Cause and Effect Ripple through All the Storylines: A Conversation with ‘Lady in the Lake’ Creator and Showrunner Alma Har’el

When the disappearance of a young girl grips the city of Baltimore on Thanksgiving 1966, the lives of two women converge on a fatal collision course. Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) is a Jewish housewife seeking to shed a secret past and reinvent herself as a journalist, and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) is a mother navigating the political underbelly of Black Baltimore while struggling to provide for her family. Their disparate lives seem parallel at first, but when Maddie becomes fixated on Cleo’s mystifying death, a chasm opens that puts everyone around them in danger. From visionary director Alma Har’el, Lady in the Lake emerges as a feverish noir thriller and an unexpected tale of the price women pay for their dreams.

There is an incredible magnitude of visionary storytelling at play in the adaptation of The Lady in the Lake from first-time showrunner Alma Har’el (Honey Boy). A hint of what is to come into play lets you dip your toes in the water with the hypnotizing opening title sequence, and a score that hinges on earworm and curiosity. The seven episodes take you on a whirlwind of a ride, where characters unravel and shed inner and outer truths, led by Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, as two individual women walking in different shoes, navigate their lives in 1960s Baltimore.

While avoiding crossing over into spoiler territory, this whodunit quixotic dream state like mystery is worth the perilous ride through 1960s Baltimore alongside the people, the music and storytellers, and the politics that defined a generation. It’s also worth taking a deep dive into analyzing the story, character, and overall direction. I’ll leave you with this – Alma does not shy away from her bold vision, but rather fully embraces artistic and creative liberties that anchor the foundation of the limited series. (You’ll see once you watch Episode 6.)

Alma Har’el spoke with Script about why she was drawn to the characters in the book, the process of character development to rewriting while filming, creating the show's specific visual aesthetic and tone, her collaboration with her writers’ room, and so much more. 

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: What initially attracted you to the book?

Alma Har’el: I was given the book by Jean-Marc Vallée, who's no longer with us, he tragically passed away a week before pre-production, which was extremely shocking, both as somebody who had the honor to know him and also as a first-time showrunner...realizing I'm doing this without...he was somewhat of a North Star in terms of his faith in the project and putting it together. And his partner, Nathan Ross, is still of course on the project, they handed me the book and said that Natalie [Portman] is attached to it and is interested in it as a producer and an actress. And that, of course, was the first shining light and omen that made me read it.

And then I read it and I was really taken by Maddie Morgenstern and Cleo. I fell in love with both of them. Cleo was a very different character in the book, we reimagined her and her world. And the first meeting I had with Natalie, we said, ‘OK, we're gonna do it, but we have to turn it into a two-hander.’ Then I dove into a lot of research about the murder that inspired the book, the murder of Shirley Parker, about her, about women in her circle, Black women in Baltimore, and it just revealed such a big world full of politics and music.

I was drawn in and I think, as a Jewish Ashkenazi white woman, I definitely think there's something in Maddie Morgenstern that has been...it's your biggest fear, being wrapped up in your own struggles and your own sense of victimhood, that you would completely be oblivious and tone deaf to the those around you. And I think we're living it now in the world. So, it was an opportunity to humanize that moment and try to understand how can something like that happen?

Sadie: In terms of the character development, especially between Cleo and Maddie and how their stories are running in parallel but are very much on different sides of the tracks, how were you able to keep that momentum and their individuality without necessarily needing to lean on one another to serve or steer the story?

Alma: Yeah, TV is fascinating in that regard. I often watch things that have ensemble casts but that are led by two characters or one or three or four characters, which is something we do here. It's a whole art form of its own to juggle storylines within a script and how to do it while centering a storyline but also making this whole cause and effect ripple through all the storylines. And I wanted all of it to have a lot of motion and momentum.

Sometimes I watch episode one and I feel like it’s almost you're like a pinball inside of a big pinball machine that's Baltimore and being thrown around it, you know, and kind of hitting a lot of spots that can scare you. And so it was really done first obviously in the writing which is the development of the characters, building the world and then trying later on in the edit which was is a whole other thing too, separate the story and make sure that they stand on their own and then weave them together.

In the process of shooting, we rewrote the script completely as we were shooting. I work a lot with the actors to bring themselves into it. And then in the edit…you can really write in the edit, but we didn't write in the edit because of the strike. So, we just sort of had this process of making sure that it just flows in a way that keeps connecting all the dots.

Sadie: Was the narrator device of Cleo original to the book or was that added on in the rewrite phase?

Alma: That is actually one of the things that stayed from the book, but was, I would say, sharpened. The book itself has a lot of different points of views of characters in Baltimore, speaking about what happened, some of them you just hear for one or two pages and never see them again. So, every chapter is a different point of view. But I was very taken by Cleo's sort of voiceover from the dead that I kept and expanded upon.

Sadie: Another great thing about this series is the color palette and the tone of the show. There's this muted blue that resonates through that kind of, at least for me, insinuates this ghostly effect, like an offset of reality. Landing on that aesthetic decision, what were those conversations like with your key creatives such as your DP, production designer, costume, all of it?

