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Brit Marling spent the summer of her junior year at Georgetown University interning at Goldman Sachs, an investment firm that this very publication once called “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” She ended that summer with a cushy job offer — only to reject it and, along with her pal Mike Cahill, head to Cuba to film a documentary about boxers and ballerinas caught in the middle of the U.S.-Cuba imbroglio. Marling drank from the capitalist cup, and it left a very bitter taste in her mouth.
In the years since, Marling has established herself as one of the more compelling artists in Hollywood. She was the toast of Sundance 2011 with Another Earth and The Sound of My Voice, two heady films she starred in and co-wrote with her Georgetown classmates Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij, respectively. And The OA, a trippy, dimension-hopping series she created with Batmanglij, made them streaming folk heroes of sorts when the beloved show was canceled by Netflix after two seasons, ending on a cliffhanger.
Marling and Batmanglij have reteamed for A Murder at the End of the World, a seven-part FX miniseries that follows Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), an amateur sleuth and hacker who’s dedicated her life to identifying Jane Does and tracking down their killers. When she’s invited to a remote retreat in Iceland by shadowy tech billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) and his wife, Lee Andersen (Marling), and one of the guests drops dead, Darby digs into the murder and the mystery of why she and her ex, Bill (Harris Dickinson), were invited to join these luminaries in the first place. It’s a Stieg Larsson meets Agatha Christie noir-thriller — with a heavy dose of Kubrick — that will keep you guessing from one week to the next.
Rolling Stone spoke with Marling about the series, its pivotal sixth episode (which she also directed), The OA’s cancellation, and much more.
Warning: Spoilers for Chapter Six of A Murder at the End of the World ahead.
For Chapter Six, I wanted to first ask you about the misdirection regarding Lee. We learn that all is not what it seemed.
It’s one of the things that you don’t expect from Lee. It’s very easy in the beginning to cast her as a femme fatale or the dark and dangerous mysterious woman who’s probably manipulating everything behind the scenes. Then you come to see in Chapter Six that she has been doing a lot of things behind the scenes, but because you bring a lot of your unconscious bias of the femme fatale toward Lee, you haven’t been able to read any of the clues that were definitely there that she’s been acting suspicious because her family’s dealing with a lot of trauma and she’s been in an abusive situation. That was interesting for us to write about because I think a lot of times, we assume that domestic violence situations only exist in certain kinds of homes — whatever that even means — or against certain kinds of women. And often very strong, smart, forthright, and competent women can find themselves in abusive and intimidating situations with their partners.
Why would Lee even be attracted to Andy in the first place? It seems she must have had to toss out many of the ideals she held onto earlier in life — and in the manifesto that attracted Bill and Darby to her work.
Lee begins her life in that early era of the internet when so much seemed possible. I have a lot of friends who were hackers in that early era, and they describe it as this limitless-freedom feeling to a space that was this wide-open frontier that could become anything. There was so much creativity and community and this sense that punk kids could really, for the first time, rise up and topple the system. And then, as things calcified, it became very different. And a lot of women in that space have found themselves doxxed, or stalked, or had their reputations destroyed online in one way or the other, whether it’s fake porn that’s been released of them or something else. There’s nothing you can really do when that happens, and we wanted to talk about the fragility of that space. Once those images exist of you on the internet, there’s no getting them back. To watch someone like Lee, who had so much to offer the world, have to retreat from it because she’s been met with such an intense force of violence, and threats of violence, is heartbreaking. She pivots toward Andy because he has a brilliant mind and is interested in many of the things she’s interested in, but he also offers this measure of security and safety in a world where she doesn’t feel she has any.
Their dynamic reminded me of Elon Musk and Grimes, since Grimes was this hippie who first made news for putting chickens on a raft with her partner and trying to sail it down the Mississippi only to end up with a megalomaniacal tech billionaire. Did they serve as inspiration?
Our inspiration for Andy actually came from an unlikely place. We were reading a lot about Walt Disney at the time and read this story that really stuck with us. When he was initially making Snow White, people thought he was insane for wanting to make a full-length animated feature. He persisted and persisted and did this thing, and it created the medium. When he was in his later years and he had this big house in the Hollywood Hills, he built this train set through his living room and backyard, and people would find this grown man riding a child’s train set through his house. But he was working something out that he couldn’t quite articulate yet in three dimensions — the idea of taking his stories, bringing them into the real world, and allowing people to physically move through his narratives. So, he invents the theme park from this miniature train station he’d turned his house into. There was something about that outside-the-box thinking that we wanted to acknowledge.
