We were honored to host Lynn Shelton in an interview with The Girls Club to discuss her films and her recent work on “Little Fires Everywhere.” Sadly, Lynn passed away just two weeks after this interview was conducted. We wanted to share this conversation and celebrate her honest and giving spirit with everyone as a remembrance.

This interview took place May 5. It has been edited and condensed. It was transcribed by Sophie Willard.

W&H: I’ve been doing a whole lot of Lynn Shelton watching over the last two days, watching your last couple of movies that I hadn’t seen for some bizarre reason. It was great to catch up on all your work because I think it’s quite unique. Let’s start off with “Little Fires Everywhere.” Can you give us a logline for the miniseries?

LS: It’s a story that takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, which is a community that was planned a long time ago. It’s very rigidly structured, and the reason I bring this up is because the setting is incredibly important for the show. It’s a rigid, very organized, very homogenous and upper-middle class for the most part, community outside of Cleveland. The series is based on a novel written by Celeste Ng who was raised there, and it’s about two mothers.

One of the mothers, Elena (Reese Witherspoon), is raised in this community and is of this community, and her character is like the community itself. She is all about: plan everything, make sure that you foresee what might happen and prepare for that, have a hierarchy, and a little schedule. and make sure everything is just so.

This new mother, Mia (Kerry Washington), comes to town — she is an artist, nomadic single mom, she has this 14-year-old daughter who’s about to enter High School, who has been roaming the country with her mom her whole life. She has a completely different approach to life, so it’s a very interesting examination of what happens when these two lives intersect. Elena has four children and they become intertwined with Pearl (Lexi Underwood), Mia’s daughter.

There’s a lot of interesting things that happen, and there’s this whole B-story that ends up becoming a primary mover and shaker of this entire story that is all about race and class, and most of all, about mothers. Who deserves to be a mother? What are all the different ways to be a mother? What’s the right way to be a mother? Is there a right way to be a mother? All the different kinds of mothers, surrogate mothers to adoptive mothers, to birth mothers who gave up their children and want their child back, to more traditional mothers, and single mothers versus married mothers. It really runs the gamut, and that was what appealed to me when I first read the novel.

W&H: You were executive producer on this.

LS: One of many, yes.

W&H: One of many, and you directed half the episodes: four out of eight. So when you came in as an executive producer and a director, instead of just being director for hire, you were involved in shaping the creativity of this piece. Can you talk about how you got involved with this, and what was it like to be not just jobbed in but to be involved in the creation as well?

LS: I should say I have directed two pilots in the past: I directed “Fresh Off the Boat,” and I directed a pilot for CBS prior to that which never made it to air. So that is a very similar job, it’s just that this is a bit more intense because I’m on it through the whole run, and it was only eight episodes total. I directed the first episode, and the last episode — the most book-ending episodes — and then the block in the middle, episodes four and five.

The reason that I didn’t direct all of them, which was another thought [being considered], was that we just thought it would be too much. It was also for our budget. It’s a lot more arduous: it means that the whole thing ends up being like a year of production instead of six or seven months of production — I’m just throwing [hypothetical numbers] out there. What’s efficient about having more than one director is that one person can be shooting, while the other is prepping for the next, so it ends up consolidating your schedule a little bit. This is hyperbole, but I was going to say it almost killed me just to do the four episodes, so to do all eight – I don’t know if I would have, honestly!

W&H: That’s like five of your movies, which are 90 minutes usually.

LS: Yeah exactly. The thing about television is that, as a director, you are not the creator unless you created the show — you are not the one who is the creative visionary, and the buck doesn’t stop with you. As the director you’re coming in to help the showrunner and the head writer/creator of the show, to translate from the written word to the screen in cinematic language. So what I bring is cinematic language, a toolkit, and I’m able to transform those beautifully written pages, and put them onto the screen.

It’s incredibly collaborative. I’m always double-checking and over-communicating, “Okay, so when you write this, is this what you mean or is this what you mean?” I’m proposing and bringing myself to the fore, don’t get me wrong, but it’s definitely all about being in service to the show. It’s like that on guest episodic jobs as well. It’s just that in this case, it’s a little bit more like filmmaking — where I’m the creative visionary and the buck stops with me — because I’m bringing a lot more of my own creative vision and proposing things that have not yet been set in stone.

