Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The first shot in the new Fullscreen series The Deleted pans up from the gentle waves of the Pacific Ocean to a row of beach houses. The second shot is a hot young couple having NC-17 sex on a bare mattress in one of those beach houses. By the end of the first episode, there will be more NC-17 sex, a kidnapping, text messaging, a creepy cult, the L.A. skyline, and lots of lingering shots of perfect bare asses of barely 18s with names like Parker and Agatha.
The series is about — oh, come on, you neither care nor need to know the plot. The Deleted is broody, sexy, high-gloss, millennial TV. It’s pitched for a very specific audience. You know who you are. (Here’s a hint: Indiewire’s review called it “a softcore porn thriller for teens.” In the headline.)
Bret Eaton Ellis, who directed all eight episodes, knows the territory. Now 52 years old, he wrote Less Than Zero — a debut novel about disaffected, sexually adventurous college kids in Hollywood — in 1985 when he was himself a 21-year-old college student. In the three decades since, Ellis has returned often to that world in books (The Rules of Attraction, The Informers), a film (The Canyons) and in a series of film shorts that were the source material for The Deleted.
Decider caught up with Ellis for a revealing conversation about his Fullscreen series, the decline of indie film and the state of his career.
DECIDER: One of the things I thought about a lot watching The Deleted is how Fullscreen is a mobile-first distributor that’s now growing on TV platforms. Did you spend a lot of time talking to your cinematographer about how a scene would play on a 60-inch HD vs. on a 4-inch iPhone?
BRET EASTON ELLIS: It was the No. 1 thing we talked about, and it was one of the most important thing we wanted to figure out. We talked about how to make it look cinematic and not like a web series, how to make it look as good as premium cable. We realized it would be a mistake to pay too much attention to formatting the series for a phone and that we should shoot as cinematically as possible. We really wanted to make the colors pop in post-production — not saturated, exactly, but making the blues bluer and the greens greener. We watched it a lot on iPhones and iPads and laptops while we were editing, and we chose shots that we thought worked best on smaller formats.
One thing I expected as shows have started to be made for a big range of screen sizes is that the rules for smaller formats — simpler composition and flatter color schemes — would necessarily set the rules for everything, and that really hasn’t happened.
You can watch things on your iPhone and people do that all the time — something like 80 percent of our audience for The Deleted will watch on smartphones — but Fullscreen and I both wanted something that looks different than everything else that’s out there. That meant a lot of masters and wide shots and fewer closeups like you usually get on a web series. And we didn’t do any handheld work at all. I couldn’t change my aesthetic to fit into a web mold, and Fullscreen and I were on the same page with that.
You use a lot of tracking shots — particularly in the first episode — shot from behind characters’ backs. Was that a design choice or something about making those characters more closed and opaque?
It was all of that. The DPs and I storyboarded out and spent a lot of time planning those shots because we had 14 days to shoot 110 pages of script. We wanted to introduce characters by having the camera follow them, and shooting from behind their backs was kind of a thematic thing.
With Fullscreen having a fairly young audience, what was the discussion about depicting sex and nudity? How did you navigate whether a 15-year-old or a 20-year-old was the target audience?
The Deleted is based on a series of shorts I made a few years ago that Fullscreen had seen. They wanted make that into a series, and the first thing we had to do was age it down. The people in the shorts were in their thirties. It was pretty sexual, and Fullscreen liked that. They asked me to age it down knowing that it was going to be NSFW material. I showed one of the scripts to the producers before we sent it to Fullscreen, and they said, “This is too much sex, and it’s kind dirty.” So I took it out. When Fullscreen got the script, they said, “Where’s the sex and nudity? We’re competing against premium cable.” The actors knew coming into the auditions that there would be nudity, though Nash Grier was not up for doing nudity.
Have you had much feedback of what age group is watching the series?
I can only tell from Twitter and Facebook. Part of the reason Fullscreen liked the fact that I was attracted to the idea of using Nash Grier is that he has so many eyes on social media — something like 15 million or 20 million when you add Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and everything else together, so he’s really been an engine for promoting the show. I don’t have numbers from Fullscreen, and it’s hard to get numbers. I do a podcast for PodcastOne, and it’s like pulling teeth to get download numbers. I sold The Canyons to IFC knowing I’d never get numbers from them.
Are you planning to recut these from quarter-hour to half-hour for Fullscreen to syndicate for TV?
I don’t know. There has been some talk about dropping the credits and putting it together as a movie, which would be about an hour and 40 minutes. I’m fine with it the way it is now.
How do you think about that coming from features for Less Than Zero and American Psycho? Was shorter episodes something you had to come around to or something you embraced from the beginning?
I definitely embraced it. Content malleable. TV has changed the way we look at movies for example. I find myself impatient with movies now because they seem to offer too little information compared to an eight-hour TV season where you can follow a person and get a better understanding of his relationships.
Would The Deleted have worked as a feature film?
