For a start, the Odyssey was the first time a hero in Western culture was celebrated for smarts and cunning—and not just fighting and violence. It was as if Homer had grown up after creating the Iliad (in which 239 characters, identified by name, meet their death), and decided to tell a more civilized tale.
This peculiar man took ads in the newspaper, offering to hire "talkers" who would tell him the wildest and most intimate details of their lives. The end result was a diary with more than 1,000 characters—striving with one another to provide the most compelling, uncensored narrative.
After the finale, what's left isn't the euphoria you get from so many series. It's the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.
Moral grey attempts to capture the unflattening of heroes and villains into complex characters who waver, err, and do not always live up to their ideals or our expectations of either pole.
So many of my interviews these days feel like jousting with someone's soul, trying to get to the personal core of what makes them an artist. But I also love these interviews where the premise is, essentially, tell me a story so I can commit it to history.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