I really enjoy it, this process. I think some filmmakers find it too frustrating, and you do hear about the director who is hired to come in and direct an entire six or eight episodes series and they want to make it like a movie, they want to make it their own — and they end up butting heads with the showrunner because they each are not quite on the same page.

I think because I’ve done so much guest episodic directing, that I understand my role is different. Maybe I’m speaking out of turn — it might be for somebody else to say this — but I feel like I’m pretty good at collaborating and trying to constantly check in with who it is that I’m serving in this particular project. It’s nice because you get to bring a little bit more of your own creativity to the process but it’s still highly collaborative.

W&H: How did you decide which episodes you were going to direct?

LS: That was predetermined. We always felt like the first and the last episodes were the bookends, the most important episodes. So we knew that that was part of [the work], and then to divide it in half just made sense to us. I think there was a consideration at first, like maybe I would do the first two and the last two, or something.

Ultimately, we decided to make [the premiere and finale] two standalone episodes, and then create two-episode blocks for the other six. So two and three were directed by Michael Weaver, I directed four and five, and six and seven were directed by Nzinga Stewart. The idea was that if I came in, in the middle, then there wouldn’t be four whole episodes of a gap — I’d be involved, so there would be more of a through-line.

W&H: Did you hire the other directors?

LS: Those decisions were made [higher up]. I was always asked for my input, and I put forward people, not just for the other directors, but also for the DP, who was hired after I was hired — the production designer was already in place, she was already sketching things — but definitely the DP. Oh, and I got my editor, [Tyler L. Cook] the lead editor [is] the editor that I would edit for the rest of my life with, if I had my druthers. I love him so much. Then there were two other editors as well.

So, yeah, I had my say, but I was not the one to make those decisions; it was always the producers. We had so many people interviewed, so many editors, so many DPs, so many other directors, and there was a lot of passion. The producers really, really wanted to make sure that every single decision was the right decision, so we looked at all the options, and were very meticulous about all those choices.

W&H: TV has changed so much recently with the growth and explosion of those kinds of limited series, which we only previously saw on HBO, really, and other pay venues, maybe three or four years ago. So, I would imagine there’s a creative satisfaction in being involved in something from the beginning, and throughout the eight episodes, versus just dropping in on a show.

LS: Yeah, it’s wonderful, and to be able to see it through and really feel like you’re part of it from beginning to end, is really an extraordinary experience. My kid is now in college, which is another reason I was able to move. At the beginning of this year, I moved to LA officially, from Seattle. But for years and years I was living in Seattle, and commuting to do jobs, which is why I never really considered doing a producing director role, or this kind of EP director role before, because I was just in it for seven months straight, with no poking my head above water.

Before my kid went off to college I wanted to not be a complete absentee parent [laughs]. Luckily, his dad was extremely more than capable of holding down the fort when I was gone, but I wanted to be able to go back and forth, so episodic directing was perfect for me. But now to be able to even consider taking a job on like this was really… well, let me be clear, pitching hard to get a job like this — I’ve never pitched as hard to get a job like this.

W&H: They called you in, and you pitched hard to get it?

LS: What happened was, I got hired to direct an episode of “The Morning Show.” In December 2018, I started to shoot my episode, which was episode four of “The Morning Show,” the first season. That was how I met Reese and Lauren Neustadter, her producing partner. I had been shooting for a couple weeks, and then we had our winter hiatus, and I was going to finish shooting my episode after, into the new year

I must have made enough of a good impression on Reese and Lauren because Lauren handed me the “Little Fires Everywhere” novel right before the break, and said, “Do me a favor: read it, and see if it piques your interest, and if it does, I’d love for you to consider pitching.”

So it was that I had established this working relationship with Reese, and that Lauren was able to watch how I do my thing, and I think that helped a lot, but I really pitched hard. I had a really thick lookbook that I printed up and put in front of everybody at every meeting — all four of the pitch meetings that I had to do. I really put my back into it, and made an impassioned plea that I was the right person for the job.

