In the first episode, “Netflix Presents” doesn’t arrive until 50 minutes in. It’s a great, surprising moment. Was that a decision sparked by the storytelling freedom of working on Netflix?
When I was growing up, I loved films like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colours” trilogy. At the same time, my other favorite films were “The Terminator” 1 and 2. And I didn’t understand why you couldn’t combine the two things together. To me, that was always the sweet spot, and the idea of starting with sort of a more European verité feeling and then all of a sudden, she starts telling this story, and [the audience] from the boys’ perspective are transported to all of a sudden this aerial [shot] over Russia, and it’s like Netflix Presents, it’s just exciting. It seemed like the thing that would get me excited. The exact feeling that you felt is the feeling that I felt I would feel if I was an audience member.
Did you expect the ending would split people between either embracing it or having a hard time with it?
I think I actually expected that people would have a hard time because of the subject matter, and we thought about it long and hard, and we thought this is something that’s happening, and we believe that meaning can fight meaninglessness. And so it’s something that we stand by. So that I was ready for. I thought about it and I was like, “In the end, I believe in this.”
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I’ve experienced trauma in my life, and the times that I’ve experienced trauma, it does not foreshadow itself. I don’t know if that’s fair in a cinematic universe, but certainly my experience with it has been that it blindsides you. And so I thought that was also an important element, though I think everything in the story leads up to that. So those are the things that I’m comfortable with.
But I’m not sure it’s divisive, because I think there are multiple different reactions that people have to the ending; it’s not just one or the other. I don’t think I was expecting the panoply of reactions. And I think that’s exciting.
What can we expect in season 2? Is The OA’s world going to expand?
Brit and I, before we began, conceived of something sort of like a Rubik’s cube and if we keep going, then I think we’ll stay along that path. But I think it will be equivalent to the experience of watching the first season. I think that one of the important things that I have actually not seen yet talked about is the idea that if you watch a chapter or two chapters of “The OA,” you can’t possibly understand what later chapters in the season will be like. A novel or a two-hour movie evolves. If you see the first half of a two-hour movie, you don’t usually feel like you know what happens in the second half. And I think that’s a big distinction between “The OA” and other things, is that it’s a continuously evolving story.
“The OA” is now streaming on Netflix.
