The process of moving a novel from the page to the screen
is one, essentially, of transformation.
What you're trying to do is articulate the theme of the novel as much as the plot.
-No phones. -This is some Jim Jones bullshit!
I think I've read everything Paul Theroux's written.
And he's been an incredibly important voice in my life.
In my own prose writing I kind of try to borrow his timbre, his tone.
So I was excited to set about the process of how you would adapt
that extant text into a television show.
I'm delighted, actually, to see that someone took the book,
in this case Neil Cross, and he's saying,
"I wanna preserve the spirit of this book.
The same Allie, the same Charlie, but 40 years later."
Computers, circuit boards, SIM card ports. There's gold in all of that.
I saw Neil's work immediately in the way that I could make it.
I saw where the camera would go.
He came into scenes where I would wanna come into a scene.
He's a really visual cinematic storyteller.
Rupert really set the tone,
sort of that poetic cinematic look for the first couple of episodes.
He did this incredible
flying shot that just keeps going and going and going,
and you just see all this action unfold and then it ends up on Allie.
It's just beautiful.
He saw my hair,
and it was chopped too perfectly.
He said, "We need to make your hair look like your mom does it."
Why are you doing this to us?
What we're seeing is a family that has secrets,
and has problems, but instead of leaning further into that family drama...
we explode it.
And the show thereafter is,
"Where do they go now? What do they do? How do they manage it?"