Even if you haven’t seen it yet, you might’ve already heard about Netflix‘s “The OA.” The surprise show dropped nearly unannounced on the streaming service last month, and has been earning steady buzz ever since as audiences try to unravel its knotty mysteries. The rare show that’s both mindbending and moving at the same time, “The OA” is the latest creation from frequent collaborators writer/director Zal Batmanglij and writer/star Brit Marling, who have previously delivered “Sound Of My Voice” and “The East.” However, “The OA” feels like the duo at their most unfiltered and pure, with the series offering a perfect marriage of their sensibilities, which draw from both arthouse and mainstream influences.
In case you’re catching up, “The OA” kicks off when a young woman named Prairie suddenly returns home after being missing for years, but she’s hardly the same person she once was. Previously blind, her vision has been miraculously restored, and she now refers to herself as The OA. Thrust into the public eye, and into a suburban life that feels alien, The OA sparks a profound connection with a group of high-school boys that will forever change their lives and their understanding of the world around them. And that’s really just an overview of a show that’s even better the less you know going in, and unfolds in ways that are frequently unexpected and surprising.
Earlier this week, we spoke with Batmanglij over the phone about “The OA,” and he thoughtfully shared the genesis for the series, his thoughts on the reactions to the finale, and what he hopes to bring the second season, should the show be renewed on Netflix.
“The OA” feels like a show that’s very much about the nature of storytelling itself. When you were first conceiving the series, what did you and Brit Marling talk about in terms of that aspect of it?
I think that’s exactly right, that we were fascinated by the power of story and also the idea that with the internet, stories were becoming more ubiquitous but also less vital in some ways. The fact that there were so many more stories made them less crucial.
Four years ago in December 2012, when we began this project, we started to think of a story that we wanted to tell. One of the things that really appealed to us was the fractured nature of modern existence. It’s like we wanted a story that, at every turn, turned in the direction that wasn’t quite expected. What’s funny is, I never dreamed that we would anticipate the time so much. By the time this came out, four years later, our society feels like that fractured nature has really come to the surface.
And to answer your question about storytelling, you know Brit and I went across the country [to look at] what it felt like today for someone to be in high school. And it was a shocking experience for me. One of the things that’s so [surprising] is that students have this low-grade anxiety over being cyberbullied. Like, at anytime there could be a subtweet about them. They could wake up to it, it could happen in the middle of the night, it could happen in the middle of a school day. So they all were on edge about that. The other thing that you felt overwhelmingly when you went to these places, was that these students were really sophisticated, really smart, but at the same time, they were like hungry for some meaning or something that connects them to something larger than themselves. The idea of a character that comes with a story is very appealing. The idea of language changing the perspective by which you think. For us we were fascinated by teenage boys on the cusp of manhood and stories that were slowly preparing them for the traumas ahead.
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So you have this show about identity and storytelling. At what point did the Movements come into the framework?
I had read somewhere that Quentin Tarantino had talked about how violence is uniquely cinematic. Like, you can’t write violence as well as you can show it on screen. I thought that was really true, and I love the idea of things that are uniquely cinematic, but I’m not interested in violence; it’s not what gets me going. So I was sort of interested in, what’s the opposite of violence? What’s something like violence that goes in the other direction? And I think that’s where it came from, the idea of something that is a language all onto its own. One of the amazing things to me about long-format storytelling is how they create an ecosystem, and the people who take in the stories or watch the stories, and the people who work on the stories together, form an ecosystem over multiple years, and that’s fascinated me. And The Movements is sort of a line in the sand. It’s sort of like, “Okay, who wants to keep going on this journey?” And I like that and I think that’s important.
When you make a movie, you’re asking people to, first of all, find the time the movie’s playing, then, if they have kids, find a babysitter, get in the car, find a parking spot, sit down in the movie and watch it for two hours, right? And so there’s a contract between you, the filmmaker, and the audience, that we’re not going to do anything that’s going to shake you too much, and if we are, then we’re going to call ourselves a Cannes film [or] a foreign film or something that’s really challenging. But a series that’s on Netflix, honestly, if any part of it is not for you, there are so many shows to watch. [Laughs] So many excellent things to watch. I mean, how does anyone have time to watch it all? So if you don’t feel like trying something new or going on a journey or being part of an ecosystem that might make you uncomfortable, then please, by all means, you know? And so I love that quality of this medium which is to me like writing a novel. There’s tons of books that, if it’s not working for me, I just close the book and keep going, and with the beauty of Netflix, you don’t even have to buy the book; it’s just there.
It’s a lot like food. When I tried edamame for the first time,…I really didn’t like it, because it made me uncomfortable; it was just something different. I eat it now without thinking twice about it.