This Way to Indie City

When Lodge Kerrigan’s phone buzzed one day back in 2014, it was Steven Soderbergh calling. He was asking if Kerrigan — the director of such revered independent features as Claire Dolan, Keane and Clean, Shaven — might be interested in turning the film The Girlfriend Experience into a television show.

Kerrigan was no stranger to TV. He’d been working as a director for hire for several years, on such shows as Homeland, Longmire, Bates Motel, The Red Road and The Killing. While his services were in demand, he hadn’t actually created a show of his own. But this was obviously not a problem for his old friend.

“When Steven Soderbergh calls and asks, ‘Hey, do you want to turn one of my movies into a TV show?’ you say yes!” Kerrigan says with a laugh.

So he and his co-creator — writer-director-actress Amy Seimetz — put together a 15-page proposal and brought the R-rated concept to premium cable networks. Starz was interested, and after the partners knocked out a pair of sample episodes — “faster than  they could execute the legal contracts,” as Kerrigan recalls — they had a series commitment.

“It’s rare to have that kind of support,” Kerrigan says of both Soderbergh — an executive producer on the show — and Starz. “They came to Amy and  me because they wanted the show to have an auteur feel to it, to have it all  written and directed by us so it could have a specific vision. The way the TV landscape is evolving, it was just a fantastic opportunity.”

Kerrigan is far from the first of the ‘90s indie directors to make the leap. That honor goes to Allison Anders, who migrated to the medium in 1999, on a couple of episodes of HBO’s Sex and the City.

“I was the first to do it,” she says with no small amount of pride. “I was clued in early. There was a woman in the generation before me, Donna Deitch, who didn’t seem to be making any movies anymore. I was upset on her behalf, until I learned that she had this amazing career directing television.

"I didn’t immediately imagine doing it myself, because it went against the idea of being an indie filmmaker. We had fought for our independence, and by doing TV, you’re literally doing something for hire that’s not your own.”

Starting with that first episode of Sex and the City, though, Anders followed in Deitch’s path. Deitch has directed dozens of television episodes, and while Anders doesn’t have a résumé quite that long, she is constantly working. She recently directed an episode of the CW’s Riverdale, which followed her work on Lifetime’s Beaches remake.

“It’s difficult to put your fingerprints on a show when you work on it, because then you fail,” Anders says. “But I came to realize — and made my peace with — the idea that a show was not my baby. It was someone else’s, and my role was really as a sort of foster mother. I would take care of it for a while, then hand it off to someone else. While I’m at it, I can give it a little bit of my own touch.”

Kimberly Peirce, another indie filmmaker who has found her way to television, exploded onto the scene with the 1999 drama Boys Don’t Cry (for which Hilary Swank won her first Oscar). She followed that with a single episode of The L Word in 2006, then two more features — Stop-Loss (2008) and a remake of Carrie (2013) — and now finds herself much sought-after by showrunners.

Her résumé includes shows like Manhattan, American Crime, Halt and Catch Fire and, more recently, an episode of Six, the History series about Navy SEALs, starring Walton Goggins.

“For a director like me, it’s nice to join the race as it’s being run,” she says. “But I think it’s less about possession than it is that a good idea is communal. If an actor gives me a good idea for something, it’s no less my idea than theirs. I am always in service of the show, but what I’m aiming for is to serve the material.

"Hopefully, when you see one of my episodes, you feel a continuation of something that someone else started, but that I was able to bring up certain elements that needed to be brought up.”

For Peirce, television provided an unexpected bonus: on-the-job training.

“You learn more every time you work,” she says. “We shot my episode of Six in eight days, which forces you to work faster. And I got to use different techniques that I’ve learned over the past two years directing television. You end up with more confidence in your choices, and there’s just no way doing a feature every few years gives you that.”

And then there is the versatility, the opportunity to work in both comedy and drama, which the feature film world doesn’t necessarily allow. Of course, it helps when a show creator reaches out to you personally and says, “This episode has your name on it,” as William Broyles — co-creator of Six with his son, David — did to Peirce.

“So often,” she says, “film directors are boxed in, and only get the chance to work in a single genre. But in television, you get the chance to go outside that box. Shooting that episode of Six allowed me to shoot a relationship scene, an emotional scene, a battle scene and a lighter scene, all in the same episode.”

It took Peirce years to break into television, and in that respect she’s not alone. But in 2015 John Ridley called her to work on his ABC show, American Crime. Ridley also called her comrade Gregg Araki, who directed such ‘90s indie staples as The Doom Generation and Nowhere, as well as more recent work like Mysterious Skin and White Bird in a Blizzard.