Alma: Oh, my goodness, you're really asking all the good questions. So, what happened was that I very much wanted to shoot this on film, but wasn't allowed to. I was very much, during my research, obsessed with these Kodachrome slide films by a few photographers, one of them being Fred Herzog – he took photos in the beginning of like color photography and really made a name for himself in the 50s and 60s with that specific street photography. All of our references were only street photography, we never used anything from fashion or films.

My production designer JC Molina, who is a force, helped me shape the look of the show. I went to meet with Yvan Lucas who is really an exceptional colorist who in the same year last year did Killers of the Flower Moon and Barbie. But I've been a fan of his since he did Seven…and it was a turning point, what he did there…he's a true artist. I went to see him, and I said ‘I really need to figure out how to get there’ because I don't want to just leave it all to digitally enhancing the picture and I said, ‘I'm thinking about painting all the sets in Kodachrome tones.’ So, when I come to the color, we can have a good start to get to where I want to be.

And we ended up having these very specific colors in all the production design and the costumes that we named the “Herzog red”, which was an orange-red that you can only get in Kodachrome - the blue, the hues, everything shifted towards that on all the sets, and all the clothes and everything, no primary colors. And then when we got to the color, we could then dial it in to make it look the way it does. So, it was a few steps that got us there. And I think that it gives you almost a photography kind of look to it - street photography - and also a bit otherworldly-dreamy look that we achieved with the lenses that we created with Panavision that gives you this kind of old way of breaking light.

Sadie: When it came to putting together your writers’ room, what kind of voices were you looking for to help shape the tone of this world?

Alma: We had three wonderful Black women, Nambi E. Kelley, Briana Belser, and Sheila Wilson, who also joined us as a producer and was on the set a good portion of the shoot as I was rewriting. And of course, executive producer Boaz Yakin who wrote episode five and the finale. I wrote six with Sheila and I wrote one and two. So, it was really a lot of people working together.

And as a showrunner, as I'm sure you know, you kind of have to take everything in and make sure that tonally everything sits together and in the dialogue. So, it was the first time of me doing it. I was learning the process of it and how it's done. I think that the most important thing that I got from the writers’ room with these exceptional, not just writers, but women, is the different perspectives they had on the story. A lot of very challenging conversations about the relationships between Jewish folks and Black folks in the '60s. Why things have turned out the way they turned out and the way they did.

But also, from the perspective of each character - brought in Byron Bowers, who's a consulting producer - and really worked a lot on the men and making sure how the Black men in this show have a certain sensibility, that is both very tough and very hardened by the reality, but also have a lot of interiority, and a lot of inner life and sensitivity to the women in their lives, which you don't usually see often in those relationships - a lot of loyalty and honor. And so really, these conversations informed everything.

And then there was just a major period of also rewriting while we were shooting, as we had to recast the character of Cleo and got Moses [Ingram] to come in who was from Baltimore, and sort of wanted to make sure a lot of the world and everything that happens for that character is authentic to the place. So then being in Baltimore brought a lot of new ideas. So yeah, very long process, a lot of rewriting, and a lot of good people helping with those conversations.

Sadie: The magic that happens, especially being on location and realizing how much location truly informs the story.

Alma: Yeah, I would say this: character is destiny and location is story.

Sadie: I love that. Was there an overall thematic anchor for you on this show?

Alma: There are certain things that come very naturally to me as a writer. And the thing that I had to keep in mind on this is to make everything work together - the aspect of the mystery, the suspense, and the tension. Moses gave me a sweatshirt at the end when we wrapped that said, ‘Murder tension mystery’ on it, [laughs] because I kept saying it to her.

And the idea for me was that there are two things we're always investigating in this show - who did it and who we are - so both of those should have that tone. Even when we fall with Maddie through the rabbit hole of trying to figure out what happened and who is the murderer, we're actually also figuring out as we go down who she is and weaving those two mysteries together constantly for all the characters.

Sadie: And it works so well. I really enjoyed that chase of the story, and ultimately, she’s telling her story as she is telling someone else’s.

Alma: I really identify with this idea that as a documentary filmmaker, there's a line that Moses says in the second episode, ‘You wanted to tell everybody's stories, but your own.’ And I really identify with that. I have a lot of pain in my past, a lot of trauma, and a lot of secrets and things like that, that did not involve any murders, [laughs] but definitely feel like something that is extremely hard to share. And by telling other people's stories, I often get to really look at those things. So, I think that was a big theme.

And then the other theme was the search for the marvelous, which I think is also what has defined my life - searching for that. And through creative endeavors, through spiritual experiences, through dreams, through psychedelic experiences that I think also informs this show, you know, being in the 60s, there's a trippy element to it. So those are the things - it was just searching for the marvelous and then finding out who did it. Who did it to you? Who’s the murderer? Who did it? 

Lady in the Lake premieres July 19, 2024, on Apple TV+.