Quibi's The Stranger creator talks about that ending

WARNING: This article contains spoilers about The Stranger.

Quibi's intense thriller The Stranger concludes on a triumphant note for Clare (Maika Monroe) as she literally gets the drop on her stalker Carl E (Dane DeHaan), turning the tables on him after a terrifying night of cat-and-mouse. It's a brutal journey to get to this point, one that takes Clare from the streets of Los Angeles to subterranean tunnels to the city's seedy underbelly, and claims the life of her only friend, JJ (Avan Jogia). But The Stranger writer-director Veena Sud says this final reversal is the key to what she wanted to accomplish with the series.

"The overarching desire [for me], of playing in this genre of damsel in distress that's been done a million times before, was to tell a hero story for a young woman," says Sud, who's known for creating the AMC-turned-Netflix crime drama The Killing. "This is a revenge story. This is a story about a woman on the run, who decides to turn and face her attacker and beat the f—ing s— out of him. It's an homage to #MeToo, and to every woman who's turned and faced the bad guy."

Now that Quibi has released every entry of this "Movie in Chapters," Sud spoke to EW about crafting that conclusion, creating a story in quick-bite form, and why she's more than a little scared of technology.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let's talk about that ending — what went into creating that moment of triumph for Clare?

VEENA SUD: Maika inhabited that in a way that was really cool and authentic. When she shows up on that riverbank and picks up the gun, and she's in full control of the situation and she knows it, there is a truth to just how she's standing there. Her body's exhausted, she's been through the wringer, she's been running from this motherf---er for 12 hours. And she's done running, and she's just gonna stand there and relish it.

And you know, every single woman knows what it's like to be dehumanized, whether it's being catcalled on the street or attacked violently. There is an experience of being a woman in this world that takes away a tiny piece of humanity from us that I wanted this story to reflect. And so for Clare, in a lot of ways, as writ large and high-octane as this story is, it definitely is a parable for many of our journeys from being wounded from these things to saying, "Let me retreat from the world because I don't want to be victimized anymore," to saying, "F--- that, I'm stepping into my power. I'm facing that demon, and I'm gonna kick his ass."

The show combines resonant themes like sexism and police brutality with a very pulpy backdrop and story line. How did you go about blending those elements together?

I'm always interested in taking genres and going deeper, or subverting them or playing with them, purely for fun. I did that with The Killing, and this was another opportunity to take on the horror genre, and to look at conventions in the genre and how they might be turned on their head. So to look at who the victim is, who the attacker is, how women are disempowered on the screen, in terms of how we look at victimhood in horror films.

Maika, like [The Killing protagonist] Sarah Linden before her, was a woman who would go all the way in playing genuine terror versus sexy terror, and let it show on her face how the night devastates her physically, and what it really feels like in this pulpy world that clearly is fictionalized and overwrought to a certain degree. I wanted my character to inhabit the true space of true terror, of what it feels like to have a stalker, even though in this story it's writ quite large. And in Maika Monroe, here was an actress that I felt could embody everything that I wanted the character to feel and portray, and make it very satisfying at the end of the story, when Clare decides to turn the tables on Carl E.

How did you come to collaborate with Quibi on The Stranger?

I had no intention, actually, to do any television last year. I wanted a break, and I was looking to do something new. And everyone says, of course, you say yes when Jeffrey Katzenberg wants a meeting, but I wasn't 100 percent sure what Quibi was, nor did I want to do television. But within moments of our meeting, I was convinced that this was something completely different. And so the story itself, every piece of it, every moment of it came from the palette that he's offering artists: to play with a different visual [style], to play on a different platform, to go for it in terms of what we want to do with very few restrictions from him. I was on board the second he told me what [Quibi] was about and how other people are gonna play with it, like [Steven] Spielberg, with the shows just dropping at night. It's amazing to have that interactive capability on the platform. It felt like a great hybrid, not only of TV and film, but of what's to come. It's like the missing link to what VR could be, maybe, one day.

Was it difficult figuring out how to divide your story into Quibi's unique format of chapters?

It was a fascinating challenge as a writer, because it was a three-act structure, divided into episodes, with cliffhangers at the end of each episode. And the cliffhangers could not be similar. There had to be all sorts of different ways to cliffhang in a very, very, very short amount of time that hopefully didn't feel manipulative or repetitive. It almost felt like those serials at movies back in the day, where you would go in and watch five to 10 minutes of a short film, and it had a cliffhanger.

And then as a director, it was a huge challenge. The most significant challenge was thinking of how to make the visual experience as fun on a small screen that's also potentially vertical, versus the widescreen that the whole world has gotten used to seeing in our living rooms. That's where a lot of the actual story came from, because I realized that if people just stand around and talk, you're gonna go crazy, because it's really visually boring on the phone screen. So there was the need for my character to be moving through different spaces that change, that were visually interesting. And that was one thing me and the director of photography, Paul Yee, spent a lot of time talking about: how to create that visual tapestry of richness that would feel cinematic even though you're looking at a screen the size of your phone.

Phones and technology also play a big part in the story. Were those themes that you had already been thinking about, or did that element of the production influence that?

I've always been thinking about it. I had a flip phone until not that long ago; I'm a dinosaur in terms of technology. So of course, I've always looked at it with a critical eye. My fear is what happens in the show: that the casual giving away of information then leads to great danger when someone is determined to find you. That was always something that I thought about, and when I moved from my flip phone to an actual smartphone, there was a lot of caution and worry and fretting. And then when I was talking to Jeffrey and the Quibi creative team about this project, we were kind of getting into meta conversations about what the phone means in this day and age. That's when I started to marry my worry about technology with this incredible opportunity for technology to be interactive, and how that could all go horribly wrong.

Are there going to be more episodes, or another season, of The Stranger?

It was created as a standalone project for Quibi, but it does not preclude the idea, and the hopes, that there may be a season 2 from me. There's an anthology aspect to it. There might be a continuation of some of the scenes in a season 2, but the story itself is a one-season arc.

Related content:

Quibi's The Stranger creator talks about that ending and adapting to quick-bite storytelling

Related Articles