[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - The best response you can have to a payoff in a thriller is someone goes, "Oh, right, I forgot, of course..." [multiple voices chattering] [Narrator] On Story offers a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

All of our content is recorded live at Austin Film Festival and at our year-round events.

To view previous episodes, visit OnStory.tv.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story."

A look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators, and filmmakers.

This week's "On Story," "Mare of Easttown" creator, Brad Ingelsby.

- I think of 'em as like a penny you put in the piggy bank.

Always putting little pennies in the piggy bank and then one day you turn around, you got a little bit of money to spend.

That's usually how I write characters is like, "Oh, that's interesting, I can maybe use that."

And once you get enough of those things, you feel like you got a little bit of momentum.

But I think it's also time.

You just have to spend time with the character.

By the time I get to writing, it feels like I've known them my whole life.

[paper crumples] [typing] - In this episode, join Brad Ingelsby, creator of the HBO hit "Mare of Easttown," for a conversation on writing the small town thriller filled to the brim with writing that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

[typewriter ding] [solemn music] [Barbara] I watched all of your films.

And one of the things I think is so amazing is the ecosystem you have.

That your setting is as much a part of the story as the people.

You get an A+ in mining your personal history for your content.

So can you just talk a little bit about how, that's definitely unique.

- When I'm starting to write something, I have a knowledge of a certain place, a certain way of life, a group of routines that a group of people would go through every day.

And I think it's probably most evident in "American Woman" and "Mare."

I think those two stories in particular speak to how I grew up.

Aunts living down the street, in that case, her sister lived across the street, in Mare's case, her ex-husband lives in the backyard, essentially.

That's why we called it "Mare of Easttown."

It's about how a community has shaped Mare in ways that are good and bad.

[dog barking in distance] [tapping] [door opening] - Hey, Mare.

- Is Frank home?

- Yeah.

- Pennsylvania's a pretty blue collar state.

That's something that's evident in all of your films.

That exploration of that, is that what helps you more richly build a character?

- I guess the work ethic and the way of life was always instilled in us at a young age.

And I admired it a lot.

And I felt like those were the people that I could relate to, in a way.

And I think there's a heroism in the every day.

I think that's a part of what I try to get out in "Mare," is the resilience of a certain group of people that I really admire and it's something I've seen in my own life, I continue to see when I go home.

And it's a quality that I really like to write about.

And if you can get specific, I think the more specific you can get about a community, a life, a family, the more universal it becomes.

- After having watched "Mare" and then going back to watch "American Woman," it was interesting to see the evolution and the space that you had because you have an hour and a half movie and then all of a sudden you have seven hours and you can do a lot more with that.

So can you talk a little bit about how you look at a character like that in developing them?

- Yeah, I think it's, in the case of "American Woman," it was a story about maturity.

Like you said, we were trying to get a glimpse of a life in an hour and a half or a little longer than that.

And it felt like if we jumped time and we were able to drop in on her life at these different times in her life, when there was a critical moment or critical moments, that it would give you a portrait of a life without having to be there every minute of every day, 'cause no one would've watched it.

But I think that "American Woman" was the test drive, in a lot of ways, because it was very much about a way of life, that story.

Her sister lived across the street.

It's about a community, a family, that's broken, but hangs together, that fights a lot, but ultimately loves each other.

And "Mare" has a lot of that.

I think "Mare," if "American Woman" was the portrait of a woman, then I think, I think "Mare" is the portrait of a community.

And obviously Mare is the hero, is the audience's eyes and ears and we're tracking her mainly, but I was interested in Dawn and Lori and all the neighbors.

And that becomes very hard to tell in an hour and a half.

And so what a mini series allows you is just to go and spend time with the characters that in "American Woman," I could never have spent time with.

[crowd cheering] - Help me bring them out here, folks.

Beth Henley.

[crowd cheering] - Saw you on TV this morning, Dawn.

You know if you don't think I'm doing my job, I just wish you'd come to me first.

- This isn't about you, Mare.

It's about finding my daughter.

- Mare, be quiet.

- Yeah, I know that.

I do know that, but I'm doing my job, Dawn.

- Mare, it's not the right-- - Get her away from me.

- It's not the right time to have this conversation, okay?

You can have it later.

