Inside Brit Marling’s Singular Directorial Vision for ‘A Murder at the End of the World’

A Murder at the End of the World is a series stuffed with complex images and ideas. But the initial visual template set by director Brit Marling and cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen came down to a relatively simple binary: hot and cold. “It was always two distinct timelines, and two really distinct worlds, between the frozen tundra of Iceland and the deserts of the American West,” Marling says. “We were going to braid that hot and cold.”

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races” class=”external-link external-link-embed__hed-link button” data-event-click='{“element”:”ExternalLink”,”outgoingURL”:”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season”}’ href=”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>A guide to Hollywood’s biggest racesArrow A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races” class=”external-link external-link-embed__image-link” data-event-click='{“element”:”ExternalLink”,”outgoingURL”:”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season”}’ href=”https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/award-season” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>

The series as a whole is a more elaborate tapestry, blending elements of romance, science fiction, and hard-edged realism. It follows Emma Corrin’s Darby, an amateur sleuth who’s recruited, for unclear reasons, to participate in an exclusive Arctic retreat hosted by the reclusive billionaire Andy Ronson (Clive Owen). Bodies pile up, and as the series’ exploration of artificial intelligence and wealth inequality starts catching up with the characters, in flashbacks we trace Darby’s road-trip romance with Bill (Harris Dickinson), who becomes her partner in crime-solving—a storyline that ultimately converges with the present’s tragedies in inevitably shocking fashion.

Finding inspiration in everything from locked-room Agatha Christie whodunits to the iconic filmography of Krzysztof Kieślowski, End of the World marks a deft narrative directing debut for Marling, who also—as in her previous collaborations with co-creator Zal Batmanglij—stars in and writes for the series. (Marling helmed the pilot, plus episodes five and six.) Christensen, meanwhile, was brought on board after Marling realized that she was the cinematographer behind both A Quiet Place and Far From the Madding Crowd. “I was like, ‘Why does the understanding of light feel the same in these movies that are so different, such different genres, such different worlds? I feel like this is the same DP,’” Marling says. “I called Zal and I was like, ‘Charlotte is the only D.P. we can work with to do this.”

Below, the pair go over seven shots that illuminate their collaboration.

The Motel

Charlotte Bruus Christensen: When you watch certain European movies, it always feels like there’s an idea and they shot it. It’s not overly complicated, even though the plot is complicated. We did well in doing the minimalistic thing, which also made the whole point of view story, made it closer to Darby. This shot says exactly that. I remember this very bright window and then this dark hotel room. We’re like, “No, when she walks back towards us, we’re going to just go with what it should be, which is she’s dark for a moment until she gets to the bathroom door.” As you’d said, Brit, “Let’s let the dark corners fall into darkness, and not light it all up and crunch it in the grade.” We were brave to just let the imperfect be the perfect for us.

Brit Marling: Even though at the time, people are at the monitor panicking, and people back home watching dailies are like, “But do you guys want to turn up the lights, because you can bring it down in the color grade?” Charlotte and I are like, “No, no, no.” We’ve both been in the color grade too many times and know what happens there. We’re going to keep it dark on set, and it’s going to be okay, guys. Trust it’s going to be scary.

The story has a touch of high fantasy-feeling to it. Yes, there are billionaire retreats, but how often are amateur sleuths invited on them? Yes, there is AI, but it’s not quite as evolved—certainly as we were writing this—as it is in the story. We tried as a result to find the ways in which we could tack the story to the ground, and a huge part of that was making this entire road trip feel real. We paired down to a featherweight crew; we were really small. Everything was done in real locations. We had the option of building this on set; everyone wanted to do it on a soundstage. We were like, “No, for this part to feel real, we have to go to a real motel. It has to actually be small. We have to be constricted in where we can put the camera. We can’t get as far back as you’d like to get.” Something about the confines breeds the creativity, and also lends a feeling of authenticity. You cannot get as wide as you might like to get, and as a result you feel you are really in the hotel room with Darby.

