The Watch - Why ‘Normal People’ Is So Captivating, Featuring Director Lenny Abrahamson | The Watch

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

The cult of Sally Rooney and stellar performances from the two young actors (4:06) are what makes ‘Normal People’ an instant must-watch and a masterclass on how to make a TV show that’s just about feelings (19:38). Plus, a conversation with one of the show’s directors, Lenny Abrahamson, about how he adapted the show from the best-selling book (36:27). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Lenny Abrahamson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line. Every time we talk, it's a conversation with friends. It's Andy Greenwald! That was for the real Rooney hits.

We're talking about Sally Rooney today. We're talking about normal people. It's just... Normie Peeps. premiered last night on the Hulu Network. and I got to say, man, every time I hear Sally Rooney's name, ever since I've done the Ferris Peeler Rewatchables, I just think about Alan Ruck going, Runey! Get a hold of yourself, man!

Sally Rooney, you did it, man. She did it. Queen of two genres. What's the other genre? I guess mediums. Let me take that back. It's Thursday, and if it's a little steamy in here, it's because we're talking about normy people.

We're talking about normal people, and today, Annie and I will talk about. the first couple of episodes, all 12 went up. And then the second half of the watch episode today, we're going to be talking. We'll have my interview with Lenny Abramson, who directed the first six episodes of normal people and directed Room and was a lovely guy, Irish director. It was really cool to talk to him about how they brought normal people to life. Greenwald, how are you? Before we get into it, I want to ask the question that is on the lips, if not the four brains of all of our listeners. Did you do your Bono accent for him? No, I didn't. I find that these Irish accents are so authentic and beautiful.

You know, just that those lults. And also, he's Irish. So I probably would be very insulting if I started doing my bio accent. Didn't stop you with Colin Farrell. I did a lot of Irish. I did a lot of voice work with the Ronin rewatchables we did where I imitated Jonathan Price and Natasha McElhone's Irish accents. So, okay. So you got it out of your system. Irish accent completists can find me anywhere, but not talking to Lenny Abramson. I know Lenny Abramson is from the Green Isle, the Emerald Isle. I don't know what it's called. But that's why I asked, because remember, you were once across a table from Colin Farrell and no hesitation.

Like Jordan in his prime, you uncorked the mid-range Bono. Yeah, it's a regret. You know what I mean? We've all got them. I think he rolled with it. I don't know if I would say he loved it. You know? Right.

When you think about it, like, it's pretty offensive. I've always found it celebratory, but okay, no, I get it. And the thing is that you really taught it to me. It was your insight into, it was. It was like your whole thing. Wasn't your whole thing? Like Bono makes this phone call? It wasn't my thing.

I mean, that was you two's thing on the Zoo TV tour. Where he would call Mr. President and, and he would say, you know, I don't mean to bug you. Yeah. I'm baiting you right now. I'm not going to do it. Mr. President! There it is.

Reopen this country, sir! Okay, Elon Musk. You know, we were just saying that, that like, and I don't know if it's reflective of our listeners' experiences, too. Maybe right now you're listening to us on headphones as you take a perhaps suboptimally distanced walk in the world. But I would say, once the weather turned here in L.A., people are getting real for Yeah, there's a lot of activity on the streets right now. People are getting reckless. People are walking too abreast. And I was trying to explain this to Chris and Kaya earlier, but like, if you are doing that,

I will give you such a stern, difficult to decipher look from the top third of my face, which is not covered during my run. So you can paint the picture if you want to. You're out there. You're keeping it tight. You're jogging it off. You're getting... I am running a lot. And because what else does one do? And I am definitely running with my face covering on. And my wife was like, I'm not sure you should do that because I don't know if you can breathe. And I looked her in the eye and I said, I 100% can't.

I definitely cannot breathe well. But I will die on lap 5 or whatever rather than give in. Right. Right. No, my favorite part about your jogging right now is getting to go along with you in some ways because you come home. Yeah. You got the runners high. I got that endorphin rush. You inevitably text me something that's dripping with enthusiasm and a lust for life where you're like, have you ever heard this Apex twin album? Holy shit. I just drug six walls to it. And then like an hour and a half later when you're back either like back in the professor's seat or just like contemplate. what we're all contemplating, the cliff's edge is so steep. It's so dark. And then you're like, I'm back in the bad place. One thing that you know about me is I live in extremes. I feel like that's what everybody knows about me, you know?

Like either the life of the party or the death of the party, that's me. Yeah. So that's just how I represent myself out there. And if you see someone jogging, wearing a tight, tight-fitted face covering, making an incredulous get-a-load of this guy gesture to an audience of no one. Yeah. No autographs, please.

I'm just, no need to say thank you. All right, so a couple of times this year this has happened where I feel like we've come across something pretty special. Now, that being said, I have not, I have no pre-game, we did not pre-game on this show, so I don't know if you're about to come and zag on me here and say, normal people, more like hard pass or something. I could do better than that.

I would have been workshopping for hours. I will say for myself that a couple of times this year, I feel like a show is really cut through the static for me. Right. And really landed. And that that's been Saul, that's been Ozark, that's been zero zero. And it's been normal people. I love this show.

And I think it's pretty special and pretty unique. And I have a couple of reasons why I'd like to talk about. But I guess let's hear what you think about it first. You've watched two episodes. What, where in your personal list of why the show matters, where do you place Sean Fennesse's observation and expression of gratitude that this is finally the show that made Irish people sexy again? How do you feel about that? Because I understand, Chris, I'm looking at you through the Zoom window and I know that you are torn because You are a child of two great traditions, literary, sexual, and otherwise.

