Susannah Grant is the Oscar-nominated writer of “Erin Brockovich,” “Ever After,” "28 Days” and “In Her Shoes.” Her latest work is Netflix’s limited series “Unbelievable,” a docudrama adapted from reporting published by ProPublica and The Marshall Project that tells the story of two police detectives from different precincts who cracked the case of a serial rapist who carried out his vicious crimes in Colorado and Washington state between 2008 and 2011. Grant developed the project into an eight-episode depiction of both bungled and bravura police work. It’s also an essential analysis of the cold, systemic realities that victims of sexual assault often face when they make the courageous decision to report the crimes against them. In this episode of “The Call Sheet,” Grant talks about her efforts to avoid one-dimensional portraits of shoddy detective work, developing the look of the series as showrunner and collaborating with series stars Kaitlyn Dever, Toni Collette and Merritt Wever.
Susannah Grant is the Oscar-nominated writer of “Erin Brockovich,” “Ever After,” "28 Days” and “In Her Shoes.” Her latest work is Netflix’s limited series “Unbelievable,” a docudrama adapted from reporting published by ProPublica and The Marshall Project that tells the story of two police detectives from different precincts who cracked the case of a serial rapist who carried out his vicious crimes in Colorado and Washington state between 2008 and 2011.
Grant developed the project into an eight-episode depiction of both bungled and bravura police work. It’s also an essential analysis of the cold, systemic realities that victims of sexual assault often face when they make the courageous decision to report the crimes against them. In this episode of “The Call Sheet,” Grant talks about her efforts to avoid one-dimensional portraits of shoddy detective work, developing the look of the series as showrunner and collaborating with series stars Kaitlyn Dever, Toni Collette and Merritt Wever.
KRIS TAPLEY: I'm Kris Tapley and you're listening to The Call Sheet, a show that dives deep into the craft of your favorite Netflix films and series with some of the most talented artists and artisans in the game.
We’re moving back into the series world with this week's guest. So let's go ahead and have her introduce herself.
SUSANNAH GRANT: My name is Susannah Grant and my craft is filmmaking.
KT: Sometimes the work of filmmaking and journalism overlaps. Obviously that's often the case with documentary projects, but with something like Netflix’s limited series, “Unbelievable,” which the company recently revealed has been streamed by some 32 million households since its September release, the impact of docu-drama is truly palpable.
And adaptation of vital dense reporting published by ProPublica and the Marshall Project, the series tells the story of two police detectives from different precincts who cracked the case of a serial rapist who carried out his vicious crimes in Colorado and Washington state between 2008 and 2011.
Susannah Grant developed the project into an eight-episode depiction of both bungled and bravura of police work. It's also an essential analysis of the cold, systemic realities that victims of sexual assault often face when they make the courageous decision to report the crimes against them.
Susannah is the Oscar nominated writer, Steven Soderbergh's, 2000 film, “Erin Brockovich.” She also penned the scripts for films like “Ever After,” “28 Days” and “In Her Shoes,” among others.
On this episode, Susannah will talk about her efforts to avoid a one-dimensional portrait of shoddy detective work. She'll also talk about developing the look of the series with director Lisa Cholodenko in the earlier episodes. And stick around until the end for the most important lesson she learned in film school. I'm going to get into that in a whole lot more, so let's begin.
Susannah, let's start by discussing the development and the writing of this, beginning with the structure. You settled on eight episodes. Was that decided early on? Was that something you came to? How did you come to decide ultimately what to include and what not to include? Because you have a big canvas anyway, right? It's a series.
SG: You know, we toyed around with the idea of doing a two-hour movie. But the more we talked about it, the more we thought, there's so many interesting avenues to go down and ideas to flesh out a little bit within it that you wouldn't be able to do in a two hour movie.
And a lot of the people who worked both in support of Marie and in support of the detectives in Colorado, we wanted to really give them their due and bring them to life and show that this wasn't three individuals. You know, these were people working in concert or against other people and other fleshed out human beings.
So it just felt like the eight hours was going to give us a better opportunity to really turn over every rock that we wanted to and spend time with it, you know?
