Two thirds of the season’s excitingly diverse episodes are directed by women
Topics:
Doug Emmett,
Entertainment,
jay duplass,
mark duplass,
Megan Griffiths,
room 104,
TV, Entertainment News
But for a few time-shifts, the Duplass brothers’ anthology series “ Room 104 ” has one set. It is a bland — neither dingy nor ritzy — 400 sq. ft. motel room: Stock motel table. Two stock motel beds. A stock motel dresser with a stock motel television on top. A stock motel desk. A stock motel bathroom.
“When I first looked at it, my first thought was, ‘Wow, it’s really beige,’ ” said Megan Griffiths, who directed “The Missionaries” and “The Fight, ” two episodes that have yet to air.
The room’s ordinariness was intentional on the part of Mark and Jay Duplass. It could easily recede into the background, and it forced filmmakers to be inventive. Griffiths described having to “work a lot harder to keep your blocking interesting because your backgrounds are changing so minimally.”
Her first episode, “The Missionaries, ” is about a night when two young missionaries’ doubts lead them to explore. Her other episode, “The Fight, ” is about two female MMA fighters’ scheme to buck an unfair system. The two episodes manage to feel like entirely separate worlds — in one case, developing male minds; in the other, an octagon.
“I think Mark and [the cinematographer] Doug Emmett had conversations about specifically wanting every episode to bring out something different in the room and to make it feel like it has its own personality, ” Griffiths said. “Somehow that room was this great blank canvas that I didn’ t really expect it to be.”
This weekend’s episode, “The Voyeurs, ” marks the midpoint of “Room 104”’s first season. And that aspect — the same blank canvas being reimagined in a fresh way each week — is a big part of what’s made the show consistently thrilling to behold. Each week showcases a different talented, often young, often not widely known, director.
The Duplass brothers approached the series with two rules for choosing directors: They would not direct any of the episodes, and at least half of the episodes would be directed by women. (Six of the nine episodes wound up being directed by women.) From there, the way Mark Duplass tells it, it was a bit like putting together a fantasy indie filmmaker team.
“There are all these directors that I’ ve loved and have been fans of but who haven’ t necessarily been right to direct some of our scripts because the scripts have been very much inside the Duplass lane, ” he said, referring to a tone that mixes comedy and drama and features naturalistic interpersonal relationship dynamics. “But when I write an episode like ‘Ralphie’ and I really take off my skin, I can say, ‘I’ m going to try something really creepy with horror. Let me go hire a director who does that really, really well who I haven’ t had the previous chance to collaborate with.’ ”
For “Ralphie, ” the series opener about a babysitting gig gone wrong, that director was Sarah Adina Smith. Smith, 34, was coming off “Buster’s Mal Heart, ” a thriller starring Rami Malek — equal parts absurd and haunting — about Y2K, an event referred to as “The Inversion, ” a character with psychological issues, murder and. . well, it’s not really important. Suffice to say, there were parallels between Smith’s past work and the tone the Duplass brothers were after for “Ralphie.”