And half of you right now can look to the beautiful post-adolescence just exploring each other's minds and bodies on normal people. And you feel a certain way. And the other half of you, I assume, is watching the plot against America. And you're like, both of these shows are so hot. Like, which one am I going to take ownership of in my own? personal archives. I think that Vince Vaughn's character from Wedding Crashers said it best when he said,

I get it. Just two kids who like to fuck trying to make it honest. And that's what the show is about, you know? That's the quote. I want to take it back. I think the show is clearly something special, too. I'm not going to zag. But I do want to kind of set the table because we have been making jokes about the extended

Rooneyverse for a while. And now we can finally talk about it. And the truth is I wasn't really joking. And numbers don't lie. People are listening. People are downloading. They're sharing with friends. They're like, these guys are on to something.

These guys, when I want to put my finger on the pulse of literature, particularly literature written by a 20-something Irish woman, we turn to these. Let us now turn to our Irish sex correspondence, two 40-year-old guys who are. top chef at zero zero zero. This is finally clear the field. You can finally be ourselves, be free. Well, no, I just wanted to talk about Sally Rooney, the author before we pivot to Sally Rooney.

Yeah, for sure. Inspiration. And although she worked on the show as more than just the inspiration for this show and also conversations with friends is now forthcoming as well. I believe some of the same team that brought us this. So Sally Rooney is one of those, every few years, there is a literary wonderkin. They're someone who cuts through the whole scrim of no one reads books anymore and becomes the person who writes the books that people read or at least buy. And Sally Rooney is, I believe she's maybe just 30 now.

And her first book was published when she was 26, 27 conversations with friends. Normal people is the follow-up. Both these books are really good. That's just the baseline place I want to start with. And you read them recently, right? I read Conversations with Friends last year and I read normal people at the beginning of this year. and they are they're super hot, they are super fun,

they are very quick reads in the best possible way. The best way I would describe her and her particular gifts as a writer is she's kind of like a Geiger counter for the internal lives of young people. Her books are written very, very, very much subjectively, very, very much first person. and she has a kind of wonderfully affect-free affect

in that she just seems to sort of tune her literary radio dial into the innermost thoughts and lives and emotions of these characters. In the case of normal people, it's between the characters who you've now met on the show, Marianne and Connell, and it toggles between them in first person. And it feels like she's just receiving the broadcast and then putting it on the page.

There's very little frippery. to it. And there's something that is so compelling about the way she communicates in her lives that it, and this is kind of a grandiose word, it kind of forgives anything else you might find fault within the books because she's a young writer and she's still figuring it out, blah, blah, blah. But there's something that is so true about the tone and the voice that it is undeniable and it's also really pleasurable to read. And I guess going into this project, my main question was, how do you successfully make something? so internal, external. How do you stay true to what made the book fairly magical when one of the

things, for example, just to pull something out of the bag, one of the things that made it so magical is the way she writes about Connell's inner life, for example. And much of what's happening inside of him is all the things that no one outside would ever be able to see. Sure. the way he processes his own shyness and his class awareness and his shame and his desire and all of the way that turns. It's just sort of just beef stew. That's a big thing in Ireland, right?

There's like a big chunky stew of emotions in his head. You spend a lot of time there, I can tell. People ask why I'm not a published critic anymore. And, you know, I say, I don't know. I've got the analogies for days. If you were still writing reviews and you were like, normal people, that's good stew. I think that would have negative page views.

Yes. Like it would be people being like actually sending notes being like, I refuse to read this. What you call sexy, only AG has the courage to call beef stew. Anyway, this is a remarkable adaptation. Already it is one of the best adaptations I can remember seeing because it does that thing that truly great adaptations do, which is hone in zero in. on the spirit that drew you to the work to begin with, and then subtly expands it,

teases out other colors in it that maybe you weren't even aware of, and blast it out in technicolor, widescreen, beautiful HD. And the result is something that I'm two episodes in, and I'm already considering saying that this is in some ways, quote unquote, better than the book. That doesn't, that's not fair. That doesn't matter. We're lucky enough to have both,

and Sally Rooney worked on both. So they are both products of her mind. One isn't in competition with the other. But they've found something. It's Lenny Abramson's direction. It's the brilliant performances of these young Irish sex bombs that they cast. It's all of it. And it's very exciting.

I think that in some ways, the success of the book obviously makes a show like this possible. And in a lot of ways, it's almost like if it's the same way that if they had taken, you know, an Iron Man title and said, okay, well, Iron Man sells this thing and then we can do all these things underneath of that. And I think that it would be hard for me to understand if they were like, hey, yeah, like, we just made a show about two Irish kids falling in love and then going on with their young adult lives. Obviously, there's like a lot of energy and buzz around it being an adaptation of a Sally Rooney book. But the relationship that's on this screen and the way that they foreground, sometimes he can't

really project the inner lives of characters on film. you have to kind of infer it. But the way that they prioritize their emotional interaction and psychological interaction with each other and with the world around them over any other real concerns, I think it's maybe unique on television. I was trying to remember my favorite couples,

my favorite love stories on television, or even just the most famous ones. So you go back to like David and Maddie on Moonlighting, you could talk about Eric and Tammy Taylor on Friday Night Lights, the various couplings on Mad Men, even some of the sitcom ones, you know,

that people are always very excited about, like the Jedd Fisher, John Crosinski, you went on the office, and plenty of ones like, you know, Ross and Rachel and friends. They're always like, there's a coupling, and then there is, like,

the concept of the show is in front of it. So there's the world of advertising or the world of high school football or private investigative firm or if you like Grey's Anatomy, like the hospital and all the stuff that has, happening there. All the stuff that matters in normal people is this, this relationship. That's

what this show is about. It's not about how they deal with school or whether or not he's good at Gaelic football or whether or not she, whether she's like happier in Dublin than in Sligo, although all those things come up. The thing that matters is their relationship with each other and the impact that they have had on each other. And what happens as time passes between these two people and the way in which they've dialed in it. I talked about this like TV concierge, but the only comp I really can think of is the before sunrise trilogy.

