Director Craig Zobel has made a career out of unpredictable choices, with movies and television projects ranging from Z for Zachariah to The Hunt and the provocative Paramount Plus original series, One Dollar, to say nothing of his early days working on the original concept for The Leftovers. His latest project, Mare of Easttown, combines small-town family drama with a white-knuckle murder mystery.
Kate Winslet stars as the eponymous Mare, a detective with a tragic past. When a local girl is murdered, Mare gets saddled with a new partner from out-of-town (seven episode run. As a result, Mare of Easttown rewards viewers through its impressive scope and empathetic, beating heart.
While promoting the HBO debut of Mare of Easttown, odyssey through Hollywood and how he's managed to avoid getting pinned to any particular genre or style of filmmaking. Finally, he discusses how films like Compliance and Z for Zachariah made for turning points in his career, shaping the way he wanted to create his art moving forward.
Mare of Easttown debuts April 18 on HBO.
I am upset. I got the first several episodes via screener, and now I have to wait longer than everybody else to see what happens in the later episodes!
(Laughs) That's exciting! I mean, I'm sorry for your pain, but it's exciting that you want to know what happens.
I was just talking with my friends, and I realized that the last movie I saw in theaters was The Hunt!
Oh, yay! Apparently, the sign is still up at The Grove movie theater in L.A., which makes me happy.
Oh, that's awesome. I live in New York, and the subway stations are all full of year-old ads, it's crazy.
(Laughs)
Actually, kinda related to that, I was looking at your career, at your IMDB and all that, and you've never let yourself get pinned to any one genre. Is that by design, has that been a goal of yours? What's the term, "journeyman director?" Or does that have negative connotations? I'm actually not sure...
I don't know that I like the term "journeyman," I think it means, "not that great." But I like the idea of being a filmmaker who does a bunch of different genres. But maybe that's me carrying baggage.
Oh, I thought it was a positive term, oh man, if it has negative connotations, that is absolutely not what I meant!
(Laughs) I genuinely appreciate the sentiment! I actually like the concept that I don't have a signature style. That's actually something I like about my work, or I'd hope it's the case. While I love watching Wes Anderson movies, I'd get bored making them, personally. It's a way to keep it fun, trying to do new things.
And you've jumped back and forth between TV and movies. I feel like you're a prime example of someone who's thriving in this... They keep calling it the "golden age of television." There's so much great TV right now. Is there a distinction for you, between film and television?
I don't feel it's that different. There are different levels of collaboration on TV shows, but I think the main thing is the length of the story. I like esoteric art movies that are very slow. But I recognize that most of the world doesn't like those! When I make a film, well, I like a film that is 90 minutes long, and engaging the whole time. But those moments that I would miss from some sort of artistic drama, you get to do them in TV, in bits and pieces. It's a different scale to what this narrative is, and I have a lot of fun doing it.
Since you directed every episode of Mare of Easttown, did you shoot one episode at a time, or did you shoot everything together?
Interestingly, we shot this one the second way, everything together. Previous to this, I had done, for CBS All Access, now Paramount Plus, I had done the show, One Dollar. We did that in two-episode chunks. I enjoyed shooting everything together, in a way, but I actually think I won't do it that way again if I get to do an entire season of a show again. For one thing, you can have a pandemic in the middle of the schedule, and it impacts all the episodes, not just the one. (Laughs) But there was an art to learning how to hold in your head, especially with a murder mystery... Like, "Wait, that happens in episode four, not episode three, we can't do that yet!" You're constantly checking in with the script supervisor and asking, "Do they know this yet? What do they know right now?"
Right. Related to that, it must have been extra challenging for you. You kind of had to hit the ground running, right, because you were something of a late hire, no?
Yeah. They had shot a few days by the time I came on board. In a lot of ways, I was learning as we went. I was so excited to do it because I was able to see Kate already trying out the character. I was, like, "Ah, this is interesting. This is a different person than I've seen lead a TV show before. This is different for Kate Winslet. Like, I'd never seen her do this before, quite like this. I was excited, and that was my guiding star, going, "More of this, please, what I'm liking from this." But yeah, I did feel like I was scrambling to catch up, at first.
This show is dark and scary and I'm on the edge of my seat, but it's also got a light touch to it. The characters get to breathe. Since you're not limited to a two-hour story, you don't have to push the plot over everything else, and we get to explore the story. Is that something that drew you to the project?
Absolutely. What was exciting about this was... I was fascinated by the construction of the story. It is a detective story, which I'm a big fan of, and HBO knows how to do that, they do awesome detective stories. But this is one that was... Not in an "eat your vegetables" kind of way, but it felt new and different in that it was a family drama about this woman and the people in her life and where she is in the world, and her experience. There was a lot to explore, and it was attractive to me. I hadn't seen that in a while, and it felt like a new way to do it.
I'm sure you've been hearing this all day from the other interviewers, but you nailed it. You don't need me to tell you!
Thank you.
Let's talk about the pandemic. How long was production shut down?