W&H: That’s amazing. So a lookbook, and four meetings. Anything else? I think everybody here would want to know.

LS: Sure. So the first meeting was with Pilar Savone, who is Kerry Washington’s producing partner; Lauren Neustadter, who’s one of Reese Witherspoon’s producing partners; and Liz Tigelaar, who was the showrunner, and had been writing the show for a year with her writers. So my first pitch was to them, and then my second pitch, once they said, “you should go to the next step,” was to Reese and Kerry. They were on board, and then I went to ABC Studios and had to do it all over again with those execs, and then the final piece was Hulu, and all of those guys. So it was a lot.

This was all in the evenings and on weekends because, at the same time, I was directing a two episode block — episode eight, and ten, the finale — of Season 3 of “Glow,” which was really, really hard. So I was trying on the weekends to come up with a pitch, and then having to do these evening meetings, driving to Hulu. It was crazy.

I still can’t believe that I got the job, but it was very personal because I read this book and I literally personally connected in some way to most of the characters. When I was a kid, I was a poet like Pearl was; I went to grad school at the School of Visual Arts and studied Photography, just like Mia does. And I wanted that life — when I was a kid I always envisioned I’d be off on the road with my own kid, just single, no partner — and I would be a photographer, and I would be an artist, and we would make our living that way. That was exactly the life I envisioned when I was a kid.

I ended up having the life that Elena had, because I ended up getting married to a man, and settling down, and buying a house in the community that I had grown up in — Seattle — raising a kid, and it was much more traditional on paper, but I almost felt like I had the soul of this other life. I also really identified with Izzy (Megan Stott), the young Richardson kid who’s a fish out of water and is the only artist in the family. I have those kinds of feelings too, so it was actually very personal.

In my lookbook, I had images from my grad school experience, some of my own photography, I had images of each of the characters that I felt were good reference points — creatively, who these people were. I went through and had a whole ’90s section on culture, kids in the ’90s.

Then it went to the seasons. I drew from cinematic references because it starts in the summer, and then as tensions rise it gets colder, and the colors change, the lighting changes through fall, and then it ends in the winter. So, as an example, “Call Me by Your Name” was a reference for the summer, and “The Ice Storm” was a reference for the winter — the whole blue, dark of winter — so images like that.

There’s an art photographer named Tina Barney, and I went found a book at [West Hollywood book store] Book Soup – it was like a $100 tome of her photographs – because I was remembering from my photography days, [and thought] the Richardson household feels like a Tina Barney photograph. She took all these photographs of this very white, upper-middle class world, from the inside because that was what she grew up with, so it was very candid, really beautiful, and it feels real, it feels lifted – it doesn’t feel like it’s staged. It’s definitely an insider’s view of that world, so I used a lot of her photographs as references as well.

The thing about the pitch is that it’s an opportunity for you to show that you really thought about the work, that this is what it inspired in your own brain — and also just going through the effort of slamming down a 99 page lookbook! It’s like, “Oh she really wants this job!” It’s very expensive, so you don’t necessarily have to print it up; you can also put it on to an iPad, or put it in a PDF and have everybody read through it at the same time — there’s other ways of doing it — but I just really wanted to have those people to have that physical experience of turning pages, so that was the way I decided to go.

W&H: You really have worked on a lot of the strongest feminist shows over the last couple of years. Is that intentional, or is it just the way people hire you?

LS: I feel incredibly, incredibly lucky. I feel like I’ve been able to come to a place in my career as a television director that I really can pick and choose the shows that I want to work on, and the projects I want to be involved with. I think it’s a combination. I think that folks are drawn to me, maybe because I’ve already done past work like that. “Dickinson” was such a blessing, I love working on “Glow,” and I feel incredibly lucky.

