Unpacking a Murder at the End of the World

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.