Filmmaker Sam Esmail on Those ‘Mr. Robot’ Connections and Using the ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ Playbook
The writer-director explains how a ‘Friends’-obsessed character in his Netflix movie doesn’t recognize that her mother (Julia Roberts) looks like an actor who once guest starred on ‘Friends’ (real-life Julia Roberts).
Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind ranks atop Netflix’s film chart, and fans are now decoding its place in his universe of storytelling.
Mr. Robot buffs picked up on a familiar site: a yellow emergency preparedness kit with the branding of the USA series’ villainous corporation, E-Corp. That bucket would serve as one of signals that cyberattack would incite the film’s imminent disaster and systematic destabilization of the US.
Esmail had wanted to make disaster film that revolved around a cyberattack, and when he read Rumaan Alam’s novel, Leave the World Behind, he knew he could merge that idea with his existing universe of stories.
The film centers on the Sandford family and their calamitous weekend getaway at the Long Island home of G.H Scott (Mahershala Ali). Rose Sandford (Farrah Mackenzie), the daughter of Julia Roberts’ Amanda and Ethan Hawke’s Clay, is a Friends obsessive unable to watch the series finale due to the abrupt loss of an Internet connection.
Her mother looks identical to Roberts’ own Friends character, Susie Moss, from season two’s “The One After the Superbowl.”
Email is taking a page out of the Ocean’s Twelve playbook where Roberts played both her similar-looking character, Tess Ocean, and herself in the same universe.
“The universe for these movies is slightly off from our reality. They have to be, obviously. They’re being performed by actors in our world,” Esmail says. “So my meta, convoluted explanation is that when Rose is watching Friends and she sees Julia on it, she sees a passing resemblance to her mother, but obviously shrugs it off because it’s not her mom.”
Esmail thinks that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission. “I shot it, I put it in the film, I showed it to Netflix and I just crossed my fingers,” Esmail recalls. “That was literally my only strategy, and to their credit, they didn’t say anything. They didn’t react and I didn’t ask. So I’ll just leave it at that.”
Leave the World Behind is based on a book
It felt pretty natural, and I didn’t just do it with Mr. Robot. There are nods to everything I’ve worked on, from Homecoming and Comet to Robot. I fancy myself as creating my own little universe whenever I make a film, so I thought to myself, “Why not connect them all?” It’s more fun that way.
Reading the book?
Before I read the book, I had been toying with the idea of making a disaster film around a cyberattack. It’s mystifying. I don’t know if people grasp what that would look like or how that would feel, and I thought that was just such fertile ground for a film. And then I read this book where author Rumaan Alam takes a disaster thriller and flips it.
What’s front and center about the book are the characters, and the disaster elements were off in the distance and pretty vague. And immediately, I just thought about grafting my cyberattack obsessions onto those disaster elements. It just fit so perfectly given the anxieties about technology among the characters and their reliance on it. So, in a weird way, it was a match made in heaven, and I’m lucky that Rumaan responded to those changes, too.
It’s a little bit like Homecoming when I brought Dermot Mulroney and Julia back together after My Best Friend’s Wedding. I always love doing that. I’m a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and to work with these heroes of mine is always a treat. I’ve adored Ethan Hawke since I was in high school. So it was great to get some of these actors together. I believe this is the first movie Ethan and Kevin have been in together.
I thought that was crazy, too, because it seems like they would’ve naturally have done something in the past. So I love to take credit for the fact that I brought them all together in a movie, finally.
There’s a Friends component of this movie
Absolutely. This goes back to what I was just saying. The universe I create for these movies is slightly off from our reality. They have to be, obviously. They’re being performed by actors that are in our world. So my meta, convoluted explanation is that when Rose [Farrah Mackenzie] is watching Friends and she sees Julia on it, she sees a passing resemblance to her mother, but obviously shrugs it off because it’s not her mom. Kids also don’t like to imagine their moms being these famous celebrities that they see on TV, so that’s how I justify it to myself.
I don’t know if you caught the Geist Easter eggs, but they’re also included in the film.
The antifreeze jug, when G.H. retrieves the satellite phone
Heidi Bergman is out there, too, and she gets the same treatment from strangers on the street, saying, “Hey, you look like that one actor.” It’s kind of like how I always get mistaken for George Clooney. We just have this uncanny resemblance that you can’t deny.
