Dark waters
First-time showrunner Alma Har’el joins executive producers Julie Gardner and Nathan Ross to tell the story of adapting Laura Lippman novel Lady in the Lake for Apple TV+.
The first TV series starring Natalie Portman, Lady in the Lake follows the lives of two central characters whose paths are intertwined, though they never really meet.
Based on Laura Lippmann’s novel of the same name, the Apple TV+ series stars Portman as Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife living in 1960s Baltimore. When the disappearance of a young girl grips the city, she seeks to shed her secret past and reinvent herself as an investigative journalist.
Meanwhile, Cleo Johnson (played by The Queen’s Gambit’s Moses Ingram) is a mother navigating the political underbelly of black Baltimore while struggling to provide for her family. Though their disparate lives run in parallel at first, Maddie soon becomes fixated on Cleo’s mystifying death, opening up a chasm that puts everyone around them in danger.
Described as a “feverish noir thriller” created, written and directed by Alma Har’el, the seven-part series marks the first scripted series greenlight from Bad Wolf America – the US offshoot of Cardiff-based Bad Wolf (His Dark Materials, The Winter King) – which has partnered with Crazyrose (Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects) to make the long-anticipated series.
Back in 2019, Bad Wolf co-founder Julie Gardner, who is based in LA, and Crazyrose leaders Nathan Ross and the late Jean-Marc Vallée all had their eyes on the rights to Lippman’s novel. It was then Fifth Season (fka Endeavour Content), where both companies had deals, that brought the two parties together to develop the project.
“For me it was this gorgeous moment of synchronicity because I didn’t know Nathan at all, and it was love at first sight because it was just a really nice relationship,” Gardner tells DQ. “We’ve held each other’s hands. We’ve clung to each other – I’ve certainly clung to Nathan for almost four years. It was a real privilege to be able to work with them on this show.”
“It was love at first sight,” echoes Ross, who had come across Lippman’s novel after reading a review of it by Stephen King in The New York Times. “Jean-Marc and I had some good success with [HBO series] Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects, and because it was female-centric, we were very open to teaming with a female-centric production company. I had seen The Night Of [HBO’s miniseries executive produced by Bad Wolf co-founder Jane Tranter] and I was very fond of that. It was the kind of thing we would make.”
Gardner describes Lippman as an “exceptional thriller novelist,” and says the book stood out because it was a thriller that also had the foundations to be a television series that examined issues of race, gender and female friendship.
“It felt to me, as I read the novel, that some of the themes it was examining in the 1960s in Baltimore remained very relevant and current to what was then 2019 and 2020,” she says. “Maddie Schwartz and Cleo Johnson, played by Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, are two women who essentially, in different ways, blow up their lives and reshape them. And they’re seeking a kind of freedom that is outside of their grasp.”
Portman was the only actor in the frame to play Maddie from the outset, and she joined the project very early on in development. “Reading the book, before we got into the rights, for one reason or the other, I just had in my head Natalie Portman from the very first fucking page,” Ross says. “I don’t know why; I love her and she’s obviously great. Who doesn’t love Natalie Portman? It could have been another actress. But for some reason, that was in my head. That’s who it was from beginning to end.”
Sitting down with Ross, Vallée and Gardner in the fall of 2019, the actor read the script, was open to doing a limited series for the first time and liked their pitch. But she just had one question: who’s the director?
Bringing the company’s feature film approach to television, Crazyrose didn’t want a traditional television showrunner to lead Lady in the Lake. Instead, they needed a filmmaker. “Jean-Marc being a writer-director, that’s what we were used to,” Ross says. But with Vallée too busy to helm the series himself, they came across Israeli-American director Alma Har’el, who was on the awards circuit with her acclaimed 2019 feature film debut Honey Boy when Ross and Gardner were establishing their partnership on the series.
“Jean-Marc, who to his credit also turned me on to it, said to Natalie, ‘Have you seen Honey Boy?’ She hadn’t, so she had a homework assignment, and she came back to us and there was some love at first sight on that front as well, and so then it became trying to recruit Alma,” Ross says.
In the wake of Honey Boy, Har’el was “passing on everything,” her agent told Ross. But the executives turned recruiters in an effort to bring Har’el on board. Then when the director spoke with Portman, they formed a quick friendship and bonded over their ambition for the project.
Har’el herself describes being asked to helm Lady in the Lake by Vallée as an “honour,” as she was a “big fan” of his 2013 feature Dallas Buyers Club and his television work. “That was all marked by this approach of a filmmaker, as opposed to a showrunner and a team of writers,” she says. “He was very hard to say no to, very lively and artistic and just full of passion. He just convinced me that there’s a way to make television that feels like an auteur experience.”
As a result, the director was “empowered” to take creative leaps on the project, with Lippman along for the ride as a fellow exec producer alongside Ross, Vallée, Gardner, Portman and more.
“Everybody just said, ‘Go ahead and make it your own,” she remembers. “Of course, there were a lot of fears about how I do things that are very unorthodox, and the structure of the show being very different from other shows in terms of how the characters are set on a collision course but don’t necessarily meet. It was the same thing with the language of the show that involves so much of the dream world and the subconscious. But at the end of the day, they all came together around it and made it possible and supported it.”
In particular, Har’el was focused on weaving together the show’s central mystery with an “inner search for who we are,” which is a familiar motif in her projects. “All of my work, to a certain degree, deals with dreams and the subconscious and shadows, and how those things that we don’t necessarily see inform our lives,” she notes.