KT: Yeah. Once you decided on that – within that, how did you set how it would be structured?
SG: Well, we inherited a really great structure. I don't know if you've read the article in which is based.
KT: I did, yeah.
SG: Okay. So there are a lot of dramatic structures set up in the beginning of that article that take the viewer on an interesting journey in terms of his or her own ideas about whether Marie told the truth or not. And we thought that was an interesting thing to play with as well. So, you know, it worked really well in the article, so we thought, why mess with that?
It's such a great storytelling structure. So we started with that, obviously as we got deeper into it, we made changes. We took out the character of the perpetrator. He's examined more deeply iin both the article and the book that proceeded this, but for us all along, it was the story of those three women and their journey through how sexual assault is or is not investigated.
KT: When you were breaking this out, you wrote the first episode with Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, and a few other writers, Jennifer Schuur and Becky Mode, handled a few episodes as well. Talk about doling out that work.
SG: Netflix ordered it off of one episode and then I quickly wrote the second, and I knew I was going to write the third.
So, by the time we got into the room, we were really talking about that back half of the series. You know, One, Two, and Three were already sort of structurally sound. But it's a lot of information. You know, on Episode Four, you start the investigation, you start the red herrings, and we do what anybody does when they're breaking a story.
Just break it down into all the little pieces and look at them all and figure out what order creates the dramatic build you want, and figure out how to parse that up into chapters, individual chapters. So we made sure that we had those pretty soundly set. And then everybody went off and wrote at that point.
And Michael and Ayelet did another, and Becky did one and Jen did one and then I was going to do the last two and I ran out of time. So Becky helped me with one of them, which was great. So we co-wrote Seven and then I did Eight by myself.
KT: Yeah. You're wearing tons of hats on this one.
SG: Yeah.
KT: You know, you begin the series first with these kinds of sweeping images of the neighborhood and then right into Marie giving her statement about what happened.
It's kind of there in the reporting to begin with, as you mentioned. But how did you decide, like visual storytelling, how we want to kick off this narrative?
SG: So there are a couple of answers to that. One was I wanted to set it in normalcy. I wanted to set it in a town that could feel like your town.
I think a lot of people are really good at othering the notion of sexual assault and victims of sexual assault. So in the script I had, you know, scenes of real normalcy, and then Lisa Cholodenko directed the first three. And she and Quyen Tran, who was a director of photography, introduced the notion of the kind of drive-by.
Those first images, they're all drive-bys. And the idea was to, in addition to that sense of normalcy, introduce the idea of stalking and following. You know, there's a woman in every one of those frames. A car is driving slowly by, so it is normalcy. But there is, I think, a sense of unsettledness to it. And then we have a really beautiful score by Will Bates that strengthen that combination of the worlds you know, but there's an element to it that’s untrustworthy.
KT: Yeah. There's also a few, I think, “Do Not Enter” signs that you see in some of those images too. So it's a very interesting way to kick it off, you know?
And also, how did you decide on introducing these various characters? Getting back to just structuring the whole thing out, because, you know, we get through an entire episode before we meet Karen Duvall, Merritt Wever's character, and it's not until the end of that episode that we meet Grace Rasmussen, the Toni Collette character.
You’ve got a lot of space to breathe in and introduce them as you wish. And so how did you decide how to do that?
SG: Well, we got a big great bit of information from Netflix when we were just figuring out how to lay it all out, and they said most of their viewers view in two episode bites. So I thought, well great, I'll think of it as a two-hour pilot.
And that gave me the room to wait to introduce Karen Duvall. I thought, okay, if that's how your viewers are viewing it, I'm going to write to that. And it was great. It was incredibly liberating.
And to have Toni Collette and have the freedom to not introduce her – I mean, not that I don't want Toni on screen all the time, you know, but to be able to hold off on introducing that until two hours in is a real luxury. I think it's harder to do that in series where you're, you know, showing one episode a week, you know.