What I said before about film directing versus TV directing, first of all, I know that I’m going to be able to go and get my ya-yas out [laughs] in terms of being the total control freak in film. It’s all up to me. It’s all my vision. Because I’m going to keep making movies, it’s easier for me to just indulge in being imbued in somebody else’s vision when I work on television. But it only works if I really respect the vision; if I’m really interested in, and impassioned by, and respect the showrunner, or the writer, or the producer’s vision for the show; if I feel like it’s smart and “woke,” and has something to say, and it doesn’t feel like regurgitation. So I’m able to say yes to TV work that I’m drawn to for a reason.

W&H: So here are a couple more questions about the lookbook, and then I want to get into your movies. Did you leave the lookbook behind afterwards, and how long did those meetings take?

LS: Yes, and the shortest one was probably an hour and a half; the longest an hour and 45 minutes.

W&H: Another question: “I’m curious about how prep and production went with directors doing two episodes back-to-back?”

LS: When you do an episode — like when I was doing four and five — production-wise, you’re approaching one episode like you’re doing a feature film. So, if you’re going to be at a location like the exterior of the high school, for one scene in episode four, and then for two scenes in episode five, you’ll shoot those all on the same day. It’s called a block, because it’s basically using those two episodes for efficiency sake. And in fact, I was surprised when I watched the entire series: there were a lot of scenes within the other directors’ episodes that I had directed. [laughs]

I was like, “Oh! Yeah, I remember I directed that!” Not episode six, because six was totally standalone, but in [episodes] seven or three [for example], there would be some one scene in this one location, but in my episode I was going to be there for the whole day.

The courtroom scenes are a great example: I was at the exterior of the courthouse, and I picked up one or two of Nzingha Stewart’s scenes from outside of the courthouse in episode seven because I was there anyway, and she was all the way across town that day. These were double up days, which means that there were some days where — I think there were nine double up days between the finale and her block — she was shooting the block of [episodes] six and seven at the same time I was shooting episode eight. Which is really rough, because you’ve got to hire extra people.

W&H: Do you do that for time?

LS: It was for efficiency, even though [it means there are] more people to hire. You have to double the crew. It’s really difficult on the art department; they have to get extra people to be running around, and trying to keep two sets up and running, and ready for the next day — it’s really a nightmare for the art department. But ultimately it was about reducing the total number of production days, and the total number of days that we were renting the production office. It was so expensive to do that show.

So, if we wanted to have a huge crane one day to get a huge amount of scope, or put more money into the fire, for example, to really make sure that looked great, then we had to find other ways to shrink the budget, and one of the ways they came up with was to double up the days.

W&H: I’m just thinking about double-upping the days, and thinking about the world we’re going to enter, post-COVID, in terms of all the different hires, and how many people are running around. It feels like the world is going to be a little bit different. I know you were saying that you were in Boston about to do a show [when things amped-up]. What happened when you got shut down? What were you doing? Then let’s move into what the world is going to look like in the future.

LS: I started working on this AMC show in January, in LA, soft-prepping casting, and crew. I was hired to direct the the pilot episode of a new series that is greenlit – the whole thing is being written. I didn’t want to do another “Little Fires Everywhere,” [in that] I don’t want to spend that much time in Boston. So I said, “I’ll just do the first one and you can hand it off.”

But I love this show — it’s called “Kevin Can Fuck Himself.” Sorry for the f-word here, I think they’re going to blot it out. It’s a brilliant show and what happened was, before I even got hired I said, “Look, I need this weekend off, and I might need a couple days off surrounding it.” I got permission to come back to the west coast [because] there were three different things I was supposed to be doing that weekend.

I remember the day I left Boston was March 12. I had been there since the end of February prepping for this show we were going to start shooting at the end of March, and then I was going to come to LA for the big red carpet premiere of “Little Fires Everywhere” that evening of March 12. And so I got on a super early morning flight that day, and as I was going to bed the night before in Boston, I finally get a text, [saying] “they’ve canceled it [the premiere].”