In our story, we’re trying to deal with the complexity of the fact that a lot of innovators have something quite beautiful to offer, and have minds that think outside the box and offer these things, and the question is: What happens when these technologies are being built within a capitalist system where everybody has to beat each other to the marketplace and scoop up the profits, so there’s a race where things aren’t being incubated as long and only being developed by certain kinds of people with access to those resources? Then, we the people — who are the lab rats — have to internalize the consequences of that. I think about the smartphone, and my ability to concentrate or imagine has completely eroded in the last five years. It’s so shocking and sad to me. When we were doing research on OA 2, we were meeting with people in Silicon Valley, and we met with this app designer. He had a lockbox in the front of his house, and he put his phone in it and he said, “Me and my family, we lock up our phones in the front of the house, so we spend our time inside phone-free — because they’re a drug.”
And that’s where Darby comes in.
Darby Hart is a reflection of this. There are a lot of dazzling qualities Darby has. As someone who is as old as Google and grew up in the age of the internet, her mind is sprawling and she understands the hive mind of amateur sleuths on the web, and there’s so much beauty and competency in that, and at the same time, Darby is having a hard time navigating intimacy, love, or a normal coming-of-age experience because she’s spent so much of her life behind a screen.
In Chapter Six, we flash back to them finding Patricia’s body and see their interaction with the original serial killer — the killer cop. Why did you feel it was so important to weave together these two storylines?
In most detective stories, the detective stays the same and the case arcs around him; he doesn’t actually change. And we thought, OK, if we’re going to turn this genre on its head and put in a young woman who’s usually the age and gender of the victim as the detective, how does that change the genre? Can we make something that will allow the detective to evolve during the case? This journey into the past is about the things that you hide from yourself about yourself, which I think is at the core of our desire to watch mysteries and solve them. Most of the time, a murder mystery will get tied up in a bow, and mysteries of the heart and oneself are much harder to unravel. We go into the past and Darby has to contend with the fact that she always imagined Bill was to blame, and that he left her in such a cruel way. But as she’s unraveling the case in the present and his death, she’s forced to remember all the ways she abandoned him first, and the ways she cruelly emotionally abandoned him because she wasn’t in a place to meet love. She grew up without a mother and her education was in a morgue with the dead. Being on a retreat and trying to connect with other people is a practice for her in trying to open up and be vulnerable.
The early serial killer storyline reminded me of the Golden State Killer and Michelle McNamara’s book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which I imagine must have been cresting in the zeitgeist around the time you were developing this series. And that guy was a cop, too.
It’s so funny you bring that up because we were already midway through making this story and then someone in the writers’ room was like, “Have you seen I’ll Be Gone in the Dark?” And we watched that [documentary], and I’d felt like we were taking some liberties in the way we described amateur sleuthdom. We’d be turning some of the scripts in and we’d get comments of: “Would amateur sleuths actually go this far and visit a crime scene?” But when I saw I’ll Be Gone in the Dark I thought, oh no, people will actually do this. And it was really amazing to watch the fearlessness and dogged determination that she and everyone in her cohort had to pursue this thing everyone else had given up on. After I watched that documentary, I felt like we were going in the right direction.
There’s a scene of Darby in a warehouse filled with crates of information about Jane Doe victims and it reminded me of the warehouses of untested rape kits that are just sitting there and how our institutions have failed so many women.
When you mentioned “warehouses of untested rape kits,” I didn’t even know that that existed, but the moment you said that I was like, “Yup, makes sense.” I think that’s part of existing in the culture we’re in. It’s hard to articulate fully because none of us have known anything else. It reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s thing about the fish perceiving water: If you’re a fish in water and all you’ve ever known is water, you can’t even articulate what that is. I sometimes think that with forces of oppression, which are required in order for capitalism to function on some level, they’re hard to always put your finger on and name. They take on visible things, but they also have an invisible element. To be honest with you, I didn’t realize the depth of it until we tried to write this. And it was so hard to write. I’ve never taken drafts apart and started from square one so many times.
