Page 21 - Real Style February 2018

xer, meaning when things go wrong with the cons, the big boss sends in Shelly and Lenny Cohen to x things.
rs: How do you come up with the storylines? Pa: You have an amazingly smart, challenging group of people, where you sit in a room and bulls***. You somehow organize that bulls*** into a story. One of the great things about working with Adam, who comes from the feature world, is I think a lot of feature shows don’t ask “What is this about?” Adam and I spend a lot of time talking about that, before
we pitched the pilot, before the pilot and even before the second season. We know we are telling a story about a con artist, but what is that really about? Like our favourite movies, which are about identities and swapping identities and pretending to be other people—why do they speak to us?
Why is it such an American thing to want
to see a con escape? Whenever we get lost in coming up with the story, we just clear that out. Why? It says that about identity, and can you know the person you love and falling in love, are you pretending... To a certain degree, is there something okay about that? We want to explore all those things, even though we are kind of doing this lighter side dark comedy. Those things still exist in those stories.
rs: Inbar Lavi morphs into the person that her mark falls in love with. It’s a very interesting concept, of “Do we do that in real life?”
Pa: Obviously that’s an extreme version of what we are all doing in our own lives. Also, wanting to talk about social media and the Internet. You can now invent a persona that you present to the world all the time. One of the interesting things about Mad Men is when people want to do things and not be seen, they just make a phone call and say “I’m going to be gone for three hours.” That world doesn’t exist anymore. There’s a kind of
more sophisticated version of inventing yourself and disappearing. We are a persona; we are inventions, to a certain degree. Inbar’s character is so good at being these different people. What happens when you really fall in love, then? Do
you wonder if you are fooling yourself? When she falls for Patrick in the rst season, there’s this question of “Am I on the job or am I really doing this?” The second season explores that quite a bit. You see Ezra and the other two, Richard and Jules. They become good at this. It’s exciting at rst, but then it comes with consequences. If you see every interaction as a con at a certain level, what does that do to you?
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