Yeah, and I think that that's, one of the reasons that's a good comp is because you're talking about coupling and coupling as the goal, both for an audience and for the show itself, to bring these people together. I think in almost any example I can think of,

perhaps outside of those films, at least off the top of my head, what's communicated to us through the story and the storytelling, is that there are two distinct strands, two distinct people. And the goal that they're both chasing is to become completely wound into some new, um, extraordinary hole that is greater than the way they were, uh, apart.

And I think one of the essential aspects of the book, normal people is its, um, almost embedded reporter style of storytelling in which it, alternates chapters from one character's point of view and the other character's point of view, and both points of view are legitimate and both are fully realized, even when they are in conflict with the other side of the net, so to speak. And one of the things that the show has already done in a way that I really admire is that it is about the coupling, but it's specifically about these two individuals who remain individuals even when they are coupling,

literally. Yeah. You know, and you can see that in the very delicate dance. of the first time that they sleep together, which is both a master class in consent, but also is very, very careful. This is Lenny Abramson's camera. This is the performance.

This is all the little details that go into it. The show is absolutely committed to preserving our perception of both of them as individuals engaged in something. Yeah. As opposed to two people who are subsuming themselves in this glorious orgasmic hole

or whatever the goal of a romantic story might be. And I think that's harder to do, than it sounds. Every choice is loaded. I mean, I think that you alluded to the dynamics of the sex scenes, which are pretty steamy, and, like, I think are, you know,

they're fun. You know, they definitely, in the early episodes, like, they seem to be really enjoying themselves. The interesting thing, it happens over the course of a couple of episodes, so I think, episode five or six or whatever, I don't want to spoil anything, but speaking in generalities, there's a moment

where one of the characters does something to the other. Like, they have, they upset them. And in most shows, they would show how the offended person feels. They would say, like, this person has had their heartbroken and now they're, uh, they're mourning, this loss of their, their love or their, their hurt are upset. And let's spend time with them as they kind of like recover from that. And instead they go and spend time with the person who perpetrated it, the person, the heartbreaker. And it's such an interesting choice. Because usually we are, it kind of strips away some of the language that we use to talk about relationships sometimes where there's always somebody who's in the right or somebody who's in the wrong. It's more about

these are just two people who are figuring it out. It's not about will they or won't they. It's about who are they? And I think that that's the reason why even when you watch an episode and really an episode can be as much as Connell goes and picks up Chinese food with his friends, sees Marianne at school, they talk a little bit, then they have sex after school, but then he kind of is like aloof with her, but she's also rude to him,

and then the episode ends. That's an episode of normal people. Like, there's nothing, there's no island from Lost here. There's no, you know, Don Draper figures it all out at the end. It's really, really, really like life. I was reading an interview with,

and I want to say his name, like a Mexican spirit. I want to say Paul Mescal. I'm sure that's not right, but, It's five o'clock somewhere. I'm guessing it's mescal, but I don't know. Probably.

And he's talking about, and he's a 24-year-old guy, he's done mostly theater before this, and he's talking about, you know, of course, everyone's like, what was it like doing naked sex scenes? And he spoke about the person

who worked on the show filling a role that has become, this is a good thing, and that's become standard on most Hollywood productions over the last few years, and that's an intimacy coordinator. Yeah.

And I can't think of a show, better suited to have someone in that role than this show because it is not necessarily about sex. It is not necessarily about romance. The show itself is about intimacy. And intimacy meaning people navigating larger spaces as they do in the sort of torture box that is high school. And then there's a dramatic power shift. I haven't seen that in the show yet, but I'm assuming it's there. It's in the book. When they get to. university and then even even beyond navigating these larger spaces but seeking solace in the very small spaces between them so going from macro to micro and trying to find something in that intimacy

and the sort of push pull in all senses of that and so when you're talking about a scene when someone one character hurts another character that is also intimate you know and I think that it's the rare show that understands that as a through line that that's its subject matter that is its premise, that is its advertising agency or its polar bear strewn island or whatever you want to call it. That is very rare. It's very rare to watch on TV or in movies. And look, like, let's pull it back on a business perspective. It's very hard to say, I want to make a show about people and their feelings. That's what I'm saying, man. You don't get to do that unless you do have the cover of a best-selling book. Yes. And that this person has a ton of fans that they'll be interested to see how this show is

executed plus maybe you get people who have read the book and are just interested in like the two characters. The show really also grabs a hold of something that I think the best shows about young people do, especially shows about people who are ending at the end of high school, whether it's days and confused or even Ferris Bueller or movies like that or stories like that, if you look at your young life or really your whole life as a series of roller coaster dips and you're going up and down. That point right towards the end of high school is you're really at the top because you've gotten through school. You probably know where you're going next to some extent even if you don't know what you're going to be doing there. And you've achieved this kind of

zero gravity feeling. And you know as you go down, it's only going to get harder. Things are only going to get more real and more adult. And you're about to go into this world where you're not the person that you had thought you were. It was the thing that I think everybody feels like when they leave home for the first time is you just realize, oh, everything I thought I knew about myself, nobody actually gives a shit. You know, I have to reteach everybody who I am. Can I just jump in and ask, since none of us have left our homes in over seven weeks, will we get that feeling again? Where I'm like, I am. Yeah. When I go, when I see you get it, I'm like, here's the thing. I'm super into the dead. I want you to call me flower. Yeah, but I'm going to be like, I am a. a long-limbed running Adonis, who was also a, in the flesh, social justice warrior, like literally, proudly.

Like, I go out there. More like daredevil. Yeah. And I put myself in the challenging situations. When I passed someone running around the reservoir the other day, I heard someone cough. I kept running. So, you know, at 8 p.m. tonight, be sure to cheer for the real heroes.

