Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1500026
42 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E Yoon: The original design of the script had a very bold premise from Sunny: we would start with Danny, we would leave him for quite a while, and then lay out the majority of Amy's life. Then Danny would surprise us at the doorway later on with Amy. That was something that was very bold, very challenging, particularly for a two-handed show with two very dynamic and charismatic characters. It worked to a certain extent, but I think what we recognized was we were missing some of the delicious parallels that Sunny had laid out in these beats between the characters. In that juxtapo- sition of those parallels, I think [there is] a clearer evocation of this thesis: that the thing bothering Danny, even though it circumstantially might be different than the thing that is bothering Amy, [suggests] a kind of cosmic parity between those two. What we ended up playing with, with the encouragement of A24 and with Netflix, was more crosscutting . . . . "This is where I have to really tip my hat to Laura Zempel, who created all these beautiful little grace notes in those cuts between the characters. CineMontage: How did you approach the actual road rage chase? Yo o n : Th e re a re d e f i n i te l y s e v e ra l chapters to that. It's really important to understand where Danny's head is when he sees that the bird flipped by Amy's char- acter . . . to show in that little vignette that he is a man that is put upon by the world and that he's disrespected and for all of us to identify that. That's something that we could all resonate with. Then, what we wanted to do from there was to keep escalating the reasons why Danny won't stop. That the fact that Amy's car swerves into him as he's trying to follow her leads him to go into that super-dan- gerous situation with the red light. Then she escalates it again by starting to throw things at his windshield. Each moment where you think, "OK, this is getting ridic- ulous," she keeps escalating the insults. So you start to understand beat by beat why he can't let this chase go. CineMontage: What is it about these two characters that leads them to the road rage incident? Yoon: From the beginning, all of the de- partment heads that Sunny brought on had this ongoing conversation about the void: this kind of hole in our hearts or in our souls that makes us feel like what we have or what we're doing or what we've accomplished isn't quite enough. Some of us find a way to fill that hole through religion, some of us fill that hole through achievement, but what we see carefully laid out, piece by piece, is how deeply unsatisfied each of the charac- ters are for some reason. It's like an itch that they can't scratch. There's something about this sense of purpose that each of them gets in fighting this other person that allows them to at least look away from that hole for a little while. Na t F u l l e r : Th e re's t h e e l e m e n t o f them breaking out of their mundane life with this experience of having a beef with somebody and having that rivalry. It almost wakes up something in both of them that they needed in a way, but also at the same time it's very destructive. Yoon: I think that pivotal moment in Danny's story in the first episode is when he says, "This isn't it. I can't just kill myself. I need to find some other reason to live." That's when he discovers the receipt and is reminded that, "Oh yeah, there's that terri- ble person that insulted me. If I can only get revenge on that person, maybe my life will have meaning." CineMontage: Since the show is all about the aftermath of the initial incident, how did you assure that the episodes flowed from one to another? Fuller: The progression of it starts with this one triggering event, the road rage incident. It was important to have a nice se- quential build of the people's actions. Even though each next domino to fall in the story was very important, I think it was import- ant to have a very methodical build-up with the steam building up that leads to the big ultimate showdown at the end . . . . You're unveiling the pieces of the onion for each character, and you want to do it in a way that builds. One event leads to this event, which leads to this event. Zempel: For me, the key was keeping the parallels between Amy and Danny and what they're going through and building off of them, and finding ways to keep their struggles connected to each other. They share very few scenes together. Laura Zempel. Jordan Kim.