, I felt a part of the cast. And literally, we had so much work to do that day, but we paused everything and just said, everybody, just stay where you are. You drift the camera way up and

said, again, just show me yourself. We float it left. We float it right. And that was it. And this beautiful shot, this beautiful shot, I can't account for that. Now, the good thing about working that muscle is the very end of Indiana winter, I also can't take credit for him because we're filming on the set, aura squeezes five shots into, uh, into Ridgeway. And possum is just so good. I got, I got so much confidence in him that I understood I could do things, especially with this show, because when I was a kid and I heard about the Underground Railroad, I saw black folks on trains underground, learned that was not the case. But in making the show, I said to our production is or Mark Freeberg, I don't want CGI trains.

The trains have to be real. And wherever I could take a moment in time and extend it, I wanted to extend that moment in time. That thing is happening right there, right now. So I started to lean on possum. James and I were leaning on possum. And so I knew after she shot him, I wanted to walk all the way over to the handcart. I wanted to walk over there with her, walk away and walk back to the handcart. And as she's walking to the handcart, I can't see him, but I can hear Chase in my ears.

There's a 10-year-old kid. If I don't call cut, he's not going to stop. I can hear him come out of the little crawl space. I know he's walked over to Joel. And so I whispered to James, hey, tell him to go back. And James over the walkie whispers to Possum, go back. And Possum, in the show, is what you see when you watch the show? He floats off Cora.

This is not planned or choreograph. And he very fluently comes around. And there's my 10-year-old actor. And he is just giving it. And now, and Possum just starts walking in and walking in. And we're all just sitting there watching this thing happen in real time, this unorchestrated piece of happening, I guess I'll call it. And that's the crest, the little hill.

And it was not easy to walk up that hill and comes over. And I see that little tear. I was like, oh, shit. Yeah, that's the ending of that story. It's like, I didn't write that. And I'm glad I didn't because I think being there in the space, witnessing or feeling it happening, and then working with these people, like you say, we're on the football field.

It's like, hey, four verticals. That was a four verticals moment. And that one ended up in the end zone. But that's also like a testament, your style, aside from being gorgeous, it also makes a lot of sense because a moment like that can happen. If you want to stick with it, you don't have to be like, shit, man, now I have to go, like, but I've been shooting this whole thing as inserts and close-ups and a master two. It's like if you shoot the whole thing in a way that allows for life to happen,

then life can happen. You know what I mean? But that would be kind of wild if you were like, man, this whole time I've been just chopping this thing up into ones and twos and masters and then like, you know, every... And that was what was cool about

this being a television show too. Going into it, I had the completely opposite thought. I thought it would be very restrictive. And in the making of it, it was so clear, holy shit, this is so fluid. It's expansive. And I think you're right.

It was, especially with the style, the approach that we took on, this one in particular, it just worked, man. It just worked. I want to save a little time at the end. You've been very generous with your time already to just ask about two future projects that we're both excited about. But you did mention just now conceiving of this as a TV show, why it's a TV show. And I heard you say something pretty interesting with Deezes and Mero, and maybe other places, but I choose to shout them out, I guess, where you're basically like, one of the reasons this is a television show is not just so that you can live in multiple hours of a

story and do justice to it, but so that people can enter it and interact with it at their own pace. And I think that's an interesting consideration. It's not a consideration that necessarily all filmmakers give for their work. And it came from, specifically in that interview, a moment when Deezis was like, I'm so honored to have you on my show. You're the great director, but I can't watch this show. And, you know, you're very gracious with him and talked him through it. And I thought that was such an interesting answer and such an interesting acceptance of an

aspect of television storytelling in quotes that I think some filmmakers would rather not imagine that people are pressing pause or taking time for themselves or et cetera. Yeah, but I think that this, I have to take into consideration the subject matter. And the subject matter is, it's heavy. And I think, too, I like to think of the, to some degree I'm a constructivist. And I think the elements that make up the work, I'm also a thematic in part. you go into a movie theater, it's a very assaultive is the wrong word. You know, you are the captive of the screening. The image is larger than you. You're surrounded by strangers. You have to

turn your phone off and you can't control the pace at which you watch. I think because of that, the images projected can also appear to be assaultive. I didn't want that. You know, I knew that some of these images would be triggering for certain people in the audience and that they should be empowered to be able to control the pace at which they watch it, how they watch it, with whom they watch it, when they watch it. I think also, too, a really cool thing has happened in television because despite that, I didn't feel imagistically the show would be limited. You know, television now is very different than television 20 years ago because the television can do things that it couldn't do 20 years ago. You know, there are colors, there are levels of brightness that a television

just couldn't even remotely capture 20 years ago that it can now. So the tradeoff of not subjecting someone to this captive experience by having to sit in a theater where the images are larger than them, they're surrounded by strangers and they can't control it. The tradeoff is, it wasn't as drastic as it would have been 20 years ago. I felt visually we could still communicate the things that we wanted to because this thing was a Pulitzer Prize running book already. There's no need for it to exist in images except there are certain things the image can do that can elevate and sublimate some of the things in this text. So I thought, yeah, this is how we're going to do it. Speaking of the TV aspect of it and speaking of you approaching it as a director who's taking on this entire series, I was curious whether or not going into it, you sought out the advice of anyone, like a Soderberg or Carrie Fuganago who had kind of shot. I talked to both of him.

