But honestly, none of that was as difficult for me as being in the middle of Covid and wearing glasses with goggles and a mask and visor. I didn’t quite realize how much I communicate through my face — a lot of director-actor relationships aren’t about giving a line reading but through the way that you interact and the nonverbal cues. The pandemic gear got in the way of all that.
How much input did you have on the visual design? Was there any illustrator or director you were looking to for inspiration?
Tim and Blur had been working on the story for a long time, and they had a lot of production art that felt “Thief of Baghdad”-adjacent. I felt the world itself needed to be a little less phantasmagoric and a little more “Deadliest Catch.” My whole thing was I wanted the people to be at risk of being washed off the deck at any moment. They’re either going to get chewed apart by these blunt-nosed sharks, or they’re going to be dismembered by these pincers of these giant crustaceans.
It must be easier to rip characters apart and spill their guts when you’re working in animation.
Yes, and on the water! Like Jim Cameron and Kevin Costner will tell you, there are such things as forces of nature. If you ever do a story that takes place on the high seas, do it in C.G., because you’re not going to be chasing the sun, and you won’t be worried about people being crushed between boats or drowning. And you’ll never be waiting around for the wave machine.
Is there anyone you’d like to bring into the fold if you get to make a Season 4?
There are a lot, but look, this show takes a while. This episode I did took, like, 18 months. We originally started off wanting to do this with Ridley Scott, Jim Cameron, Zack Snyder, Gore Verbinski. So many friends of mine I went to and asked, “Would you want to do something like this?,” and they were like, “Yes!” But the reality is that the only way this show is affordable is if the people who are making it don’t mind losing the money they could be making doing something else.
Are we hoping that the world embraces this show on a heretofore unseen level, making it a no-brainer to increase the subsidy for it? Yeah, that would be great. Until that happens, it’s hard to get the director of “Avatar” or the director of “Pirates of the Caribbean” to drop everything they’re doing and come and play with us.