Christensen: Even her costume, I think we all go back to being 17, 18—just that wildness in that still image. You feel that fearful moment of being lonely, and not being lonely, and wanting to figure out the world. It’s so much easier to feel that you could be there: you can smell that carpet and you remember you being in a motel room like that.

The Road

Marling: One of the references that had been in our mind in the writing and in the shooting was Badlands: this feeling of, what if there were two young lovers on the road, and they weren’t running from the law, but they had authorized themselves to be the law? And what would it be like if you were falling in love, but you were falling in love over dead bodies at crime scenes, in this macabre situation? They’re in morgues together, they’re in dusty roadside motels, they’re going down into basements with each other. They’re trying to piece together a very dark story from the past and understand what happened while they’re simultaneously falling in love with each other.

We went to Utah. We were almost like a documentary-size crew, we were so small, and it was scorching hot this day. You can’t see this, but there’s a little bit of an overpass farther the right of the frame, and it would be so hot sometimes that we’d be hiding out in this shade under this little bit of overpass. There were dead cow skeletons littered all over this part of the desert, from cows that had just wandered off and died. There were flash flood warnings as we were in the process of scouting and shooting. So it was intense out there. And then right at twilight, there would be this amazing moment where it would rapidly cool down, and the sand would go from being scorching hot to suddenly cold, and we just got this window.

This is a long scene, and Bill gives a very lengthy monologue. The producers are like, “Please shoot this at any time, but twilight.” Charlotte and I were like, “No, has to be twilight, because of what’s being said here…” We tried to use time of day a lot as a way to hand off from the past back into the present. The twilight here hands off to the twilight in the motel. And it’s also the feeling of: He’s saying something here that will turn out to be the truth of why their relationship unravels, and why he dies. When you go back in time and remember it, it has to have that quality of feeling a little bit like the afterlife. We flash back to moments from this at the very, very end, when she’s contemplating his death. We really only got to do three takes of this before we lost the light.

Christensen: He’s talking about mobile phones and screens and everything that we don’t need, and how she needs it. It’s that whole conflict of modern life and how we choose to spend our time. The light and that car in the back, it was just one of those moments where you feel like: this is moviemaking. This is old-fashioned, proper moviemaking.

The Crypt

Marling: When Zal and I had this idea in 2019, and then wrote it most wholly in 2020, we had thought it was so fantastical—the idea of a billionaire having basically built himself an underground cathedral, then designed this elaborate mirror system to funnel actual sunlight into this space. It seemed so genuinely science fiction. By the time we were putting the show out into the world, there were all these news stories coming out about various tech billionaires and their underground fiefdoms that they’re building. We were sensing something, which is this feeling that the haves and have-nots have gotten so extreme that the haves can repurpose a cathedral and bring it underground and build an entire universe in Iceland.

This happens right as Darby is taking the elevator down and the floors are ticking off, and she’s being like: “Wait, okay, this is one floor, two floor, three floor. Okay, we’re 10 stories underground.” The doors part, and she sees this image. We wanted to create the feeling of a feudal underground. It’s the moment you realize that what you thought was a boutique luxury hotel has actually been a fortress, and that Andy sees himself as a king. Charlotte and I literally went through, I think, 47 different ideas for chandeliers, looking for that one chandelier that would fit with the space and feel clean and modern, but also give you King Arthur vibes.

Christensen: This particular shot, it’s almost like three rooms in one room, in one shot. It’s so true what you’re saying, Brit, when the set was going up and it was all just in the work lights when they were painting it—we were like, “How on earth do we get these crazy amazing ideas of the sunlight and the beam?”

