Damon Lindelof’s journey to (and through)The Leftoversis a fascinating one, but one can’t help but think the experiences along the way fed into the brilliance and ambition of the HBO drama. After having worked onCrossing Jordan, Lindelof was paired withJ.J. Abramsto create this crazy new TV series calledLost. Abrams left soon after the pilot to directMission: Impossible III, and Lindelof carried out the run ofLostalongside co-showrunnerCarlton Cuse. That series came to a divisive (and, naysayers be damned, satisfying) end, and after a break Lindelof lent his talents to feature films ranging fromStar Trek Into DarknesstoPrometheustoTomorrowland.
But soon Lindelof felt that itch to return to TV, and he did, but with something entirely different fromLost. From the get-go, the HBO adaptation ofTom Perrotta’sThe Leftoverswas decidedly not a plot-focused series. The big story device that was the “in”—the Sudden Departure—was something Lindelof and Perrotta both said would probably never be answered. This was a show about people, broken people, struggling to connect, to live, to survive in a world that had gone topsy-turvy in an instant.
Over the course of three seasons, Lindelof, his writing team, and directing producerMimi Ledercarefully crafted what became one of the best shows in TV history. A wholly unique, smart, ambitious drama that each week forced audiences to give themselves over to the emotions of these characters. The show came to a conclusion this past Sunday witha brilliant and surprising series finalethat brought the story of Kevin and Nora to an emotional conclusion while also potentially offering up some practical answer for where all of The Departed went.
A couple of days after the finale aired, I was able to hop on the phone with Lindelof for an extensive conversation about all thingsLeftovers. We discussed how he and the writers came up with that final scene, and the ambiguity of the finale (and the surprise that manydon’tfind it ambiguous). We also talked about the final season as a whole, including the origin story of “The Most Powerful Man in the World (And His Identical Twin Brother)”, how the standout Laurie episode came about, and his reaction to the deeply personal writing the show has inspired from the critical community—specificallythis incredible, crushing piece by Variety editorMaureen Ryan. As a fan of Lindelof’s work I also took the opportunity to ask about his reaction toAlien: Covenantand looking back onTomorrowland, as well as what he’d like to do next—which most likelywon’tbe a blockbuster feature.
It’s a wide-ranging interview and Lindelof was more than gracious with his time, so if you’re a fan of his work,The Leftovers, or just talented writers/showrunners in general, I hope you’ll find this interview insightful. Check it out below.
So the finale aired Sunday. The response seems to be overwhelmingly positive. How are you feeling?
DAMON LINDELOF: I’m feeling probably more calm and sanguine about it than waiting for the other shoe to drop, which is sort of my default position. I’ve been letting it kind of trickle in—certainly there was the temptation to do the deep dive into ‘What did everybody think?’ on Sunday night. Fortunately I was distracted, we had a screening here in L.A. and then Jimmy Kimmel did a Q&A with all of us afterwards then some of us went to dinner together and by the time I got home it was so late and I was exhausted, and I was like, ‘If I go down the rabbit hole I’ll never come out.’ So I woke up Monday morning and I had lots of nice emails and texts from friends and people that I loved and kind of started there. The writers and I have kind of been communicating with one another, and they sent me some nice pieces that the critical community was saying so I feel like it’s all been curated in a kind of nice and safe way. I’m really grateful to not be on Twitter because you don’t have to look too hard and for too long to find someone with the alternate take, but it’s been such an overwhelmingly wonderful experience that I kind of don’t know what to do with it all. It’s overwhelming and it’s a bit much. On Monday night I sat down and had a two-hour conversation with my wife kind of about all my feelings about everything that was happening, and that’s probably the best feeling I’ve had in a long time because it allowed me to connect with the human that I love the most. I’m trying to just keep it as simple as possible and enjoy it because things like this don’t happen often in this business. I’m gonna take it at face value for now.
Absolutely. Well let me say congrats—I absolutely loved the ending and it blew me away.
LINDELOF: Oh thanks man. Thank you.
I know you’ve already a lot of interviews but I do want to talk about that ending. What’s the origin story of that final conversation between Nora and Kevin? How and when did you decide you were going to offer up a plausible answer for where they went wrapped in this very character-intrinsic conversation?
