Brit Marling on ‘A Murder at the End of the World’

Brit Marling has spent her career both co-writing and starring in projects that are grounded in reality yet shockingly metaphysical: an indie thriller about a cult leader and possible time traveler who lives in a basement (Sound of My Voice); a film about a convicted felon who applies to live on a duplicate version of our planet (Another Earth); a dreamy series about a blind woman who disappears for seven years and reemerges with the ability to see, the conviction that she is a kind of angel, and knowledge of a series of “movements” that induce interdimensional travel (The OA). The last show — which Marling created with longtime collaborator Zal Batmanglij — was one of Netflix’s early hits, gaining a devoted audience with its esoteric narrative, which stressed the necessity of collectivism. When it was abruptly canceled in 2019, after its second season, bereft fans launched a #SaveTheOA movement that included a hunger strike and protests outside of Netflix HQ. Marling and Batmanglij disappeared, creatively speaking, for a few years.

This month, they’re back with the miniseries A Murder at the End of the World. After filming and release dates were delayed by the pandemic and two lengthy Hollywood strikes — punctuated by other crises during the shoot in Iceland, like multiple members of the cast and crew testing positive for COVID and Marling getting severe hypothermia — the show’s seven episodes began airing November 14. Although it’s as eerily prognostic and quietly radical as Marling and Batmanglij’s earlier work, it follows a more traditional structure: Murder’s protagonist is Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), an amateur sleuth, hacker, and author who, thanks to a childhood spent helping out her coroner dad and studying the work of her favorite coder, Lee Andersen (Marling), spends her time on internet forums trying to solve Jane Doe cold cases. When tech billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen) invites her to a mysterious retreat in Iceland alongside Lee — now his wife — and a variety of other “original thinkers,” Darby soon finds herself tasked with solving a murder that hits much closer to home. This show is the first time in her collaboration with Batmanglij that Marling hasn’t played the lead, in part because she also wanted to direct. For Marling, the show was a chance to both invert the traditional whodunit by making it more feminine and emotionally evocative as well as grapple with the climate crisis, acute misogyny, artificial intelligence, and the haunting narcissism of the sort of people who walk around saying “disruption.” “Our goal for a long time has been to figure out how to make things that are compelling and entertaining and accessible but also smuggle some subversive stuff across,” Marling says. “And the better we do our jobs, the less you notice.”

I was surprised by how narratively straightforward this show is. With everything else you’ve done, there’s some metaphysical or supernatural twist. But the twist here is that it’s a grounded, near-fi mystery.
It was exciting to try to map something out that felt so real that nobody could be like, “Well, this is fantasy.” It was actually really important to not have there be some element in it like, “Oh, now the ceiling opens up and a time traveler comes in.” If we did that, then we’re sort of giving the audience a way out — of saying that the whole premise feels “fantasy” or “distant future.” Rather than, “Actually, there are things we could be solving now.”

Which part of this story came to you first?
The idea of Darby. When you think about mysteries or detective stories, the language we use is “private eye.” It’s literally the world according to someone’s POV — what they notice or don’t notice as they observe things. There was something exciting about thinking about the private eye as a young woman, about really lensing everything from that experience. So much so that there’s never another POV in the show; you’re never not with Darby.

Something about that challenge seemed really exciting because it felt like if you brought a female gaze to the crime scene, you would think about it all differently. The intelligences or the skills that come along with that are things we haven’t admired for very long. We’re really into reason or rational thinking. Less interested in elliptical thinking, empathy, feeling your way through mystery as well as thinking your way through it. The more we end up on [taps my phone] these things, I feel like there’s some way in which we’re divesting from the softer or more sensitive sides of ourselves.

You’ve described before how you accidentally wrote your way into the sci-fi genre because it was hard to envision writing a “free” woman in the real world in the way that you wanted to. It sounds like you’re saying that now you’ve done that with Darby?
This is my first time trying. It’s so easy to make something science fiction. As a woman or any person who’s marginalized, it’s like taking off the handcuffs: In this world, we’re not dealing with oppression this way. It’s so much harder to write in the realities of the present and find that strong female lead inside of it. And it’s really challenging to critique the state of things without, in the language of cinema, perpetuating it. It’s very hard to critique violence against women without putting violence against women onscreen. How can you talk about something without showing it? One of the solutions we came to, rather than showing women dead and mutilated and covered in blood, was to deal with bones. In that way, you feel haunted by the loss of this life, but you aren’t eroticizing the death of women.

