Unpacking a Murder at the End of the World
Released on 12/07/2023
I wanna puncture the illusion of events like this
just a little bit and say that,
and I don't think I'm betraying my fellow moderators here,
most of the time, moderators don't know very much at all
about the people they're talking to.
We sort of fake an interest and an enthusiasm.
All this to say, I don't have to pretend today
I'm so pleased to say I was actually watching Brit
and Zal's new show,
A Murder at the End of the World on my own
before I was asked to moderate this.
So this is coming from a very genuine place of excitement.
So please, without further ado,
welcome to the stage Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij.
[audience cheers and claps]
Welcome, welcome.
That was such a nice intro.
How do we live up to it?
I don't wanna talk too much about your last show,
The OA, but I do wanna start there
because it was meant to be five seasons.
It was infamously, unceremoniously canceled after two,
much to the outrage and profound disappointment of many,
many of us.
When I heard that the new show was a limited series,
my first thought was, well, this is uncancelable.
You can't cancel a single episode of television.
So I have to know, is that the reason the two of you
thought, we'll just make a single season of television?
You know, you're not the first person to say that.
And every time I hear it, I'm like,
I wish we had thought about it that way.
That's so clever and correct.
But I think actually this story just was a novel
with like a beginning, middle, and end.
And it was just a book.
And we asked ourselves, how long will it take to tell this?
And we were like, eight hours.
And then we were like, hmm,
budgetarily, could we make it seven?
And we did and so.
I was gonna ask why seven?
It's somewhat of an unusual number of episodes.
It was a budget thing?
Well, I think also every time we make one of these,
it sort of feels like we're writing a novel,
adapting the novel, and then making an eight hour film.
That's what each season of The OA felt like.
So by the time we were doing it for the third time
with A Murder at the End of the World,
we were like, you know, if we just shave off an hour,
we'll make it a lot easier on ourselves.
So maybe the next thing we make will be three hours
and then two hours, and then we'll just be right back at
making feature films again, yeah.
Can you, for the audience very briefly sum up
what the show is, what it's about, what you're going for,
Zal maybe you want to take this one?
Sure, A Murder at the End of the World,
is about a tech billionaire and his wife
who decide to host a retreat of world luminaries.
And they invite our hero, Darby Hart, who is a 24-year-old
freshly minted author whose book isn't that successful.
So she doesn't know why she's invite.
And she's invited to a remote hotel
these billionaires have just built in Iceland.
And then, you know, shit happens.
Bad shit, good shit.
[everyone chuckles]
Sort of murders in confined spaces,
whether it's a house or in this case a hotel.
I mean, there's a storied tradition of this.
It's a classic of the genre.
And I, how much of making the show was wanting
to participate in that tradition.
Try your own version of a murder mystery, a who done it.
And did you study past examples in the work,
the lead up to making it?
We did, we did, we watched a lot of Gosford Park.
We watched Gosford Park multiple times.
Actually, Zal one day came into our writer's room,
which is really just like the bedroom
or a spare room of whatever house we're in.
And he had been doing some research on the
whodunit as a genre.
And he came in and he was like, you know,
the whodunit came to popularity for the first time
between the first and the second World War,
which was another time when I think everyone was kind
of looking around and being like, okay, who done it?
Like, how did we get here?
And who's to blame?
Who's responsible for this, you know,
situation we're finding ourselves in.
And I think it felt to both of us, like this is,
we're in another era where things are very complicated
and we're up against these big overwhelming forces,
whether that's the climate crisis
or the unravel of democracy or whatever it is,
it feels like the forces are huge
and that we're kind of all looking around
and being like, okay, who done it?
How did we get here?
And how do we, how do we find our way out of this?
So that was sort of the beginning
of thinking about the genre.
And it was too tempting because
the old English manor house
where these stories were set
and a sort of billionaire's retreat, it's just too easy
to sort of, you know, supplant one with the other.
It just felt like such a natural fit.
[Jason] Wait, say more, why?
What was so easy about that?
Well, you know, both have a group of interesting
and strange characters coming together.
Both have a sort of natural leader, you know,
the guy who owns the house.
Both are a seat of power, representative of a seat
of power at the time.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
What other trope were there?
Were, were you conscious of other tropes
you were playing with, subverting?
Well, what happens, you know, I mean,
I guess sometimes it's the audacity of me and Brit
and what we should be sort of punished
or praised for, which is that we think
that we can change a genre, you know,
because we find certain genres very problematic.
Like Brit one day, you know, was just like,
why does every murder mystery have to start
with a dead woman, half clothed, blood somewhere?