KT: It allows you to, for her especially, to have this big impact with how she's introduced. I mean, she gets this kind of badass scene and you know, okay. You get an idea of who she is right out of the gate and you're ready to see more of her once that episode ends.
SG: And I think the introduction of Merritt’s character does a similar thing. I know the first episode is really hard for people to watch, and she's got such a graceful quality to her and competence to her and compassion to her. Really just in that first scene where she's driving her car and sort of disagreeing with her husband about how they're going to handle her daughter's cough, you know?
But there's something that I think lets a viewer go, “Oh, okay, okay. There's a grownup in the room.” Somebody who's gonna point this all in the right direction somehow, you know? So. But being able to wait to introduce that is a real – it's the luxury of streaming.
KT: Yeah, absolutely. And then after what you've just seen in this first episode, it's like now you get an episode where it's like, this is what it should be.
This is what the investigation should be. This is where the empathy level should be. It's such a, kind of whiplash to what you've just witnessed for the first hour. And also regarding her, I love her just, I don't want to say monotone, but it's kind of what comes to mind. Just the way she's clearly talking through stuff in her mind and there's something relaxing about it.
SG: Very relaxing. There was somebody who wrote somewhere, if there is a heaven and God greets me there, I hope she has the voice of Merritt Wever.
KT: Yeah, totally. But was that kind of the idea? To just show this drastic difference between these two approaches in these two episodes?
SG: Yeah, you know what? There was a – “This American Life” also did – this story has been told now four times. I mean, you know, anecdotally a lot more than that too, but it's a testament to the strength of the material that it can survive and actually have a real impact in every medium. But “This American Life” did an hour on it.
And Ira Glass said something to the effect of it being an example of the justice system going horribly wrong, and then in another example of it going as it should. His distillation of the story in that way, it was really helpful to me in writing it. And it's sort of a North Star of sorts in how we were portraying it.
Which isn't to say that, you know, I wanted to make everybody in Washington evil and everyone in Colorado right and saintly. In fact, I tried to go against that instinct as much as I could because that's not great storytelling. But yeah, that was obviously very intentional to show the differences.
KT: Since you mentioned that, you know, the fact that it's been told a few times – was there something you felt that the story was missing that you wanted to put into how you depicted it?
SG: Well, I mean, I wouldn't say missing, but I thought it would benefit from being told in this medium. I just think there's a way to connect to people's hearts when they watch something on screen, you know, acted or portrayed by people. You can see their emotions on their faces.
I think it can have for viewers a more immediate emotional impact. And I mean my theory about sexual assault is not that people don't believe women. My personal theory is people believe women, they just don't care enough. And it's easy not to care if you're not looking, you know? And I thought if you tell this story and you put this young woman in people's living rooms and you ask people to walk through this process with her, I think they'll care. I think they will care more.
And then also there's just like the basic nature of reach. You know, I mean, ProPublica and the Marshall Project are the best we have in investigative journalism. And I read them all the time, and I listen to “This American Life” all the time. And there are a lot of people like me. However, they're not in 190 countries overnight as Netflix is, you know what I mean?
A month in, 32 million households, which they said was about 50 million people. You know, that reach with this story and that ability to have it land in different cultures. And you know, it's been, really well received in India, which just has a very active conversation around sexual assault, also South America. And that's exciting.
KT: Yeah, absolutely.
SG: So I wouldn't – I think those prior tellings of this story are fantastic and we owe a tremendous amount to them, but it was exciting to be able to blast it out a little wider.
KT: Yeah. There's something that developed with these two detective characters. You know, you took some liberties with telling their story a little bit.
This kind of mentor/mentee relationship that you've talked about that developed between the two characters – did that just happen naturally or was there something you wanted to say about that relationship between women that we haven't seen on screen? Anything like that?
SG: Well, you know, I didn't really invent that from whole cloth.
I spoke to the woman who inspired Toni's character before the production. I didn't speak to the woman who inspired Merritt’s character. She just like, I don't know, she's busy. She works for the FBI now. She didn't get back to me and she's fine. She's very, very laid back about it all. But you know, you talk to them a little bit, and there's a story that Merritt's character tells in one episode in which she describes seeing Grace Rasmusson at a drug bust when she was a rookie.