I’m realizing now you don’t see any dead women’s actual bodies at all.
And that’s hard to do and make a story compelling. It’s so much easier to just kill a beautiful woman and put her in a pool of blood with a nightie on. That image for everybody, in a terrible way, is darkly arousing. It provides this nuclear reactor of energy that powers so much of our storytelling.

Was the series always conceived of as a miniseries?
From the beginning, we thought, Oh we’ll create this character and this world and this first experience where a young amateur sleuth is invited on this tech billionaire’s dazzling retreat and she’s there to solve it. That idea felt like it had a beginning, middle, and end. Of course, there’s always the opportunity to take Darby as a character and place her somewhere else in the world to unravel other mysteries.

Like Carmen Sandiego.
Remember her red hat, low over one eye, and her dark hair? I cannot believe how much Carmen Sandiego probably informs this show. Why does everything go back to Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail? I still sometimes will be showering and think, What if my axle wheel breaks? Like, what will I trade? 

It’s a helpful paradigm.
Exactly. Nobody tells you when you’re small that life is just about endlessly fording the river.

So the narrative for Darby is not self-contained? There’s a world where there’s another series?
Definitely. We dreamt of a world for her, so there’s a lot psychologically that she could navigate. But we were very satisfied with this seven hours and would be so happy to leave it there. I’ve started to realize a huge part of storytelling and art-making is about the climate of the world and what stories meet what forces at what time. I think The OA was ahead of its time, and this is a bit more on time.

All of your work feels a little prescient. We almost weren’t able to talk about your acting in this project because of the strike, which was in part due to concerns about AI. This show has a lot on its mind about AI — there’s a virtual assistant character, conversations about deep fakes and AI-written movies. What kinds of conversations were you and Zal having about that at the time you wrote the script?
This was 2018 or 2019, after The OA was canceled. Actually, while we were still making Part II, a friend of ours went on a tech retreat and came back and told us about some of the experiences loosely. You’re invited somewhere, you don’t know where, you get on a plane with a bunch of strangers — it felt like a rich zone. We had thought that maybe it would work its way into The OA, but it was too big or full.

We wanted to try and write a tech billionaire who didn’t feel two-dimensional. Is he into space? Is he into holographic reality? AI seemed interesting to us. When we first started writing these scripts, we’d give them to people and they’d be like, “Is this really gonna be the thing?” They’d be like, “What’s a large language model? What’s a deep fake?” And it was very bizarre to watch these things, one after the other, come to pass, to the point where, on so many levels, by the time we released the story it was no longer sci-fi at all. ChatGPT came out as we were editing. We were like, “Huh. Do we still really need that scene where Martin the filmmaker is talking about what it’s like to co-write a script with AI?” That was strange, to watch something you thought was science fiction and watch it become science present.

We even wrote Ziba (Pegah Ferydoni) as an Iranian activist, part of the diaspora in Berlin, and when we were in the edit, the uprising in Iran happened. Suddenly these female Iranian activists were everywhere. Even on a much more minor, mundane level, we wrote that Darby mixes coffee with Coke, and everyone was like, “That’s disgusting, what a weird drink.” And one day in the edit, the assistant editor came to me and said, “Brit, I have a surprise for you.” He walked me downstairs and opened the fridge and Coca-Cola had just released a coffee-Coke drink.

It’s like you’re in the dream factory from The OA, dipping into the collective unconscious.
Can you imagine if that was a job you could do? Just, like, go sleep and dream? I’d love that job.

But you’re kind of doing that. You’re tapping into something.
I think we all have that. Kids have that; they’re really tapped in. I feel like the public education system is designed to slowly beat that out of you and make learning about ingesting and regurgitating. Which, interestingly, is what these large language models are. The more we take human intelligence and make it this one thing and computerize it, the more we leave abstract intelligences behind because they’re not quantifiable.