Ridley’s call led to Araki’s first foray in television, and he has since directed episodes of Amazon’s coming-of-age comedy Red Oaks, as well as Netflix’s new young-adult series, 13 Reasons Why. While he’s still making indie features, he quickly fell in love with television work.

“It’s exciting and cool to make these mini-movies,” he says. “You get to flex your directing muscles a bit, but there’s an auteur behind it, and it’s not you. It’s someone else’s voice, and you get to implement that voice. You get to be creative, but all the artistic burden and all the responsibility falls on someone else.”

What happened with Peirce and Araki also occurred for Hal Hartley, the director of such beloved ‘90s indie flicks as Trust, Amateur and Henry Fool. Hartley has directed 13 features and many more short films, all of which he wrote. But the impression that many in TV had of him, as they had of Peirce, was that they weren’t necessarily team players.

This, of course, is the farthest thing from the truth for any skilled director, who understands that the job is — first and foremost — about collaboration.

“I really wanted to do it for quite a while,” Hartley says of television. “I moved back to the U.S. from Germany in 2009, and met with people about it. I had my own ideas, of course, but I think it was hard for people to clock me as a director for hire. It took a while for something to shake out.”

What shook out was Hartley’s connection with Red Oaks co-creator Gregory Jacobs, who has long been a first assistant director and producer for Steven Soderbergh. Before he held that job, though, Jacobs was a first AD for Hartley, on Amateur.

“My agent told me about this series on Amazon,” Hartley says with a laugh, “and that it was created by Greg Jacobs. I said, ‘I was at his wedding!’ It was very fortuitous. I did one episode in the first season and it was a good experience for everybody, so they brought me back to do five episodes in season two.”

On Red Oaks, Hartley surprised himself at how easily he slid into the role of directing someone else’s vision. “I’ve never been an employee before,” he says. “I’m used to worrying about everything, including the money and the cast and the crew.

"But it took me only about 20 minutes during the first tech scout to feel at home. I had a really clear idea of the show’s comedy, and I got it pretty quickly. Mostly, the job is to shoot everything you need and then just stay out of the way.”

Hartley’s desire to break into the medium stretches back to the turn of the century, when he realized that the future of the industry was digital.

“I could see, in the early 2000s, that everything was going that way,” he says. “Fans were seeing things electronically, and by 2005, I found myself thinking less and less about theatrical releases and more about taking advantage of the new paradigms. I felt it was the way of the future, and I wanted to get in on it.”

Of course, that’s not how it is for everyone. Tom DiCillo admits he had to be “dragged, kicking and screaming.” Best known for four movies in the 1990s — Johnny Suede, Box of Moonlight, The Real Blonde and quite possibly the quintessential ‘90s indie flick, Living in Oblivion — DiCillo had no real interest in TV work.

But when his wife became ill, he needed to maintain his DGA health plan, so he started taking jobs in episodic television.

“It was really a financial necessity,” he explains, “and the transition wasn’t an easy one. The first time I did it [for a 2003 episode of USA’s Monk], we were having our first conference call, and I think I expressed an interest in changing a pronoun. That’s it — just one pronoun. There was a pause, then the writer spoke up on the line and made it clear to me that my input was not needed on any writing issues.”

Over the next dozen years or so, he would continue to work on shows like Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: SVU, The Good Wife and Chicago Fire. Then, in 2015, along came the Netflix series Flaked, starring Will Arnett. That experience, he found, was altogether different from anything he’d had before.

“I felt completely at home on Flaked,” he says. “They made me feel extremely welcome, and the freedom and the courtesy that they gave me was a refreshing change. I think you see it in my work — I tried harder.”

Now that they’re all working so much in television, each of these six are at least thinking about doing more.

Kerrigan is shooting season two of The Girlfriend Experience, coming to Starz next year. DiCillo is still mostly focused on getting another film off the ground, but his reps are pushing him toward TV. Hartley has a show in development at Amazon, Our Lady of the Highway, about a group of nuns who start brewing beer to keep their convent going.

Anders has developed three pilots — two at AMC that ultimately didn’t go forward — and is looking for something else of her own to do, perhaps a limited series.

Peirce had a show almost go for A&E and has two more projects she’s pitching. Araki has a few things he’s working on, but which he is still developing.

“A lot of people I know from the indie world are moving to TV,” Araki says. “It fits the indie skill set. Shooting fast and cheap is well suited to TV. The many years I spent in the indie trenches helped me immensely in television. You have to work in a very efficient way, much like an indie film.”

It’s a sentiment echoed in some fashion by each of the other five filmmakers: this move they’ve all made is a surprisingly natural one, and their skilled work is typical for one very good reason.

“A good director is a good director,” Peirce says. “That’s the thing people really need to remember.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 4, 2017