Not all heroes wear capes, but most of them wear masks while jogging. Some sort of facial. covering. And listening to AFX Twin. Yeah. Even when driving in a car, just to set a good example. But you know what I mean? It's like these are two characters. They're at various levels of, different levels of

happiness with who they are in high school. And they both are aware that things are going to change. For Connell, I think it's a little bittersweet because he's the man in Sligo. He's the star athlete. He's the apple of everybody's eye. He's got a great relationship with his mom. Even if they have lesser,

they don't have the same means that Mary Ann has. Marianne is basically an outcast, even though she's the smartest person in that school, and doesn't get along with her brother. It's kind of alone in this castle of a house and has like a chilly relationship with her mom, even though I, you know, it just seems like they, and then when they, they leave and they're going to go to school, like they, they mix all that stuff up. And that's what these stories about young, late teenage and a young adulthood are so good

capturing is that moment where all of those adult emotions hit you for the first time. And when you experience them for the first time, they feel unbelievably heavy. Also, that anything is possible. When you suddenly realize that rules that governed your existence, whether they are who you are allowed to be friends with, what the limits of those friendships might be, the shape of things, that all of that is actually pretty arbitrary and much more flexible in ways than you'd ever realize in ways that are both could be exciting or could be terrifying. And it's really, especially at that age, your social life, as well as your own identity, they're just decks that can keep getting reshuffled. Yeah. And sometimes you're not the one doing the shuffling. Yeah. And it takes a very,

very steady hand to be able to communicate the mix of wonder and dread that is embedded in every one of those moments. And so far, the show is able to do it. And one thing, that, I would say, and I'm curious about other people's feelings about this. I think that so far, the show has done a remarkably good job of pushing up the dials on some things that read very subtly in the book. For example, Marianne's home life is, at least in my memory of the book, a little bit is a lot more subtle in its early presentation, and then things. come crashing down in different ways later in the story, and we won't spoil it. But I thought they did a very good job. And again, it's a very TV way of doing it. But there are certain looks and

certain behaviors from her brother, like the scene when he makes her get out of the car in the first or second episode. That's not in the book. That's helpful. Yeah. You know, in understanding that guy's a prick. Yeah. I feel like that's not a spoiler. You know, that guy's got red flags all over him. Yeah. Just little things like that. And, you know, free of the subjectivity of one or the other narrators, like we are, like we're, we're trained to in the book, we can, the first time we see Marianne on the show,

she wilds out on a teacher. And if we were reading that experience, and again, that's invented, that's not in the book, but if we were reading that moment from Mary Ann's perspective, there would be almost no way for it not to be just, feel justified. Yeah, she would be like, this teacher was insulting me

and I came, yeah. And if it was from Connell's perspective, there would probably be, it would probably be couched in some level of excusing or forgiving in a way that, especially early on, we don't really know his POV yet or his, what motivates him. We wouldn't, we might push it aside. And so I think the show does such a smart job early on foregrounding aspects of the characters that are going to be crucially important later. And then even more specifically, you know, I started this by talking about how good Sally Rooney is with the internal lives of the characters. there's a moment early on, I think it's episode two, when Marianne and Connell are together, and she's like, don't you have any opinions? What do you think and what do you feel? And he's like, I have no idea. Yeah. No, that's the character. And, you know, it's pilot writing 101 to be like, let us know what the characters want. You have to, you have to flash a sign. And if it was a movie, he would have to say it. He would have to do a Crash Davis speech about here's what I believe in. Right. And that is so defining. And it was done

very artfully. I think one of the things that I have tried to pay more attention to now is like the moments when the moments when shows slip the medicine in and communicate the stuff that you have to but sometimes you want to hide in the more fun

stuff and whether it's through really strong direction and just looks and cuts or it's little moments like that. The show has successfully hidden the medicine so that I

think that almost anyone, and I would love to hear people's opinions about this on Twitter or Facebook group or whatever, after two episodes, I feel like you are, if you're enjoying it, I feel like you are buckled in and you have all the information you need. Yeah, and I was thinking about this because we discussed Top Chef. I think we were talking about Top Chef when we were talking about the sort of lost art of, oh, I think we're also talking about Homeland. Like the lost art of accruing goodwill for characters over years rather than six out. episodes. And it's become increasingly common that you really are only going to spend eight to ten episodes with a set of characters and a limited amount of seasons, if that. And obviously,

this is a limited series, but I can't help but feel like this is the flip side of that. This is the ideal thing because I feel like as soon as you see them, they're almost like a plant that's dying or something. Like, you're catching them in this moment of, as soon as I see them, the shutter goes off and that image is fading. Like the image of their youth, of their innocence, of their initial wonder at one another. And their connection immediately starts to fade. And the finite amount of episodes and the finite amount of time that we're going to spend in this world makes it that much more poignant. Does that make sense? It does. And I think that's also, though, what makes people at BBC or at Hulu and the particular producers of the show bullish, I think.

on working with Sally Rooney because she's clearly adept in both mediums. She wrote some of the scripts here. She was an executive producer, and it doesn't seem like that was just a vanity title. And so while there might not be a season two of Kamala and Marianne, the Rooneyverse is real because she has an ability to create a vibe and a mood and a type of person and a type of person expresses herself in a very particular way. Yeah. And I think that that is a real opportunity so that there could be multiple series in this world.

Now, I'm not saying that this is a... Connell's mom? Just jammed... Yeah, it's on the same... I would watch that. Let me just stop you right there. But I'm saying there's not... But I'm not saying it's like an...

I'm not seriously saying it's an expanded universe where we will see... No, but it could be a... Like a vibe that it was like... like, oh, you want another show like this? Here we go. It is a, it is, it is the definition of a big mood. Yeah. And, um, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Uh, do you want, is there anything else you wanted to hit on this show? We can, otherwise we could throw it to my interview with Lenny. I think I, I kind of want to hear the interview. I mean, I'm excited. We should we decide how we want to cover this show? Because did they drop the whole thing? They put them all up, man.

Wild reckless. What do you feel like your appetite is? Did you watch this with your wife? I did. Yeah. And, and it was a rare. she wanted to keep going and I was like, let's let's keep the magic alive. Okay, that's good. Let's parcel this out a little bit because there aren't that many shows we want to watch.