LINDELOF: We gathered the writers—once we found out that there was gonna be a third season, we only knew a couple things about this season before we started the deep dive into breaking it. The first thing that we knew was that we owed a consequence for Kevin dying and coming back to life again. When you do something like that you don’t want it to feel like there isn’t gonna be—an unintended consequence for it is like, ‘Oh thank God they’re alive again’, it’s like no. What’s that gonna be? We had the inklings of this kind ofLife of Brian, reluctant Messiah construct. So we liked this idea of The Book of Kevin, and then the other thing that was up on the white board was just the word ‘Nora. Nora. Nora.’ I kind of felt like Season 2 really focused a lot on Kevin’s journey, and I sort of felt like Nora Durst has the longest road to travel towards some level of healing and internal and personal salvation, and I want to go down that road because she lost so much. I had this inkling of an idea for the latter—what if there was a device, a story device but also a literal device, that Nora could get into that she was told would basically reunite her with her children. Is there any way that we could get a character who was a skeptic and destroyer of all things bullshitty to actually believe in that thing enough to get into it? Or does she get into it because nothing else matters? Then it became obvious to us right out of the gate that if Nora is going to actually going to get into a device like that she can’t be with Kevin anymore, and Lilly has to be out of the equation as well. So we had to kind of strip away all of her most important relationships, or she has to give them in order for her to get in it. So that was the math that we were basically faced with, and then the big question is if she gets in this thing, then what? What happens? Does it work? Does it not work? Does it kill her? Does she change her mind?
All of these conversations were happening in the first two weeks of January before we had even hired the other half of the writers room, this was just the sort of holdovers from Season 2. We sort of said, ‘Well, whether or not it actually does happen, let’s talk about what if this machine works? Where did the 2% go?’ It was the first time really in the life of the show that we had had that conversation as writers, although I had had this idea when we were shooting the pilot. Pete Berg was directing the scene where the baby disappears out of the back of the car, the scene that basically starts the series, and I said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be interesting if we got one take where we held on the baby and then the mom in the front seat is talking on her cell phone and suddenly we don’t hear anything, and then the camera moves off the crying baby to the front seat and themomis gone. That would be sort of an interesting way to basically get across the idea that some kind of flip happened, that in our world we lost 2% of the population but from the baby’s perspective 90% of the world was gone.’ And Pete said, ‘We don’t have time to get that shot, we’re losing the light.’ And I was like, ‘Oh okay,’ but I kind of buried it away as at least my own personal potential explanation for what happened to the 2% even though we would probably never ever reveal it.
But once we were confronted with this idea of the LADR and Nora getting inside the LADR, it forced us to sort of revisit that idea and we kind of riffed out the broad mechanics of what Carrie ended up saying in the finale, which were ‘Here’s what that place would look like’ and she would have to go on an almost Odyssean journey in order to get back to her family again, but what experience have they been having for the past seven or eight years, however long it takes Nora in that other space to find them. Have they gotten to a place where they’re OK? What if Nora basically saw them OK? Would she want to come in and disrupt that or would she basically realize that she didn’t belong there, that whatever universal construct had basically separated us in the first place, maybe she basically gave herself over to that and just seeing them was enough to realize that she should come back to the world that she had been sorted into. That felt like it was a really interesting idea too. So we had that story before we even started writing the third season at all, certainly breaking the premiere episode, and we knew that we were going towards it. We wondered who she should be telling that story to, and we knew it was gonna be an older version of Nora because this journey would take a very long time and she was in some degree of self-imposed exile. We liked this idea that Nora was in the Guilty Remnant—although the Guilty Remnant no longer existed, she was behaving like the GR, she wasn’t talking much, she was smoking cigarettes, she was in some state of sort of existential despair and separation. If the pilot basically showed Kevin showing up at the Guilty Remnant house and trying to get Laurie to rejoin humanity and failing, maybe we would repeat that idea in the series finale with Nora but he would be successful. They would reboot and restart each other’s universe.
