Even with all this chaos going on in that episode, the interactions between Amy and Naomi [Ashley Park] were so interesting. They’ve spent the season kind of competing for the favor of Jordan [Maria Bello, playing Naomi’s sister in law, who is the potential buyer of Amy’s business], this rich, white woman, but she’s not really the focus, their dynamic with each other is. What did you want to explore with their relationship?
There are a couple of aspects that drew us to Amy and Naomi’s dynamic. One being that I think for everyone, when you’re feeling alone and isolated like Amy, you’re pretty desperate for friends. You’re desperate for moments of connection. And in episode two, when they’re sitting down, it almost feels like Amy might have a friend. But just one little thing—her comment about “it must be so nice to stay at home all day with your [daughter]”—and suddenly that connection is blown up. Ego and insecurity enters the picture, and Naomi starts to get very defensive. That’s sort of the seed for which their very complicated relationship grows into the jealousy on Naomi’s side, and ultimately leads to the confrontation in episode six. And so we were just trying to mine kind of how hard it is for all of us to connect. There’s always some misinterpretation, some miscommunication that derails the whole dynamic. Then I think also, the Amy-Naomi dynamic, it’s somewhat intentional that they’re both Asian-American. That’s happened to me in real life, too. I think a lot of us think, “Oh hey, we’re alike, we should get along. We’re a community.” And that’s a very surface level approach to it. The truth is, humans are humans and ego is ego, and race is not not something that can just blindly fix that.
It says a lot that even when he has Amy, Naomi, and Jordan tied up, Isaac [David Choe] still looks at Amy and Naomi and says, “You know you’re Asian, right?”
Exactly. Jordan has just gone off about Zugzwang in chess, and he’s just like, “What the fuck? Why are you guys hanging out with her?” Yeah, you’re right, I didn’t even think about that. He’s looking at them like, “What are you doing? We’re supposed to be all on the same team here.”
When it comes to the show’s ending, how early on did you know where Danny and Amy would end up?
Very early. We were preparing the pitch to take out to buyers. I do these very long PowerPoint presentations that are full of Photoshop storyboards and whatnot. We were on a zoom, Steven Ali, myself, Ravi Nandan, and Alli Reich from A24, and we’re trying to figure out the end of the pitch. I had a bunch of ideas, none of them really resonating with people. We all knew that we wanted this feeling of coming home for these two people, the feeling of being seen. And Ali Wong actually pitched, what if one of them crawls into the hospital bed? Everyone was like, “Oh, that’s great.” It’s very minimalist, but says a lot. So then I photoshopped a slide with some stills from Lost in Translation, In the Mood for Love, and the Upstream Color poster. That sort of set the mood for that final beat in terms of the pitch, and then I used that as inspiration. Then with our DP, Larkin Seiple, our production designer, Grace Yun, and our producing director, Jake Schreier, I think in execution, we discovered the top shot, and these flourishes of surrealism, and color bursts to help capture that initial mood that we all landed on.
Cat Cardenas
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