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Interview: Amy Seimetz Talks Sex, Aliens, and The Girlfriend Experience

We spoke to Seimetz about achieving a “live wire” atmosphere on set.

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Interview: Amy Seimetz Talks Sex, Aliens, and The Girlfriend Experience
Photo: Starz

Throughout her career, Amy Seimetz has displayed a consistent emotional intelligence, showing how characters are eaten up by obsessions that are informed by their habitats. Last summer, the writer, director, and actress casually stole Alien: Covenant out from under her more famous co-stars, displaying an achingly human sense of terror that allowed that film to fleetingly recapture the visceral highs of its legendary predecessor, Alien.

Now, Seimetz is back in the auteur’s chair with the second season of The Girlfriend Experience, which splits her and fellow filmmaker and co-creator Lodge Kerrigan off from one another, allowing them to each riff on the escort lifestyle in distinctive and eccentric fashions. Seimetz brings to her portion of the season, “Bria,” what she brings to her on-screen performances and to her first film as a director, Sun Don’t Shine: a humorous and tragic understanding of the fragility of relationships in extremis. I spoke with Seimetz last week about her methods of coaxing and achieving a “live wire” atmosphere.

“Bria” resists the tropes of the expensive-escort drama: the high rises and luxury and such. How did it come about?

In order to keep it interesting and new and really play around with the limited-series format, we wanted to approach season two in a totally different way. The format was key to keeping it new for audiences, splitting Lodge and I up and having us each do our own episodes. Being a person who doesn’t want to get stuck aping my own style, I wanted to get away from the corporate world that I explored last season. I wanted to shoot my story in a place that was a little wild and messy, and explore avenues of the working class. I wrote “Bria” for New Mexico, knowing that I could put this character in a place that felt very planetary, like she’s an alien on a new planet. I was inspired by Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, and I wanted to treat each character like they didn’t belong in this world.

That’s funny, because I thought about Walkabout while watching “Bria.”

Mm-hmm. That was definitely on our mood board. [laughs] I love Roeg’s movies. We also had a lot of photographs from Blade Runner, strangely. I’ve always been interested in blending genres and coming out with something new. Here, I wanted to blend the tropes and textures of an American western with sci-fi, and sort of defy genre in a way.

Hearing you discuss the alien-ness of settings reminds me of how you used Florida in Sun Don’t Shine. It’s difficult, and I love this, to describe your aesthetic. There’s an intangible creepiness to your work.

I have a strange sense of humor. I look at my movies and shows and think, “This is so darkly funny.” [laughs] I grew up in Florida, it’s weird there, and it’s a part of my sensibility. Location is such a huge player in atmosphere and the way I approach things. I went to New Mexico a month before production and did pre-scouting and rewrote the script to visually incorporate the textures of the setting: the wildness and seediness of everything there. Landscape is always a character to me.

When you rewrote the script to accommodate certain locations, were you planning specific images at that point, or is your process more intuitive?

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It’s a mix of both. Again, I was really inspired by The Man Who Fell to Earth and there are these great scenes of Bowie in the desert having a sort of picnic. I thought the desert would be so beautiful and weird and isolating in a different way than the first season’s setting, where we’re locked in these hermetically sealed rooms, you know? I have these visions, but the location will bring something new and interesting, giving a new perspective on a character’s home or work. I like to take advantage of what’s in front of me.

Your direction feels very spontaneous.

The show isn’t improvised, but I want things to feel unpredictable, and for viewers to feel the anxiety of watching these live wires. Filmmaking is a contrived medium. There’s a hundred people working on this thing, so trying to create the sensibility of a live wire is what I always aim for, and it requires an intense amount of pre-production. I feel like films are really made in pre-production. If you plan it really well, then you can be spontaneous.

I wanted to circle back to what you said about your sense of humor in your work. I think that Carmen Ejogo’s performance is very funny on one level.

Oh my god, she’s hilarious. Doing comedys is really hard, and by no means do I think The Girlfriend Experience is a comedy, but playing the straight guy against Harmony Korine is a magnificent feat.

Some of the entitled men that we’ve seen in the show are types that we’re familiar with—politicians, CEOs—but I haven’t seen Paul before. He’s a unique creation. Where did you and Harmony find this character?

That character was so hard to cast because on the page it’s so weird, and I needed somebody who understood how to normalize weirdness. And, for that, there’s nobody better than Harmony Korine. It’s almost like I wrote it for him.

I assumed you had written it for him.

No, it was just magical that Harmony wanted to do it. He’s so wonderful to work with, so open. And he’s a live wire. Harmony was an ideal actor to come on board because he’s so interesting and constantly making choices that you’re not expecting. I was fascinated as a kid with divorced parents, and meeting their new significant others was always a weird situation. But I often knew that it was a big deal for the new person to meet the kids—that it was something special and that, for my mother’s significant others, meeting her kids meant that they had reached some sort of new level in the relationship. Even though I didn’t have any control over it. [laughs]

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In season one, I didn’t really tap into what the johns were also paying for. Yes, company, but what else do these men want ownership over with these women? I was fascinated with the idea of a guy who didn’t necessarily want sex, but who wanted to buy intimacy and buy this woman’s life, and, in turn, have this sort of family experience. Some of the women we interviewed had clients for like 10 years, which was mind-blowing to me. Some men wanted to buy things for the sex workers because they wanted to feel that they were saving this person. The men were paying to make themselves feel better.

You and Harmony are both actors and filmmakers. Do you two speak the same collaborative language?

Each actor requires a different sort of communication, you know? Carmen is so smart and astute, her direction was always about moment-to-moment evolution of emotion, and she’s very good at communicating where the character is at each emotional beat. Harmony responded to descriptions of a scene’s sound design. So sometimes I’d be like: “I want this to be really loud and nonstop, so just keep talking. And now I need you to be quiet so I can feel the space.” And he understood that because he’s a filmmaker. He understands performance through a cinematic language. It’s the same with Tunde [Adebimpe], who played the U.S. Marshal—he’s the lead singer of TV on the Radio—and he also understood things on a rhythmic and sonic level.

Did you and Lodge discuss how the season’s two parts would complement one another, or were you each in your own orbit?

A little of both. We discussed a mirroring of thematic elements, but we each also wanted to go off and do whatever we wanted to do, and really push the show into an auteur realm. In terms of literal crossover elements, we didn’t feel the need to keep each other in check.

Each piece is remarkably reflective of its creator. It’s an interesting experiment to split you guys up like that.

Yeah, I think so too. It offers a revealing glimpse of the process of direction. For cinephiles, it should be interesting to re-approach season one, in which we collaborated on the same story, and see the differences in each episode’s direction now that season two has allowed us each to do our own thing.

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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