I don’t know, man. I think a lot about trying to return to the sensitivity or awareness I had as a kid, and I was drawn to acting so specifically because after I spent all of this time studying economics in college, I felt like my brain had become so much about right angles and mathematical proofs and acting was this invitation to be back in your body. In western culture we live from the neck up. But actually, all this stuff, from the neck down, came first. There’s this amazing philosopher, Antonio Damasio, who talks about the idea that the brain evolved later and is actually just a statistical organ for processing the intelligence of the rest of your body. I find that idea mind-blowing. I haven’t given up acting because it’s the only thing I know that’s a way to keep getting me back into my body.

Can I tell you something embarrassing? When The OA got canceled, I cried for like an hour. And obviously I had nothing to do with the show; I just really loved it.
I felt that way too. What’s so sad is we even cried with our executives. Some of the fans are upset with Netflix, and I try to explain: The people who were really there making it loved it too and gave everything to it. I think the strikes have made it more apparent that there was a whole shift in the model of the entire business. Everybody suddenly had to make more, make it for less, make it appeal all over the world at the same time. And OA, despite its huge and loyal following, just fell in that gap.

But I think about it all the time. And some part of me — I don’t feel that it’s ended. In my mind I understand that it’s ended. But in my body I feel like it’s something that has gone dormant. If the right conditions and circumstances come again, it will grow. I really do think that.

What legally or logistically has to happen? Is it a realistic hope for it to come back?
The fundamental thing that’s at the core of the Faustian bargain of Hollywood is that the writers don’t own their copyright, which is insane. Imagine a novelist spending five years writing an original idea from scratch that came out of their brains, and then they didn’t own the right to the thing that they made. It’s cuckoo bananas.

The OA is something Zal and I spent years dreaming up, but we don’t own the rights to that material. That said, Twin Peaks came back after a period of time. It’s not legally impossible. Zal and I talk about it. There will be a moment and we’ll be like, “This is so The OA.” And we’ll file it away. It might have been that it just came a little bit before its time and some things just have to happen in the world and then it’ll come back.

One of my favorite facts about you is that you haven’t watched Twin Peaks, but it feels so deeply embedded in The OA.
I finally watched it. I love it. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it. Because I love Mulholland Drive. I was like, How did you get into long-format storytelling and not study your favorite filmmaker’s long-format story? There’s a mood and a tone and a frequency that David Lynch can dial into that’s so specific and that I sometimes see or feel in the world, but don’t often see reflected onscreen.

And then you cast Josie in this show! Joan Chen.
Isn’t she amazing? So regal. From another era somehow. The crazy thing is that I didn’t even realize she was Josie until after it was over. So I never got to be like, “Josie, talk to me. Tell me all the secrets!”

Tell me about being a drawer knob!
Yeah, exactly: “Tell me about being a drawer knob.”

Something you said once that I’ve never forgotten was that you feel like it’s a moral imperative for artists right now to make work about the climate crisis. Can you tell me about putting that idea into this project?
The climate crisis is so hard to contend with because it’s a hyperobject — which is just to say it’s so big and on a timescale we can’t fully understand, so it’s hard to wrap our day-to-day, practical minds around it. The culture we’re living in has made us all feel impotent in the face of it, and that we as individuals can’t do anything — that it has to come from policy and corporations. Of course, we know that the change can’t and won’t come from there as quickly as we need it to. So it has to come from people. The same way the changes afoot in Hollywood right now had to come from labor. I think we all know that now. Then the question becomes: What do we do? What can we do? I think both Zal and I feel like, at least as storytellers, it has to be a part of every story we tell. We have to address it and do what we can to make the weight and consequence of it felt.

We actually made this story in climate crisis. When we were in Iceland shooting, we were standing in the valley with a location scout, prepared to shoot, and they were like, “Clear skies, it’s gonna be great.” And out of nowhere from the south, an enormous storm came and dumped a level of snowfall that was unprecedented — that no one could have predicted because the jet stream has changed, so the winds have changed, so storms are approaching valleys in a way that they haven’t for hundreds of thousands of years.