I know, I know. I'm happy to do it however you want to do it. I feel like we could probably cover it in the next week or so or the next two or three episodes. We'll say this. So hopefully people have checked it out. Hopefully we haven't spoiled much and we've encouraged people to watch it and you're going to have this great interview coming up.

Let's meet back here. on Monday. And probably by Monday, I don't want to get ahead of myself, but we could probably have knocked out the first half. Sure. Right? I'm already there.

You know how it goes here? I'm just talking for myself here. I'm very reticent to make commitments on this podcast, but I will do my best. Just be careful when you're doing your jogs. You never know where a normal people spoiler might come from. Can I be real real with you? You're giving someone a scolding look

and they're like, oh, I'll tell you what happens. Episode 7, son of a bitch. Hey, I am immune. I have antibodies. I've read the book. I haven't. So I don't know, you know. All these twists are new to me.

Can I just put a little postcript for the other Mommingtons and Dattingtons out there? Sure. One thing that I am glad that I realized recently is that, you know, okay, well, let's start here. One new development during quarantine is my children know how to turn the TV on themselves now. because all rules are off. That was the day the computers became aware. No, it's a gift. I'm very pro.

But I did learn just the other day when I've, I'd been saving the last two episodes of Ugly Delicious because I just loved that show so much. And I really had a day. I was like, I really just want to watch the show that I enjoy and gives me pleasure. And so I knocked out the season. And it's fantastic. and what I learned the next morning was that on their way

to a new episode of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic the TV was frozen on a still of David Chang eating like a giant shwarma which is where I had left things off in ugly delicious

that was paramount in my mind this morning when I realized with like sinking I don't need coffee yet horror that there was a non-zero chance that when my children

fired up the TV box to watch Paw Patrol and they would learn they got some Paul Patrol they would get full Paul Patrol there would have been a different definition of yelping for help

coming from the other room so my older daughter was like I can turn on the TV dad I was like dad's got it today Dad is just mashing the menu button on the Apple TV remote like I used to mash the X button on the PlayStation. So I'm just saying, just heads up, Apple TV heads.

Stay safe out there. Get yourself back to the safety of the home screen before you quit out your show. And everybody's fine. Everybody's fine. Is there anything else we should be telling our listeners to check out? I know that the Parks and Rec reunion is tonight. Oh, yeah, that's crazy.

You know, and then there's a bunch of shows coming up in the next couple of weeks. Upload on Amazon. We'll have a couple of interviews coming up in the next few weeks, which are pretty fun. But, you know, there's a lot of stuff. We'll keep you abreast as much as we can about what we're checking out. I almost kept my children abreast this morning when they turned on TV. All right. That's enough from you.

I'm cut off. We're going to take a quick break. And then we'll come back with my interview with normal people director, Lenny Abramson. Today's episode of The Watch, it's brought to you by Billions. The hit Showtime series Billions starring Emmy winners, Paul Giamatti, and Damian Lewis. It's back. This season, the battle between Chuck and Axe reignites. And in this ultimate game of one-upsmanship, no one stays at the top for long.

The scheming and sabotage will leave you guessing as loyalty shift and opposing forces collide. Don't miss the new season of Billions starting Sunday, May 3rd, at 9 p.m. only on Showtime to try a free month of Showtime, go to Showtime.com and enter the code The Watch. This is an offer for first-time subscribers only, and it expires May 31st, so get in there. That's Showtime.com, promo code The Watch. I just wanted to welcome Lenny Abramson to The Watch.

He is one of the directors of two directors who work on normal people, which is coming to Hulu, and is an instrumental part of bringing this show to life. And Lenny, thank you so much for joining the pod today. this is one of my favorite shows of the year. Thank you. It's lovely to hear that and really a pleasure to be here.

I've been having a hard time describing to people who haven't seen it yet what it is I love so much about this series. And sometimes the word magical will come out. And I don't mean that at all. And I was wondering if you can help me. How do you describe the show to people who haven't seen it? Because on the surface, it's a pretty straightforward coming of age story. Yeah, it's a really hard one.

I mean, and actually, I think maybe the easiest way to talk about it is just say what it isn't, which it's not a high concept show. And that's why it's hard to talk about in the sense that, like, you can't say, oh, yeah, it's a dystopian thing or it's a, it's one of those ones about a, you know, there's no mystery at the start. There's no dark secret to be uncovered. There's no high concept sci-fi premise, right? And so many of the shows around at the moment like fall into those sorts of easy to describe or kind of sexy to describe a category. So, it is exactly what you say. It's a kind of coming of age story. It's a love story. It's a story about intimacy. And it's a story about the sorts of like two young people falling in love, which tracks them

over a kind of key four year period in their lives from when they're about 18 to sort of early, you know, 22 or something. But at the same time, it is sort of special. And that question keeps rising. What is it about it that makes it stand out? And so what would I say? I think it successfully shows intimacy. So it's very textured and you really feel like in a particularly strong way, maybe that you're with the characters, that you're really having an encounter with them. Yeah, I found that my wife and I am watching the episodes

are as emotionally invested with the happiness of these characters as we are with anything, like, is even like better call Saul or, you know what I mean? And like even characters who are under intense amounts of pressure and are bumping up against the underworld and crime, we feel almost- It's really nice that you say that, because Better Call Soul is my sort of all-time favorite of the current shows. And I always use as an example of like how when things are really brilliant. Yeah, that's great. But I think maybe what makes it stand out is just that it's sort of truthful and naturalistic and really closely observed. and that that's quite unusual at the moment,

like real people, people that you could recognize as, you know, living next door to you or whatever, like looked at really sort of honestly, and isn't it amazing, it turns out you can absolutely fall in love with them and unbelievably care about them

without all the sort of, you know, the architecture of big plot or crazy jeopardy surrounding them. And so much of what they do to make you fall in love with them is the most pedestrian normal everyday stuff. And one of the things that's the one of the miracles of normal people is the normal behavior, they're walking around town or campus, reading, working at a pretty regular job. It just feels so much like life. And you're able to, I think, I wouldn't say get away with that, but it would be difficult,

