This “bait-and-switch aspect” is part of what appealed to director Soderbergh when writer Ed Solomon presented the project. Soderbergh helmed all six episodes of the series, about the fallout from botched kidnapping.

“You think it’s about a group of well-off white people being victimized. And then the whole thing starts to tilt,” Soderbergh reporters. “By the end of it, we’re in very different place than where we started. This melodrama had this interesting subterranean thematic thread bubbling along that eventually takes primacy in the last two episodes.”

Soderbergh called brother and sister Louis (Gerald Jones) and Natalia (Adia) the “real heart of the story.” After disrupting the kidnapping, they return to Guyana thanks to some unexpected help. The siblings “are the only people who managed to get out of this. Although at the end of it, they’re sort of back to where they started. I guess they’ve learned something, but it’s not a happy conclusion. It’s good; they survived. But that was a very difficult ride for them to get back to where they started.”

The series ends with Louis and Natalia walking around the Colony at Essequibo, the ill-fated development that connected the series’ Guyanese characters with Danes’ character’s family, and a pan over to a billboard advertising that the aborted project is “coming in 2003.”

“From the very beginning of the script, it was all engineered to that last shot,” he said.

“On Mosaic, we were able to do that. I was using the same footage for the linear version that I was using for the app. That’s why that was not a problem,” Soderberg said. “My vision for the app version of Full Circle was completely different imagery, completely different approach directorially, different cameras, different everything.”

The Full Circle script was 400 pages, Soderbergh said, with the app version consisting of an additional 170 pages “in which there’s no overlap.”

Other changes included fleshing out a storyline between Phaldut Sharma’s Garmen and Sheyi Cole’s Xavier, and even reconceiving the break-in in the finale from a violent bedroom fight to the confrontation that ended up in the final cut, where Danes’ Sam Browne realizes what she’s done.

“The scene in which Louis comes to the apartment to try and steal the painting was rethought on set,” Soderbergh explained in a second roundtable discussion with reporters that took place in July. “In the original script, it turned into like a fight in the bedroom and the gun was under the bed and the mattress flipped over and pushed [Sam] against the window, and it looked like the window was gonna crack. There was no exchange between the two of them. What I said to Ed was, ‘That doesn’t feel like what we’re making now. And we need to look at this differently.’”

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter over the course of the two roundtables, Soderbergh talks below about entrusting key moments to the series’ relatively unknown actors; why he wanted to reveal key information through conversations instead of flashbacks, like with the talk Sam (Danes) and Beetz’s Melody have at the hospital in the finale; what’s next for these characters and how he feels about returning to a branching narrative format.

A lot of narrative, especially in later episodes, centers around the Guyanese characters, young brother and sister Natalia and Louis.

Having casting director Carmen Cuba was crucial. We spent a lot of time trying to make sure those characters were given the treatment that all the characters were given.

I want to shoot everybody like they are movie stars, like they are the leads. That’s not just a directorial approach, that has to be reflected in the writing as well. The thing was designed for Louis and Natalia to be the heroes of this. They’re the only people in the entire show who are unsullied by making bad choices. They found themselves in bad circumstance, but they’re good people, and they’ve been trying to do the right thing. They’re the only ones that kind of emerge morally unscathed.

Something we talked about a lot was making sure that this process of giving them that kind of primacy is gradual. It was a fairly intensive search that Carmen did. One of the things that I decided from the get-go was, I’m not going to ask where they’re based. I don’t want to make decisions that are only driven by: Well, do they live in New York? So Carmen would send me a lot of people to look at, and I would start to narrow it down. I’d say, “OK, it’s this person, this person, this person,” and then Carmen would go, “OK, well, Sheyi Cole lives in London, as does Phaldut Sharma. Jharrel [Jerome] lives in Los Angeles.” And I said, “Well, we’re just gonna have to figure this out.”

So, fortunately, we got all of our first choices and figured out budgetarily how to make that all work. And as the show was being shot, and we were looking at the footage, Ed and I were both looking for ways to expand the storyline of the kids, particularly, Louis and Natalia and Xavier and Garmen. That relationship in the original script was was different. It was the same up to a point. And then during shooting, we decided to go with something a little bit different. I was enamored of this idea that Garmen views Xavier as a) being the only person in that group that really knows what he’s doing and b) as a potential partner in an escape plan. And so that was something that was really developed while we were shooting. Because in the original script that idea didn’t exist.