You almost died on set, right?
I got hypothermia. Very severe hypothermia. I thought hypothermia was just, you get a little trembly or something. But actually when you get severe hypothermia, the blood leaves your brain. Your cognition shuts down, so you come into a childlike state in your mind. The blood is rushed into your heart to keep your heart pumping. It’s left your digestion, so the moment you get warm again, you immediately throw everything up because your body thinks you’re going to die. The heart is the most vital organ, which is kind of poetic and beautiful.

But yeah, I was in a remote mountain hospital on an IV recovering, and we ran out of things we could shoot without me. And we were already up against it because of COVID. Iceland had the best COVID numbers, and then as we were on a plane with all the cast and crew flying over there, in the air, they decided to go for herd immunity. By the time we landed, COVID was like [exploding sound].

It feels like there is a moral imperative to talk about the climate crisis in a way that doesn’t demoralize people or shut us down, but tries instead to be like: “This is happening. We’re responsible. How do we contend with it, live inside it, educate each other about it, and find some sort of collective resistance to change the way we’re living so that the worst-case scenario isn’t met?”

There’s a critique baked into the story about people like Andy who are ostensibly trying to “solve” the climate crisis while really just protecting themselves.
The feeling is, take as much as you can get off the table to protect you and your family. There are homes in London now that are mansions underground: networks, basketball courts, swimming pools. There’s a group of people preparing themselves, many of whom are running the companies that are majorly to blame, and that terrifies me and makes me think that it’s incumbent upon us, the majority, the 99 percent, to be like, “Okay, how do we band together and build communities?” The only thing that’s actually resilient enough to withstand the level of change that’s coming — this sounds so small, but I don’t think it is — is just genuinely knitting community fabric back together.

How do you make art like that within a system run by those exact types of billionaires?
We keep tricking them every time. I don’t know when they’re gonna realize that we’re being so much more subversive than anyone thought. Should we tell them this? One of the real achievements of this story — though everytime I watch it I’m like, I could have done this better, I could have done that better — is that I think you don’t notice how subversive it is. To take the young woman who’s normally dead — mutilated, with a boob out on the ground at the beginning of the story, her erotic death the charge that fuels the mystery — to stand that 20-something woman up, put clothes on her, clean the blood off her face, and let her feel she has the authority to solve, and command the scene of, a crime. To gather people in a group to resist together. If we’ve pulled that off and made it seem like it’s no big deal — it’s not tongue-in-cheek or Nancy Drew, and it feels as credible as Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson rolling up at the beginning of True Detective.

This was the first thing you’ve made that’s not starring you. You have a big role, but Lee is not the protagonist. Why?
I kept wanting to direct during OA, but there was no way to do it. Because our stories are so ambitious and have such big casts and big production design, it requires so much to mount them. There was no way to be in front of the camera and behind the camera at the same time; we just move at too quick a rate to make the budget of the show work.

So I felt like, Okay, I want to direct. For me, that will require taking a big step back in acting so I can do it the way I want to do it. It’s one thing to have made a story evocative on the page, and now I have to take it to the screen — so much communication has to happen to cross that bridge. So many photo references and color palettes and swatches and finding Louise Bourgeoises to fill the hotel. Directing feels like you’re taking the world-building part to its ultimate conclusion.

I also felt like this story needed to be about someone from Gen Z; that does really matter to the story, because that is the correct person to face off with the tech billionaire. Gen Z, unlike our millennial generation, never bought into the con of, like, capitalism. The millennials, we had a period when we were doing what our baby-boomer parents told us to do and trying to ride the train to where they rode it. And then we all got off and realized that not only are the tracks not built across this chasm, but the train’s just going to fall into that, and that the best thing we can do is pull the emergency brake on the train and try to get out in the mud, in the muck, and build tracks in a new direction.

