“The OA” co-creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij deserve some much needed time for a long vacation to decompress from the two-year marathon that was creating ‘Part II’ of their groundbreaking Netflix original series. One of the most narratively and technically unorthodox shows, the production behind “The OA” is almost as much of an enigma as the show itself. Defying traditional television production schedules, throwing out standard pattern budgets during production due to the fact that it is one of the few shows to exist without a pattern narrative, Marling and Batmanglij have met their ambitious grasp with the final product in the overall superior second season.
In ‘Part II,’ OA wakes up in a different dimension only to find that she’s inexplicably arrived in the same place as Hap. There, she must navigate her new life as a Russian heiress, outsmart her nemesis (and former captor), use her metaphysical abilities to help a cynical detective solve a missing child case, and awake Homer (the love of her life and supposed soulmate), all in the season’s eight episodes.
READ MORE: Let’s Discuss What Part II Of ‘The OA’ Means For The Series [Spoilers]
Coinciding with the long-awaited release of ‘Part II’ on Netflix, I had a chance to sit down with Marling and Batmanglij to discuss the complex production process behind the series, analyze some of the show’s more complex themes, take a deep dive into some of the show’s most popular theories, reminisce on the creative progression of their 18-year relationship, and more.
First of all, congratulations on finally completing what is, by all accounts, the monumental undertaking that was the second season of ‘The OA.’ How long did it take you two to write ‘Part II?’
Batmanglij: So, we get greenlit at the beginning of February of 2017. And then, we come to San Francisco, because we have an idea that we want to set it here. Brit and I spent two weeks here, and then we formed an outline, and pitched that. We put together a small writing group, and we spent the whole summer writing. We wrote 400 pages, which was crazy [laughter] because if we were setting aside to write a feature, we’d probably give ourselves six months. In three months, we wrote 400 pages.
And then, right away, we started pre-production. We started building sets, coming up here to scout, and scouting from Los Angeles. Usually, for a medium-sized feature, you’re doing eight weeks of prep, and in that same period, we’re prepping eight hours. And the only reason we can pull it off is because we have this amazing crew working. Aida Rodgers and Sarah Esberg from Plan B. Our AV. Steven Meizler, our DP. Just an amazing group of people come together. And, of course, Brit [laughter].
Marling: We have each other, too. We all love each other.
Batmanglij: And we’re involved of every aspect of that stuff. The scouts can show us a convenience store in Chinatown to be the store that Karim (Kingsley Ben-Adir) meets Donald (Van Brunelle) in front of. But it’s Brit who fights for things like, “No, Donald is Vietnamese. So it has to be Little Saigon. So we go to Little Saigon.” We try to get those details right, and we’re like pushing for things that we really don’t have the time to do. [laughter] And then, we start shooting in January.
Marling: We shot from January to the beginning of June. And then we start editing. And then, you have a similar crunch because if you were editing a feature, you’d have six months. You’re basically making four features in the time that you would normally make one.
Batmanglij: And this thing has 1,600 visual effects. So, getting all those visual effects right, we had great partners, amazing people that we were working with. We were very grateful.
Marling: Very lucky. But it’s a long process, and we’ve had an amazing amount of creative freedom at Netflix and incredible support from everybody we work with there. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible, and also wouldn’t be desirable. You would just say, “Why am I doing four times the work every two years?”
Batmanglij: And we still say that [laughter], but it’s only possible because we have those good partners.
That is a hell of a process. Brit, as someone who wears multiple hats on this project, what’s the most difficult part of bringing “The OA” to life?
Batmanglij: Oh, I’m curious to hear this [laughter].
Marling: Different problems at different times. When I’m wearing the show creator hat, it’s really a problem of stamina. By the time you’re in month eight of the edit, your body is so depleted from the experience of doing all that writing in four months, the experience of acting, which is so physically exhausting when you’re spending days in a harness in the air or you’re spending days in a tank underwater [laughter] fighting for air. When you get to the end of a five-month shoot like that, as an actor, you normally collapse. And you’re done.
Batmanglij: You go on vacay [laughter].
Marling: Instead, for us, I get to the end of that period, and it’s like, “And now the race against the clock has begun. Now we have all this footage. How are we going to re-write the narrative based on what we actually have instead of what we imagined we could get?” That part of it is the most challenging from the show creator hat.
From the acting side, the hardest thing is knowing that at any given point in time, no matter how much time you’ve spent acting, you’re always in danger of being phony or telling a lie. And that really keeps me on my toes. A lot of professions have this experience-grade. The more time you spend doing heart surgery, the more you’ve encountered certain problems, certain things, you get better at being a heart surgeon. Acting is so interesting because, to me, that relationship doesn’t necessarily exist. You’re always equally capable of coming into a scene and, for whatever reason, because you’re tired, because you’re confused, because of not sitting and listening and being present and responding in real-time to somebody, you’re always in danger of doing that. So, [laughter] there is a vulnerability there that never goes away.