And that actually was true, that she had seen her and been impressed with her when she was working narcotics undercover. So I had that bit of information. Well, that's sort of wonderful. That's it. That's a great thing to hold as you're building this relationship. I didn't want it to just be two cop solving this together.
I wanted to show a relationship developing between them. You know, they both work in very male workplaces. There are a lot of different ways to go about that. I thought it was interesting to look at two different ways of going about that. Two different ways of being the only woman in a very male workplace.
You know, there's all this information about how the more women there are on police forces, the better record they have of investigating sexual assault. So the idea of showing that, you know, one plus one could we equal a lot more than two when you get two really good detectives working together who are women – you know, that that felt like a good message to share.
It's based in truth. You know, forces do better on this issue when there are more women in them.
KT: Absolutely. All right. Moving off the page into the production now, it's interesting to me that that you took the role of kind of bringing the series home as director rather than launching it. You're working with Lisa Cholodenko on those first three episodes as director. Is that something you wanted to do from the start? To kind of bring it home?
SG: To finish it? Yeah. I mean, I definitely wanted to direct it. I wanted to direct as much of it as I could. I was also doing a lot of writing and I was show running it, and I'm a huge fan of Lisa's.
I mean, there were a few things that were really in important in the direction of this, and I think primary among them was the delicacy of the sort of airspace between human beings and the ways in which that space can be clear, and people can understand each other and connect with each other. And the ways in which that space can be muddy and confusion can happen and people can miss-see each other and misunderstand each other.
And I mean, if you look at all Lisa's work, it has such human emotional integrity. I mean, there isn't a false moment in any of her films. And I and Sarah Timberman, who's my producing partner – who was, you know, with me every step of the way and we made all these decisions together – she and I, early on said, we should see if Lisa will jump on board for this.
And we wooed her and she came in and “She's the one!” And then she was squirrelly and she said she wasn't going to do it. And we kept chasing her. And she has said she was sort of unclear about what she as an artist could bring to it, or would bring to it that would elevate it. And she didn't want to sign on without being clear about what that contribution would be.
And we didn't know what it would be, but we knew that she's enough of an artist that she’d find, you know, she would – and she did. She really did. There's a whole – what I said about the opening, that that level of consciousness to everything she was doing. But she added something to, you know, the flashback sequences of the sexual assault.
The flashbacks were as they were on the page when she got them. But she was really racking her brain about how she could get into the mind of this young woman. And this idea of a picture of her at the beach was present in the script. And so she came up with the idea of her disappearing into that picture during the assault, which was such a, it's such a great addition.
You know, I think it really – it's great for that moment because it really speak to her coping mechanism in the moment. But then it has implications throughout because she does the same thing again. She disappears in pressured moments later in the script in ways that people don't understand. But I think the audience does, having seen where her mind goes in a situation like that.
KT: Yeah, you did a great job of foreseeing my next question, which was that very thing. Like, how to shoot that, how to show it.
SG: That's the mentality of disappearing. That question of, you know, how to shoot a rape was something – I'd never written a scene of sexual violence before, so I sat down to write it and I was in sort of the objective viewpoint, and I immediately, I just felt wrong. It just felt like I couldn't write it. I just thought, “This is terrible.” It feels like voyeuristic and…
KT: Observational, weird, passive stasis.
SG: Yeah, exactly. And there's so much, either overt or subtle, rape pornography in our culture, and it just, it felt like even just thinking about it was bumping up kind of close to that, and there was no way we could do that, you know?
So I just switched it to subjective and her point of view. And since her account of it is what's called into question anyway, it ended up being a really good narrative device as well. Because if the only way you're seeing it is from her retelling, then you should just see it from her experience.
So a lot of people have asked me, “Oh, was it really hard thing to shoot?” It had very little screen time of sexual violence in it. And there's actually – it's emotionally graphic. The sound is very strong, and the score is very strong, but it's not at all graphic. It's disturbing. It's really not graphic at all.