We couldn’t find a way to put Darby credibly on the screen that wasn’t like Nancy Drew — this tongue-in-cheek, “We don’t think this girl can really solve it.” It made me aware of how intense my own internalized misogyny actually is, and also the audience’s. In the early stages, we had the classic scene of the genre in Chapter Two where the detective goes and interviews all the suspects. And every time we turned that draft in people would go, “Don’t buy it.” And it makes sense. Who of the hotel guests, all these luminaries and powerful people, is going to open the door when a twentysomething girl knocks on it? So it took five hours of storytelling where we got Darby to a place in Chapter Five where she can sit down and interview the suspects. And even then, she has to do it sitting next to Andy Ronson and use his authority.
What are the challenges of directing an episode you’re also starring in?
This is my first time directing because when we were making other things and I was playing the lead, the worlds we’ve always tried to realize are so ambitious and the budgets are tight, so you gotta shoot at a page rate that makes it very hard to be the lead and also be behind the camera. When we were coming up with this, I wanted to direct so much so I was like, “I gotta take a step back from being the lead and play a supporting role.” Initially, [me and Zal] divvied up the chapters to direct based on the ones Lee is least in and those would be the ones I would direct, but then Chapter Six didn’t exactly work out that way. And that was really hard. It forced me to be more prepared, so I would have to come every day with storyboards and a plan. It had to have that level of precision to do both roles. The funny thing about acting is, you know when you’ve been honest. The take you’re gonna end up using in the edit is never a surprise; you can feel the artifice drop away when you’re performing the scene. I never have to check those takes as a director.
Going from The OA into A Murder at the End of the World, was there a desire to do something a bit less weird and more within the confines of a traditional noir-thriller?
I just love murder mysteries as a genre, and I think part of it was being bummed out where you get to the part of it that’s like, “Oh … the dead girl,” and she’s usually half-clothed, mutilated, with blood all over her on the ground, and that meant-to-be-erotic image of the dead woman provides so much jet fuel for the narrative. We thought, “Is there a way to take that dead girl off the ground, put clothes on her, clean the blood off her face, and give her the authority — not through a badge but as a citizen detective?” Something about that felt so compelling and worth trying to do. And it turned out to be a lot harder than we thought. The OA was so much easier to write because it was so unfettered. It had a wildness to it and felt like there were no rules. Here, you had to hit the beats of the genre, but because you’d made the person who’s the age and gender of the victim into the lead role of the detective, none of those support beams hold. So, you have to make something that looks like a house, and that everyone sees as a house, and that has a front door in the place that everybody remembers, but inside all the scaffolding has to be different because you’re putting them in a different gender and not giving them a badge.
How did The OA experience make you feel about Netflix? Having the show be abruptly canceled after two seasons when it was getting stronger and stronger, and had attracted such a dedicated following?
Part of what happened that was so confusing was The OA was one of the first times where something that had 20 million-plus people watching it could be canceled. There was no real precedent for that. It used to be that if you canceled a TV show it had under a million viewers. That was the first time where you could have a huge global audience and the show could be ended, and I think so much of the outcry and backlash was about that. People were talking to each other and found each other on the internet, and there was such a big fandom, and people were like, “What? The economics of this doesn’t add up.”
What the strike made clear is that part of how tech companies disrupt in every industry is they go in and, in order to gain purchase in that industry, they underprice the product to capture the market share. And Wall Street will only allow that to go on for so long until they’re like, “We need to have our come-to-Jesus moment. We need to be out of the red and into the black.” We were caught up in that course-correction and in this growing idea every company is now following — that I think is kind of dangerous — which is this idea of applying economies of scale to storytelling, or this idea that you can just make more stories reach more people and make them faster and cheaper. We’re in a weird world if stories have to appeal to 50 million-plus people in order to function. Eventually, it means that you’re progressing in large part toward just telling stories that have already been told before, so they’re familiar; or repeating I.P. that is already known, so it has an audience; or leaning in toward the lowest common denominator, which can be violence, and specifically violence against marginalized groups because that works well in every country.
You had Zendaya on the show, too. I think The OA will probably be the last show canceled with Zendaya in it.
[Laughs] I know! It’s hard to imagine, right?
I have to ask: How was The OA going to end?
I wish I could say. But I think some part of me still thinks that maybe The OA will come back. Twin Peaks came back after years, so who knows? Maybe the conditions and circumstances may become ripe for it. I think it could!
