Amy Seimetz & Lodge Kerrigan Talk Revamped ‘Girlfriend Experience’

You make bold aesthetic choices, you tell a thought-provoking mosaic-like story about a complicated, unknowable main character, you constantly challenge the audience’s perception of who your main character is and why she does what she does. What to do for a second act once you’ve propped a compelling show up on own its two legs? If you’re “The Girlfriend Experience” writer/directors Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan, with the blessing of executive producer Steven Soderbergh, you take a torch to it.

“Season one was an experiment,” Seimetz said. “In considering the future of the show and ensuring it never got stale and the only way we could do that, being the filmmakers we are and already having made season one, was to blow up the format.”

Season one of ‘GFE,’ a TV adaptation of Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 micro-budgeted indie of the same name, was already loose in concept: employ the idea of a character in the sex worker industry and do what you want. Soderbergh handpicked his directors, Seimetz, the filmmaker behind “Sun Don’t Shine,” Kerrigan the helmer of “Clean, Shaven” and gave them free reign.

“Do whatever you want,” Kerrigan said, recalling Soderbergh’s liberating directive. They created the elusive character Christine (Riley Keough) and as Rolling Stone put it so perfectly, came up with a show about “sex, lies and capitalism.” But its concept was an experiment onto itself.

“It was like an arranged marriage,” Seimetz said of season one with a laugh, describing the way the two directors were thrown together to write and direct a series despite not knowing each other let alone knowing whether their creative processes would gel. “We were thrust into this project, but we had to write together and that was really hard,” she admitted. “I had never really wanted to write with someone and I don’t think Lodge wanted to either and so learning to do that became part of the process, that push and pull.”

“We didn’t know each other well,” Kerrigan said, “But now we spend more time with each other than we do our families.”

Conceived as an anthology show, season two would be drastically different. And in pushing that idea of change and the experiment even further, Seimetz and Kerrigan decided to totally overhaul the show and tell two completely independent stories with different characters and zero crossover. They would write on their own with no real input from the other.

“It’s almost like a totally different show with the same title and that’s how Soderbergh and all of us wanted it to be,” Seimetz explained. “It’s not a sexy word, but we wanted it to be a meditation on the title and approaching it in a different way and allowing it to be endless. The idea is: how can we make this as different as possible so the future of the show can dig deeper and deeper. It’s as nerd filmmaker-y as it is entertaining in my opinion.”

Season two is radically different. “We really wanted to push what’s acceptable in television and this kind of storytelling,” Kerrigan said. “This kind of format can be really exciting. You can watch all of my seven episodes or Amy’s or watch them together, see how they interplay with each other and draw your own connections between the two.”