KT: I’ll say too, because it's what you hear also, because every time we come back to it, we hear that certain timbre of her kind of shout or scream, like muffled scream, and it takes you right to the – before you're even in the scene watching it, you know where you're going with it and it's an effective device.
Tell me about establishing the look and working with the DP’s. You mentioned Quyen Tran was on the first three with Lisa.
SG: Yeah.
KT: What was the overall conceit there, in the simplest terms, I guess? Like what did you want this to look like?
SG: Nobody wanted it to feel pushed at all. The word Lisa uses all the time is
over-determined.”
I thought it was, even in the writing, and every aspect of it, if you feel like you're pushing a message, if an audience feels like, “Oh, this person's really trying to make a point here,” you know, they'll feel alienated. I would feel alienated. So we just tried to just tell the story as much as possible and have that dictate what the emotional content is.
So at the beginning, you know, we talked with Lisa and Q, and we also have a great production designer, and they had visual references and I wish I could remember the name of the photographer, but there's a photographer who does a series of photographs. They're all women in fairly lonely stark rooms.
And those were visual reference. And we thought, okay, that sounds good. And then Lisa also talked a lot about “Rosemary's Baby.” And the sort of gaslighting that happens to her in that movie and how that was achieved. Those were the two things they were talking about. So that felt good to me in terms of just setting the tone for those first three.
And then the storytelling really shifts for the middle when Michael Dinner came on. And it's much more dynamic and it's just information flying at both the detectives in Colorado and then Marie, where her life gets so complicated legally and logistically and interpersonally. And he has a very different hand, you know. He has a very different look and style. There's a shift in the story. So it was kind of a welcome transition.
KT: What about for the two at the end that you're taking on?
SG: The two at the end? Well, you know, it was really working toward a level of emotional resolution. You know, the first one I is primarily the arrest of the guy and the emotional implications of that.
I just always saw this whole piece as, yes, there's a plot, there's a really strong plot, but to me it was a character piece. And in terms of figuring out how to shoot the arrest, the whole thing is shown through the experience of Karen Duvall, and it ends up being, for me, a very strong character moment.
Obviously it's a huge plot moment as well, but I had two shots that I shot that were not centered or driven by or dictated by her experience in that whole arrest sequence. And I didn't end up using them. Because they just didn't fit.
So there's a sort of quieting down of the noise, not to a happy resolution. Hyper energy into something that's more like a vibration. So taking it from those big emotional swings and then bringing it down to something that's more of a quieter, but palpable, vibration of the impact of something like this.
KT: And the way you shoot his sort of booking or delousing, all of that. It's fascinating because he's left –
SG: Processing.
KT: Processing, yeah. He's left there naked and with this minimal shaft of light and you know, it's just a striking image. What were you going for with how you were breaking him down there?
SG: That also really came back to the script. We had a great technical consultant. It was a woman named Liz Devine who worked for the Sheriff's department for 15 years and anything law enforcement related, I ran by her.
And I kept saying, “How do they keep track of someone when they're processed into jail? Like how do you know who's who?” And she finally said, “Oh, they give him a wristband.” And every one of his victims, when she went through the processing of the rape kit, also had a wristband.
So that was sort of a key to me. And I thought, oh, we'll put him through exactly what they went through and we'll make sure that he experiences it. Obviously, I'm not saying we'll put him through what they went through with the assault. I mean, the process of obtaining the information for a rape kit is very similar to the process of processing one of these perpetrators that land in jail.
They need the same information from their bodies. So once I saw it as a parallel of that, that sort of formed the mental framework for how I wanted to see it. I wanted to see that he was enduring a tiny piece of what he had inflicted on others, and that it was very impersonal. You know, you don't even see the people who are processing him at all, and it's a real physical violation. And I wanted nobody to care who he was. For him to be irrelevant.
KT: The answer to this has being kind of scattered through what we've been talking about maybe, but I just wanted to talk about: how did you want to both sort of embrace what the audience has been conditioned to expect of procedural drama, but also break that mold a bit and convey information in different ways?
