Awards Daily talks to Michael Showalter, director of the first four episodes of Hulu’s The Dropout, about getting inside Elizabeth’s head and why he’s interested in characters that deceive.
Based on his recent projects, director Michael Showalter has been on a bit of a fraud kick.
“The Shrink Next Door [on Apple+], Tammy [The Eyes of Tammy Faye], and The Dropout all have a central main character who is charismatic and driven and deceptive,” says Showalter. “In our culture right now, with the last president and the way in which social media has affected the way we present ourselves to the world, there seems to be a pandemic in the culture of following false idols.”
And anyone who invested in or worked for Elizabeth Holmes’ company Theranos would agree.
There have been many podcasts, books, and documentaries on how Holmes defrauded investors for more than a decade, but none of these projects have ever been able to get inside her head the way Hulu’s The Dropout has, with Amanda Seyfried as the ill-fated founder.
“Amanda and I had phone conversations and Zooms with some people who were there,” says Showalter. “Some Theranos people and someone who went to high school with Elizabeth Holmes. Those were really fascinating conversations where we got to ask all sorts of questions just to get a sense of what she was like from people who were there with her.”
Showalter found her participation in a dance troupe especially interesting, the idea that she was just someone in high school trying to fit in and who liked to dance.
“We [the showrunner, executive producers, and Amanda] would just have endlessly long conversations about what we all thought. I think what’s really fascinating from purely a creative filmmaking standpoint is to see the character start to take shape in the form of Amanda Seyfried’s performance. In that process, you start to learn about the character. You start to discover the character as you’re helping the actor create that performance.”
One connection that really gained some clarity for Showalter was Elizabeth’s relationship with Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews).
“We started to realize, for us anyway, he’s just really in love with her. A lot of my understanding of the Sunny character is that he’s a guy who’s just madly in love with this person and willing to do anything for her. And that’s an interesting thing that happens in the course of doing the research and living with the story. And then it just starts to become a story about people.”
The limited series also grapples with Holmes’s alleged sexual assault that took place during her sophomore year at Stanford.
“There was a desire to want to be as delicate with the fact that I don’t know to what extent that it’s been reported or corroborated. We didn’t want to go all the way and show something where we don’t really know what happened, but I think it’s clear that something happened and something traumatizing, but also, it’s something that a lot of people can relate to as being in college and drinking and going to parties and being sexually active at a young age and all of the consequences of that. Liz [Meriwether] wanted it to be like that, so from a directorial point of view, it’s definitely a turning point for Elizabeth. It feels like she is creating an armor around her. With each crisis, she quadruples down on her ambition as potentially a coping mechanism for whatever pain she might be working through.”
For as dramatic as The Dropout is, it’s not without its lighter moments, something Showalter felt strongly about.
“There’s a surreal absurdism. It’s such a bonfire of the vanities where you have heads of state and five-star generals and ex-presidents and vice presidents, you have the most powerful men in the world eating out of her hands. You have to be able to satirize that and see it for what it is and try to poke fun at the folly of it because we’re all responsible in a sense for these kinds of train wrecks. I think it’s really important for there to be a sense of humor to it because it’s ridiculous. Her voice. The clothing. It’s all so obvious now. You look back on it and think, ‘How could anyone have bought this?'”
As director of the first four episodes of the 8-episode limited series, Showalter had the task of establishing the mood of the show for fellow directors Francesca Gregorini and Erica Watson.
“For me, I definitely think we found some sort of visual vocabulary of how the show would feel and look, and wanting to make the audience feel like you were there, what it might have felt like to be in those offices, in those buildings, in those meetings. If I handed anything off, it would be to set the tone of what the show is going to look and feel like.”
Even though he may be fascinated with exploring figures involved in fraud, he also hopes that his work allows for the space to analyze the reasons why they did what they did.
“[I wanted] to try to understand them and make sense of it, to not see them as separate from me, but to understand what could be the underlying mechanism behind these situations and to try to come to it from a human and comedic place as well.”
The Dropout is streaming on Hulu, with new episodes every Thursday.