We all liked that construct very much, so the idea that Nora would be telling that story to anyone other than Kevin seemed absurd, and that’s when it became kind of apparent to us that—I think it’s sort of reductive to say thatThe Leftoversis just a love story, but the love story was a big part of it and if the show was asking could you reconnect with other people in a world where this thing could happen again at any instant? Even knowing that it would destroy you, could you be vulnerable and allow yourself to feel and care for someone knowing that they could leave you in an instant? Oh fuck it, why not? It’s worth it, even though there’s potential pain at the end of it. How better to articulate that idea than between Kevin and Nora, who have always had this incredible chemistry between the two of them—that was in Perrotta’s book and it was something that we wanted to return to for the final season.
I find the ambiguity of the finale fascinating. I watched it on a screener a few days before air and it didn’t cross my mind that Nora might be lying. I tried to unpack why that was, why I didn’t think of it, and aside from the fact that Carrie Coon is a god among men—
LINDELOF: Agreed.
I feel like I just can’t bring myself to believe that in this fragile, sincere moment she’s not sharing a uniquely and totally honest conversation with Kevin. The fact that this moment could be a lie was just too crushing to me to consider.
LINDELOF: I’m right there with you. This is both the upside and the downside of living in the culture that we’re in now where the watchers of a television show can basically kind of crowdsource what their belief system is, and they can make cogent arguments on either side of it. But I think that that idea of returning to the you that just saw it, that was not really influenced by what everybody else was thinking, that’s the feeling that I was going for. It bums me out a little bit that some people are gonna watch the finale not necessarily being spoiled but being told that there is some sort of subjective possibility that it’s true or it’s not true. I had the unique opportunity—we were in New York and we did a screening of the finale on Thursday of last week, and everybody just watched it and it was moderated by Matt Seitz the chief critic for Vulture, and the first question that he asked us on the panel was, ‘Why didn’t you show Nora’s journey?’ He wasn’t asking it like, ‘I’m not sure I believe her,’ he treated it like an artistic choice that could’ve been made, and then Perrotta was like, ‘Well that depends on whether or not it was true.’ We polled the audience and basically said show of hands how many people believe Nora, and 90% of the people in the audience put their hands up and the other 10% I think were offended by the question. That basically tells you that the subjective emotional response, the heart response, is yeah of course she’s telling the truth, it’s Nora Durst. She’s a cynic and a non-believer and a crusher of all things that are not true, she’s the one that told the story. Not to mention Mimi Leder, and I can’t say enough amazing things about her, directed the hell out of that finale and basically showed the presentation of the LADR. Basically showing you this is the emptied out husk of where a body once was, and the performances by the physicists—basically these people seem legit, this thing looks like it works versus ‘We want you to get into this cardboard box and just wish yourself into another reality.’ All of the work that we did to basically make Nora’s story believable was really critically important to us in presenting our story.
The ending is incredible and it ends perfectly in tune with what the series is and what’s true to the characters, but is there a part of you that wants toBetter Call Saulthis and follow Nora’s journey on the other side?
LINDELOF: You know, would it be an amazing spinoff to show Nora’s journey on the other side, particularly once she tracks down Mark Lynn Baker and Bronson Pinchot and the other members ofPerfect Strangersfor their reunion show, which I imagine would be the highest rated television show on the other side? Categorically no, that would be the worst spinoff ever, and it would also sapThe Leftoversof all of its emotional power by clearly defining that space. I think this show was always about telling stories, not on a meta level—I mean any television show is just telling stories—but the characters in the show tell stories, and that’s what religion and belief and spirituality are based on. The New Testament and the Old Testament and the Koran are all oral traditions that were transcribed and written down by someone telling a story. It just felt apropos when you have performers like Scott Glenn who tells his story that involves a magical chicken, but he is absolutely and totally committed to the reality of his story. Or you have Grace sitting across the table from him at the end of the same episode telling her story, or Kevin Garvey telling his story to Nora in the finale. When you have actors like we have, why in God’s name would you do anything other than just put the camera on them and let them do what they do best?