SG: You know, I have what I think what was probably an asset here in that I'm really not a consumer of procedural drama. I'm really, it's not my – and nothing against it. I'm sure there are a lot of great ones, but it's not the language I speak, so I wasn't consciously busting tropes. I wasn't saying, “Oh, we're going to upend ‘Cagney & Lacey’ here.”
I've never seen “Cagney & Lacey.” Again, no disrespect. Probably a great show, but…
KT: One of my mom’s favorites.
SG: Great! I'm sure it's wonderful! So I think rather than figuring out how I was gonna do something different, I think maybe the big difference was: I just kept saying, this is a character drama. This is a character-driven piece that happens to have a gripping plot and everything hung on those characters.
KT: All right. So you've shot the series, you're in the editing room. How did you approach this? I mean, were there certain episodes that needed to be nailed down first that would help inform others?
SG: Yeah. Well, you know, you roll along.
KT: Were you editing as you went?
SG: Yeah. So while Lisa shooting, Michael's prepping and while Lisa’s editing, Michael shooting, and I'm prepping, so we're all seeing what everyone else is doing.
The benefit of getting your script pretty buttoned up before you shoot is that there isn't that much that changes when you're in the editing room. A lot of tightening, a lot of – you know, obviously I overwrite, I overwrite all the time. And you'd think I'd learn by now, but no. So there's a lot of pulling out stuff that that wasn't necessary, that you don't need to say twice, or that you can indicate without saying out loud.
So there was tightening of everything. I lifted in an entire scene out of the final episode because I realized I had a scene in which she basically said, “This is how this show's going to end. I'm going to tell you everything that's going to happen in the next statement.” Again, you'd think I'd know by now, but it read good on the page, so.
KT: We're always learning.
SG: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, not huge evolutions. And then, you know, there's so much about sound and music and… Well, we didn't move anything from one episode to the other or anything like that. I mean, they were all intact.
KT: So it was all pretty straight forward then?
SG: Yeah, it was. We had this idea, you know, there was on idea that we hung onto for awhile in the script phase. We thought about having a device in which, as the detectives get information about this guy, we'll see him stalking someone else – you know, which he was doing – seeing only what they know.
So for instance, as soon as they know he's in a white truck, we thought, well, maybe we have a shot from inside a white truck driving by a house looking at it and we know this is this guy. And then when they know what gloves he has, well maybe we see those gloves. When we know what camera he used, you know. And sort of as he's being revealed to them, see more of him. Netflix wisely said, “Don’t need it. It's going to be fine without it.”
KT: It's interesting though.
SG: Yeah. Yeah. But you know, I also realized that to really be there with those characters, it's really important not to know or see anything more than they know or see. You have to be on that ride with them. I think it's important not to know more.
KT: Yeah. Even with it being straightforward, I'm just curious if there was anything… You know, the series is very much about storytelling and details and how trauma and coping mechanisms impede access to those details in some ways.
And if there was an element there, you wanted to explore at all? Because I know you didn't really like try to fake out the audience. Like maybe she's not telling the truth.
SG: Well, you know, there are people who weren't sure at the end of Episode One, and I don't mind that. You know, I wasn't trying to fake them out, but I wasn't trying to make it clear either.
I actually was hoping that people would find themselves allied with the detective who's getting frustrated. You know, and saying, “I don't know what to believe. You're making it very hard for me to know what to believe. You've told me four different things,” you know. And I really, really didn't want to vilify him.
There was a… I read in Ken and T's book – Ken Armstrong and T. Miller wrote the article and the book – that when he found out what he had done and the mistake he'd made, he called that the worst day of his life. That was the basis of his character for me. This is not somebody who goes around thinking he does bad things in the world.
He's a good guy, you know. The idea that he's done something so egregious – this is really painful to him. So I didn't mind people being able to, you know, buddy up to him and understand why he's making the decisions he's made. They're terrible. They're the wrong decisions. But yes, in terms of trauma, yes, we learned a lot about how trauma informs one's reaction, you know, and their ability to tell what's happened to them.