And why does that image system power the whole narrative?
And, you know, you say it much better, so you should say it.
No, I mean, at Twin Peaks, for instance, as a series,
I love, like, love that series
and I found myself watching it again one day
and being like, oh, could you make this if like the image
in the sky was a Larry Palmer, like, would you be as drawn
to like solving a mystery that was of a young man?
Like, not exactly.
There's something about the dead woman
that has a sort of dark erotic charge
that murder mysteries have been trafficking in for forever.
And so I think for us, the challenge was like, okay,
can we take that young woman and sort of stand her up
and clean the blood off of her?
And can she solve the crime?
And not with a badge or the authority of gender or her age,
but just because she authorizes herself to do it
as a kind of citizen detective.
And I think if we'd been making it even, you know, five,
10 years ago or something
that would've felt very tongue in cheek, sort
of Nancy Drew style murder mystery.
But where amateur sleuthing is right now
and where the sort of like hive mind
of the internet is right now,
a young woman could become a credible detective
and really have logged her 10,000 hours on the internet
solving cold cases with other amateur sleuths.
And so it felt like a character we could finally write
and pull off where it would actually be very serious,
or we could get the audience to take her seriously
if we could figure out how to write our way
around the sort of tent poles of the genre
as Zal was talking about.
I do want to keep talking about Darby
and citizen detection, but your answer there reminded me,
and we talked a little bit about this backstage
of your appearance on an episode
of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast,
Revisionist History a season or two ago.
It was a three part series on the Disney movie,
A Little Mermaid,
and he had Brit on as sort of an expert screenwriter,
which she is, and asked or gave her homework
and said, can you please rewrite the ending
of The Little Mermaid in a way that might,
well, I don't know, why don't you tell us
what you understood the assignment to be?
Well, he called me one day because he had,
he was having a daughter
and he was watching animations, you know,
films that he might share with his daughter.
And he watched The Little Mermaid and was outraged.
And he called me just screaming.
He was like, this is ridiculous.
I mean, she doesn't even do anything.
She has no agency.
She solves nothing, at the end she's like cowering
at the bottom of like a tidal pool.
And he was very upset and he was like,
is there a way to rewrite this story that,
you know, maintains some of the things
that we love about it, but maybe gives some,
you know, power and agency back
to the Little Mermaid herself.
And maybe also, and this was the twist I pulled on him
as I called him back three days later.
And I was like, what if Ursula isn't really the villain?
And he was like, oooooh.
And then I wrote some stuff up and I sent it to him
and he was like, this is so much fun.
I'm gonna spend three episodes on it
and I'm gonna call Jodie Foster
and see if she wants to come play the Little Mermaid.
[Jason] You made that call.
He made that call.
[Jason] Oh, he made that call, right?
Yeah.
And she came and she did it.
And Glen Close was Ursula
and we had a ball, we even got Zal to come
into the recording booth
and play one of the characters, which,
[Jason] Who did you play?
[Zal] No, I was awful.
The priest, who.
Brit's laughing at Malcolm
and her laughing at me trying to do one line,
and then I realized like
how intense it is the Brit acts in our projects
and that I'd never had enough empathy for that.
This raises so many questions for me about the purpose
of stories and sort to be totally honest
before that episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast,
I was sort of the opinion that it doesn't matter
what the ending is, we're all intelligent consumers of art.
We could separate this is a story versus like,
this is the way I should live my life.
Right?
But something about that episode kind of convinced you,
but maybe the endings of these stories do mean,
and maybe we, we do struggle to separate out like,
what's it mean that The Little Mermaid ended
up at the bottom, whatever.
Like it's think about, tell me how you think about
the moral, I guess of stories?
Do they need to end the right way?
Do they need to end in a way that's morally edifying
or is that cheap?
Are we being talked down to, or condescended
to if the ending is politically correct,
for lack of a better term?
Well, I mean I think all endings are political,
all movies, all stories are political, all of them.
There's no way out of it.
And it's who is controlling those politics.
Or, and also I think to add to that, it's, I think stories
often put parameters around what we're capable of imagining
and who we're capable of having empathy with,
which is why it's so nice to be alive in a time when
technology's reached a place
where filmmaking is accessible to more people
and a lot of different kinds of storytellers, us included,
are finding our way into the writer and director's chair
'cause it just changes the stories that are out there.
But, you know, you and I were talking about
science fiction earlier.
There was a little boy who was 10 years old
who read a graphic novel in the sixties,
in the 1960s that featured lasers,
which was like such a far out idea.