- Credit to HBO that they weren't asking us to cut every single scene that wasn't about the plot or the procedural aspect of the show, because we were all convinced that if we do our job emotionally, that when all the cards are laid out on the table, at the end of the series, it will be surprising in terms of the procedural elements of the show.

It'll be a surprise reveal, but it will also be incredibly emotional.

But the only way for it to be incredibly emotional is that you get to spend time with the people and you've built up a connection to them so that when the killer is revealed, it's surprising and also devastating.

- I think that's a really hard thing to know, for a writer, is who's ready to develop, especially if you're gonna be taking the time to be writing on spec.

Is this person gonna make it past page 30?

Is there anything here?

Can you talk a little bit about how those people present themselves to you?

- I really think of it as like, like, it's really a collection of moments.

When I was growing up, my grandmother moved in with us.

And my grandmother was a very tough, stubborn lady that ultimately got arthritis and was humbled by that.

She was very independent, always wanted to drive on her own, maintained her own house long after her husband passed away and then had to move in with us 'cause she wasn't able to live on her own.

That's a very humbling experience.

And had to move in and my mom had to help take care of her.

Oh, that's interesting.

Anyway, I say that because, I think of 'em as like it's a penny you put in the piggy bank.

Always putting little pennies in the piggy bank.

And then one day you turn around, you got a little bit of money to spend.

And so that's usually how I write characters is like, "Oh, that's interesting.

I can maybe use that or I can maybe use that."

And once you get enough of those things, you feel like you got a little bit of momentum.

But I think it's also time.

You just have to spend time with the character.

And usually I've spent months and months with the character before I ever write them.

And so by the time I get to writing, it feels like I've known them my whole life.

And if Mare walked in here or Lori walked in here, I feel like I know what they would do, but that just comes with, like any relationship in life, it just comes with time and experience.

I think it's-- You build them with the moments.

It's like going to the beach and picking up seashells.

You build them that way, but then you just have to live with them.

I always feel like if I can't get them out of my head, if they're still talking to me, then the only way to get rid of 'em is to write them.

If they're still annoying me after all these, I have to write that person.

Mare was certainly an annoyance that had to come out.

[typewriting ding] - One of the things about Mare is that she's incredibly magnetic in a way.

We can't get enough of her, clearly.

I kept thinking, "Surely there'll be one more episode."

But she's kind of petty and she has a chip on her shoulder and does [bleep] things.

But we like her, you end up, because she's so resilient, because she never gives up.

How did you balance that?

- As you said, I think what made people connect with Mare was that she was real.

That you believed her flaws.

She had flaws.

But I also think, and I think Kate has said this before, I know she's said it to me, is that what appealed to her was the love of family.

That even when she made these horrible decisions, you could somehow, even though you didn't approve of them, you could understand them in a way.

- Here, I got this for your new pet.

[Drew gasping] Come on.

Check it out.

Shavonne's gonna help you put it together.

Shavonne?

- Yeah?

- Will you help Drew, please?

You here to guilt me into returning to the church again, Danny?

- No, no, no, no.

I gave up on that a while ago.

- You even watching him out there?

He's jumping off that thing like it's a diving board.

- Table's not a diving board, Andrew.

[Brad] She's trying to preserve a family unit that's really broken.

- I think one of the things that made me really appreciate her, perhaps it's my age, is that she was reflective, but didn't necessarily change.

And I think that's an interesting characteristic that you gave her.

- But that's life.

I mean, how many people do you know that you go, "Wow, that person is so different."

They kinda don't really change.

I would say her personality remained relatively static.

But I think what we knew we had in our back pocket was the ascension to the attic.

[Gayle] Do you still live in the same house?

- Yeah.

- Have you been able to go back up to the attic since?

- No.

We don't.

I don't know, no one goes up there.

- And Kate was also really great with the humor in the show.

I think Kate knew, all of us knew that if you took a step back and looked at what the show was about and the crime itself, it's really heavy and dark and we had to have a lightness there.

There had to be some levity all the time.

And Gene's so wonderful at this.

Gene was always a moment where the audience could laugh and take a breath.

- I had an affair with Helen Fayhee.

[Mare choking] [Mare laughing] - Listen, affair's a strong word, very strong.

It happened twice.