The whole – you know, it's interesting, we've learned a lot since this too, and I was talking to a detective who now spends his time – he has a 35 year career in law enforcement, and he said all 35 years, were not informed about what trauma does to the brain.
So now he spends – his full time job is advocating for trauma training for cops. And when he was trained – and this training still happens – job number one in investigating a sexual assault is to determine the reliability of the victim. That's the first thing. So obviously that's not trauma-informed. We tried to show that in every survivor of these attacks, that there was some way in which her recollection was affected by the trauma of what she went through.
One thing I kind of regret is that I didn't, you know – there there's a gender difference obviously, between the detectives in Colorado and the detectives in Washington. There's also a training difference and there's an experience difference. I could have made that clearer. But…
KT: I think it stood out to me, honestly, because as I'm watching it, I'm like, that was something – I took a note, I jotted down when I was watching the first episode for the second time recently. It was like, “Why can't they train these people differently?”
SG: Right, right. They were trained, just trained wrong,
KT: And I think about it as well as in terms of just police shootings. Same thing.
SG: Yeah, it seems like it’s in the same family. Yeah.
KT: Yeah. You talked briefly there about music. Just tell me about how choices with music evolved and how you wanted to use that.
SG: Well, Will Bates had a really good feel for it. The music he was writing for it was it – it felt really right early on.
Again, we didn't want it to be pushed. We didn't want any of the emotion to be pushed. It's just a piece that you had to really be careful about. Not letting the audience feel like you were telling them what you wanted them to feel or think. We wanted something that would communicate the confusion and in terms of Marie's story, the sort of disjointed way her thoughts are gathering.
And then also with Parker, if you look at him, the music that accompanies him, there's something a little off in the sound of it. But he's subtle, you know, he's got a very, a very soft touch, which I like. By the end, I think his music by the end is really supportive of what I think is very strong emotion. But again, not pushing it.
KT: As I understand it, that final phone call between Marie and the detective happened?
SG: It did. As Marie has said, the words were all different, but when she watched it, she said – not to me, but to Ken Armstrong – she said that it felt like the same kind of spirit of it. Exactly.
KT: Yeah. Well, did you struggle still, nevertheless, with how to end it? Did you want to end it with that?
SG: Yeah. I wanted to end it with that.
KT: Two people from hundreds of miles apart.
SG: Yeah, I really liked that it ends with the word, “Thank you.” I guess that's two words. Her first line is, “I've been raped” and her last line is “Thank you.” Which – I don’t know, I'm really into bookends and those feel like good ones.
But there's a quality – boy, Merritt Wever. So good, huh? And there's a quality she brings to that phone call in which she just, I think opens up the heart of that character. And you feel like she understands from a personal place everything that that girl is going through, you know.
And their reluctance to hang up on both their parts, I'm really moved by. And you know, I didn't want it to end – I didn't want it to feel like a “happy ending” and whatever that means, you know. Obviously this is something that this young woman is going to be carrying around with her like, you know, like Merritt says in one of the early episodes, like a bullet in the spine for her life.
So I didn't want to deny that by ending it with too much closure, but I did want them to connect. You know, it was important that they connect. They did, you know.
KT: Yeah, definitely. And then the last thing before we start to wrap it up, there's been a lot of talk about a possible return for this series. You know, anthologizing in some way. Is your head anywhere on that right now? Personally, I would love to see Merritt Wever and Toni Collette –
SG: I mean, I'll do anything with Merritt and Toni again!
KT: Maybe there's more stories to attack or something like that? I don't know, but…
SG: I don't think there's another Grace Rasmussen and Karen Duvall story.
I think if there's another really spectacularly told piece of material or a story we find, Sarah and I find, that is as good, if not better – but that's a really, really high bar. You know, if the story warranted it, we'd do it. But we're not, you know – I don't know, nobody wants to do a not-quite-as-good second season of something you feel good about how you did the first time, right?
KT: I hear you. All right. We're in the home stretch here. Just a few rapid fire questions for you. You attended AFI here in LA. What's the most important thing you learned in film school?
