Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij Talk A Murder at the End of the World, Working With Chat GPT, and The Future of The OA
Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, the brilliant minds behind The OA, return with a new show on FX called A Murder at the End of the World. It finds Emma Corrin playing Darby Hart, a Gen Z amateur sleuth who is invited by a tech giant to a remote retreat. But when one of the other guests is found dead, Darby must use her skills to stop a murderer. Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado spoke with creators Marling and Batmanglij and actor Corrin about the new high tech whodunnit.
After tackling near death experiences and other dimensions, Marling and Batmanglij decided to go the science fiction route diving into the world of technology and AI. “When we thought of who's going to be an interesting tech billionaire we haven't seen before we thought, ‘Oh, an AI designer is an arena I hadn't seen on screen before.’ So we were curious to do that. Then we got to work with an early version of Chat GPT. It was really fun to play with it. We thought, ‘Oh, an AI assistant would be just like a really fun thing to have,’” said Batmanglij. “When we were screening the show for the first time on the big screen […] and Ray turns on the music for Darby and runs her a bath, I was like, ‘Man, we’re a year away from that actually being possible.’”
Fresh off the SAG and WAG strikes, AI remains a hot button issue. “The way that certainly that Brit and Zal have handled it in the show goes very hand in hand with what the discourse has been in the rest of the world at the moment,” shared Corrin, “which is returning to human relationships and not losing that or losing sight of what we care about or what we value in ourselves and how we communicate.”
The show takes the premise of a whodunnit and adds even more layers to explore. “Brit and Zal are so clever in the fact that they've made a show that you can easily call a whodunnit because I suppose that is the center pin of the series, but it's also a love story. It's also a commentary on our relationships, who we can trust. It's a really wonderfully detailed and complex character study of this girl who's growing up in a very fast changing world. I think that in itself is really interesting as well,” said Corrin. “It’s a whodunnit, but they've created a main character who is incredibly complex and not at all one-dimensional, which is really fascinating to watch.”
A Murder at the End of the World shot in Iceland, which was a challenging location. “It was absolutely incredible. Being in that landscape was incredibly humbling and just breathtaking. My first day on this job was shooting on a frozen lake with Alice. We got to set by snowmobile, which was wild, in subzero temperatures,” Corrin told me. “Brit got hypothermia. It was like a baptism by fire. Basically that entire month in Iceland was shooting out in the elements every day and it was like the most challenging, but the most rewarding thing to be actually making a TV series in that in that weather. It was wild.”
Another unique aspect of filming the show was that Corrin played Darby in two different but distinct points in her life. “I really loved having the chance to play two versions of one person. I felt that they, certainly for me, really informed each other. It was the greatest acting or character exercise. To be able to sense physically and vocally and in my body the ways that I was playing her. When she was younger in terms of what she was going through and then vice versa,” they said. “Playing younger Darby knowing who she would become and then knowing where she started, I just thought it was it was really wonderful to have that chance to play those two quite different people actually.”
Marling and Batmanglij have been working together for decades after becoming fast friends in college. “At this point we've been doing it for so long that we like really know each other and we really know the ways to invite each other to do our best work. How to not shut ideas down early, but how to nurture things and let things grow and that just takes time and practice,” said Marling, with Batmanglij adding: “When you're a kid and you're building a fort with a friend, no one ever says, ‘Oh no, don't put the cushion that way’ or ‘Don't put the sheet that way.’ Kids play with a lot of the rules of improv. A lot of ‘yes and.’ They are constantly building off of each other, not tearing each other down. But, as we become adults, fear creeps in and ego and cautiousness. So together, we're more fort builders. We're trying to find a way to not shut each other down early on, which I think is cool.”
This is Marling and Batmanglij’s newest show after their Netflix masterpiece The OA was unfortunately cancelled. “I think sometimes about seeds in the desert. You know, that are in the desert for sometimes decades and then the conditions or the climate and circumstance changes and all of a sudden that seed grows. You never know what what will happen,” Marling told me about continuing The OA in some capacity, “but we loved telling that story very much and we love The OA fans very deeply. They're an incredible group of people. The art that they've made and the rebellion that they've been a part of… it's very heartening and really honestly makes us excited to keep telling all stories to try to meet their expectations.”
New episodes of A Murder at the End of the World air Tuesdays on FX and stream the next day on Hulu.