That little boy grew up,
and when he was in his fifties, he became the person
who invented the laser.
And I think that that, you know,
sometimes science fiction is prescient
and it's foreseeing something that's coming,
but sometimes science fiction is calling into being
something that doesn't exist.
And so I think for the people who make science fiction
or tell these kind of stories, there's actually,
I don't know if it's a moral imperative,
but it's a real question of what kind
of worlds do you want to build
because it does affect sort of the way in which we imagine
or what we all think is possible
or a future we could step into.
I love that.
Do you, both of you consider yourself
science fiction practitioners?
Are you in the genre, are you outside?
Where, how do you think of yourself in relation to sci-fi?
Before we answer that very good question
I just wanna say that I think that on
what you were asking earlier,
I think the most radical thing I've experienced
in my lifetime is not a technological leap.
It's not the internet or a driverless car,
which I was in today, coming here.
Those are, you know, gonna change our lives.
But I think the most radical thing
that's happened in my lifetime
is that women are writing and directing stories
and that it's happening on such a mass level.
[audience clapping and cheering]
I'm not even getting, like, I saw Anatomy of a Fall.
Have you guys seen Anatomy of a Fall yet?
You have to go see it if you haven't seen it.
And I walked out and I realized like, oh,
I will now see women on the streets, Brit, who I work with,
I will just see the world differently
because I saw this movie
and, you know, this is a radical move.
And I think it's such an honor for me to get to work
with Brit because, you know,
A Murder at the End of the World, is coming out right now
and Brit directed chapters five and six.
Five comes out today and six comes out next week.
And I just noticed the difference when Brit's working
with Emma, when Brit's writing these stories
and then directing them.
And there's such a difference.
And I think that is the thing
that is the thing that's gonna change our lives.
[Jason] What is the difference?
Can you say a bit more about that?
I'll use Anatomy of a Fall
'cause it's easier to talk about.
I think it's just,
I'd never seen a woman like that on screen before.
And as Brit just said, once you see it,
once someone lives to tell it,
like has the skills to put that on screen
and move us in the way that those filmmakers
and actors did, then all of a sudden
the limitations of your imagination change.
Okay, back to science fiction are you,
fabulous answer by the way,
are you a sci-fi writer?
Are both of you?
Yes, yes, I think we are
sometimes science fiction writers.
I mean, something else I think a lot about is an expression
that I heard Adrian Marie Brown use once.
She's an activist and a writer who I admire.
And she, she wrote a book called Pleasure Activism.
But she had talked about once the idea
of resistance fiction.
And I really like that expression
because I, she sort of described it as
every story is either maintaining the status quo
or it's working against the status quo
and trying to build something different.
And I think that all of our stories in one way
or another have that energy in them,
maybe just 'cause of who we are as people
and as Zal was saying earlier,
because every story by nature of
who is the storyteller is political.
And sometimes I think that takes a science fiction bend,
you know, like in The OA,
which you could describe a science fiction or low fantasy
or just really fucking weird and far out.
But yeah, I think all of the ideas behind this stuff
are an attempt of people who have traditionally
in storytelling been in the margins,
trying to figure out how to imagine a world
that they can really not only survive in, but thrive in.
And what might that look like
and how to articulate the experience of being
in the world that we're in now.
What do you, what would you say Zal though?
[Zal] Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Brit earlier used the word prescient
and we have to talk about AI in the show.
AI plays a fairly central role.
There's an AI assistant kind of in the walls of the hotel
made by the tech billionaire
who's presiding over this retreat.
This was written as I understand it
what, four years ago you said?
In the first episode,
the AI is asked to, I think if I have this right,
write Harry Potter in the style of Ernest Hemingway.
And that's very familiar to us now
because ChatGPT can do that in a second.
But when you wrote that, where,
what were you basing that on?
Because now it feels extremely prescient.
When we would give people early drafts of the script
or like early stuff, they'd be like,
are you sure you wanna do AI?
Isn't that just a Hollywood thing?
And there's like stuff talking about large language models
and people would be like, ah, cross that out.
That's so confusing.
Nobody caress, what does this mean?
And we really fought to keep it in that space.
And then like lo and behold, as we were shooting
and then as you know, while we were writing,
actually a friend of ours helped us get early access
to ChatGPT-3 an early beta version.
And we played around with that a bit as we were,
you know, coming up with Ray.
But then it was interesting to see like, as we were editing
as we, everything just sort of kind of came to pass.