Well that’s one of the things that struck me from the finale, is just how incredible the casting of this show is. You cast Carrie Coon beforeGone Girl, Justin had never really had the opportunity to be a leading man in a project of this scale before. But as the series evolved and the characters grew, these actors, from Brenneman to Eccleston and beyond, just absolutely stepped up to the plate and knocked it out of the park. Now that the series has ended, how does it feel looking back on those casting decisions for the pilot and seeing how wonderfully they played out?
LINDELOF: You know, I think one of the tradecrafts in our business that doesn’t get championed or sung about enough is the casting director. It’s been really great this season in particular to see Liza Richardson, who’s our music supervisor, get recognized as an artist unto her own right. And I think the two jobs are fairly analogous in that they’re curators of incredible art—that in and of itself is an incredible skill, to basically walk through a museum and see, you know a museum could be filled with any art but it’s a very specific job and art in and of itself to put the right art on the wall in the right place and figure out how they all relate to one another. It’s not rocket science to look at Carrie Coon’s audition and say, ‘This is an incredible actor, I want her in the show,’ so who’s the person who’s putting Carrie Coon in front of me? In the case of the first season of the show Ellen Lewis was our casting director and she has worked primarily with Martin Scorsese, and the only TV show that she had cast before us wasBoardwalk Empireand she introduced us to so many of those fantastic New York stage actors and was a big champion for the casting of Justin, who I was already familiar with fromMullholland Drive, etc. And then in the second season Vicki Thomas was our casting director and she stayed on through Year 3 and we added on Nikki Barrett, who cast so many of the fantastic Australian actors out of Sydney and Melbourne. So I feel fortunate enough to work with those incredibly talented artists in their own right. I get to say like, ‘Yeah that person’s a phenomenal actor. Yes please!’ I’m not oversimplifying the process, but when you eat a great meal you’re not a genius for identifying it as a great meal, the credit goes to the chef. So in this case the chef is the actor themselves but the sous chef who actually has to prepare that meal and figure out how these ingredients are gonna work together, that’s the casting director. So all the credit goes to them.
Absolutely. I thought the season as a whole was terrific. “International Assassin” has become a now-classic episode of television, and I know was a huge gamble on your part. How did you guys go about crafting “The Most Powerful Man in the World (And His Identical Twin Brother)”? Was it more or less nerve-wracking this time around?
LINDELOF: It was both more nerve-wracking and less nerve-wracking. It was less nerve-wracking because there was already a language that we had established to do that kind of an episode, so we knew that it could work versus the first time around where we didn’t know even if it could work but we were gonna try it anyway. But the nerve-wracking part was are we going to undo the coolness of the first episode, the thing that made it unique, by just going back to the same well again pun entirely intended? So the idea was almost like sequel rules apply—if you’re gonna go back and do a sequel to this thing, what’s the new idea? So we talked about sequels that we love whether it beEmpire Strikes Back, which introduces a new idea to theStar Warsuniverse not just an escalation of plot but what if Darth Vader was a good guy at one point? What if he was Luke’s dad? Spoiler alert. OrAliens, which basically said the first movie was a horror movie but what if the second movie was an action movie? And give the protagonist an emotional connection through this young girl. So we were like what’s the new idea in “International Assassin 2”, it can’t just be ‘Kevin you’re an assassin here’s a new target for you,’ especially because Patti was gone now. There’s another idea in great sequels, how do you turn the antagonist into a protagonist, like inTerminator 2now Arnold’s a good guy, so we were like, ‘What if Patti comes back to help Kevin this time?’ It doesn’t seem like she’s helping him but he actually summons her, he asks for her her help. So once we came up with the idea that Assassin Kevin comes in and he’s all guns blazing, he’s ready to carry out whatever his mission is, who’s the target, and then he learns that the target is himself and he has to play both the hunter and the hunted, and ultimately we’re gonna come to some sort of emotional conclusion. Once we had that structure then it was just a matter of finding the right temperature, the right tonality, and the correct number of dick jokes, and then it was pretty simple from there.
I definitely had a lot of fun explaining the dick shelf to my girlfriend, who’s never seenThe Leftovers.
LINDELOF: Oh good. I would’ve loved to have heard that conversation.