The original plan was I was going to fly to LA for the red carpet premiere, then Saturday fly from LA to Seattle — which was the hotspot at the time, of COVID-19 – to go to the wedding of my best friend, and then the next day I was going to go to a panel at SXSW, on the 14th [laughs]. So it was crazy – and then fly back to Boston! Within five days, one by one by one, each of those things disappeared. First, Hulu pulled their panel, then hours later, SXSW canceled altogether, then my poor friend Megan said, “We’re delaying the wedding until August!” At that point, I just wanted this flight out of Boston because I could tell it was coming. What I didn’t want was for us to go full-on Italy, have no travel available anymore at all, and get stuck in Boston for six months, or a year, or two years. So, luckily I was able to get out of there.

Hulu was very kind and said, “Well, we already have this ticket for you, you can use it if you want anyway.” I think they knew they were going to have to fly me anyway! So I flew to LA and I never left. By the end of the 12th, [AMC] had given me a heads-up that it would be official probably the next day [that production would be halted]- AMC was still working it out. They were smart because that was the weekend that they were about to send the entire cast out from LA, a bunch more people, and hair and makeup, and art department. It was really going to be up and running. So they said, “Yeah, let’s not. Why don’t you guys just stay home.” So, it was crazy — I have this new boyfriend, and I thought I wasn’t going to see him for seven weeks, [and went to] him being stuck with me 24/7!

In terms of your question about how are we going to get back up and running, everybody’s desperate to do it. For instance, even our production we were trying to figure out, “What if we took the crew, what if we took the cast, and we just quarantined together?” There’s a lot of that discussion. There’s a lot of self-quarantining because they know it’s totally controlled — then that stays the same, we’re all on the same compound, we go to and from the workplace, and the workplace is safe, and it’s all sort of isolated. The problem is that, at least for the Boston show, there’s so much on location, that you really would have to just completely reimagine the show, you’d have to compromise it. It’s set in Worcester. “The Fighter” was a big reference – oh my God, I love “The Fighter,” it’s fun to rewatch that – it was a very similar kind of vibe in terms of the place, it was a really important element to this thing so we just couldn’t see a way to do it.

I think there are some productions that are going to be able to, or some that will be written specifically to just be all bottle episodes, all be done on a set somewhere, and I saw that the BBC is going to do that — they’re going to quarantine — so I think it is possible but not for every show. You can’t do every show like that.

W&H: So, this one sounds like it won’t be back up for a while, so are you looking at other things, or are you just under contract? Are you going to make another of your movies?

LS: [laughs] Is it hard, or a different job to be an animation director? How hard would it be to get into that?

Seriously, I have no idea. I have no prospects at all, and I’m just counting my pennies. I’m in way better shape than many other people, I realize that, but I’m literally like, “Okay, how many months am I going to be going until I completely run out of money?”

Except for residuals, thank God for residuals — the DGA gives me some residuals — but I don’t know what those look like, they’ve been declining over the years. For a while I would get a lot of money from my one “Mad Men” episode, and my five “New Girl” episodes. Well, that’s old news now, so people aren’t watching those so much, they’re not in the cycle so much, so my residuals went from a maybe a few thousand dollars down to a few hundred. Now it’s like, “Oh look, I got a $20 check, let’s go crazy tonight!” It’s scary.

W&H: Let’s move into your filmmaking. I remember us talking a while ago when you were on the cusp of becoming a TV director, but you were a bit apprehensive about making that leap. Your films are completely different to the world you live in, in TV Land. So, talk about that balance that you’ve created between your films – which are small, lovely stories that you want to tell – versus TV. You don’t get any bigger than Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington in terms of television stars. How were you able to negotiate that?

LS: Well the original plan was… my first feature film was made in 2005, and premiered and won the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance – the sort of punk rock little sister to Sundance that takes place at the same time in Park City, every year. Then it went to a bunch of regional festivals, and it got me some notoriety, but not enough to really get any meetings in Hollywood, with reps, but honestly, I wasn’t looking for that.

I didn’t know if I would ever intersect with the industry, honestly. I really didn’t foresee that. I was teaching part time in Seattle, my expenses were very low, very low mortgage. I lived in this little tiny house with my kid and my husband – and the expenses were just lower there, and I didn’t need a lot.