SG: Rewriting. They had a really good film script library, so I would spend every afternoon going through the drafts, I’d pull out five drafts – and they had collections of multiple drafts – but pull out five drafts of a movie I loved.
And I'd read them from the first to the fifth and I'd see how… You know, this was in the time of ever every writer saying, “Oh, development's hell. It just makes your script worse, it’s just bad notes.” And, you know, yeah, that happens sometimes, but also sometimes rewriting is great and you just make it better.
So I did that religiously. I did it with every movie I loved, and they had a great collection. I'm sure they still do. I don't know if it's open to non-students, but boy, that's a real great resource.
KT: They should digitize that collection.
SG: Yeah. Maybe they have, that'd be good. So that was – yeah. Rewriting. Rewriting. You can always make it better.
KT: What time of day are you most productive as a writer?
SG: 4:30 AM.
KT: Really? Before the kids are up?
SG: Yeah. Yeah. I used to write late at night. I used to start writing around 11 o'clock at night, and then I’d just write until I dropped, and then I'd wake up and just keep writing. I get very easily distracted by light, so I just draw all the shades and I'd just work in darkness.
And then I had a family and then, you know, I found it really hard to write if you start the day with like, “Oh, I gotta make somebody’s lunch.” And I mean, then I don't know who I am, you know?
So I started getting up a little before them and then a little bit more before them. And so now I, yeah, I get up at around 4:30 and I generally work from like 4:30 to 11, and then I take a break and deal with life stuff and business stuff, and then I grab another, like, not very productive hour or two in the afternoon sometimes.
KT: Yeah, I should give that a shot. I've got a three year old.
SG: It's good. It's good. Get up before him and then, like, you own your brain for a little while and it's easy to come back to it. You know, it's hard –I find it hard to find that place if I don't start the day there, you know?
KT: Yeah, that's true. This is an impossible question, maybe – best screenplay of all time? Or maybe your favorite.
SG: Wow. Best screen play of all time. Well, this is not going to be a direct answer. I feel like every screenwriting problem is solved somewhere in “Tootsie.” If I’m ever in a log jam, I think there’s gotta be some problem like this… and “Oh yeah! that's what they did.”
I think “Witness” is a brilliant screenplay. I mean, that's hard, man. I don't know. I'm going to like say one and then leave this place and think of the seven better ones that I didn't say.
KT: Maybe this next one will be a little easier. I ask this of everyone: what was the movie that made you fall in love with movies?
SG: “Network.” Yeah, I think I snuck in. I was young, too. I like it was New Jersey in the 70’s. They let eight year olds into R-rated movies. You know, you can do whatever you want. But I dunno how I got there, but I was alone because it was New Jersey in the 70’s, and 11 year olds were alone in movie theaters, and I saw it.
It just completely blew my mind. I just thought, “Whatever this is, I want to be a part of it.” You know, this tradition of American storytelling. I just – the fact that it blew the lid off of stuff, you know?
KT: It remains relevant.
SG: Oh my God. So relevant.
KT: For years to come.
SG: I know. So that early on, and then “Nashville,” but really it was “Network” and that was the one that made me say, “This is a tradition I want to be a part of.”
KT: It would also be a fair answer to the best screenplay.
SG: Yeah. For sure. Yeah.
KT: Well, exceptional work with this series. Truly I think it's one of the best things I've seen this year.
SG: That’s nice of you to say. Thanks very much.
KT: Congrats on it, and thank you for coming on the show.
SG: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
KT: I think what Susannah and her team of writers and directors achieved with this series is something akin to that empathy machine I talked about a few episodes ago.
There's a subjective quality to the film making in “Unbelievable,” and a sense of compassion in it's storytelling that roots it and allows it to transcend what you might expect from a story like this. So please check it out. “Unbelievable” is available to stream on Netflix right now.
The Call Sheet is a Netflix podcast hosted by me, Kris Tapley. The show is produced by Noah Eberhart and the team at Blue Duck Media. Stuart Park created all the original music in this episode and a special thanks to the team at Netflix.