So now a lot of what felt like science fiction near future,
by the time the story came into the world is
just where we're at.
Did that excite you guys?
Were you worried that maybe you got it slightly wrong
or were you pretty comfortable?
Well this, you know, the actor's strike was happening
and so the studio called us and said,
we're not gonna release the show.
Do you guys want January, November?
We said November.
By January it'll be like really passe, so.
[audience chuckles]
Probably true.
Let's talk a little bit more about Darby the protagonist.
She is a hacker and a writer
and sort of the perennial challenge
of both of those professions on screen
is that it's very hard to dramatize basically typing.
I mean, what these people do for a living is at a computer,
whether you're writing or you're coding.
Did you think about the challenges
of having a main character who really doesn't,
in one sense do a lot?
I'm gonna let Zal take this one
'cause he fought actually very hard on our screen
work throughout the entire.
Yeah, it was very hard to fight Disney legal
on using just like, you know, Google or Facebook
or Reddit or any of those things.
So we did it and it's there
and we wanted to use it as realistically as possible.
But yeah, I disagree that it's boring.
Everyone always says that it's boring.
But I think, you know, we have a six minute scene
where Bill and Darby are meeting each other
for the first time and 90% of that scene
happens over the computer, they can't see each other,
and then at the end they see each other.
And I love it.
So we spend our lives in front of computers
and screens, so we should be able to figure out
how to dramatize that.
It's harder.
But I think also what Zal was really careful with,
you know, in building that scene
was making a narrative inside it.
So like every beat of it, you know,
Darby's wanting something and tries something
and then doesn't get it and then has to try something else
and you're watching it play out on a screen,
but each, each beat of what's happening on screen
has a narrative thrust
and there's a beginning, middle, and end and a reversal.
And so I think that hopefully holds the moments
and makes them compelling.
And to be fair, they're both citizen detectives,
so they are going out into the world
and doing things as well.
And, that makes me want to ask,
do you think as writers it is important
to also go out in the world and do things?
And I ask somewhat selfishly
because as an editor of a magazine,
I sometimes worry that writers don't do that enough
and they, they do just stay at home
in front of their computers
and aren't experiencing the world enough.
So are you guys out and about
or are you very kind of computer bound as people?
Brit gives me this grin when she wants
to throw all the hard questions my way.
[everyone chuckles]
Yeah, I mean, I think we have to fight
to be out and about more.
When we were younger, we just did it.
It was just a lot easier to go do wild things
and then come back and try to form a story from it
or form a story and then try to go do something wild
to sort of play it out.
But yeah, I'm excited to go forth into the world this,
we're done with this story and anything is possible
and the world is changing constantly.
So it's a good time to go and explore.
I think it's also part of the love affair
between Bill and Darby.
And what makes it an interesting romance
is that she grew up as the coroner's daughter.
She was an outcast in school.
Like she came into her algebra class
smelling of formaldehyde, you know, she's weird,
but she finds him on the internet
and they begin this courtship
and they're solving these cases and it's so intoxicating
and Darby would be happy to keep it there, you know,
like she's a girl who's kind of living from here up
like a lot of us are these days we're just like all here.
And then, you know, they stumble across this important piece
of evidence and Bill's like, I'm gonna drive a state away.
I'm gonna pick you up.
Like, let's get in the car, let's go solve this thing.
Let's drive across the country.
And Darby closes her laptop
because the idea of, you know,
meeting Bill IRL like in the flesh
and contending with the awkwardness of bodies
and the strangeness of actually falling in love
with someone in real time is so terrifying to her
as I think it's kind of becoming terrifying
for all of us the more we live our lives online, you know,
to risk vulnerability and stuff in person.
But I think what happens between the two of them
as they're on the road is like really heartening.
And we felt it as a crew and a cast shooting it.
Like in the end we kind of pared down
and we were just like 20 of us in the desert
shooting this story as they fell in love.
And you got back to sort of the essence of filmmaking,
a little stripped bare of all the pomp and circumstance
and just people like sweating it out
and finding it together in these locations.
And there was something very beautiful about that adventure.
Zal you mentioned earlier that Brit
also acts in this show.
So between the two of you,
I mean you pretty much do everything you can do.
You write it, you direct it, you produce it, you act in it.
Is that auteurism, is that an obnoxious word?
Are you both auteurs of the silver screen?
Don't look at Zal, this is a question.
[Brit] This for me, but I thought it was for him.
We're doing the thing where you were
giving him the hard question.
Let's see what he says when I don't look.
[Jason] We'll start with Brit.
Are you an auteur?