I love to have the total creative freedom to do whatever kind of work I wanted to do, and not to ask permission for millions of dollars to do something, so my second and third films were self produced, and I looked at the resources I had at my disposal. I asked a friend if I could use his house for “Humpday” for two weeks – he moved in with his girlfriend, and just gave it to me for free — that kind of stuff.

For my second feature film, I wanted to experiment with improvisation, improvisational dialogue, so I didn’t even know if that would be a movie. My goal was that it feel so real, it feels like a documentary, and to hopefully get into SXSW. That was my goal. That was “My Effortless Brilliance,” and I got into SXSW, and it was a movie because IFC bought it. They were like, “We want to take you out to coffee,” and then they said, “We want to buy this movie.”

I was like, “Really?! Great!” And then I knew I can work this way, and the next film was “Humpday” and that was my breakout movie because that was the movie — after two of trying, believe me, I tried before that — to get into Sundance, and getting into Sundance as a feature filmmaker, at least for me, was a total life changer. And it was also a darling of the festival that year, in 2009.

It was the kind of thing where I spent two solid months going to meetings with reps at agencies, managers, trying to decide, “Do I need them both?” It was a much harder choice and process than I ever thought it would be. It was really funny because I enjoyed making these small movies with my friends in Seattle, grabbing a camera and some friends, and saying, “Okay, you want to go make a movie, let’s go make a movie for a few thousand dollars.” But I thought it would be silly not to try to have some kind of intersection, so I thought, what I would like to do is direct an episode or two of television a year just to pay the bills, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about my movies being big moneymakers. Of course I want people to be able to see them, of course I want to sell them, of course I want there to be distribution, but I don’t want to be ruled by the market; I want to be able to make the movie that’s my vision and that is the movie I want to make.

That was my original idea about how the relationship would be between me and television. I ended up really loving doing television, and people kept offering me great [opportunities]. And to start out – because I get asked a lot about how you break into television — it was purely on my film work. My first two gigs were “Mad Men” and “New Girl.” “Mad Men” was Season 4, and at that time, once a season they had this idea of looking outside of their stable of already pre-determined directors to pick one person who is fresh and new, just as a breath of fresh air. I got to be that person. It still blows my mind!

It was the best boot camp ever, because every job since then, until “Little Fires Everywhere” probably, was a breeze, because it was a really amazing, demanding experience. Then “New Girl” — it was their very first season, and [creator] Liz Meriwether was a fan of “Humpday.” And with both of them, you would see very little in common with “Humpday,” which is all handheld, digitally shot, very now, very cinema verité, almost doc style. It doesn’t look anything like “Mad Men.” But the acting is so authentic, and so naturalistic, and it’s actually also very well edited, and so I think that that was what Matt [Weiner, “Mad Men” creator] saw in me. H was like, “I just want these words to be said in a naturalistic way.” It’s the only thing I can think of about why he hired me, honestly!

But I found that I was really good at TV directing because it demands a lot of efficiency, and I had made “Humpday” in 10 days. My next movie, “Your Sister’s Sister,” was made in 12 days, and my last movie, “Sword of Trust,” I also made in 12 days. I’m very efficient. I think it’s because I was an editor before, so I know exactly what I need, when I have it, and when I can move on. I can’t recommend that enough, by the way: editing before you direct.

So that’s what TV directing is: you never have enough time. You always have to have a sense of “Okay, if I spend too much time on this one scene, I’m going to really burn myself later, and not have enough time to get this other scene.” That sense of time management, the experience I’ve had self-producing in the past, being my own AD, being my own editor — it was the perfect training ground actually for TV.

So I found that I was good at it, and I found that I really enjoyed not always having to be the one who was the ultimate visionary — that I actually liked serving somebody else’s vision. It was fun to be just the Captain of the ship, but not the Admiral of the crew, and not have the onus of the whole thing.

W&H: I like that terminology, the Captain of the ship, but not the Admiral of the crew. So that was 2009 when you took all those meetings. Did you wind up signing with an agent and a manager, or an agent, or a manager?