- But I think Kate was, as a mom, as a sister, was just so in touch with this character and this world and the family dynamic and also the humor of the show that I was always, if she had an idea, a line change, I was always open to doing it because nine times out of ten, it was a great idea.

[typewriter ding] - The crime procedural part was a beautiful weave into learning about Mare.

- Yep.

- And also the red herrings and the taking us back and forth with introducing us to the various people.

At what point in that writing process were you really thinking about, "Are we losing the plot here?"

- It's a great question.

I have no interest in plot.

So if you look at my stuff, there's almost no plot at all.

"Mare" has a procedural, but all the movies almost have no plot.

They all tend to deal with losing a child or something, some anxiety I'm dealing with or something.

But I was really only interested in Mare.

And I had a cop who's a buddy of mine on the east coast, he's a patrol officer and he was telling me about his initial job as a patrol officer, out near Lancaster, actually, I forget the exact name of the town.

But he was like, "It was me and 11 officers."

And he said, "Our detective was a woman and she was tasked with, essentially, having to solve all the crimes."

So that was the nugget and then I started to think about Mare.

But I had no idea what the, now she's a detective, "Well, I have to have a case to solve."

But I was never particularly interested in the case.

So that's why when the show came out, everyone was so hung up on the who done it.

I was shocked by that.

We didn't think it was that cool, you know.

It was really the story about a woman's life.

And then it became something.

I thought we did an okay job.

We set up a decent mystery, nothing special about it.

But I was more interested in portraying a community and a woman's life and grief.

But I think what it did is it gave you latitude to have those scenes with the family so that, "Okay, we'll give 'em a procedural beat, we'll drop a little crumb, and that will give us eight minutes to do the stuff we care about."

And so in the editing, it was very strategic in trying to put yourself in the audience's shoes and go, "Okay, how much time do we have to do character stuff and when do we have to get back to the case?"

- One of the things that I thought was a great plot point, obviously, you used it in a greater way, was this couple Betty and, and Glenn Carroll.

- Yeah.

- Because they were, to me, as much a what's this place really like?

- Next time you just call the station.

Do you have the main number?

- I don't remember.

But I trust you when I don't know who the station will send over.

- I understand, but I'm a detective sergeant, which means I investigate the burglaries and the overdoses and all the really bad crap that goes on around here.

- Sounds awful.

Maybe you should look into a different line of work.

- Here it is.

Mrs. Carroll.

See this?

That's the main station number.

All right?

That's the one you want.

I'm gonna put it right in the center.

So you call them, okay?

Next time, instead of waking me up.

- So there's the scene of the crime, as they say in your business.

My granddaughter was upstairs getting undressed to take a shower when she looked out the window.

And ah!

There he is.

- I loved that there were some characters in here that were there for really no more than color.

- I think the Carrolls were, I loved them as characters.

They helped set up the world.

I think the opening scene of the show established the world in a very quiet and humorous but really effective way because you're like, "I guess Mare gets called out to these people's house all the time," and we get a sense of her life and then it pays off, in a way, at the end where she goes back to the house just to innocuous visit that turns out to be a clue.

- So, you'd like to report a missing gun.

- No, no, it it's not missing anymore.

- So it wasn't stolen?

- Do you remember the morning you came over for my granddaughter and the prowler?

[Mare] Uh huh.

- Well, I'd gone out in the shed and got the gun.

So I know I had it then.

- Okay.

- But that night I heard a noise out in the shed and I went out to get it and it was gone.

- But now it's back.

- Yes.

I went out the other day to get some tools and there it was.

I don't know what I'm saying.

- Okay.

What kind of gun is it?

- It's a Colt Detective Special.

[typewriter ding] - I thought that was a really fascinating ending.

Because to your point, it's really tragic.

I mean, there's this huge piece of tragedy to it, except it's not Mare's tragedy, really.

It's somebody else's tragedy and this was a story about Mare.

What was the decision there?

How did you get there?

Were you worried about that a little bit?

Because it's a sucker punch, a little bit.

- I think if you look at the themes of the show and the characters, I don't wanna say it was obvious, it wasn't obvious, that that's the wrong word.

But Mare's lost a son and now her closest friend in life is going to essentially lose a son.

Oh, that's thematically quite potent.