Marling: The set is only dynamic if it’s lit properly, because it’s actually all a wash in one color. So, when the set was just up under work lights, you would look at it and be like, “Oh, is this going to work?” We kept having in our mind the idea of Escher’s drawings and the feelings of staircases that go down but go up—it’s almost like a surrealist, cubist form. The way that Charlotte achieved that that’s so impressive is just constantly thinking of where to send light that carves out the architecture, so that even though it’s a wash of one color, which is supposed to be stone, you can feel it actually this is a labyrinth that goes on forever. If you just follow the staircases and follow the tunnels, it leads to all kinds of places, which I think is an achievement of lighting.

Christensen: This shot, more than any in any movie I’ve made that I can think of right now, is the closest to painting. Even the little stripes of light in the staircase—if they weren’t there, you’re not seeing that that space in the middle actually is lowered. How do we create the depth? The little wall lights that I call coffee lights. Brit, what do they call them?

Marling: I call them coffee lights too now, because of Charlotte. [Laughs] But they are sconces.

The Isolation

Marling: When we first looked at episode five, it almost felt claustrophobic. So much goes on in this room: How do you make it feel like you’re constantly finding a new perspective on the room? At first it feels like a safe haven, but then it feels like it’s not safe. Then it starts to feel like a prison. And when other parts of the hotel feel unsafe, it’s the place that you want to be back in because you’re safe there with Ray.

Genre comes from “generic.” It’s just the idea that you’re hitting tropes, and usually in genre you can be hitting them in a predictable way. True love can be generic, but if you can get deeper beneath the feelings and hit them from a fresh angle, I think you can actually make the tentpole moments of genre come alive again in a way that feels like life to people. With something like this, we were always asking ourselves: Is there a way to do genre that feels closer to Kieślowski’s Red or the Life of Veronique? Can you put those things together? Can you make something that’s thrilling, but has the soul and sensitivity and tenderness and warmth of a Kieślowski film? Or a sense of the mystical, maybe.

She has this encounter with Ray, and it feels more like The Wizard of Oz. He’s projected in this floating head. She’s in a dark room; only the red light is on. She’s smoking a joint. The wind’s howling outside. You feel like she’s come to commune with the person that she’s come to trust, which isn’t even a person. It’s just this ghostly apparition on the wall. When I saw the images from this scene is when I felt the most proud of the work we’d done, because I felt like we’d gotten to a marriage between genre and art that felt authentic. Not like we were trying for it, but that we were coming up from underneath.

Christensen: When shooting we weren’t ever being led by what we “should” be doing because this is a murder mystery or whatever. We were doing what was right. This is the only light that’s on, and there’s the wind outside, and that’s the two things that you really see in this image. We weren’t overdoing things. We were lighting the story every time, and we were trusting that darkness. It really was dark. There was nothing. It wasn’t that this was a bright image and we darkened it in the DI. This was how dark it was.

Marling: And we filmed all of Ray’s stuff. It wasn’t like it was just the AD being like, “And then Ray says…” We took the time to always film whatever was being played back, so that whatever was on a computer screen was real. It was never green screen. If it was on a screen playing on the wall, it was actually really playing on the wall. One of the things I’ve always hated as an actor is your job is hard enough already, and then people just throw a blue screen at you, and they’re like, “Pretend that you’re hearing a newscast.” It’s a lot easier to find the depth and the intimacy when everyone around you is trying to give you as much as possible to make the story feel real. Including giving you the dark when you should be scared, and feel you’re in the dark.

The Pool

Marling: This scene was shot twice. One time it was shot in Iceland, but there was a blizzard and we were dealing with COVID on set, and so we were basically shut down. We were there in this pool at 3:00 AM. We managed to literally get two camera setups while we were there, and then we got shut down. We’d been in Iceland for two months. We were like, “Okay, we don’t have a scene.” We had to go back to New Jersey and build the pool, the tank, and then everything around it was in green screen. We built two of the walls, and then it was glass on either side and everything else was just VFXed in. It’s crazy because the scene was such a hodgepodge of what was grabbed in Iceland in a real, practical hotel spa that had a storm going on all around—and then what we could achieve on a soundstage in New Jersey, sandwiched between a recycling plant and a freeway and a landfill.