LS: Again, I never thought I would, and then I realized that, “Oh 20 percent of nothing really is nothing.” [laughs] I’m very happy with the decision I made. I went with this wonderful woman, I’m still with the same people 10 years later: Rosalie Swedlin – who was at the time at Industry Entertainment, now she’s at Anonymous Content – is my manager, and Rich Klubeck, and Amanda Hymson are at UTA. I felt very happy right away with my decision, and I still do. It’s nice to have an agency because they have a book department, they have a TV department, so Larry Salz and Lily Saffron are my TV agents. Before I really could afford to have my lawyer, I put that off for a few years, and now I have a lawyer too – they have a legal department as well, so I could use that as a resource when I needed that. So it’s nice to have that infrastructure.

I love having a manager — I have a very deep, nice relationship with my agents as well, but a manager is like… sometimes she’s my therapist [laughs]. I went to a couple of fancy film festivals, and she helped, she lent me a clutch, or whatever — she’s my role model as well, I love her. She’s almost like a maternal figure, or not a maternal figure, more like my elegant, older lady role model, I love her so much.

The manager is a through-line – there’s this thing that happens with agencies where they have more clients, and they get distracted by the shiny new model sometimes, so the manager’s job is to be like, “Don’t forget about this person who has been there for you all this time.” It’s a good balance. I really just knew absolutely nothing — I hadn’t even been to film school, so I knew nothing about Hollywood — and I felt like the more education I could get, and the more guides and teachers I could have, the better, and I’ve never regretted that decision.

W&H: I’m going to go back to “Little Fires Everywhere.” Were you involved with the casting?

LS: I was. Obviously, Reese and Kerry were on from the beginning. Casting was underway, so I think they had found a couple of the kids, I [think] I was at the callback for Pearl [with Lexi Underwood]. For most of those teenagers, I was in all the casting sessions, and [Casting Director] David Rubin is a genius, I love him so much and we were always on the same page. We always loved the same people, and occasionally we would sidebar together, thinking “I really feel that this person is going to be better, for this and this reason.” So we would agree to join forces, and push for somebody. Again, it wasn’t my ultimate decision, because the buck didn’t stop with me — I was an EP, but I was at the bottom of the list of many EPs — so they were ultimately the decision makers, but I was definitely part of that process.

And the nice thing was that in the callbacks, I could give the adjustments to the actors, start to play around, and say, “Well, this person is fantastic, and they look right, and I believe them when they say their words, but they are not changing when I give them a note, and that is going to be death for us on set. They have to be able to do different versions.” I could give advice like that.

W&H: You’ve written all the movies that you directed, except for one – “Laggies” – and that’s eight movies in total you directed, seven you wrote. Do you miss when you’re not making a movie? Do you have a movie coming up, or are you doing TV for a while? What’s the balance?

LS: It’s nice to have a film in the hopper – or two or three, because inevitably they disappear.

W&H: Can you raise money now because you’re famous?

LS: Well, we’ll see. My reps have been sending me scripts for years, and I think they just about fell over backwards yesterday because I told them I wanted to direct a script they sent me and usually I don’t [laughs]. Usually, with my films, I just want to self-generate them. This script, I read it and [thought], “I can totally see [myself] directing this; this would be super fun and awesome.”

I’ve never put myself out there to get big studio movie jobs, or at least early on I didn’t. I’ve only started to be open to it because of the creative control issue. I didn’t want to have to worry about negotiating and “collaborating” with a bunch of different studio network execs, and worried investors — I just wanted to make the movie I wanted to make.

Over time, talking to other filmmakers, talking to producers, having meetings with more people, I’ve realized there is a middle ground; there is such a thing as having a bigger budget, and a producer who really has your back, and the ability to make a film that has bigger scope, but you can still retain your creative vision. You might have to do a bit more hand-holding along the way with execs, but it is a possibility.

And I also have gained more confidence because I’ve done so many big, ambitious TV shows, especially this last one, that it’s whet my appetite for doing a bigger movie – and for me, bigger is not that big! The movie I’m looking at is maybe a $15 million movie, which to some people is nothing. For me [it’s] way more millions of dollars than I’ve ever worked with on a movie before! “Laggies” was my most expensive movie, at a few million dollars, but not anywhere near $15 million.