Many of the secrets and revelations come out through conversations between the characters

I think we determined that it was more organic with the style of the storytelling to have us learn that as the characters learned. We really wanted to save those final pieces of the puzzle for that that big dialogue scene between Claire and Zazie in the hospital. I’m the first person to tell you: Let’s figure out a way to show something and not tell it. When people say, “What’s the biggest difference between movies and television?” I go, “Oh, I can tell you that right now. In a movie, people don’t talk for long periods of time. That’s the difference between movies and television.” However, having said that, I am not afraid of two people in a room. I built my whole career on two people in a room.

What from the branching narrative you integrated into the series?

Most of the stuff that came from the branching version had to do with Garmen and Xavier, what was going on in the motel with the kids. It was character stuff that I felt was interesting and I wanted to retain.

As far as whether or not to do another branching narrative, I think there are two issues here: One is that if I were going to do it again, I’d pick a completely different kind of story to tell. I think I’d want to do a comedy. I think a comedy provides really interesting potential for a multiple point of view story. The second is, it’s not clear to me that this form of storytelling is needed or even wanted by audiences.

There’s strong impulse for people to want to be told a story like, “You’re the storyteller, telling me a story. Don’t make me do the work that is your work.” Even though we’re not making people work by having them make a binary choice, I still think, psychologically, for a person experiencing a story, they’re like, “I don’t want to be in that mode. I want to be in the listening, tell-me-a-story mode. Don’t make me engaged like that.” That’s what I’m beginning to think. And so it’s a real question whether or not I would want to return to that format without an idea that I feel can only be executed properly in that format.

If you’re going to continue the story, Melody and Xavier seem to be the two people with the most potential for an interesting trajectory — especially Xavier. I mean, he’s alone; he’s in this city that he doesn’t know that well. My theory is he absolutely went back and picked up that painting. So he can probably convert that into some amount of cash. But he’s kind of he’s kind of loose. Especially since that little syndicate has been [disrupted], so there’s a huge power vacuum. And he’s a bright, resourceful kid. So I think Xavier is the one that when we got to the end of it, I was like, “Oh, his future is going to be fascinating.” But every man, woman and child in the country would have to watch this show, I think, for Max to want to revisit this.

The building that stands in for the Colony at Essequibo was real place

All that we could really find out about it is, it was one of those projects that ran out of resources before it was completed and so it’s just sitting there. I’m not sure how old it is. I think it’s more than a decade. Ed would know all of this. It is really such an odd thing. It’s just kind of sitting there in the middle of this field. And the design of it is really odd, like it has no connection to anything around it aesthetically. There’s no acknowledgment of the fact that you’re in Guyana. It’s just a weird sort of construction and was kind of a perfect visual symbol of a doomed idea, that was never going to work. I don’t know enough about the details about how it got to the stage that it got, like where the initial money came from. But one of the aspects of the story that I like is identifying business endeavors, in which money is being made on the making of the thing, as opposed to money being made from the thing being done and people experiencing it. Like the deals are structured in such a way that if the thing just gets built, then certain people are going to make a lot of money.

There’s a process that I go through. As an idea begins to emerge, one of the first questions you’re asking yourself is: Is it a movie idea? Or is it a series or a show? And then, what kind of resources do we need to execute this properly? And given what the piece is, who’s the most likely buyer?

Then you have to make a decision about what state does it need to be in? Do they hear two sentences and they know the way you do things, then they go, “Got it. We like that”? Or, do you need to really develop it out? Ed wrote Full Circle on spec, the whole thing. So that makes my life easier, because we just turn in the scripts and go, “This is what we want to do. And this is the number.” So that makes everything a little more aerodynamic. But you’ve got to make a decision about how much of it you’re going to you need to put down on paper or in a file before you take it out: Do you need to get more elements attached? Does it help if it’s a piece with a very strong lead or leads? Is it worth trying to get somebody attached before you take it out to a buyer? You have a list of questions that you ask yourself that need to be answered before you start taking something out. It’s making sure you’ve gone through that checklist. Every project is different.

Ed Solomon’s work

He really spent a lot of time talking to people and researching every tributary that the show explores. Ed was chasing that down and was very, very adamant that whatever was in the show — if we were questioned about it, Ed specifically — that he could do the math for you of how this came about, how this idea was developed, who he talked to to flesh it out. [There was a] huge amount of interaction with the cast to make sure they felt their characters were three dimensional and incorporating their ideas.