Charlotte was saying about the image prior that she’s in the dark night of the soul, she’s at the end of her rope with who she thinks might be the killer. Here she’s freezing, she’s tired, she hasn’t slept, the only warmth is this body of water. And you see this moment where she’s just like, “Fuck it, I’m taking off my clothes. I’m getting in this warm body of water. I’m getting warm. I know it’s dangerous. I know it’s probably stupid, but I’m at a place of animal instinct.” On the page people always had a hard time with it. People were always like, “Why does she go in the water? Why does she go under?” And we’d explain all the things and it would never quite track. But in the filming of it we managed to pull off, I think, the atmospheric feeling, which is that she’s almost happy to meet death.

She’s not even sure she wants to be alive any longer. She just needs primal warmth. And this moment is the moment before she decides to go under. And it’s a complicated blend of wanting to give up, wanting to be subsumed by the warmth of the womb, wanting to know the answers, but not having them.

Christensen: I was pulled into a cupboard, and we had to communicate either side of the window, do you remember? I got COVID on this night, so basically I had to leave the set, and I was out in a blizzard in an igloo tent with a walkie talkie. We can do a lot of stuff, Brit and I, but we do not know how to use a walkie. Brit was talking when she wasn’t pushing the thing, and so was I, and I had it on when I wasn’t talking. So I threw it in the snow, and we were just shouting through the glass. [Laughs] It was brutal.

Marling: The size of the pool in Iceland was actually more like a little jacuzzi that went to the outside, and what we ended up building on the stage in New Jersey was an actual legitimate pool that we could get in with camera equipment and shoot the ending of the scene. It turned out that all we needed in order to pull that off was to just paint the bottom of the pool black, turn off the lights, and just have one main light. There’s this feeling that she gets into something kind of small. But then once she gets in, it feels mythological, like this bottomless black space that she’s descending into.

The Fire

Marling: When she’s underwater in the pool, she’s remembering these moments where she had this horrible fight and everything was on fire. That’s part of where our excitement was, to just light this whole wall on fire—not just have a couple things go up in flames, but literally let the whole wall go, and let that feeling of the passion that has formed between Darby and Bill be a beautiful ember. At this point, something is smoldering about it in a way that it’s threatening to literally light the whole room on fire. Darby’s obsession is the kindling for that. For all of her competency and focus, she also allows herself to become unhinged, and driven by her passion to an extreme that becomes dangerous.

The past is this hot, smoldering thing that’s still cooking. Something can happen to you seven years ago, but the fire of what happened to you seven years ago can burn you in the present moment. Sometimes more painfully seven years later than it even did at the time, because you understand it better, and you see your own role in it.

The Walk

Christensen: This sums up everything that we have been talking about: the simplicity, trusting the story and trusting an image, and not overdoing things. This is the staircase where she’s walking down into the lobby, and it’s just lit with different levels and slight changes in color. We had an LED light that was behind the railing.

It’s so simple, but again, the simple is sometimes the harder thing to light, and you’re scared when doing it. But we saw it straight away. We had this idea that the journey from her room, when everything has shut down—it’s super cold, which is why we wanted to make this space actually quite warm, with that salmon color in daylight.

Marling: We are Darby, and so we can put ourselves into that silhouette. As she descends this staircase, we’re with her. She’s descending into a dark night of the soul. If we follow the shot through and it wasn’t a still frame, she walks forward, she walks forward, she walks forward. It becomes her closeup, and she hears the sound and turns and looks, and you see the mist of her breath because it’s so cold in here. And you see how afraid she is, but you don’t need to see at the top. You can feel it from how black and vast [it is], and the way that the curve of the stairs opens out to you.

I feel like this shot is what the show is, which is this invitation to go down into the dark night and touch something dark, in order to come back up to the light at the end. We do that. When you get to the end of the story, there’s something genuinely hopeful at the center, but it’s not a saccharin hope. It’s a hard one, sharp-edged hope. It’s because you went through the dark to get there.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.