Director Jeremy Podeswa has directed almost every premium-television show you can think of, from Six Feet Under to True Blood, Dexter, American Horror Story, Boardwalk Empire and now The Handmaid’s Tale.HBO
Jeremy Podeswa is a practical sort of artist. Ask the Toronto-born, award-winning film and television director an abstract question about the meta-cultural impact of working on television’s most talked-about shows, and you’ll get an answer rooted in the nuts-and-bolts labour of making the series.
It’s not that Podeswa doesn’t care for such questions, he’s just too busy working.
Speaking to him by phone from his second home in Los Angeles, only a fortnight after he learned that he’s been nominated for a fourth Primetime Emmy Award (for his work on Game of Thrones), I asked him to take a moment and consider the fantastic trajectory of his career.
Starting in the eighties and nineties with acclaimed Canadian indie shorts and features such as Fugitive Pieces, The Five Senses and Eclipse, Podeswa has since directed almost every premium-television show you can think of, from Six Feet Under to True Blood, Dexter, American Horror Story, Boardwalk Empire and now The Handmaid’s Tale. Does he find his ascent dizzying?
“When you’re making an indie film, and then showing it, you don’t have 100 million people all over the world watching it, like you do with these long-running television shows. A television show is very present in people’s lives – and can be for years. It’s just not the same. But I don’t get overwhelmed any more because my build-up has been incremental. Six Feet Under was almost 20 years ago.”
However, Podeswa is hardly blasé about his achievements.
“I did have a feeling of awe, almost overwhelming, when I was working on the show Rome, and we were filming in Cinecitta [a massive, legendary studio in Rome], with hundreds of extras. … My mind was blown, and for a minute I thought, ‘How did I get here?’"
Podeswa works with actor Emilia Clark on HBO's Game of Thrones.HBO
Shows such as Game of Thrones have enormous fan bases, a subset of which are the "toxic fanboys” – fans, of all genders, whose sense of ownership of the show can cross over into an abusive relationship. What kind of pressure does that bring to the work?
“There’s so much at hand that you have to take care of on the set – because the shows are really complex – that I’m so preoccupied with doing the job of being a director. The last thing you have time to think about are anybody’s expectations. It’s exciting to do a zeitgeist-y show, and it’s great to know you are not making something in a vacuum, but it doesn’t change the actual job. Sure, some of the online fan chatter can be a bit… funky. But most of it is pretty good.”
Every week, Podeswa’s current gig, the television version of The Handmaid’s Tale, becomes more relevant – and Podeswa finds the art/life conflation as alarming as the rest of us do.
“It’s scary and complicated, but it also makes you feel that you have a greater sense of purpose. The show would be successful at any time, but right now it also is saying things people need and want to hear. One of the episodes I did has a heart-wrenching scene where Offred is separated from her child. That was broadcast the week that the same thing was happening at the U.S. border. We could never have imagined that when we were filming, but when it was broadcast... it was devastating.”
Despite such occasional parallels between television and reality, Podeswa notes that the popularity of streaming is making television dramas far less reactive.
“The biggest change shows up in how the episodes are written. Because people can watch a whole season in one sitting, the writers are more mindful that people are experiencing the shows in the way they might read a novel. You don’t have the audience reaction the way you did with weekly broadcasts. That immediate dialogue between writers and audiences is gone, and that is certainly a loss, but in a way, streaming television is more freeing for the writers.”
U.S. premium television has been very good to Jeremy Podeswa, but he’s not leaving feature films behind.
“When I go back to features, I’ll have more skills to work with. The diversity of writers, actors, designers – of everybody I’ve worked with – has made me far more versatile as a director and a writer. In the last decade, I’ve directed everything in television from realistic dramas to fantasy epics, historical dramas to vampire horrors. Working in television, you learn to do all sorts of things very quickly and precisely, because of the speed of the process and dexterity it gives you. And there are more opportunities in a given year to experiment, try out all kinds of new tools in storytelling.”