I think, to go and say, hey, this is, I want to make a series where people just sort of go about their everyday lives, I guess partially under the sort of umbrella of it being from this sort of hit novel. But also, there is an elasticity to episodic television runtime now where I think that you're able to cram all this interesting stuff in to relatively short episodes. I was wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about the decisions made for how you were going to break up these episodes. Yeah, that's a really good, you make a really good point because first of all, you're absolutely right that none of this would be possible if Sally Rooney hadn't written a brilliant novel that so many people loved. So that's where it all starts. And that turns the heads

towards this in a way that, you know, if you just went out, if we'd gone pitching to LA and said, guys, here's this brilliant thing. It's two young people, they fall in love, you know. There would have been tumbleweed in the conference rooms of, people would have been like, so are they X-Men or? Yeah, exactly. What are their superpowers? So there's that for sure. And then you're right. The fact that we have this kind of, we're in the world of streamers and you can make things be what they should be is so important. So the thinking we had around it was, well, we knew it was going to be TV because the novel, it's, I mean, my background is really filmed, but we knew this would be TV because the novel is episodic. And it is, and it's also, its focus is detailed, right?

So, you know, television allows you to do that and in a way where sometimes film imposes the need for this, like, massive arc or or this one central, huge. huge event or something, which television doesn't sort of doesn't kind of nail you to that. And then the normal thing for drama, or the normal thing that has been the case for drama is that you're looking at 45 minutes to an hour. But I don't think that would have worked for us. I think there's something about this short episodic format. So our episodes range from longest is maybe 35 minutes. Shortest is about 20 minutes. And what that lets you do is just go and say, takes the audience, a bit like the book does and says, let me show you this thing. it might look kind of small from over there,

but let me take you and show you this up close and track everything that's going on and wow, you won't believe how fascinating and how kind of moving it is what's happening between these two people and with the people around them. And if that takes 20 minutes,

because it's like two or three really key scenes and some setting up, let it be 20 minutes. If it takes a bit longer, then that's fine too. But you're not going, oh God, we need loads of, we need loads of event,

loads that we need a B story, you know, everything that you might need if you've got your like conventional hours worth of of drama to handle. Yeah, all of the sort of any B story, any sort of the supporting characters all sort of emerge through the POV of the two main characters that were, we're getting to know over these episodes. So there isn't that conventional like, and now for this is what the parents are doing or this is what the friends are doing or this is how this other girl or this other guy are feeling. I know with the adaptation of room, you obviously, felt a really deep connection to the material.

You wrote this letter to the author about why you felt like you were the best person for the material. What drew you to Sally's book? And what made you feel like you were the right person to help bring it to screen? Well, when I read it, and I was lucky enough to read a copy before it was published via my longtime great friend and producer, Ed Geinney from Element Pictures. And I've known Ed since we were a teenager, so we have this long connection. It's brilliant. And it's the thing that other directors look at me with,

that's where the most envy ever comes from is that I have a long-term producing partner that I trust and love, you know? So Ed said, read this, you're going to love it. And I did, and I did love it. And I think what got me, there's a thing I love about the novel and then there's why it might fit me.

I loved exactly all the things we've talked about. I love the fact that Sally takes the intimacy between two young people seriously that she writes about people who are young, but not like for a young adult audience. It's absolutely for anybody. It's for people who love literature. It's for people who are in school. It's for it just has this kind of extraordinary universal kind of appeal. But she writes positively about intimacy and about sexuality and about sex. And she doesn't pathologize it or problematize it or make it like glossy. It's just, it's so well-absor.

and so truthful, and it just reminds me of that phase of my own life and makes me think about my kids as they get older. And I don't know, it was just this kind of level of detail and texture and truthfulness and observation, all of which is very special. And then the other thing about is she writes in a deceptively simple way. Like, there's something really direct about her writing. She seems to just describe what's happening and what people are feeling and thinking without any kind of extra literary flourish, you know? And for me, there is a sort of spectrum of things that I've done, but there's a sort of central strand of work which is maybe trying to do the same thing,

which is to appear not to be present as a filmmaker, you know, to give you a feeling that you're actually with the characters that I'm showing and that there's a direct relationship between you as a viewer and them and a sense of kind of encounter or whatever. And so Ed said, and I felt that there was a sort of fit between the way Sally writes and the way I often shoot. And then on top of that, it's Irish. I'm Irish and I still live here, but I haven't shot anything here for like nearly a decade. And it felt like a really brilliant account of contemporary Ireland, which appealed to me as somebody who comes from here and wants to see it reflected on screen.

And so a whole bunch of reasons made me feel like I should do it. Did you find yourself personally attracted or personally connected to the Trinity stuff just because I know that you went there. And I spent some time, I went to school in Cork for about six months in the late 90s and spent some time in Dublin and found that the everything that, you know, the debate society stuff and the clubs and also just the way, how kids lived and how they would go back home on weekends. is just so carefully and beautifully observed.

And you don't necessarily need to be deeply familiar with the sort of rhythms of Irish life, but that gets across without it being explicit ever. Oh, that's great to hear. And that's amazing you spent time here. Yeah, I recognize that Dublin she described. And, you know, I was in Trinity, as you say, and I also did that scholarship exam

and lived in college. and although it come from Dublin and, you know, have a very different background, really, to either Marianne or Connell, that was a real point of connection. And what's amazing about it is, although it's changed a lot in the 25 years since I was there more, actually. In fact, I'm going to lie, I'm going to say 25 years since I was there. Let's just let that be on record.

Give me that one. There's no fact-checking of podcasts. Come on. No, nobody. Just stay off Google, everybody. But I, yeah, I recognize the feelings that they had. It's funny, Sally says herself that she's, people say, well, which one are you? You know, are you, Conall or Marianne?