I also wanted to touch on “Certified”, which I think may be one of my favorite episodes of the series. I say this about all the actors on this show but if Amy Brenneman doesn’t get an Emmy nomination I will riot—
LINDELOF: I’ll hold you to that. I’ll riot with you, because you’re able to’t have a one-man riot. There need to be at least a couple there.
Okay good, I think that’ll help. But how did you go about crafting this Laurie episode?
LINDELOF: Well we knew that there was gonna be a Laurie episode, and it felt like if we wanted to go back and start at the beginning—Lostwas a show that had flashbacks in every episode,The Leftoverswe want to be very careful and judicious about when we travel into the past and we want to make sure that they have maximum impact. I think one of the lingering questions when we first met Laurie Garvey in the pilot was ‘Why did she join the GR?’ So the idea of going back to that first day that she put on white for the first time, that could be a really powerful idea to introduce into the third season as we brought Laurie’s journey to its conclusion. And Amy and I had talked about way back in the first season that she might have tried to kill herself and then not chickened out but thought twice about it, and then sort of looking in the mirror saying, ‘I don’t wanna die but I also don’t know how to help people,’ which is what a therapist does. In a post-departure world I’m sort of shattered by this, that the Guilty Remnant would offer Option C, what’s behind Door #3? Someone would tell her what to do.
So it kind of started with that idea. Patrick Somerville, who’s been on since Season 2, has always really been drawn to Laurie, particularly the idea that she’s a therapist, and Carly Wray who wrote that episode with Patrick quite beautifully. The idea of like, ‘Okay so what is ourIn Treatmentversion of Laurie Garvey basically just in therapy sessions with every character in the show?’ So she talks to Kevin Sr., she talks to John Murphy, she talks to of course Nora and Kevin, those will be the two culminative moments. But ultimately the idea of a therapist who lets go of the idea of saying, ‘I’m gonna help you along whatever path you’re on as opposed to trying to pull you onto my path, or attempt to fix you, I’m going to guide you, I’m going to let you go.’ That felt like the most sort of beautiful acknowledgment for her, and then of course what was her own fate going to be as she went down into the deep blue? Would Laurie be able to emerge from that? I’ve kind of talked about that rather extensively in other interviews I’ve done so it’s out there, but I’ll just synthesize it by saying there was a lot of spirited conversation and an emotional connection to whether or not Laurie was alive or dead, did she kill herself or didn’t she? We looked at it from every possible angle and it wasn’t really until we started talking about the finale and breaking the finale that we realized that it felt like Laurie was a character who was gonna come out of the water and not stay down there.
Lostwas your first time serving as a TV showrunner, then you worked with some of the best filmmakers in the world on features, and then you moved intoThe Leftovers. Aside from the obvious difficulty of crafting 23 episodes a year, how has your approach to running a writers room changed since theLostdays?
LINDELOF: Man, I’m probably the least qualified person to answer that question. I have more experience as a human being—I’m not a different person now as a 44-year-old man than I was as a 31-year-old man which is when I started in theLostroom. But I’ll say Carlton and I were runningLosttogether, we were partners in every way shape and form. I think the partnerships that formed over the course ofThe Leftovers—first and foremost Perrotta, who stayed onboard all the way through the entire process wire to wire and he’s the one who birthed this world so he has a disproportionate amount of say in the writers room, one that we all respected. He was there. And then Tom Spezialy who came on between Seasons 1 and 2 and was there for 2 and 3, which were largely hailed as far superior creative seasons and I think that’s due in no small part to Tom. And then Mimi is a showrunner in my opinion. She had a tremendous amount of autonomy in actually making the show. I don’t like to spend a lot of time on set because I want the material to be interpreted by others, and the only way that works is if you trust someone like Mimi to cover it from there. She always, I feel, both transcended and elevated the material every time she directed or supervised other directors, but I always felt likeThe Leftoverswas in great hands. So I guess the short answer to your question is I’ve learned to be less controlling and more trusting, I think I’m a much better listener. Although many of the writers onLostwere incredible writers, I think I probably leaned on them a little too hard or rewrote them a little too much because I needed it to be mine, and I felt less that way onThe Leftovers. When I watch this show, I’m able to actually embrace the show because it’s not mine, it’s theirs. And I can appreciate their art in the same way that I can watch another show likeFargoorMaster of NoneorTransparentand say that feels like someone else’s art. Very often I can watchThe Leftoversand have that same feeling because I’ve been able to let go, it’s not my own ego. And I get to have this conversation with you right now because I’m perceived as the frontman ofThe Leftovers, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way to me and I think that’s much to the show’s benefit.