It’s something I’m definitely interested in trying to do, but I’ll still always want to make work where I started the seed of it. “Sword of Trust,” my last movie, started because I wanted to work with Marc Maron as an actor, and I pitched the idea of a pawn shop owner — basically just that — to him, and he said, “Sure, I’ll do that. I can give you a couple of weeks.”

Then I went from there, and I knew I wanted it to be an improv movie, and I wanted it to be a comedy caper because my previous film [“Outside In”] had been a drama. It was heavy, and I just wanted to make something fun and light. Marc and I had been writing, we have worked together a lot in TV, and I directed his last two comedy specials. He’s sort of been my muse for the last few years, and we’ve been co-writing a script for a while. And now, we are romantically connected, and we are quarantining together, so if we can’t finish this damn script in quarantine!

W&H: Are you going out into the garage during the podcasts?

LS: Yeah, that guy. [laughs] Just start pounding on the door!

W&H: Didn’t he used to have people show up in the garage to talk to him, and now I guess everything is socially distant.

LS: He is doing more remote. He just talked to Cate Blanchett remotely, so he’s starting to do those. But still, somebody came over last week. The thing is, there is a way to do it safely. I don’t think they actually do it with masks on, but they stay far enough away, and he’s got disinfectant and gloves. They usually take a picture at the end of the two of them standing side-by-side, and now we’re playing around with different social distancing photographs, so they’ll be forward, and he’ll be in the back sort of lurking. It’s really funny [laughs].

Anyway, that script is 90 pages written, and the last act is outlined. It is a good movie, so we’ve got some things going.

W&H: I really just wanted to thank you so much for your time. This was really, really informative — going through the nuts and bolts of a lookbook, people don’t do that usually, and I think that’s really helpful. I know a lot of people are trying to do movies, TV – everything is so fluid now, and at the beginning of your career, it wasn’t as fluid as it is now.

During your pandemic life, what have you been watching and reading that has inspired you?

LS: Oh my God, well for filmmakers, I cannot recommend these two books highly enough: the books that I pulled from my film bookshelf that I’ve really been enjoying, especially going back and forth between because they’re in such a yin/yang situation, is Andrei Tarkovsky, the auteur from 60s and 70s Russia, who wrote this book called “Sculpting in Time” and it’s just exquisite. It’s so beautiful, he approaches cinema not just like art, but like poetry, and every film is a singular vision of that artist mindset, but he also writes beautifully.

Then on the other side, I’m just loving Sidney Lumet’s book “Making Movies.” He’s a very different kind of filmmaker. This is a man who directed — I mean the list goes on for a couple of pages at the back of the book — it’s got to be at least 30, 40 movies. And it’s great movies like “Network,” “Dog Day Afternoon” — which is one of my favorite movies of all time — and “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” with [Jason] Robards and Katharine Hepburn early on, and this movie with Rod Steiger called “The Pawnbroker,” which we watched recently – a very heavy, intense drama – and “12 Angry Men” was his first sort of breakout, and “Serpico.” He just has this real range. His approach is so different. he’s a journeyman — it’s like a craftsperson’s approach to movie-making.

Those two books have been really interesting to read side-by-side.

I’m watching as many movies as I can, and going back and forth between contemporary fare, long-ago fare, noir films, comedies, dramas. We recently watched a movie I didn’t know anything about: I grew up loving Gene Wilder, and there’s this movie called “The Frisco Kid.” He is so sweet, and he takes it on so seriously as this very devout Jewish Rabbi, and all the decisions he makes in this ridiculous Western comedy caper are all because he’s this devout Jew — it’s the most beautiful thing. So if you’re a big Gene Wilder fan, watch that.

Last night we watched “Toni Erdmann.” It’s so weird and wonderful, so good.

W&H: I love that movie. If you haven’t seen “Toni Erdmann,” you have to watch it.

LS: It’s genius. It’s long but it does pay off.

Check out “Her Effortless Brilliance: A Celebration of Lynn Shelton Through Film and Music” below. Megan Griffiths directed the tribute. 

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