Warning: This article contains spoilers for all ofDevs.
Six months and eight episodes of gripping sci-fi television later, we can see they weren’t wrong.
Behind it all wasAlex Garland, who wrote and directed every episode ofDevs.
Miya Mizuno/FX
Did you envision it as an eight-hour movie?
ALEX GARLAND: No, definitely not.
I had a lot to learn in the shift of medium.
Raymond Liu/FX
I was fully expecting that to be the case in shifting to TV.
I definitely didn’t see it as a movie.
I went into it thinking, “what do I know I have to learn?
Miya Mizuno/FX
What should I be concentrating on?”
There’s something about the width and breadth of a novel that has something in common with television.
It was definitely both.
A couple years ago I went to a part of the world with remote areas within it.
They were Chinese-made smartphones, but still smartphones.
So where isn’t the reach?
I was interested in that.
Is that an accurate description?
That’s a very flattering description that college professors would probably take issue with.
The basic line is, quantum physics deals with the LEGO blocks that make us all up.
There are some things about quantum mechanics that are very strange and very counter-intuitive.
It’s far from fully unraveled.
What the show does is present two different interpretations of quantum mechanics.
What I was doing was talking through those two interpretations.
The easiest Wikipedia-throw in explanation to aim for is an experiment called thedouble-slit experiment.
So I started by talking through the double-slit experiment, and then talking through some of the interpretations.
What madeDevsthe right fit for her to take the spotlight?
It was a bunch of things, actually.
It’s a mixture of quite jarring and quite odd.
It’s quite weird, quite elusive.
It makes for a very unfamiliar form of protagonist.
When we’re debating predestination and determinism, is it always really a conversation about mortality?
Mortality is this weird thing.
It’s a near-constant preoccupation that nobody feels aware of being preoccupied by.
It all gets cordoned off into these strange areas.
It’s also the thing that we spend our imaginative lives trying to find ways to avoid happening.
Why did you decide to depict them that way?
Where the brutal nature of the killing is concerned, that’s a slightly different thing for me.
I wanted to make people sit with it.
How did you approach using music in this show?
It really varies on a case-by-case basis according to what’s happening in the narrative.
The Steve Reich song for example, that was cross-cut with these beautiful Inuit singers.
It was connected to seeing an incredible range of history.
It was about making the scope of the music fit the scope of the imagery.
But that would vary.
The last scene of the show is Lily and Jamie hugging.
To what extent isDevsthe story about Lily and Jamie reconnecting and their journeys towards each other?
It’s the fundamental ending of the show.
What the show does is it lays out some of the big strange landscape that we live in.
That’s all that’s really happening at the end of it.
One of my favorite connections is the way Katie feels about Forrest in the end.
But yeah it’s all of the big things rolled into something quite simple.
Is the idea of many worlds both inspiring and depressing?
I think that’s essentially it.
Your lived experience within it is both very very small, and also very profound.
I wonder if this pandemic will force people to confront reality and acknowledge if their worldviews are wrong?
Scientists will accept being wrong about something.
If there’s proof they’re wrong, they’ll accept it and move on.
The rest of us don’t do that.
What coronavirus does is show us that we are fragile.
You could easily use coronavirus as a lesson about our environment.
If there is any positive that could come from it, that would be a good lesson.
How did you decide to cast Lyndon that way?
What did you like about the cast as a whole?
There’s a whole structural difference that happens.
Sometimes it was as simple as I didn’t want Lyndon looking like he had to shave every day.
I discussed it with the casting director Carmen Cuba, and she suggested meeting Cailee.
But I did say it as soon as she left.
She’s the only person who lasted that long.
There was a lovely, friendly energy between all of them.
There’s something slightly off about all of them, something unexpected, in one way or another.
