Here’s a pop quiz: Name the most talented writer/director/producer/show-runner in Hollywood today who wears his social conscience as lightly and as effectively as Batman wears his cape. If you guessed Scott Z. Burns, go to the head of the class. From The Report to The Informant! to Contagion, Burns has consistently made entertaining films that also make you think about larger issues. This month, Apple TV will begin streaming Extrapolations, his eight-part series about climate change. Trust us: you will be hooked.
JIM KELLY: I have watched the first two episodes of Extrapolations, and though I am not usually a fan of futuristic, semi-apocalyptic fare, I found your series to be absolutely riveting, with such terrific writing and acting. As a producer of An Inconvenient Truth, you obviously had an interest in the damage done by climate change, but what inspired you to revisit the subject in such an ambitious way?
SCOTT Z. BURNS: I hope you watch the rest! It doesn’t end the way you might think. The third episode is inspired by the Coen brothers, and the seventh is a bit like an Albee play. Dave Eggers and I worked on an episode about geo-engineering that was inspired by the Walter Bernstein film Fail Safe, and Rajiv Joseph did an amazing buddy film set in India that borrows from Midnight Run. So, I was inspired by exploring how the stories we already knew fit into a world we are disrupting.
So much of the storytelling done in this space since An Inconvenient Truth has focused on the bleak, back-end result of our inability to change. I understand what lures a storyteller to cut to the conclusion of our relationship with the planet to create drama—and some of that work has been very compelling, like Adam McKay’s movie [Don’t Look Up]. But I was drawn to what happens before we get there, for two reasons: first, it is already happening, and, secondly, we can still stop it. My father always used to say, “The problem isn’t that we are going to die; the problem is we are going to live.” I think he stole that from Dorothy Parker.
For a kid growing up in Miami, climate change is one thing; for a young man from a failed farm in India, it is something else; and for a whale trying to find food in an acidic ocean, it has a different impact. To an opportunistic investor, it means something else again. I wanted these stories to be about familiar human things—family, jobs, faith, love—but set against a climate-changed world.
So, the question is, What will the next world look like, and how will those changes alter the stories we tell each other? We made eight of these—but the reason the years are erratically spaced is to imply that there could be many more extrapolations.
So much of the storytelling done in this space since An Inconvenient Truth has focused on the bleak, back-end result of our inability to change. I was drawn to what happens before we get there.
J.K.: There are dream casts, and then there is Extrapolations, which has the Cinemax version of dream casts. Meryl Streep, Matthew Rhys, Kit Harington, Cherry Jones, Murray Bartlett, Sienna Miller, to name just a few. I know you worked with some of them before, but did you have much trouble recruiting such remarkable talent, and how much did the subject matter speak to them?
S.Z.B.: Because the show crosses time and the world, it felt like we were actually scouting and casting eight different pilot episodes—during a pandemic. That was brutal. And I am so grateful to Carmen Cuba, our casting director, for what she helped us pull together. Scheduling that many busy people is hard on everyone involved.
Yes, I knew some of the people who worked on our show from other projects—in the cast and crew—and I knew they care about this issue just as deeply as I do, but I also knew they love their work and have choices. I hope they came to work because of what was on the page—the characters they helped us bring to life—just as much as they responded to what is happening in the world.
J.K.: This is your first project with Apple TV. How different is it working with a streaming service as opposed to the film studios you have worked with? Fewer notes? Better budgets? No wait time for you at the Genius Bar?
S.Z.B.: Same MacBook Pro. Same wait at the Genius Bar. Lost my AirPods years ago—not expecting to be given new ones.
Erica Bello and Caroline Warner, who were my execs at Apple, were great to work with—yes, there were notes, and sometimes they trusted us and other times we made the changes. Hopefully for the better. The biggest difference for me was the speed at which TV gets shot—telling stories in 10 or 12 days. And then you’re on to the next episode—the pace invites compromise, for sure. If we made any, I hope they are invisible.
My father always used to say, “The problem isn’t that we are going to die; the problem is we are going to live.” I think he stole that from Dorothy Parker.
The kind of immersion into a story that happens in a movie theater just doesn’t take place in a living room or on a phone screen surrounded by distractions. And it would be a tragedy to continue to lose the shared public experience of stories. But, to this next generation of people, I am not so sure any of that matters. As far as this show goes, I do wish people could see some of our VFX [visual effects] on a big screen, or hear Ben Harper’s song on a great sound system.
J.K.: You have worn many hats, as a writer, director, producer, show-runner. Do you have a preferred hat, and what was it like to wear all these hats for this series?
S.Z.B.: Sadly, a TV show requires a show-runner, even though it is entirely possible that anyone who wants that job should probably not be allowed to do it. But it just would not happen with a flattened hierarchy. Too many choices that are ultimately subjective. Show-running is the hat that threatens your head. It’s a bit like hosting a party for a year straight and hoping you do it in a way so that nobody wants to leave.
As for the other hats, I usually start my relationship with a story as the writer. Selling and casting that story is an obligation which suddenly makes you a producer. Then there is the decision to direct—which takes you back to the page. I have found that ego does not lead you to better ideas or results, so the choice to direct, for me, is made only if I know I can see it in my mind.
I love all of those jobs. I try to find a story on the page, but I love the challenge of then going and looking for it in the world.