Batmanglij: It’s like heart surgery meets tight-rope walking.
How did this wonderful, collaborative relationship begin? What is it about the two of you that makes you work so harmoniously together
Batmanglij: Well, at this point, it’s how it gets done. I mean, it would be very hard to do this by yourself. It’s just too massive an undertaking to do it by yourself. So it’s–
Marling: It’s interesting, sometimes, when I think of the Duffer Brothers [creators of “Stranger Things“], I’m like, “Oh, it’s interesting that they’re doing something in a similar way.” Telling an eight-hour narrative. And it’s no accident that it’s the two of them.
Batmanglij: Yeah. A lot of our other counterparts just write it or they just direct it. Very few do both like the Duffers do both. And then, [laughter] almost nobody adds acting to that. I mean, this is the one-hour drama space, no one does that. In the comedy space, it’s more common.
Batmanglij: We met in college. We came from different walks of life. We have different minds or upbringings, but we have a few key points that are the same, which is that there is a shorelessness to our imagination. And we share that in common. It’s like this place we meet at. It’s like meeting in a physical place, except it’s a cerebral place. We meet in this imagined space, and we’ve been meeting there so long now, like 18 years, at first, it’s uncomfortable, it’s vulnerable, it’s all those things. Now, we can meet there pretty quickly, and it’s calming and relaxing and a refuge. So, it’s good. And then you undercut the pleasures of that with all the intensity and hard work of craftsmanship. The rest of our work is just craft. The imagination part’s really fun, but the craft part is hard.
Marling: It’s so true what you’re saying. And the question becomes, “Can you get good enough at the craft to take what you’ve come up within the Venn Diagram of our imaginations meeting where you can deliver writing, acting, directing, [and] storytelling as purely as we feel it there.
Batmanglij: And also, you hope that someone underwrites it, will make it happen, and that’s a really cool moment in time. When we started writing this story, there was no place that would’ve made something this wild. And Netflix hadn’t even made “House of Cards” yet. And even when “House of Cards” came out, it’s so blue chip, that it’s not gonna be confused with “The OA” [laughter]. We set sail without a port to go to, and the port appeared. But if the port hadn’t appeared, we wouldn’t be able to make this experience.
Marling: Yeah, we’d just be at sea by ourselves [laughter], all alone. Which would be fine too.
The location-scouting for Part II and the use of setting to advance the plot is impeccable. Was San Francisco always a location that you had planned to set Part II from the get-go when creating the show?
Marling: One of the things we had definitely planned from the get-go is the idea of a narrative that was interested in genre slipstreaming. Part of that just came as a reaction to what it feels like to be alive right now in the world. It feels like we’re literally genre slipstreaming. You wake up in the morning and the sun is coming through your window, and you’re moving through your routine, and you feel like you’re in a romantic comedy, and then you like go online, and you read some article about something that’s happened, and you’re like in a horror film.
The internet has created this fractured sense of reality in which you’re constantly inside different genres in a day. So, I think we were really interested in that feeling, that undercurrent. And when we were designing the labyrinth of “The OA,” we plotted out all the twists and turns of it and what the center would be that you could arrive at before we ever wrote the first chapter. Part of that was the idea that ‘Part II’ would continue the narrative and answer a lot of the questions that part one raises, but inside a different genre. And the genre that we were interested in was the noir.
Batmanglij: And we started trying to find a definition for noir. And our favorite definition was a gangster movie without the gangsters, because it’s the idea that it’s not just killing one bad guy or two bad guys, but it’s a whole city is to blame.
Like the way Los Angeles is in “Chinatown,” or San Francisco “The Maltese Falcon.” We came up here to explore, and, man, is this city rife with a lot of anxiety and weird currents and pressures. And people were really kind to us.
Marling: And San Francisco, as the epicenter of tech, seemed like a very interesting place to set a noir and to explore these ideas of, “How has technology infiltrated our lives? What aspects of it are good, but what are aspects are corrupt? What are we really letting in when we invite the smartphone into our lives?” They didn’t sell [the smartphone] to us as what it really is. They were like, “Here, we’re going to sell you a phone,” and so we all took the phone, thinking “Yeah, we love to call people.” But it’s really a tiny computer. Nobody sold it to us as tiny computers. So, now we all have a tiny computer with us all the time, and that changes how we think, it changes how we imagine, it changes how we treat people.
Batmanglij: How we treat ourselves.
Marling: How we think of ourselves.