Not at all. In fact, they were so in love with that choice, and from a story perspective, it just made perfect sense. It’s such an iconic show and a global phenomenon. It was not only resonant back in the day, but it’s also had this resurgence now across generations. So it just made perfect sense that Rose would be as obsessed as she is in the movie, and they were fully supportive of us committing to that.
This movie might be the greatest endorsement of physical media ever
I shot it, I put it in the film, I showed it to Netflix and I just crossed my fingers. That was literally my only strategy, and to their credit, they didn’t say anything. They didn’t react and I didn’t ask. So I’ll just leave it at that.
One thousand percent. Guillermo is a mensch. He’s a filmmaker’s filmmaker. He really cares, and the thing that blew me away about his feedback is that he’s really honest. He gave notes and criticisms, but they never once felt disrespectful or hurtful. It was just about being a cheerleader for the movie. And same with Rian. I feel so honored that these two masters were able to watch the film and give me feedback. They’re really just out to support filmmakers and to support watching good movies, and so it was pretty flattering to get their support.
Whenever I set out to do anything that’s fictional, and this is fictional … I sometimes feel like I need to repeat that. This is speculative. I am taking what’s out there in the world and shifting around some variables, and then asking the what-if question. But what gives me anxiety is when reality overlaps. It frightens me because I feel like the lines between reality and what I’m creating are a lot farther than what actually happens. In the case of Mr. Robot, I remember episodes would air, and then our storyline would sort of happen in the real world. And with this film, I give the credit mostly to Rumaan. He wrote this book prior to the pandemic, and when I read it, it touched a nerve. It touched on this theme about how we lose our common humanity in the face of crisis, which was happening [during the pandemic]. So the fact that he was so prescient about that is remarkable and timely, and that’s what makes the story so compelling. But on the other hand, it’s really fucking scary.
Camera is a character in its own right?
The idea of being playful with the camera sets up this grammar and visual aesthetic. Even in this innocuous moment where she’s happy and taking in her surroundings, there’s something disorienting underneath it, and we do that throughout the film. In fact, we ended up doing that shot so much that we referred to it on set as the swizzle, and we tried to employ it whenever we could. It became this inside thing that we had on set, but it always begins and ends with character and audience. The relationship between the two really starts and ends with the camera.
This project started out as a Pelican Brief reunion between Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington
Do you have another Robot story in you someday
I honestly don’t know how direct I’ll ever be with that storyline again. I have to be inspired by something. A story has to come to me. But as I said earlier, I’m always playing in that universe, so I guess it’s possible.
When a showrunner has a hit show, they tend to go one of two paths
I had such lucky break, as USA handed me the reins to run Mr. Robot. Mind you, I had never been in a writers’ room before and I had never really been on a TV set before, and then I was show-running right off this one pilot I wrote. And because of that, the first season feels different. It’s a little rough around the edges. It feels different than all the other seasons. So, as humbled as I was that USA allowed me to do that, I really saw the value in that.
And now that I’m running a production company [Esmail Corp.], I want to give that same opportunity to other showrunners. Andy Siara, who did such a brilliant job with Palm Springs, gave me The Resort, and I jumped at the chance to let him run that show. And then, my role, as a fan of his storytelling, tends to be as the audience member who’s able to guide him from that perspective. And the same goes for Mr. Robot writers Robbie [Pickering] and Amelia [Gray]. They did such a spectacular job on Gaslit, and we brought on Matt Ross to direct the entire season.
So, for me, it’s not doing the Ryan Murphy thing of dipping my toe in as a director or writer; it’s really just doing it from the audience perspective. And when I do end up doing a show again, I would probably do the Vince Gilligan route of being the main creative force behind it. So I stole from both geniuses.
Getting composer Mac Quayle to release the final batch of Mr. Robot cues
I’ve done this before, but filmmakers will often cut their material using temp music, before bringing on the composer to follow that guide. But on season four of Mr. Robot and also with Leave the World Behind, I just told Mac, “Here are some inspirations.” I’d create a playlist. And before we even started filming, he’d read the scripts, and we’d had conversations about tone. So he would just start writing music off of that, and I believe that was one of the pieces of music he had written before he’d seen any footage. That moment, specifically, was so heartbreaking and emotional, but it wasn’t sentimental. And that’s the talent that Mac has. He’s able to give this music such a genuine emotion without pushing it or forcing it, and it never feels manipulative. So that’s what I admire about him. Music can be very heavy-handed, and it can underlie an emotion that the scene is already giving you, but Mac is able to thread that needle in a great way. So “The Best Part” is just a great example of one.