And she always says they are both aspects of her experience there. And I recognize that too. There were moments where like Marianne felt like, oh, I found my tribe. And, you know, I felt like I was growing and finally could sort of, you know, like express myself better than I was sort of felt I could in secondary school. But on the other hand, I also spent a lot of time feeling intimidated. out of place, sort of overwhelmed by it like Connell does at the beginning. So I thought that was a, she just did a beautiful job of expressing, like you say, a universal truth about shifting from a smaller life into a bigger one as you get older and how daunting that is.

But I think even if they'd gone, you know, even if, even without that connection, I would have, I would have wanted to do this book. Well, I think you do something so wonderful, though, with the show, too, where the person who you often choose, you. to spend time with or see the world through, they get their turn at odd times for what would usually be a love story. So you almost would think that we would be spending more time with Marianne

after she feels like Connell has dumped her for lack of a better term, back in Sligo. But instead, we really get this kind of maudlin but beautiful episode with Connell kind of going through his life and then finally realizing at the end of an episode that he misses her and that if he doesn't have her to talk to,

he almost has no one to talk to. And it was such a brilliant move to not spend the entire time with the person who's probably crying and we don't even know what's going on with Mary. And we just kind of, we were left to wonder the same way he is. How did you sort of make those decisions

about POV and how you were going to divvy up, not screen time, but almost where you were going to be directing the audience as a sort of a moment, emotional investment at any given time. Well, all through the adaptation process, the great thing was we were all working pretty closely together. So there was Sally and Alice Birch.

She's this brilliant. She wrote Lady Macbeth, brilliant screenwriter and playwright from the UK. And then there was all of us involved in the production team as well. And it was very kind of, and some brilliant people, you know, brilliant script editor, Chelsea Morgan Hoffman and Eminort and another great producer on the project. So lots of people gathered around. this and talking about just these sorts of things, using the book as the basis and then sort of deciding how we would navigate it. And I think an instinct that I've always had is just,

you know, where the strongest emotion appears to be isn't always the most interesting place to look. Like in a funny way, we all know, well, most of us know what it's like to love somebody and be dumped and that devastation. In a way, you kind of get that, for free, I think, as a, as a viewer, but Connell's particular encounter with himself at that point in the story, where he realizes how ridiculous his anxieties were about the relationship and how his kind of obsession about what other people might think, how kind of that robbed him of something, that felt like the most interesting place to sit at that point. And similarly, oddly in the next episode when we go to university, you know, splitting the episode really into

two halves, being with him for a period and being with her, feels like you shouldn't do that, you know, in a drama, it feels like you should be intercutting and comparing and contrasting their lives. But actually taking her away from him for such a long time means that when you do finally bring her back, it has such power. And then you go with her for a period. of time and you kind of have to catch up. And there's something really lovely, I think, and it's something I believe in a lot in screen storytelling of finding ways to make the audience active, you know, like jumping to a place where you don't expect to be, having to kind of gather yourself, it kind of sharpens the attention. Oh, yeah. It allows, it kind of creates a sort of

lean-in feeling, which I think that's the kind of attention capital that a filmmaker can really used then. So I don't know. It's just, there was a lovely organic quality to how those decisions got made. And even in the edit, you know, like tweaks to that and, and kind of reconfigurations of that sometimes found even more interesting ways to tell the story. I mean, absolutely. I mean, we, this kind of is the theme of our conversation, but we spend so much time when you watch a certain kind of, I mean, and I, I love superhero movies, but like when you watch a kind of big genre movie, where a lot of the work you're doing is basically, like, people telling you what you should know about characters rather than showing you what you should

know about characters. And when you're sort of at Trinity with Marian and you're sort of discerning what kind of relationship she has with Gareth and this other guy who likes her, but she's met Connell again. And all that stuff is filling in and you're learning so much about where she's been since the last time we've seen her. And you're right. It does make you pay attention is almost like you're watching an episode of Sherlock or something. Yeah. It's funny. how, like, it's a really interesting thing. So if you're working along genre lines, and unlike you, I get great pleasure from that

when it's well done. But the way it works is, even if people are taking unusual routes through, they are still playing with the same kind of key, like, nodal points of the story, because that's what the genre demands. And so a lot of the time you're going, oh, okay, that's the sort of thing I'm in.

Or, oh, I thought I was in this, but actually I'm in that. And that's a great way of, like, that's a really playful relationship with the audience. It's sort of like when you go, when you take the safety, you sort of take the safety net away when you work in a different way, where you have to build it, the experience has to be built in and of itself and you don't have those kinds of expectations.

You do have lots of story expectations still. I mean, listen, it's a love story and you know you want them to be together. And I'm not suggesting that we've invented some new form or anything like that. But I think what's interesting about what we did was you just, You're trying to get out of the way and have it feel to the viewer that they are discovering these things themselves. Even though you're seeding lots of things and hinting and shaping, it's just if you get that level of kind of connection with an audience where they feel that they are piecing this together, I think the reward of the emotional kind of reward that that can bring is so exciting when it lands. Of course, if it doesn't land, you're left sort of with nothing. It's just a bunch of characters wandering around chatting to each other.

But I think, you know, that's the challenge and that's the exciting kind of world to play in. Yeah, and you find character in different kinds of action. I mean, you wind up finding Connell's character in the way in which he works at the gas station. You know, the way the sort of care and he's not kind of all elbows and knees. He seems like a really quiet, considerate person just in watching the way he interacts with the world. and it informs how you're going to see his interactions with Marion inevitably. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the directing partnership that you have, for lack of a better term, on this series, because I love Teddy McDonald's work on Howard's End.