Sure. Well now with the show having come to a conclusion, have you thought about whether you’re looking to keep working in TV or are you interested in moving back into features?
LINDELOF: I think that if I were to go into feature territory I’d want to make something much smaller, more scaled in the kind of indie world or the micro-budget Jason Blum world than a big superhero epic or a big sci-fi epic. I don’t really think I’m good at writing those kinds of movies, and I’ve tried. I think the scale basically demands a certain formulaic approach and every time I try to subvert formula, I end up having to embrace it instead and I just don’t think that I’m particularly good at cramming all the ideas and characters I have in my mind onto a canvas as small as a two-hour movie. So I definitely want to do another television show, I don’t know entirely what that is yet and what I wanna say. I feel like this space that I’ve been exploring in bothLostandThe Leftovers, this kind of existential spiritual belief space—at this moment in time I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say about the afterlife (laughs). I’ve looked at it through a couple of different lenses now. There’s other things that I wanna say that will probably touch on the same themes, but I think that the biggest challenge for me at this point is finding the right people to partner with on the next thing, because I really feel like the best way to unlock something new is to find a new partnership. So I’ll be dating for a while and I’ll see where the chemistry is.
I am curious, because I’m a fan of your work onPrometheus, have you seenAlien: Covenantyet? What was your reaction?
LINDELOF: I have seen it, yeah. Absolutely. That’s a really complex—I can’t respond toCovenantalong the lines of ‘I like it’, ‘I don’t like it’, ‘It’s good’ or ‘It’s bad’ because of my relationship to that material. That said, anytime I go to a movie I’m going to the movie because I want to like it and I was able to do that withCovenant. I really wanted to like it and therefore I was able to like it. I thought that Fassbender’s performance was off the hook. I love Ridley Scott’s filmmaking and there’s some incredibly beautiful filmmaking in that movie, so I programmed myself to enjoy the experience and I was successful in achieving my programming, I will say that.
I know that you and Ridley discussed the future of the franchise beyondPrometheus. Was that a pretty different idea from what becameAlien: Covenant?
LINDELOF: “I don’t know, I mean we weren’t necessarily talking about what the sequel toPrometheuswould be as opposed to like where this journey was going to end up, and I think that the themes that Ridley was really interested in overlapped with themes that I was interested in, which is things that he had already explored inBlade Runner. He had always explainedPrometheusto me as the marriage betweenAlienandBlade Runnerbecause he was interested in this idea of creation and that there were three generations of creation. You have man and his creation, which are the synthetic beings, the androids, the robots, replicants, whatever you wanna call them depending on which Ridley movie you’re in. And then what’s the next level of that, which is who created man? So that search for God as it were to go and ask, ‘Why did you make me and to what end?’ was something that Ridley was interested in and was in Jon Spaihts’ draft long before I came along, and so that was the thing that I keyed into. So I think that one of the conversations that we had at the end ofPrometheusis, Shaw and David have basically locked in on the coordinates of the planet where the Engineers came from. What does that place look like? Ridley called it ‘Paradise’. What happens when they land on that planet? It doesn’t feel like they’ve gotten there yet inCovenant,Covenantfelt like it maybe was a detour prior to them arriving at the place of origin so I don’t want to spoil any place that he might still be wanting to go, but the conversations that he and I had about where the story goes next were largely about the place where the Engineers were from and less the events ofCovenant.
I also wanted to touch onTomorrowland. The world building in that film is fantastic. Had things gone a different way at the box office, did you and Brad Bird have an idea of where a sequel might go or what it might explore?
