Anja Marquardt Talks A.I.-Heavy ‘Girlfriend Experience’ Season 3, Working With Steven Soderbergh & More [Interview]

Thematically, the seasons are similar in their ideas about control and power and agency, but all very different. Where did you want to take that?
Yeah, the franchise is a continuation in the sense that it’s committed to the idea of free will, as opposed to determinism. That was the conversation we had; those two words specifically have come up. These protagonists, they’re in this world because they choose to be, and it’s never about moral judgments. That’s not of interest to us. We want to explore who this character is and what’s driving them. And then through the machinations and the reverb of the world, whether it’s the legal world or politics, or in this case, the tech world. My interest pretty early on was—and this is something that I explored in my feature as well—here’s a simulation of intimacy that is happening in this specific girlfriend setup, right? 

The whole future-facing element of it was the question of how do we connect to other people and how is that connection possibly going to change when you let algorithms into the mix?  Iris goes and meets her clients, and she fabricates a performance and tailoring her persona to the specific client. So, it’s a huge simulation aspect of the whole thing. And to connect that with the tech world and say like, well, technology is being trained as we speak to deliver more and more seamless simulations for us in— whether it’s allowing us to connect virtually during COVID or that fun Superbowl ad of impersonating Alexa. The simulation aspect is being explored, and technology is being trained to monetize and commercialize our utmost personal spaces; to check whether that’s possible. It seems like the answer is yes; technology can extract so much information from us.

If you consider yourself a pretty good reader of people, you can meet someone, shake their hand, look in their eyes and glean that this person is friendly, open, possibly a friend, imagine what good AI good technological reader could do by aggregating so much more information, not just the handshake and the eye contact, but all those other data that our own more limited brain space isn’t able to filter quite as well.

Sounds ominous [laughs]
Well, I’m eager to see what happens. I’m also slightly freaked out and have tried to package all of those complex emotions into season three of the “Girlfriend Experience.” I’m an optimist, so I do believe that human connection is the answer at the end of the day, and it’s, it should remain the last space that is utterly private, and it’s kind of up to us to decide what to do with it. 

Well, that’s the next big question to it all, right the ethical question of A.I. “The Jurassic Park” like could/should debate.
Absolutely. What’s feasible and possible is evolving at such an accelerated pace, and the ethics discussion is just limping far behind them. We’re fully waking up to the fact that there’s racial bias in A.I. Like how did that happen? So, it’s very complex, and we have to try to do our very best. I’m just really interested in people and how we justify our behavior regarding what makes us human, so in creating characters, in my work, I like them to be flawed and complicated, however, removed their actions might be from my life. The further removed, the more interesting to me because I try to imagine myself as an audience member, like, what would I find interesting?  What kind of crazy character would be interesting for me to watch?

Tell me about hiring Julia Goldani Telles because she’s still unknown to many people, and that felt like a bold choice.
Julia is just very much in the moment, fearless, and I had seen her work in “The Affair,” and then we brought her on as the lead when I was still writing and could adjust the scripts and tailor them to her, that was fun. It was an intense collaboration trying to track Iris’ moment-to-moment goals in each scene versus how that manifests with her interacting with an A.I. or with a person in the room. And, so all of that was really like a very intricate sculpting process.

How would you describe Iris as a character because she’s pretty enigmatic, in the way you’re already suggesting; she seems to operate with outward and inward agendas and duplicitous too.
Yeah, I would describe Iris that she’s part of a new type or a new generation where she’s ready to take quite extreme leaps. The leap isn’t only geographical—like how she easily relocates from the U.S. to London, which happens in the pilot— but also to test the boundaries of her own humanness.

And then there’s this tech element of working on this A.I. mirroring project that can feedback to its interaction partners and what they want. I can’t get into deeper spoilers, but we’re looking at a fearless character who stops short of pretty much nothing to push that boundary and see what’s behind the curtain. We do get to know her quite intimately because we learn her Achilles heel and the chains that keep her down and how she’s trying to cut them and set herself free. 

There’s also really the tease of her playing with fire and the things to come in the second half of the season.
Yeah, the boundary-pushing is built into her personality, and that’s where her audacity comes in— she portrays herself as someone who can read people and what they are all about in like two seconds. It’s a bit of a superhero approach, and maybe she’s totally over her head. And as the season progresses, we’ll learn that both are a little bit true. It’s going to catch up with her, and we’re going to find out how it all goes up in flames in an exciting way.