But I think more importantly what we knew, you have a character that is stubbornly avoiding grief.

Refuses to confront it.

And how do you get that character to go to the attic?

It has to be pretty devastating events in her life that get her to that attic.

If the priest did it, is Mare going to the attic?

I don't think so.

She's probably going to work and she's going back to the next case.

But if it's Lori and Ryan, whew, that's such a gut punch.

And so I think the ending had to serve a couple purposes.

Like I said, it had to be surprising in terms of just the mystery, but it also had to be crushing emotionally that it would get a woman who's avoided having to confront the loss of a son to eventually confront it.

I didn't write it for a long time because I have seen enough mysteries to know unless you get the ending right, you're screwed.

And I was really convinced the ending had to be good.

And like I said, good meaning surprising and emotional.

And so I had a lot of characters in my head, but until I knew where it ended, I couldn't start writing it.

But then once we started writing it, I would say six months of that was thinking about it.

And then once I had the ending, I could, you know, hit the gas a little bit.

So it probably took me two months to write the first two episodes and then we went to Kate and she was our number one choice and I think we caught her at the right time.

And I've learned that's half the battle.

You catch an actor or actress at the right time in their life.

And she was getting ready to do "Ammonite."

She wanted to do something totally different after "Ammonite" and "Mare" was totally different.

I think right place, right time.

- Is that a little bittersweet, when you have something like "Mare" and you take it into seven episodes?

Are you done?

- I would say that story is done.

A bit like Deb in "American Woman," would I be interested to see what Mare's doing in a couple years?

Yeah, I'd be interested in that.

I would actually be very interested in what Lori's doing in a couple years.

That, to me, is really potent emotional stuff.

Having lost a son, having to raise a child that's not yours that's caused the downfall of, wow, that's really interesting.

So the idea like, oh, a couple years, I don't think we'll do "Mare" immediately, but I think I could see us going in in a couple years and be like, "Oh, let's see what Mare and Lori and Dawn and Shavonne and Helen are doing."

That to me, would be interesting.

You know, and also I love the character so much.

A chance to work with Kate and Julianne Nicholson again, I mean, that's pretty hard to pass up.

I'd be up for writing a story.

[baby crying] [melancholy music] [baby crying] [melancholy music] [knocking at door] - You okay, little buddy?

[melancholy music] Is this your son?

- Yes.

- Do you mind just checking to make sure all this information is correct?

[baby crying] - Yeah, that's correct.

- You write all this content and then you get into the editing room.

What changed there for you?

In that sense you have so many characters, you have so much, probably, extra stuff that you shot.

How are you getting to this magic number seven?

- I got to edit the show, which I loved.

I didn't really get to edit much on any of the movies or even be a huge part of that process on the movie but I loved editing, 'cause there's so much you could do musically and structurally and you could make things that weren't working work.

There was many instances where I would look at an episode and go, "Man, I don't think it's working, but let's, oh, I think we can steal a piece of an episode that we didn't use and put it in here, we could, the audience won't know that was taken out of another episode and we could insert it in this episode."

I think the biggest example that was in the episode five, where we'd gotten to the end of this big action sequence where Mare's running through this haunted house of horrors with this guy, and then you're watching it going, "But it's not really emotional in any way."

And so we went back and we thought, "Oh, okay, I know what we can do.

What we have to do is she's thinking about her son in this episode."

And we found this great piece of music by Grouper, who's a really great artist, that we could use and every time you'd hear it, you would identify that song as connected to her son.

So we used it in the beginning and then we used it in the middle.

And then at the end of that crazy chase sequence, we brought it back in.

[sirens wailing] [heavy breathing] [Officer 1] We need more backup!

[Officer 2] Is anyone else in the house?

Ma'am, is this blood yours?

Ma'am.

[Mare] And what's special about today?

[Kevin] It's my birthday!

[melancholy music] Help me, mom.

Let's jump in together.

One, two, three!

- And so it's scary, but then it comes back to emotion and you leave the episode knowing that Mare's thinking about her son in a way maybe she hasn't before.

And again, you're just continuing to nudge her towards the attic.

[uplifting piano music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching a conversation with Brad Ingelsby on "On Story."

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project.

That also includes the On Story radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive, accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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