I approached it as a whole season in an hour and 40 minutes. I’ve written pilots for Lionsgate and HBO that were that long. The notion of a season of a show being an hour and forty minutes led me the idea of it as a movie divided into eight parts, so I approached it that way rather than as a web series. It’s not doable as a movie today. I’d have had to raise $2 million to make a movie that would never get theatrical distribution and would get lost on VOD with no promotion. No one would see it. Fullscreen, which has deals with AT&T and DirecTV, is at least attempting to promote this on a level that a theatrical film wouldn’t get.
You talk about an eight-hour series as a more expansive, more satisfying way of exploring a story than a two-hour film. How is a short-form series not that much worse?
You have to look at the budget we had and the time we had to shoot it. There are things I had to take into consideration about a web series — the budget, the time we had, the youth of the actors — those things would all be very different for an eight-hour TV series or an actual movie. So we had to acclimate ourselves to the idea that these are eight 12- to 13-minute movies that should hold their own on some level. This was not like making a movie and was not like making a TV series. The form dictated what we could do. We didn’t have eight hours to investigate these people and this world, so we had to take that into consideration.
The Deleted looks like a film. How did you approach that coming from features to digital video?
My DPs are in their 40s. Our references weren’t TV shows; our references were movies. We talked about cinematographers like Vilmos Szigmond [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] and Raoul Coutard, who worked with Godard. It wasn’t television. When you look at projects created by a lot of millennials, there’s a lot of — I wouldn’t say carelessness — but there’s a DIY aesthetic. It’s not their fault, necessarily, but it is what it is. It’s: Let’s just get it out there. Let’s just get the Vine out there. Let’s get the YouTube video out there. And it’s threadbare visually. It’s a generational difference.
We called in a lot of favors. We had use of a Chapman crane for about eight days of shooting, and we built the crane shots we wanted around that. Fullscreen wasn’t going to pay for that. It was a favor we got, and we gave the guy who had access to the crane an associate producer credit. We also did that with the Steadicam guy, who we also only had for eight or nine days. It all comes down to your sensibility and the talent level. You can have the greatest technology in the world, and it doesn’t matter if you have nothing to say.
Did you have any concerns about getting overwhelmed with directing all eight episodes as a first-time director and also producing the series?
Very much so. We moved from pre-production into production, and it just happened. The train takes off, and you’re on it. I really liked doing it. You make a show three times — the first time by writing it, the second time by shooting it, and you really make it the third time by editing it. Editing is where the show came together.
How much did you learn while you were shooting? Did you learn things on Day 2 that you were able to use on Day 5?
I had directed a couple of commercials in Europe. I directed a Persol ad and an ad for the Paris Opera, and I had made these digital shorts. I had been on a lot of film sets and thought I knew a lot as a cinephile, but I found myself asking the stupidest questions. The most important person is the first assistant director, who really whips everything into shape.
Was this a one-off experiment, or do you want to do more short-form work like this?
I don’t know. It’s a good question, and I’m not sure. You have to make a living. Whatever we were paid for The Deleted can take care of you for a couple of months, I suppose, but no one was really doing this for the money. I’m sure the crew liked having the jobs, but the producers, the actors and myself were doing this to see where it would go. Ideally, you’d like to make a living doing this. If there was a second season, I’d be very interested in it.
I have a problem with the idea of movies right now. I have a lot of movie projects in development, but I don’t know how excited about them I am anymore. A couple of them, maybe their time has passed. I don’t know how viable they are financially, where ten years ago they may have been on the indie circuit. I’m not sure if I’m drawn to theatrical films.
Are you interested in doing more TV?
People who have seen The Deleted have approached me about doing some stuff. I haven’t found the right thing. I haven’t come up with the right material yet. One production company wants me to do another short-form series. They’re ready to write a check, and I can’t figure out what it is. I’m still exploring it. I do think this is where things are heading. Hollywood was more open ten years ago, and there’s the 1 percent making a lot of money. Everyone else is trying to figure out.
I have friends who were A-list screenwriters in the ’90s and in the aughts who were making a great living without having any of their scripts made, and that world is gone now. One of them is selling real estate, and one of them opened a burger joint in Ojai. This is the business. I’m working on a book and getting more serious about pushing the podcast forward, and there are two movie projects that could still turn into something.
If we were having this conversation ten years from now, do you think there will be some people who come out of this social-influencer culture and become big stars, or do you think the traditional routes — film school, UCB — will still be making stars?
I don’t know what world we would be talking about. It’s so fragmented and niche. I have friends who have no idea who Nash Grier is, and he has 20 million fans. Cameron Dallas is another person I wanted to have on the show; he has 10 million Instagram followers and just signed a big deal with Calvin Klein, and a lot of people have no idea who he is. Music is niche; cinema is niche; television is niche. Everyone has their pockets of interest, and the idea of movie stars is kind of a joke to millennials. They want to see Star Wars, but they don’t care who’s in it. The time when we all had the same reference points is gone.
Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.