Greg Jacobs and Steven Soderbergh, with whom I did four movies, always said that if you are in a great band it should not matter if you are playing bass or singing lead. You are still integral to making great music—and if the other people in the band are cool, it’s only the music that matters. Steven can do most any job on a film set—except maybe craft service, because he doesn’t snack at work. He always says that you need a “buddy” when you make a movie or a show—on Extrapolations, that was Greg Jacobs for me. Greg did that for Steven on The Knick and something like 15 movies. Asking him to join me was probably the best decision I made.
Show-running is the hat that threatens your head. It’s a bit like hosting a party for a year straight and hoping you do it in a way so that nobody wants to leave.
J.K.: You have quoted George Orwell as an explanation for what animates you: “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” Before we explore that a bit further, you also enjoy working on movies like The Bourne Ultimatum, which you wrote, and script-doctoring other blockbusters, such as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and No Time to Die. Are those a bit of a holiday for you, to the extent that anything in Hollywood is a holiday?
S.Z.B.: I have found nothing easier about making up a story for one of the movies in those franchises than the work we did here. On Rogue One, the late Alli Shearmur always said to me that we are asking the audience to trade us their time and money for a story. So that’s the contract you make with them no matter the content, and that contract does not allow for cynicism. They will lend you the characters they have come to love, so you can make more stories—but you need to return them in better shape than you found them.
J.K.: Getting back to Orwell, you have dealt with the C.I.A.’s use of torture after 9/11 (The Report), agricultural price-fixing (The Informant!), and the dangers of psychiatric drugs (Side Effects). And yet none of these have the whiff of a lecture about them, and The Informant! is hilarious. Is there anything in your early work in advertising that influenced your gift in sending larger messages in such entertaining ways?
S.Z.B.: Orwell: The Sequel! I think the reason that we are quoting Orwell to each other today is that he told an amazing story that has resonated since 1949. I also think he was talking about passion as much as politics. Yeats said a similar thing about Ireland in The Second Coming.
If all movies are hard to make, then it helps to pick something for which you have a great deal of passion. Because the process can rob you of anything less than that. All of those films you mentioned were passion projects for sure—they were things that had to be willed into existence by Soderbergh, myself, and others. They were not initiated by a studio.
But saying that does not absolve you from being held to account by the mysterious relationship between the subject matter, the budget, and what kind of audience you might find. Because it is called “show business” at the end of the day, and we are all using other people’s money to make these things. Maybe that is the mark advertising left on me, for better or for worse.
No matter what I write, I want the audience to leave feeling changed and moved, and that happens only if they leave feeling entertained. The goal in making Extrapolations was to create entertaining stories that come blasting out of the way life is changing and will continue to change—stories that follow you around in the world and tap you on the shoulder.
For a kid growing up in Miami, climate change is one thing; for a young man from a failed farm in India, it is something else; and for a whale trying to find food in an acidic ocean, it has a different impact.
J.K.: In 2011, you and Steven Soderbergh made Contagion, about a fatal respiratory disease that starts in Hong Kong, spreads to Minnesota, and becomes a worldwide pandemic. I know you did a lot of research in writing the movie, so were you much shocked by what happened to the world nine years later? And, by the way, how did you spend the worst days of the pandemic?
S.Z.B.: I pitched that movie to Steven on the day we wrapped The Informant!—he understood what I was trying to do before I even got to the end of the pitch.
Jeff Skoll, who financed the development of that film, put me in touch with an epidemiologist named Dr. Larry Brilliant, who helped drive the last case of smallpox off the planet. And Larry pointed me to Dr. Ian Lipkin at Columbia University, who is one of the best virologists on the planet—he had worked on SARS.
Ian and every other scientist I met said the same thing: It’s not a matter of if another pandemic will happen, just a matter of when. They were right. Ian also told me about why the wet markets in Southeast Asia are an area of concern. Oddly, we also considered bio-error as the origin of a novel virus. In the movie, this comes up—and it seems to be coming up again with covid, albeit with “low confidence.”
What none of us anticipated was the politicized response to the pandemic that caused so much death and division. The tagline on the movie poster is “Nothing spreads like fear,” but it could be re-written now to say, “Misinformation is more deadly than germs.”
As for me, I spent a fair amount of the pandemic working on what turned out to be Extrapolations.
J.K.: You and Soderbergh are lucky to have each other as collaborators, so I wonder how much of an influence he has been on you? And are there one or two folks who influenced you as a storyteller when you were growing up in the nicest state in America? (Full disclosure: my wife is from Mahtomedi!)
S.Z.B.: I’m pretty sure I’m the lucky one in that deal. Most of what I’ve learned about when to get in and out of a scene, how to construct an arc for a character, how to create a visual grammar for a film, or how to listen to a studio’s notes—not to mention how to direct a film crew— I learned from Steven. But, more importantly, I learned how to collaborate, to try new things, and what obligation one creative person has to another.
As for storytelling influences … I remember visiting the University Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, in high school and being told that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had thrown a Bad Luck Ball there protesting winter. It somehow made the possibility of writing for a living sound less impossible. As for other locals, Paul Westerberg taught me to reconsider the Skyway as a place where stories happen, and Craig Finn did that for the western suburbs where I came from.
And as for Mahtomedi, we lost to them in baseball when I was a junior—I got called out stretching a single into a double because the base wasn’t secured to the fucking peg and it moved when I hit it. I argued with the ump and was thrown out of the game … Clearly, that has stayed with me.
Extrapolations, created by Scott Z. Burns, will premiere on March 17 on Apple TV+
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor for AIR MAIL
