When screenwriter Ed Solomon says that putting together “Full Circle,” a mystery-driven Max limited series directed by Steven Soderbergh, was the hardest work he’s ever done, he well and truly means it. Not just because the story of “Full Circle” was so intricate — chronicling a botched kidnapping from the perspectives of the perpetrators, victim, law enforcement and all manner of individuals tangentially connected to the crime — but also because the project started as a sprawling branching narrative like his first project with Soderbergh, HBO’s “Mosaic.”
The ”branching narrative” of “Mosaic” allowed viewers to choose which narrative path they followed after every scene via a now-defunct app, and hasn’t been replicated since. Solomon and Soderbergh planned to make “Full Circle” as both a linear limited series and a branching narrative, using different cameras and aesthetics for the branching narrative portion. But six months before production, Solomon said they decided to refine their approach.
“We just looked at the boards going, ‘Are we really going to be able to shoot a whole really complicated series, finish for the day and then say, OK, nobody’s going home. Now we’re using these cameras and we’re gonna shoot the same thing you just shot only from an entirely different point of view?’ We thought it just was gonna be so burdensome not only to the cast and crew, but to our own brains,” he said in an interview with TheWrap conducted according to WGA strike guidance, facilitated through Solomon’s personal publicist. “We thought it was going to be too much.”
So Solomon took his favorite parts from the branching narrative script and worked them into the script for the linear version of the series, and they were off to the races.
Below, Solomon outlines the origins and evolution of the project, and how the cleverly drawn characters further changed once Soderbergh’s unique casting process began.
How did this start? Was it originally another branching narrative piece?
Right around the end of working on “Mosaic,” I was noodling with doing another branching narrative. I was seeking and I was also really lucky working in the sort of crime noir genre which is new for me as a writer. It was always stuff that I liked watching but no one had ever given me a shot at really writing it until Steven and HBO did with “Mosaic.” I started just privately making notes on another branching narrative, just trying to find the right kind of crime where the crime itself could be an inflection point in the lives of criminals, the perpetrators and the enforcement all at the same time; so that different stories could overlap from different perspectives, and it seemed to grow out from there. When I told Steven about it and when he got interested in doing it, we originally were going to do it as a linear show that we were going to shoot one way and a branching narrative that we were going to shoot another way, using different cameras, different filmic lexicon, entirely different shooting style, everything. I started writing and then we took a little break to do “No Sudden Move.”
Which is great by the way.
Thank you. I appreciate that. I’m really proud of that. I wish more people got to see it. But once we finished “No Sudden Move,” I got back full time into “Full Circle” and we were about maybe six months before production when we just looked at the boards going, “Are we really going to be able to shoot a whole really complicated series, finish for the day and then say, “OK, nobody’s going home. Now we’re using these cameras and we’re gonna shoot the same thing you just shot only from an entirely different point of view.”
We thought it just was going to be so burdensome not only to the cast and crew, but to our own brains. We thought it was going to be too much.
Once you decided not to do the branching narrative aspect of it, how did the story of the linear version evolve? Did that kind of just refine the approach? Did it make things a little more potent?
So there were a few stages: There was designing both a linear show and a branching narrative show at the same time. That filled several large walls of one office and looked like the bizarre meanderings of an absolutely crazy person (laughs). Then there was me writing a linear version of the show, which was I want to say like 420 pages long, and the branching narrative version of the show which was about 120 pages long — and keeping those two things very separate. So I wanted to make sure that everything in the branching contained new material. Then there’s the decision of Steve and I both looking at it with our own eyes glazing over and going, “If our eyes are glazing over, maybe this is the time.” And so we decided to get rid of the branching narrative. Then the next step was, let me take the stuff I love that I feel is really important, let me use the branching narrative to inform some of the linear show. So then I began a rewrite of the linear show to include a little bit more of what was in the branching that people wouldn’t have seen in a linear show otherwise. And then it became the regular rewriting that happens when actors get involved and the show gets up on its feet and it starts to evolve and you just start to evolve with it. So those are the basic stages.
The characters in this are so rich. It does feel like every single character in the show — and I do mean literally every single character — has an interior life. Was that something that was fun to play with as you were dealing with this sweeping ensemble?
I think having developed this initially as a branching narrative forced me to think of every character in the story as though it were — it was at one point or another — going to be their show. And the result of that for me is a lesson that is probably taught in the very most basic of screenwriting classes that hit me over the head this time: Every character must be a character worthy of carrying their own show. I think you can if you can try to think of every character you write as being worthy of having their own show, it will add energy to some of what normally are seen as ancillary characters, or ancillary scenes even that flesh out the show. I think that was a really interesting lesson for me.
There’s this common thread of family throughout the whole thing. Almost everyone justifies their actions as something that’s being done for their family or for their found family. Was that an important theme for you?