I was shocked to realize you hadn’t directed TV before. What was holding you back?
At the end of every season of The OA, my health would just collapse from exhaustion. Because I was writing, showrunning, and acting. It just felt unfathomable to take on another job. I remember once I was telling a doctor about what the job is like: “Yeah, it’s always a 14-hour day, six days a week, sometimes you start your day at 4 a.m. and sometimes you end at 6 p.m. and sometimes you get to a Friday night and you’re shooting from two in the afternoon until 6 a.m.” And the doctor was like, “What?! Of course your biorhythms are off.” The job has an extremism about it. I don’t know how easy it is to continue to do it in the way Zal and I are doing it, year after year. We’d have to basically make television. But we really haven’t made television — we’ve made eight-hour films or novels that are so handmade.

In your opinion, what makes something television versus a film or a novel, exactly?
I guess what I mean is normally, TV is made like a really great tailor with the pattern. The blazer is cut like this; the pants are cut like this. The master tailor makes the pilot and then is like, “Here are the patterns. Good luck!” And they’re done. Maybe they’ll come in as an executive producer in six months. There’s a writers’ room that’s going, and they pass the script off to people who are already shooting. But Zal and I are like, “Let’s make the pattern. Now we’re also going to make the thread by hand. We’re gonna cut out every suit and stitch it ourselves by hand—no sewing machines.” We were excited because we were meeting up with the idea of longform to tell stories over time and find the depth in all of that. But we didn’t have the factory-assembly model down. We hadn’t been trained in that formula as filmmakers.

Were you better at balance this time around?
No. We said we were gonna be, but it turned out to be hard to write Darby Hart and get her voice right. It was really easy to write Darby Hart in a way that people read the draft and crossed their arms and said, “She seems petulant.” You’d write a scene where Darby was interviewing people, and people would be like, “Would they really answer her questions?” And they’re right! In truth, the scene in a whodunit where the detective interviews the guest should be chapter two. But in ours, it takes until chapter five for her to prove to the audience again and again that she’s so competent and capable that she’s earned the trust of these people and they might answer her questions. Even then, they’re only answering them because a man is sitting next to her on the sofa. The fact that it took us five hours to get to that scene, and for it to feel credible and not tongue-in-cheek, that really showed me where we’re actually at. The misogyny is deeper and more entrenched than we realize.

Do you feel that way in pitch rooms — dismissed? Does being there with Zal give you a sort of credibility to men?
Oh, I’m sure. We used to do this funny thing when, in the early days, before Sound of My Voice, we were driving around town pitching a web-series version of Sound of My Voice. We’d laugh because we’d go in and even though we’d talk equally, nobody in the room would look at me. It was like I wasn’t even there. At the end they’d direct questions to him. Zal noticed, because he’s incredibly sensitive to these things. So he said, “Let’s do a pitch meeting where you say everything and I’m silent.” We did that and still, at the end of the meeting, all the questions came to Zal. There have been times when I ask for something and get a no, and then I text it to Zal, and he’ll come in and ask for the same thing, and it’ll be a yes. At this point we kind of laugh at that.

But also, class and race are a part of this conversation.

Right, because he’s a queer man of color. He experiences that sort of thing in a totally different way.
There will be times when I can give voice to something and be heard in a way that he cannot.

And I don’t even want to judge it. Because the truth is I’ve been in meetings with executives where I’ve listened to the man first and been like, days later, Wow, that woman was right there. Why didn’t I look her in the eye and seek her approval?

What about now, coming off The OA? How are you treated?
Because of The OA it’s different for sure. I think fame is really a toxic substance. When everybody in a room treats you differently, it’s hard to remain grounded, to have deep, authentic relationships with people. It’s a fundamental power imbalance. Those power gaps are loaded and over time become corrosive. At the same time, anybody who’s spent any amount of time being invisible in any way, that little bit of fame or money starts to balance things out a little bit. It’s really hard to navigate.

I’m trying to have more balance. I really am. I got a dog. I’m walking my dog. I’m planting vegetables in my backyard. I’m trying to root myself more and be grounded and invest in building this reality. For the whole of my life, I’ve slept on a mattress on the floor. I literally got a bedframe for the first time in my life during the pandemic. I got a bookshelf. There’s a rug on the floor. Granted, most of these things came from set. I walked off set and asked, “Can I take this home with me? I’m being told that I’m lacking deeply in nesting and other maternal instincts. I need to pull this shit together real quick because I ain’t young anymore.”