And, you know, Sotaburg was, you know, he's got a very particular sense of humor. So he kind of just like laughed at me and told me it was going to kill me. You know, Carrie was really intellectual about it and actually gave some really concrete advice. You know, he just, he talked about prep and how it was more or less impossible to prep, you know, more than five hours, you know, of anything and have that prep be actionable. And so he actually advised me to build in these hiatuses. And it was why, you know, we had this break between Savannah and Atlanta, not, not exclusively why, because Liz and Richard Hughes were also very diligent about that as well. But yeah, Kerry was, he gave me some legit advice that helped me get through it. I was also wondering if you could give yourself any advice on the other side of this.

If you could go back to... The only thing I would say is it was worth it. I mean, this one had killed me. I bled for this one, sometimes literally. But it was worth it. You know, I don't, I've never been, or there's nothing in my creative life that has been as satisfying as this. And I don't mean that, oh, it's a masterpiece or it's this or that.

but the things that I set out to do with this crew that we set out to do we accomplished. I did my best. I was at my best in the making for this show and I'm really proud of it. I have to take a moment just to, since he's already been mentioned,

he mentioned Soderberg. Chris and I are devoted to fans of his television show, Nick. One of my favorite thing, I moved to LA five years ago, ended up within a week, we were probably foolishly invited to an HBO party,

saw Andre Holland there. He'd been on this podcast before. I went up to him and I was like, will there be more? Please, will there be more? And he was like, yes, there will be. That was five years ago. I know. And now it's announced suddenly, not only is it hopefully possibly probably coming back, but it's coming back with you. We are overjoyed. What can you tell us? I can't tell you anything. I figured. Except that the creative team behind the Nick is the creative team behind the Nick. You know, Jack and Mike are doing a great job. You know, on And Andre is super passionate about it, super passionate about it. And I think that character is really wonderful.

And I think it'll be really beautiful to explore with you guys more in his life. But that's all I can say. That's all I can say. Okay. Well, we hope you'll come back to talk about that. The last thing I would also be remiss if I didn't mention is one of the most popular movies in my house that features an eight-year-old and four-year-old girl is a movie they call Lion King Real Life.

That's different from... They call it Lion King in Real Life. They call it Lion King real life. Lion King colon real life, you know. I haven't seen the typography, but, you know, there's Lion King, there's Lion Guard they watch on Disney Channel. There's Lion King one and a half, which is actually quite clever, kind of Rosencrensen-Gildenstern. But anyway, Lion King Real Life is a big movie. You are announced as making Lion King Real Life, too.

Yes. I know you can't tell us much because this is also a Disney thing, but I guess I would love to just know what sparked your curiosity and creativity. about engaging yourself to such an enormous project and property? Yeah, the enormity of it didn't occur to me. It was purely about the story. The script came. I wasn't going to read it because I was like, there's no way. But Lulu and I went up to, we went on a little mini vacation, a road trip.

I was like, you know what? I got time. I'll read this thing. And about 25 pages in I turned to her, I said, yo, this is fucking good. And saying that, it kind of disarmed me. it kind of curbed the hipster in me that was like, I can't do this. And as I read it, I realized, yo, this is actually completely unexpected and really wonderful. You know, I had a nephew who was about five, six years old when the original Lion King came out.

And so I was forced to watch that thing 300 times, you know, on a NHS. And I developed this legitimate bond with it, this deep affinity. And I think the script that Jeff has written, it kind of conjures that bond. know, it kind of took me back to that place. The other thing of it, too, Underground Railroad kind of was the completion of this trilogy of works that I was making between Moonlight, Bill Street, and Underground Railroad. And I was talking to James, Laxton, my cinematographer, about it. And I was like, is the next five years going to be more of the more work in the same vein?

Or is this thing an opportunity to just stretch ourselves, just for a moment, take a beat and and really take some stock of who we are as practitioners. And he said, yeah, I think that'd be cool. So long as we go back to making the shit that we always make. And I said, well, we're definitely going to make out an ALE, so there's no doubt about that. And we went into it, how long. It's really awesome, man. We're like deep into it.

That's awesome, man. It's an exciting version of a career that's possible now that it's thrilling for us as fans to be able to watch, that you can jump from medium to medium and scope to scope and find things that, excite you. You know, it's dope. Directors are different than cinematographers. We don't have the same privileges as those folks, but I remember reading Masters of Light when I was in film school and going through and looking at the filmographies of these DPs and I was like, uh, the conversation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, what? Yeah. And it's like, wait, how did they, it's like, oh, they're, they're, they're practitioners, you know, they want to explore all of it. I think directors

should have the same free. That's one of my favorite things to do is it'll be like the guy who shot McCabe and Mrs. Miller and then he sheets like a studio comedy like, two months later or something, you know? And then you go watch that studio comedy, you go, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Like, oh, the lighting is really good behind Steve Gutenberg in that. Yeah, yeah. The citizens really were on patrol.

Exactly. I want Roger Deacons to shoot a Notting Hill 2 or something. Yeah. That's got to happen. It'd be beautiful. We are so honored that you took the time to talk to us. We're such big fans. Yeah, congratulations on this achievement.

Underground Railroad is really a Titanic achievement. Thank you all, man. I appreciate it, man. The weight of it felt like the Titanic. And yeah, it did not sink. It did not sink. That's all you got to say at the end of the day. Thanks so much, man.

Thank you guys. Take care. Thank you for listening to The Watch. We are produced as always by Kaya McMullen, and we are part of the Ringer Podcast Network.