Helming an unexpected tale about the price women pay for their dreams, the director says she very much resonated with Maddie’s duality of being Jewish and white, “seeing yourself as persecuted and somebody who can fit into a lot of places that maybe other people could never come into, but then at the same time, you can be oblivious to the struggles of others.”
In tune with her documentary background, Har’el was also interested in the idea of someone who ends up telling other people’s stories rather than their own. “I just love this sentence we wrote for Cleo in the second episode, in the voiceover, when she says, ‘You wanted to tell everybody’s story but your own.’ It’s something very familiar to me and very much inspired me.”
The fact Har’el is in a relationship with Honey Boy actor Byron Bowers, who plays Slappy Johnson in Lady in the Lake, also gave her an understanding of many of the show’s themes. “I kind of wrote the part for him, so [being part of] a couple that is biracial, I’ve gotten a lot of insight into many issues that we cover and got a feeling for it. A lot of the stuff in the show didn’t unfold in the way our relationship unfolded, but definitely gave me a lot of insight into it.”
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“The book is very influential in the adaptation,” says Gardner, with the series written by Har’el, Briana Belser, Nambi E Kelley, Boaz Yakin and Sheila Wilson. “But across seven episodes, Alma’s opened up the world in extraordinary ways. She’s the most beautiful filmmaker. It’s evocative. It’s nuanced. It’s beautiful, and she very much opened up the worlds of the Cleo Johnson character, black Baltimore in the 60s and the Jewish community in that period. Without question, it’s got Alma’s individual stamp across every frame of every episode, but the novel was a great inspiration and foundation.”
During production, Har’el was surrounded by a cast and crew of up to 500 people – a huge increase from her first film, where it was “just me, a camera and my dog,” she jokes. “But at the end of the day, it was something that lived with me for three years, and every word and every cut and every shot had to feel right. It was a challenge that I’m not sure I’ll ever take again. It was just so life-consuming. But now when we’re putting it out, the relief and the satisfaction of seeing it come together does feel triumphant.”
Har’el’s “intuitive” methods on set often ran contrary to a working environment where everyone involved usually knows exactly what’s happening now and next. “That can be very threatening to a creative process that doesn’t have a formula or that doesn’t abide to a certain logic,” she notes. “A lot of times, people will come to me and say, ‘But what’s the logic here? Are we always using the camera in this way when we see her? Are we always doing handheld when there’s action?’
“I see that a lot where the camera is steady, and then when emotions rise, you go into handheld, and I never do that kind of stuff. I never abide by any of those rules. Every scene has to go through what feels right to me. It’s about the moment, and then weaving it together is a tissue that connects all of it, but it’s not falling under any rules. I actually get very frustrated with those rules. Maybe it’s part of me that never was educated [in film] properly, but I have to say that I hope this show doesn’t fall into schematic rules about the camerawork.”
Complicating matters further was the fact that all seven episodes of Lady in the Lake were crossboarded – shot out of sequence – while Portman completed her scenes first before Ingram began hers. In some cases, lines of dialogue from the same scene were recorded months apart in different locations.
“It was such a mind-fuck that I’ll never get over,” admits Har’el, who has previously featured in the DQ100. “But it trained all of us to track emotional stages of a character. Natalie and Moses, and every person on this cast, just had an incredible amount of work to track emotionally what they were doing completely out of order and out of any sense of continuity. I know to some directors, that’s their biggest nightmare. And I understand why, but it was a fun puzzle to do.”
Some scenes did need a higher level of preparation, however, with episode one’s Thanksgiving Day parade “meticulously” planned out, the director says. “I love going between being very meticulous and prepared and being completely loose and leaving it up to the day to tell me what’s the story, before I decide how to shoot it.”
Gardner points to the parade scenes as an example of the scale of the series – a filming process that involved closing streets and bringing in snow at a time when it wasn’t winter in Baltimore.
Production was also complicated by the Covid pandemic, while the editing process was held up by last year’s US actor and writer strikes. “There were key chunks of work where we had to just stop,” she says. “We lived many lives on that show. It was very intense.”
Tragically, the production also faced the loss of Vallée, who passed away in December 2021. Episode one is dedicated “in loving memory” of the director.
“He died when we were deep into prep,” Gardner says. “We hadn’t started filming. He was the person that had brought so many people together. It was an absolute tragedy. Alma really wanted to honour Jean-Marc in the work she did.”
“It’s very auteur-driven,” Ross says of the series, which has Har’el’s influence across every shot. “Jean-Marc would have been very proud. There were a lot of similarities between the two of them, in terms of just micromanaging in the best way, every little detail being looked after and nothing taken for granted.
“When we started a production company, it was to embolden and support auteur-driven filmmakers. No one personified that to us more than Alma. His presence looms large on the project in the best of ways, and I think he would have been very proud and happy with how it turned out.”
Ross acknowledges that the project saw him and Vallée secure their first-choice actor in Portman and first-choice director in Har’el. “And that’s not common,” he says. “To go two-for-two on that front, you’re off to the races.”
He adds: “In these multi-layered, multifaceted, complex limited series projects, there’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, and then the shoot was 100 days approximately. But for Julie and me, it was five years – these things are roughly a half a decade. We’re excited for people to see it.”
tagged in: Alma Har’el, Apple TV+, Bad Wolf, Bad Wolf America, Crazyrose, Fifth Season, Julie Gardner, Lady in the Lake, Nathan Ross