We were back really early. We were one of the first HBO shows, and one of the first TV shows in general to get back up and running. And we came back in September. We shut down on March 13, when everybody did, and went back in mid-September. In late August, we were prepping and starting to do stuff. It was incredibly challenging .There's no version of making a movie or TV show where anybody should find out that their mother-in-law ed away because they worked on this show. I was carrying around a lot of stress, honestly. I was just terrified whenever the producer came up to me. I was terrified she was going to tell me we had to shut down. But we were really safe. We were very cautious, I think because we came back so early. We never had to shut down. Not everybody can say that. We were really safe. I think we had 10,000 tests over the course of the shoot, and we were able to make everybody feel safe, but it was intense! (Laughs) And it was a whole new level of problem solving that we didn't have before.
It's not just masks and tests, right?
If we get rained out of a location, we can't just go to the other location. People live there, so they have to move out, and we have to sanitize the place, and then we have to bring in the props, and then we have to sanitize the place, and then we have to paint it, and then we have to sanitize the place! (Laughs) Everything got way more complicated.
I honestly can't imagine that kind of pressure.
Just the emotional leadership level... Realizing, okay, everybody is scared. I had to find ways to make the set feel not so sad and intense, that was a whole new set of challenges.
Was everybody game to come back? Did you have to rework anything from what you had shot beforehand?
It's funny, everybody was game to come back. I really attribute a lot of it to Kate. Me and the producers started talking about how we could keep shooting, and I talked to Kate, who starred in Contagion, so she has a lot of thoughts and knows a lot about this stuff! She was very active in saying what she felt would be safe and unsafe from a talent point of view. She helped guide us a lot. I think, because of that, we were able to resume. But I did try to call as many of the actors as I could ahead of time. Just to explain what the experience would be for them. There was a point where it felt like you could get Covid from anything! Like, just from leaving home! I have to say, I grew a ton. It changed the whole experience of telling this story for me. Even though the story is not about the pandemic at all, just making it shifted us all in of empathy.
Did you have to rewrite any scenes? Was it ever like, "This was a romantic physical love scene, but now they'll just write letters to each other instead?"
(Laughs) Yeah, there was! I'd say we touched 50% of the script in some way, shape, or form because of it. Some things were easy, some things were harder than others. There's one scene, I won't say which episode or which characters, but there's a scene where two characters are talking, and the background actors are the same people behind both characters, just dressed differently. We didn't feel comfortable having more than X amount of people there. We did some things like that, like putting hats on people and telling them to stand over there to make it feel like there were more people in the room!
Woah, that's actually awesome.
There was a big rock concert in the story at one point that had to go, and some other different things.
Wow. That's the kind of problem solving that makes you a director, right?
Yeah, I guess so!
Okay, going back to the very beginning, when you were hired, did you have to convince anyone? Was Evan Peters like, "Wait, who is this guy? I didn't sign up for this!"
That's a good question, and it's funny that you picked Evan. (Laughs) No, Evan and I, no, I was immediately like, "I love you, you're the best!" To answer your question, I don't know, I didn't feel any outright confrontation from anybody. But I imagine some people were like, "Who's this joker?" But by the time we were actually in it, I felt like I was friends with everybody and they all trusted me.
Since we've got a few minutes left, I'd love to learn more about you. Did you always know you were going to be a hotshot filmmaker back when you were a teenager?
I'm still waiting for the day I can call myself a hotshot filmmaker, but that's awesome of you to say (Laughs). Did I know? I wanted to be a director since forever, sure. I think making the movie Compliance really, in a lot of ways, colored and clarified the rest of my career. That was an incredibly intense but fulfilling experience. I made that movie and, with the graciousness of Magnolia Pictures, toured around with it for about a year and got to talk to people about it. I felt, sometimes, like I was a triage nurse, going, "Okay, this is what you just saw... Let's talk about the movie. You can blame it on me." It was a very creatively fulfilling experience, if that makes sense. It helped me stop making movies in a certain way... I wanted, from then on, to have good creative experiences, is what occurred to me.
That's so interesting... To bring it back to your "signature style," I think creativity, of taking whatever the project is and taking it further than other people would take it, is your signature. Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the sense that people go, "Oh, you can't really do that," and that's your cue to do that very thing.
This sounds reductive, it sounds more sage than I mean it to, but the act of making it started to become more important to me, almost in a selfish way. If television hadn't come along for me, I don't know how many movies I would have gotten to make in my career. It's still a debate. Will I get to make ten movies over my career? Who knows? It's not easy to get a movie off the ground, and it's not easy to make them! I guess I came to some sort of place where I wanted to make sure I was doing it with people who were also excited, and we were trying to do something in a slightly different way, or pushing... There has to be a reason to work so hard for up to five years per movie, rather than just the finished project. For a certain amount of years, what I did was, I tried to convince people to let me make Z for Zachariah. The experience of shooting Z for Zachariah down in New Zealand... We were so remote, so far away from Christchurch, which was the closest big town. If you drove to Christchurch and drove back, you were already halfway out of gas. We were in the middle of nowhere, and we all had a blast! Regardless of whether you liked or disliked that movie, the experience of doing that was pretty remarkable and life-changing. And it needed to be that because it took five years to make, to get people to let me go do that!