By Iain Blair
Money. Romance. Ambition. Success. Deception. Downfall. Conviction. Hulu’s limited series The Dropout, the story of Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Theranos, is a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley hustle, ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. It focuses on how this self-made female billionaire loses it all in the blink of an eye and ends up facing a potential 20-year jail sentence for fraud.
Michael Showalter
The six-time Emmy-nominated limited series was directed and executive produced by Michael Showalter, the prolific director, writer and producer who was nominated for his work on the episode “Green Juice.”
I spoke with Showalter, whose credits include The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Lovebirds and the Oscar-nominated The Big Sick, about making the series and his love of post.
Can you talk about directing a show that combines both heavy drama and great comedic timing to tell its story?
Our showrunner and writer Elizabeth Meriwether and her team of writers did a great job weaving humor into the story the whole way through, in every episode. We spent a lot of time in prep going through all the scripts, literally line by line with Liz. It’d be like, what’s the joke here? And getting a picture of what’s in our lead’s head, and then me trying to bring that to life, whether in performance or by using the camera to focus on certain aspects of a scene.
For example, right away, even in the very first episode, we have a scene where Elizabeth Holmes and her brother are in a car, and he’s flipping through her CDs. They’re all Lilith Fair-type female artists. That shot was really important, as was having those CDs on hand. So it’s knowing what is funny and then making sure you have the time to shoot it and do it justice.
How was the shoot?
I directed the first four episodes out of eight over about four months, so we had a good, long schedule. But it was very challenging in many ways, especially in the material itself and in making sure we were telling the story in the right way. It had a big scope, and it was difficult production-wise because every day we were in a different location. We shot almost entirely on location, with lots of background and set elements and VFX stuff.
All of the locations were in LA and doubled for a ton of different places in the story, including Texas, Tennessee, Palo Alto and even Beijing. Then we were also dealing with COVID and all that entailed.
Who was the DP, and what look did you go for?
My DP was Michelle Lawler, who shot The Shrink Next Door for me. We shot digital on the ARRI Alexa [with Leitz Summilux-C lenses]. We wanted a very naturalistic look, but we also did quite a lot of work in the DI.
L-R: EP/showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether and EP/director Michael Showalter on-set
Tell us about post. Was it a traditional TV post schedule?
It was more like a movie post. Limited series like this definitely feel more like movies, as you have the same beginning, middle and end story structure. There is no second season waiting for you. The big difference between film post and TV post is that with the latter, the director doesn’t usually get to stay with the material as long. It’s more down to the showrunner to see post through all the way to the end.
But with this show, it was big and more like a film post, and I was pretty involved all the way through. And we began discussing the sound and music and VFX with our teams in prep, so that felt more like a movie than a TV schedule.
Do you like the post process?
I love it. It’s so creative — you now have all the ingredients, and it’s where you start cooking them to make the show. And if it doesn’t rise properly, you can go back and start again. I love that whole aspect of post and all the experimentation and trial and error. It’s where you discover what you have and get the chance to present it in the best possible way for an audience.
Sometimes you go into post thinking it’ll turn out a certain way, and then it morphs into something completely different and better. With this, it did change in post a bit and got shorter, but I knew that would happen. Basically the show stayed the same. Post was very planned out in terms of the music we used and all the VFX.
Where did you do it?
Because of COVID it was all remote and on Zoom and Evercast.
Let’s talk about the editing. There were multiple editors, so how did that work?
I worked with David Berman, who was Emmy-nominated for Big Little Lies, and Steve Welch, who cut New Girl for Liz Meriwether and won an Emmy for Malcom in the Middle. All the editing was remote too, and it’s so good now with Evercast and other systems.
When I cut my last movie, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, I was here in LA, and all the editing and post was being done in New York. It worked great. I can get cuts all day long within minutes and give my notes. Then the editor can make changes and upload them, and I can instantly review them. It’s so seamless now, and you can do stuff like ADR that way too. I like working that way, and as a TV and film director, I like to empower editors. I’m not the sort of director who’s in the room all the time looking over the editor’s shoulder and micromanaging while they push buttons. I like to give the footage to them and see what they do with it. That’s more my style.
What were the general main editing challenges, given that the series covers nearly 20 years?
I think it was trying to compress so much storyline and so many characters into manageable episodes while keeping up the pace and balancing the drama and comedic elements.
There are quite a lot of VFX. Who did them and what was entailed?
I like to be pretty involved. FuseFX and VFX supervisor Bud Myrick did them, and when you have a project that’s this big in size and scope, I like to rely on all the experience and expertise of the VFX team. We had some big sequences, such as the whole bit when Elizabeth Holmes goes to Beijing for the summer. We shot that in downtown LA and had a lot of set extensions and greenscreen work for it.
When you’re shooting stuff that will get a lot of VFX added to the frame in post, I absolutely want to know on the day exactly where the VFX are going to live in the frame I’m making. So the VFX team is on-set with us the whole time, and we have an ongoing conversation about every little detail. I’m fascinated by VFX, and although no one wants to admit it, the technology is so good now that you can basically fake anything — and the audience will never know. So it might look like you’re in Paris for a scene, but it was actually shot on a soundstage in Burbank.
What about the DI?
We did it with Dave Hussey at Company 3. I’m pretty involved, along with all three of our DPs. We went for a slightly saturated look, and there’s a denseness to the colors. We didn’t go in with that in mind, but it evolved, and I think that the saturated, high-contrast look we settled on really suits the drama of the whole show.
Alongside your producing partner, Jordana Mollick, you run Semi-Formal Productions, which recently inked a two-year first-look deal with HBO Max. What’s the plan?
We’re developing a lot of shows and producing and helping writers and new talent. It’s an exciting time in television.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