Yes, family and home. The home that you’ve come from and the home that you’re trying to make, and what are you willing to let go of to have a better version of something? I tried to have everyone’s journey be a variation on those themes. Harmony breaks up with her girlfriend and is thrown out of the home she lived in. Xavier and Louis leave their home to start a new home in the United States, only to want desperately to go back to theirs. Sam and Derek just remodeled the home they think they’re gonna be in forever, and by the end they reassess. Mahabir and her family and her marriage, Carmen and his family trying to get home when they realize that the American dream they sought for themselves wasn’t going to work out. That was absolutely a theme and it also stems from the idea that I really wanted every character to truly be the protagonist of their own story. You know the cliche, every villain is the hero of their own story. I really wanted that to be true in this. I really wanted to feel that in this.
There’s also this common thread of wealth disparity and class, and how that affects these characters’ actions.
One of the things I remember talking to Steve about once we had committed to being solely a limited series, and we were talking about putting scenes in a certain order, one of those decisions was to go straight from the Brown family, Claire (Danes) and Tim (Olyphant) and watching them get pitched something where people are basically offering them money that they’re turning down to then cutting to people who are so desperate for money that they’re gonna give up their whole life in order to try to get anything. We were very conscious of that, but always about people striving for better that no matter which level they were at, they weren’t happy until they had more, so for one set of characters it really became about being willing to shed that in order to find a deeper happiness that’s based on being true to who you are, and no longer lying to yourself or to your spouse or to your family.
Zazie is incredible as Harmony. How did that character come about?
The character of Harmony was one of those characters — it’s rare that this happens — where she would be out ahead of me as I was writing. This may sound like bulls–t, but it’s really true. The character would often surprise me as I was writing her and when you have a character like that, you just want to write it as far as you can. She was never not fun to write, and only a few times in my writing life have I had that where you could put a character alone in a room with nothing on the walls and still know how that character would respond. And then Steven has a way with Carmen Cuba, who is our casting director, the two of them work in a really unique way, which is they will isolate a person who they know is right for it but isn’t the obvious choice. And what happens is the tension between the writing of it and the playing of it makes for a richer portrayal of the character than I ever intended, and it makes it look like afterwards there’s no other actor that could have played it. Zazie is such an intuitive and natural actor — by the way, parenthetically, one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with in my life. She is kind and lovely and professional in all the good ways. I adore her as a person and as an as an actor.
From the minute she opened her mouth the first time I was like, I have to follow her along. It was me following her now with the character rather than her being led by me. She really made it her own. I find this to be the case with great artists, as soon as they make it their own, they often make it so much better than I ever imagined.
Can we get a spin-off of her character solving crimes?
If the gods so declare it. I would be thrilled to write any number of shows for the character of Melody Harmony. That would be incredible.
Tell me a little bit about Word by Word.
When the strike hit, pretty early on I thought I wanted to do something that I did in the first couple of strikes that I’ve been involved with — I’ve been in four strikes now. In the first one, I took a bunch of classes, and in the second one I took a lot of writing workshops, and I found both of them to be really helpful. So I thought maybe I’ll do some writing workshops this time, and then I was like, “Jesus Ed, you’ve been in this business long enough, you know so many incredibly cool people, why don’t you just call some of them and just have some conversations about writing?” I have learned a lot from hearing how colleagues of mine, older or younger, do stuff. I thought that would really help freshen up what I do. And from my first responses I thought this is amazing, then immediately thought it just seems weirdly selfish. I thought I wonder if there’d be a way I can hold a series of workshops that would benefit people like me, but also maybe people who were earlier in the continuum of their careers and also offer up an opportunity for people to donate to some of the people who might be affected adversely by the strike. And as long as people keep showing up, we’re gonna keep doing it.
You’re obviously on strike right now. What can you say about what’s at stake in these negotiations?
The current conditions, unfortunately, not just for writers but for everyone in film business, what’s at stake is what’s also at stake in so many other industries in the world, which is as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer the middle class is rapidly vanishing. Right now the middle class of writers is on the verge of extinction. If the powers that be had their way, especially now that the film business is run, not by people who love film but rather tech people who don’t really know the difference, if they had their way we’d all be just gig workers. And the problem is right now, 50% of the Guild is working at minimum which may not seem like a bad thing. But when you then break that down, you parse that minimum fee over the course of what it takes to actually create, write, develop and then run a show, you’re talking two or three years. A staggeringly large number of writers have to hold more than one job in order to even pay the rent. So there’s that issue.
There’s also what is, I know, a controversial issue amongst those who don’t understand the depth of it, which is minimum writers on a show. That’s not just about forcing writers into employment, it’s about keeping a system alive that replenishes the training ground for writers, the farm division so to speak, that trains writers how to actually run shows, that trains writers how to be on set. There are the rare shows that are written by individual writers, but most of the great shows we’ve known are written by staffs of writers, and there are very obvious reasons for that. If I look at my experience, for instance, on “Full Circle” where I was on set all day and then writing at night, it fried me and I’ve been doing this for 40-plus years. It fried me beyond anything that’s ever fried me. But what’s happening now is people have far, far less experience than I do being forced into that same position, and they’re getting burnt out to such a degree that some of them aren’t able to rebound. So not only are we keeping writers out, we’re also creating a system that is not replenishing itself. When people are looking at this simply as a bottom line event, they’re not looking at it as an ecosystem that needs to continually replenish itself in order to survive long-term. I think that’s what’s at stake right now.
