Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch on Roar, your intimate coordinator for Ducks and GLOW’s “Phantom Limb”

it’s over roarIn eight separate episodes, Nicole Kidman literally sucks up old photos to relate to her past, Isa Ray is invisibly ignored by white movie executives, while the hapless Meryet Weaver falls into a toxic relationship with a verbally abusive duck. .

An often bizarre study of a woman’s experience through metaphor and magical realism; roar It ranges from gamma comedy to straight horror. For co-creators Liz Playiv and Carly Manch, who adapted material from Cecilia Ahern’s short story collection of the same name, this mixed tonal volume proved to be the ideal next step after filming three (almost four) seasons. SHINE. The couple recently spoke THR In her new project, which actually included an intimate relationship coordinator for Weaver and her Melard constellation, as well as her image, two years later, SHINE ‘s Cancel the COVID era.

Something surprised me as I looked roar How little magical realism there is in television. Do you have any idea why this is? Was it part of the feature?

Carlos in Mann It was really different and new for us. We are complete and naturalistic writers. But we wanted to make an effort. We were writing this in parallel. SHINE, And feel such a different brain space. I’m sure this is a very hard answer as to why it’s not seen anymore, but it might have to do with the difficulty of removing it. You need film production and scaling capabilities.

liz fly It’s hard to make a TV show, no matter what. But here we add technical dance about what we can do with practical and visual effects. We really wanted to do as much as we could, but it strains the production in a very intense way. And we did eight stories. So while we were trying to understand how bite marks worked, we also delved into western production and trained seven ducks for a relationship with Merritt Weaver.

mensch We asked him the same question. Why aren’t there more similar stories? I think when we read the book, we find this literary feature interesting. It looked almost daring. The part that attracted us was that there was no template.

I’m happy to raise ducks. Liz, this episode was your directorial debut. Did someone say you never work with children or animals?

Fly It goes very well if you go home, I think? [Laughs.] I didn’t expect to direct this episode. I thought it was someone else’s problem and was very excited to see how they resolved it. Then it became my problem. I thought we couldn’t use real ducks. But we don’t use a single CG duck in this episode. There was a duck that could hear very well. There was a duck that walked very well. There was a duck that was perfect for a crazy sex scene. They all had different abilities and we just needed to figure out which duck would do each scene.

mensch We never treated this episode as a scam. Yes, Liz had to figure out how to leave the seven ducks and where to put the camera, but our intention in this episode was to do something very serious: an emotionally toxic and abusive relationship. Every conversation we had about the intent of the scenes was as grounded as if we were saying it between two actors. And we were. We had Justin Kirk playing duck with us.

Fly What draws people in may be that Merritt Weaver notices, but we always knew we were telling this really delicate story. I think it shows, especially during the sex scene. We even had an intimate relations coordinator who treated us like any sex scene we would have on any show, we made sure the actors were comfortable… even bending down was comfortable.

Another thing to watch is to watch an episode of Cynthia Erivo, A woman who found bite marks on her skin., is that body horror is more often posed by female characters. Is something needed?

Fly Glad to see the male body horror story!

mensch We discussed yes or no pilot The horror story of the male body?

Yes.

mensch The episode starts with childbirth, which is just a messy, messy body story in real life. We are very inspired by motherhood. Childbirth as a bodily experience. Feeding a baby is a very physical experience. Liz has a daughter who literally rubs her skin when she misses him. Um, sure, yes, I know, because it’s something that is known in advance.

Tell me a little about the cast. You have wonderful names on board.

mensch We wrote all the scripts in advance and went through the list of people we loved for the different roles. We knew we wanted to go after some people we were already working with. We also knew that we needed some tough drummers in these roles because you need to switch between those stories and get up right away. And it takes a certain level of mastery on the part of the cast to take care of it right away, buy it right away, contact it right away. We assume people would say, “No, that’s too weird.” But they actually got in touch with him.

How much did you say about the order? It’s streaming and you can take it wherever you want, but people are forced to start over, and you’ve been guided by racism and insanity.

mensch We didn’t want to hide the fact that we do great things. [Laughs.] The beauty of the anthology is that people kind of pick where to start and undermine the way Apple shaped it. Ordering is what we decided to do with the manufacturers and Apple. But we didn’t want to hide the ball. They may look light and fluffy, but it’s an ambitious, themed work.

Fly Depending on who you are talking to in this group of program creators, there are many different commands. I don’t think there’s just one way to do it: it’s a different place for us, in terms. In the presentation of the work.

Betty Gilpin, who really broke up SHINE, has an episode. Are you proud that you are the ones who gave him a big chance?

Fly The luck of being a playwright in New York that we both started with is that you have this community of weirdos. Involve the actors before starting. Betty was the person who was in my second drama workshop. so he entered nurse jackieCarl and I worked with him. Sometimes you are lucky and you see people before the world sees them. We always knew how much Betty should be paid. And because he’s a strange man hiding in a bomb body, people don’t always see him for what we are: he’s a strange chameleon monster who can do absolutely anything. One of the joys of receiving SHINE He was going to take her into the stratosphere. It would happen with us or without him. We are happy to have been the first in this party.

mensch It’s great to have an idea like “Oh, there’s a woman sitting on a shelf for the poorest in this episode.” When we started thinking about the character Betty, we had this idea. She is a special bird.

Most recent roar Question: “What did Nicole Kidman really eat?” A woman who ate pictures.?

Fly He ate rice paper and marzipan.

This is his first project since Netflix’s cancellation SHINE Before the end of the final season. People in the industry still feel the surprise of that decision, not just because it was such a popular show, but also because I think it came at a time when a lot of people lost confidence in Netflix, because it was just creative. Two years later, how do you feel about what happened?

Fly we knew something SHINE It will come out when we talk about another show. We canceled the peak of the pandemic when there were so many terrible losses in the world. We’re very sorry that we didn’t make the final season deep enough. But everything was much bigger than that. They always are. But in that moment, there was so much loss and change.

Often times when you start doing a show it changes as the show goes on. I think it’s fair to say that something like this happened to us on Netflix. Also, at first I think we had a wonderful creative time there. We had to do what we wanted with this show and create exactly what we wanted. This is something that many people who present the first show cannot say. Now another place. And I think we’re not the only people who have felt this shift. Weird. I think about those characters. I still think about that season every now and then. It’s like my brain is playing tricks on me to think, in a strangely sad way, that I can still do this. We both have a weird sense of humor about it.

mensch It’s an unfinished, disorganized feeling. Closing really wasn’t. Two years later, we are in the acceptance phase. That happened. But there’s also this weird dissonance, as we’ve come a long way in creating this season. Most of what we write. We shot two episodes. Sometimes when you do something, you forget that the world hasn’t seen you. Such a real feeling. I feel it exists. And then I remember that this is just a personal version that never existed, as a stillborn.

Lizzie and I sometimes take comfort in the fact that this is the most vulnerable move ever canceled as a show you take inspiration from. Original SHINE, in the eighties, was taken off the air before its time. We’re still in good company.