Something I’ve noticed following you on Instagram over the years is that whenever you post anything at all, whether it’s photos from a vacation or an announcement of a new project, your comments are full of people begging you to bring back The OA. What do you feel when that happens?
I was in airport security the other day and it was very sweet — somebody stopped me and said, “I just want you to know I signed three different petitions to bring back The OA.” I was like, “Thank you!” And then I walked a bit and somebody else grabbed me from behind, and was like, “I thought you were the OA, but you’re not the OA.” And I was like, “Oh, I get that all the time.” I think I had glasses on.

It’s strange when something gets canceled but is watched by millions of people the world over. OA fans don’t come to you with a sense of wanting to take a selfie or a picture. They come with a feeling of, “Oh, that show did something unique for me.” I was in a remote town in Norway and people there knew the movements. I was driving in rural Texas and people there knew the movements. That’s actually beautiful. I’ve never seen it as negative. I think other people who read the comments get more frustrated on my behalf. Sometimes people will be in the comments like, “Just let her move on and live her life!” But I don’t feel that. Because I understand that it was a feeling that they’re after, and that it’s hard to find. And I feel that too. Maybe it will come back and then they’ll just be like, “We’ve been waiting! And it’s shit!”

There are people on Instagram and on Reddit who literally think that you are the OA. Does that scare you at all?
[Laughs.] It’s scary, I guess, because it’s like … am I? Am I blind? Was I blind for a period? Do I have a Russian father? No, I’m not the OA. As it turns out, no. I’m just Brit. Just trying to figure this shit out, man.

There are also some devoted Redditors out there who think your work all takes place in the same universe or is inherently linked in some way.
I don’t think they exist in the same universe literally. But on a different level, there are currents that we just want to keep speaking. And if one door closes to them, they’ll go through another door.

So how much of the things you were thinking and writing about with The OA made their way into this show?
There are uncanny things. Like, Clive came to test costumes one day and he said to Zal, “I’m thinking I want to wear my own glasses.” And he put them on and they were very much like Hap’s. Sometimes things are just eerily lining up, but sometimes there are just themes and currents that we’ll always be interested in: collectivism, captivity. How do we get out of the boxes we all create for ourselves? We’re always trying to make narratives that feel like an unboxing.

I watched The Recordist, one of the first shorts you and Zal made together in 2006.
No. How did you even get that?

It’s on YouTube!
How did it get on YouTube?

When was the last time you watched it?
Whenever it was made! I haven’t seen it since.

In this movie, you are on the floor, going through your own poop, looking for alien pellets.
[Laughs loudly.] I genuinely forgot about that. Oh my God.

There is a 9/11 twist. References to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s Golden Record. Were you in college when you made that?
There’s a water-treatment plant — it’s very interested in the same themes. The pellets! I can’t believe it’s on YouTube. I had just graduated from college and Zal was at the American Film Institute casting his thesis film. I was working as a cinematographer in documentaries. He was like, “You need to be in my film.” I didn’t know any better then. I didn’t know what an audience was. I didn’t know what critique was.

It seems like you understand your audience now. For Murder, you did some real-life tie-ins, like a trail of online clues that led people to a real Tribeca mystery bookshop. You know your fans just want to get into the muck with you and think about weird shit.
We all would like to be a part of a collective puzzle-solving. That’s why amateur sleuthdom is such a thing. People find one another on the internet from all over and get to find community in solving something together. It’s not just aimless chatting; they’re on some mission together to unpack a mystery that nobody else could solve. That’s so delicious and meaningful. I guess I do feel drawn to that. I was reading about this game called Cicada 3301 from a few years ago where clues appeared all over the world, and there was this feeling of people wondering: Who’s setting up this puzzle? Is it a recruiting means for an intelligence service? Somebody with spare time who’s good at puzzles? 

Like the Carmen Sandiego game.
It all goes back to Carmen Sandiego. “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?” Do you remember that melody? Didn’t they try to do a live-action and it didn’t work out?

This is your next project.
Who has the rights to Carmen Sandiego?

Brit Marling joined us during Vulture Festival LA 2023, where she stopped by the video studio to chat with Jay Jurden about cybersecurity and Gen Z.