LINDELOF: Yeah I mean Jeff Jensen and I did a tremendous amount of world building together onTomorrowlandbefore we wrote the screenplay and again that kind of goes back to the idea of how do you cram all of those ideas into a two-hour movie and what does that look like? I don’t think there were many conversations about what the sequel ofTomorrowlandwould be because we live in this media culture now where you can’t just make a movie anymore, your movie has to have a post-credit sequence and has to lay groundwork. When they madeThe Fast and the FuriousI don’t think they were thinking about, ‘What would the sequel be?’ let alone the eighth movie, their job was basically just to make a great movie, a fun ride. I think that we tried to take the same approach toTomorrowlandwhich was, ‘Let’s just make a movie with a beginning, middle, and end and see how it turns out, and then we’ll worry about where to go next if we’re all happy with the end result.’ I learned a lot fromTomorrowland, I think there’s some really good stuff in that movie, but the best part of that experience for me was getting to work with one of my idols, Brad Bird. I’m sure we both wish the end result was better than it actually was, but…we were trying to say something about the future and about the way people think about the future that tapped into Walt Disney’s fundamental idea back in the 1950s that the future was bright, and that’s a much harder idea to get across these days because we have a fixation with the apocalypse. It feels like we keep making these movies where the future isn’t bright andTomorrowlandwas gonna try to thread that needle. I still celebrate the ambition of the movie and I certainly celebrate Disney’s big swing on letting us make it. I don’t entirely have the answer yet to what could we have done differently to make it awesome, but at least we tried.
To bring it back around toThe Leftovers, one of the things I loved about the show was the tremendous and personal critical writing it inspired by people like Maureen Ryan. How did you feel about the show invoking that kind of response? There was a lot of great writing on shows likeMad MenandSopranos, but the deeply personal response to this show feels unique.
LINDELOF: It’s overwhelming and it’s extraordinary and I kind of don’t quite know how to process that feeling yet because the idea that the show—and again I want to reiterate that the show doesn’t feel like it’s mine, it feels like I’ve had the gift of being able to be involved with the show but it’s almost like I’m channeling some other thing, and because I’m surrounded by so many great artists it’s all of ours. But the idea that members of the critical community using the show as a space to kind of talk about themselves, I feel like that’s a great leap forward in critical writing. That feels almost like it’s a new thing. I’m sure it’s been done before, but this sort of idea of the critic being able to say, ‘This has always been a part of critical writing. Who areyou? How areyouprocessing this?’ And I do think in some cases it’s relevant. It’s an oversimplification to just say, ‘This is good. This is bad.’ It’s a critic’s job to say ‘Here’s why it’s good’ or ‘Here’s why it’s bad’. Here’s the new level which is, ‘Let’s not talk about whether it’s good or bad, let’s talk about my emotional response to this material, and in order for you to understand my emotional response to this material, here’s some things you need to know about me.’
To me, it’s not just that Maureen’s piece and pieces like it reduce me to tears, it’s that the critical community around Maureen didn’t say, “Uh you just overstepped your boundaries Maureen Ryan. We’re not supposed to talk about ourselves.’ No, the critical community started like disseminating Maureen’s piece and celebrating Maureen’s piece, and basically putting it out there themselves and saying, ‘This is an important piece of writing.’ And it’s not aLeftoversreview,The Leftoversis kind of the least important part—maybe not from Maureen’s perspective,The Leftoversallowed her to write this piece, but it’s not aboutThe Leftoversit’s about Maureen. And it doesn’t take away from her ability to be a critic. If she didn’t likeThe Leftoversshe’s still allowed to say so, but I think that that this show basically creating a space for people to write emotionally and personally is a beautiful thing, and I think my hope is the most lasting legacy of the show is there’s hopefully going to be a shift now in the way that people talk about these things in more emotional terms. It doesn’t have to be purely cerebral, it can be emotional and cerebral, and I think that a lot of the writing that I’ve seen aboutThe Leftoversover the years has been scratching at this space and I hope to read a lot more of it about shows that aren’tThe Leftovers, because I think that there’s incredible television out there that’s deeply emotional, that requires an emotional perspective in order to really have a great critical analysis of it.