I was wondering how the two of you worked in tandem and how it was sort of finding a coherent vision for the series that would allow the two of you still to sort of do your otorist things that directors love to do. Totally. Well, I think that it was a very conscious choice, you know, to find somebody like, you know, in quotes, like a real filmmaker to take the second block because we actively wanted somebody to bring their vision to it. And especially because I think the story does, the tone does shift, you know, halfway through. There is a sort of a dark turn in a way. And it felt like the story was like solid enough to hold another. sensibility and to let that flourish. So I think with Hettie, we talked early a lot. And then I think in a way, I tried to, you know, I didn't want to impose any limits on what she did. I know how good she is. And I know how kind of like that she's not going to come along and do something which breaks the thread. So I had the luxury of setting the show up of casting. it and of creating the tone that I felt was right for it. And I knew that anybody with, like,

as intelligent and as skillful as her would be challenged to find a way to incorporate her vision into what was already there. And that's pretty much what happened. I watched, you know, she watched what I'd done. I watched her rushes. And we talked a little bit, but generally, it was just really fascinating for me to watch the kind of the way she leaned into aspects that I hadn't and the way she found things and worked in a slightly different way, like visually, slightly more formal. And that felt like it suited what was going on. And, you know, so it was actually pretty seamless without there being a tremendous amount of, you know, detailed joint preparation or anything like that. Did you, did you two block shoot stuff where you did all your

episodes and then she did all of hers or were there ever weeks or times where there was sort of, you would do Monday and Wednesday and she was working on Tuesday and Thursday. Was there much crossover? There was no crossover and that allowed us to basically do it like two films. Oh, that's interesting. So I worked for about 10 weeks. Then there was a hiatus of about a week to allow, you know, some things like key things to be prepped that you couldn't do while we were working. And she had the crew remained the same apart from DOP. So I had this wonderful DOP called Susie LaValle. and then Hettie worked with another wonderful Irish DP called Kate McCullough. And so Kate had been prepping and a new first AD, but everybody else pretty much stayed the same through the process.

So yeah, there was no block shooting. And I know that there's a lot, I mean, talking to other people on the crew, getting a sense, more of a sense of how a lot of TV is shot, it seems like there's a lot of double banking and a lot of people. but I think if you can divide it like this, it just gives everybody each director a sense of like, of really steering the boat for that, those weeks and not having anybody else kind of coming in and out of the process.

So I wanted to also, we can wrap up soon, but I wanted to ask you a little bit about the people in front of the camera because I would imagine with a book like normal people, you know, it's almost like I remember reading, I remember when I was reading No Country for Old Men. And as I finished the book, I think they made the announcement that the Coens were going to make it

and that these were the actors who were going to play the characters. And it might be one of the only times that I was ever outdone by the casting announcement where I was like, oh, well, yeah, I guess that is Josh Brolin. That is Anthony, you know, that is Hopier-Bardham. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And now I'll never see those characters in my mind again. I'll only ever see the, But did you, when you were reading normal people, did you see faces? And how did that impact the casting process? Well, funny when I'm reading books, I have a strong feeling for the character, like kind of what they would be like to be standing beside. But I don't visualize faces. And that's funny because I know people do.

And I'm, you know, pretty visual as a person. But I, but when I'm reading, it's the feeling I get for a character. And I think also if I do, or to the extent that I do a bit, I try to forget that when I come to casting it because one thing I learned early on is I used to think that the job was to write like a really specific casting brief and the more intelligently described and the more entertaining to read, the better the casting brief. And actually, I've gone the opposite way because all that happens if you do that is you're freaking out the per casting director who's desperately trying to find somebody that has

like all these specific traits and looks exactly like this. And then you're just not miss, you're missing the person who bears no resemblance to what you in your head who walks in and just sort of blows you away. So I knew very strongly the kind of person that the kinds of people that they are. I mean, having grown up here and knowing the territory, but I didn't want to nail them physically at all because I just know that that's the road to kind of missing things. Sure. Having said that, when I had that same feeling, when I saw Paul Mescal self-tape, which was really early, was probably one of the first batches of things. self-tape's I looked at when we were just, you know, beginning to crank up the cast and you're thinking,

okay, let's start and see where we are. And, you know, and I saw this tape and I thought, well, there he is. That's Connell. I mean, you know, and it felt like I was recognizing somebody that I'd seen in my head, even though I hadn't. And same then when we, when Daisy came on the scene. And then particularly when I got them together, it was like just there they are. And one thing I've noticed, and it's, it's like one, I'm sure there's, the psychological experiments that have been done to, you know, demonstrate this. But oddly, if you cast people who really understand the roles and really play them with the correct essence, so many people you'll see on social media or whatever going,

oh my God, that is exactly how I imagine them. Yeah. And that cannot be true. You know, it just can't be true. There's too many variations out there, and there's no way that everybody saw them like that. So what they really mean is they're right, you know? And actually people's, oddly, I think people's memories of the book then, It's just like you were saying about Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem.

And that is one of my favorite films, by the way. So it's, yeah, it's amazing casting. Yeah. You can't imagine that any other way now. I think once you see the face, if the essence is right, then forevermore, there's a kind of fusion of the two things in your imagination. Well, it's an absolutely wonderful adaptation. And I think it's going to bring people a lot of joy at a time when they could really use it. If you want to stay on and we can talk better call Saul, but I don't want to take up too much more of your time.

I'll leave you to it. And thanks so much, Chris, because it was a total pleasure to talk to somebody who likes it so much and gets it so well. Yeah, thank you so much, Lenny. Take care. Take care.

All the best. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by the hit Showtime series Billions starring Emmy Award winners Paul Giamati and Damian Lewis. This season, the battle between Chuck and Axe reignites and in this ultimate game

of one-upsmanship, no one stays at the top for long. The scheming and sabotaging will leave you guessing as loyalties shift and opposing forces collide. Don't miss the new season of billions starting Sunday, May 3rd at 9 p.m. Only on Showtime. To try a free month of Showtime, go to Showtime.com and enter code The Watch. This offer is for first-time subscribers only and expires May 31st. That's Showtime.com. The code is The Watch.