I, can I, okay, the honest answer,
I think I've always found the auteur thing a little weird.
I mean, I don't know, filmmaking is so,
is inherently a choral enterprise, you know,
if you wanna take all the credit for something,
write a novel or paint a painting, you know,
I think one of the things that's beautiful
about filmmaking is that
when you have really great collaborators, you know,
like our production designer, Alex DiGerlando,
our cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen,
costume designer, Megan Gray,
like every one of them is such a gifted artist.
And you know, we write the script
and we come up with a story and we all get together.
And then to watch the ways in which they carve the story
deeper through the acumen of their craft, it's dazzling.
It's like the most, it's like when you were a kid
in the sandbox and you found other kids that wanted
to build an imagined world with you.
It's an incredible collaborative experience.
So I guess for me, I kind of,
I sometimes just a little bit raise my eyebrows
at the word auteur, 'cause I'm like,
what does that really mean?
What about the hundreds of people
that come together to make this stuff, yeah.
[Jason] Zal, do you sort of feel the same way?
Yeah, I mean, we always put the story,
people ask us if we fight in our creative collaboration
and we don't because we always put the story first.
And I think the collaborators that we work with
also put the story first.
So it's easy when you put the story
above your own anything else.
And then I think as a result,
because of the whole conversation we've been having,
the kinds of stories we're trying to tell
and trying to reimagine a genre which is really audacious,
maybe a dumb thing to do,
it naturally gives our work a certain feeling and quality.
So maybe the works have a similar feeling,
but I don't think that comes from our authorship.
It comes from the way we're dreaming.
Which I guess is a kind of authorship now
that I hear you say it, but yeah.
[Jason] Wait, say, say a little bit more about that.
Well, I think I, as I'm hearing him say it like
that is a kind of authorship.
I think that there's, Zal and I have been telling stories
together since we met when we were teenagers in college.
So there is some space that is between the two of us
that we go into all the time and build worlds in together.
And maybe because as Zal's saying,
a lot of that involves taking genres
and turning them on their heads.
There is a kind of, that has some sort of flavor
or I guess signature maybe.
The last thing I wanna talk about is spoilers
in the lead up to this panel, I must have been asked,
you know, three times not to spoil anything.
And I wouldn't dream of it.
It would be a betrayal of you and the audience.
But intellectually, I always think why do we care
so much about spoilers?
I mean, emotionally, I understand,
but we know the ending of Romeo and Juliet
and because we know the ending,
we're free to appreciate the plot and the turns
and the twists and the storytelling.
So if I knew the end of this show,
which is a murder mystery,
and knowing the end is probably a big deal,
would I appreciate it more?
Would I take more pleasure in the beats of the storytelling?
And I'm curious how the two of you, as the people
who wrote it, feel about spoilers.
[Zal] Have you ever been to a film festival?
[Jason] No.
Well, the most radical thing for me when I went
to Sundance for the first time
was to watch these other movies,
and I realized that I'd almost never seen a movie on the big
screen where I hadn't bought into it.
Like they hadn't had to sell me most of the plot
in order to get me to go to the movie.
And they do all this marketing and testing
and they get the colors right
and all this stuff to sort of seduce me.
And so when you watch a movie
and you don't know anything about it,
it is the most magical feeling.
So I think that, yeah, there's something so cool about,
you know, we really wanted to do that with OA,
especially this idea that streaming had just started
and Netflix, like you just press play
and you just, we wanted to take people
on the wildest ride in which you couldn't predict things.
So I think sometimes, but yeah, you know,
when you know the ending, it's still good.
That said, I mean, I do think we also try
to construct stories so that you can watch the ending
and then when you go back to the beginning
you see all kinds of things in it
that you didn't see before.
And I think that wasn't possible before
I mean, traditional television was made kind
of like in a factory model.
Like someone's, you know, writing chapter five
while someone else is shooting chapter one
and you're playing a kind of leapfrog to get to the end.
And you often don't know the ending
as you once as you're writing the beginning.
But in what we've been doing
or what really internet streaming storytelling has allowed,
I don't even think it is television anymore,
is that we write everything up front, you know,
and then so it exists as a whole.
And when we get to the ending of writing,
we always go back to the beginning and rewrite the beginning
because you've learned things along the way.
So hopefully, and you can call me and tell me if it's true
when you get to the end,
you can let me know if chapter one still
withstands the scrutiny of chapter seven.
Perfect note to go out on.
And please thank Brit and Zal again.
Thank you guys, thank you.
[audience clapping]
Thank you.
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