Joe Swanberg Talks About ‘Easy,’ The Authentically Intimate Netflix Series You Won’t Want To Miss

New to Netflix today is Joe Swanberg’s new drama-comedy Easy, an anthology series that examines the lives of eight different couples living in Chicago. It’s a simultaneously sweet and masterful show that smarty explores the authentic aesthetic that has categorized much of Swanberg’s work, and it’s more than worth watching.

The director and creator behind Drinking Buddies, Digging for Fire, Happy Christmas, and one of the stories in V/H/S is often credited as one of the founders of mumblecore, a film style that values improvisation and naturalism over polished performances. Decider had the opportunity to talk to the accomplished director and creator about the rise of mumblecore, the development of his new Netflix series, and how he created an improvised Spanish language episode without speaking Spanish.

“In the last few years, I feel like a lot of the people who emerged from the mumblecore scene have brought a lot of drama to comedy,” Swanberg said about the film style he’s best known for. “The biggest impact is that even though I would consider Girls and Togetherness and Looking to be comedies, I would say they’re a lot less focused on set ups and punch lines and hard laughs and much more set up on a kind of naturalistic level where the comedy is coming out of relatable situations as opposed to joke writing.”

In every stage of its conception, Easy utilized the improv-heavy approach Swanberg is known for. “Creating the series, I sort of honed into these eight ideas with Netflix about what we wanted to explore,” he said. Swanberg would start each episode by writing out a very short description of that story’s main idea. “I end up writing [the episodes] with the cast, and they end up being heavily improvised.”

Each episode feels emotional in a raw way while still remaining unexpectedly humorous. “When you sort of pull back, there’s like a definite grand comedy going on in this show despite the fact that some of the characters might be wrapped up in like pretty heavy interpersonal things,” he said.

For those who are unfamiliar with Swanberg’s work, the biggest appeal of Easy will likely be its cast of high-profile actors and performers, which includes Orlando Bloom, Marc Maron, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Dave Franco, Hannibal Buress, and Aya Cash. According to Swanberg, the casting process heavily focused on the chemistry between different actors and what actors wanted the series to be about. “It was really a chance to get to talk to people in a really nice, open-ended way. There was no scripts and we weren’t talking specifically about a character or specifically about a situation,” he said. “We were talking more broadly about America in 2016 and what kind of stories we wanted to tell, what we felt like we were and were not seeing in other shows. And through that process I kind of met and landed on the people who are in this season.”

One of those stars is an actor Swanberg has worked with before, Orlando Bloom. The actor starred in Swanberg’s 2015 drama-comedy, Digging for Fire, and he stars in Easy as half of a sexually curious couple that is using Tinder for the first time to coordinate a threesome. According to Swanberg, the idea for the episode came in part from personal experience: “You know, as a parent myself and somebody who has been married for nine years now, this is certainly a conversation I’ve had, not only with my wife but with some of my friends, where we look at Tinder and all of these dating apps and hook up apps, and we’re like ‘Wait a minute. Where was this stuff when we were actually able to use it?’”

The episode also stars Malin Akerman as Bloom’s wife and Kate Micucci as the young couple’s friend and later threeway partner. “You’re always trying to piece together chemistry and just find people who feel like they’re going to have a good vibe together,” Swanberg said. “And so it was a nice overlap where Orlando and Malin kind of knew each other. Malin and Kate had I think met each other a few times before. Everybody felt comfortable.”

The actors wrote and worked with Swanberg over the course of a week, which added to the authentic chemistry the trio has onscreen. “We shot the big climactic sex scene last, which means that we all had a week together to kind of hang out and get to know each other.”

Easy spends a lot of time detailing one of the most important aspects of romantic relationships: sex. The new series has more deeply intimate sex scenes than any other Netflix Original. When asked if there were any lines he wasn’t allowed to cross, Swanberg praised Netflix. “They’d seen Drinking Buddies and Happy Christmas and some of the work, and they knew that the process yielded narrative results,” he said. “They weren’t just going to get a solid script the way you would on most shows.”

“The real nuts and bolts of all the sex in the show comes down to the actors that I’m working with and people’s different comfort levels,” Swanberg explained. “But I would say shooting a sex scene is no different than shooting any kind of intimate, revealing scene. In many ways, it’s easier to have realistic-looking sex on camera than it is to talk to somebody really honestly and openly about your life. You’re maybe exposing a lot more in a dialogue scene than you may be in a sex scene.”

With eight couples from all different walks of life, Easy certainly covers a lot of ground. When asked what his favorite episodes of the series were, Swanberg highlighted the Marc Maron episode and the Spanish language episode. “I wouldn’t say that those are my favorite, but I would say that those are the most exciting to me because they’re getting into issues that I think are really relevant right now, and they’re also doing things I’ve never had the chance to do,” he said.

Marc Maron’s episode is especially interesting. The story focuses on a graphic novelist who has to come to terms with how self-reflective art should be. True to Swanberg’s form, the character Maron is playing closely resembles the comedian’s WTF persona. “It definitely is true to my working process where basically I would like every actor to play themselves as much as possible,” he said. “Marc’s work is already very self-reflective. It’s one of the things that drew me to his comedy and to the podcast. I feel like he has a really clear-eyed view of himself and always seems open to analyzing his actions and sort of where he is in his life.”

“Within the structure of this fake character, we get to have a nice overlap with Marc’s real life,” he said. The episode also echoes some of Swanberg’s own beliefs. “It’s certainly connected a lot to what I’m thinking about in terms of privacy and the sort of lack of distance between people’s art and their lives and how in the sort of internet, selfie culture, that’s getting even closer. People are sort of famous just for being famous now. I don’t have a judgement on it, but I’m definitely fascinated by it and feel like it’s worth spending some time exploring.”

Easy’s other episode that’s sure to widely discussed is the series’ completely Spanish episode. “Shooting an entire episode in Spanish — in improvised Spanish, which is a language I do not speak fluently — was really fun,” Swanberg said. “Because Chicago has a big Mexican population, and because I wanted to film down in Pilsen, it just made sense to me that these characters would speak Spanish to each other.”

The episode stars Aislinn Derbez, Raul Castillo, and Mauricio Ochmann. Swanberg came up with the idea for an improvised Spanish language project with Derbez when they were working together of Swanberg’s Win It All. “She was saying to me, ‘I still want to do this improv process with you, but it would be really great to do it in Spanish because my Spanish is so much better than my English, and I have a lot of things that I want to say but I don’t quite know the right way to say them in English,’” he explained.

Swanberg saw Easy as the opportunity for this experiment. He and the actors would pitch ideas and plan out the episode in English, and then the actors would film in Spanish with Swanberg having next to no clue what was being said. The actors would have to translate the scene back to him afterwards. “What was really cool about it was despite not being able to follow it word-for-word while we were working on it, the emotional tone was definitely easy to read,” he said. “I was surprised to discover how I still had favorite takes … You can still feel when actors are connecting to each other, even when you’re not understanding every word verbatim.”

The lack of focus on the language actually allowed the episode to be more creatively experimental. “I would say that in terms of not being able to focus on the specificity of the dialogue, I was actually liberated to think more visually,” Swanberg said.

Swanberg certainly sees a future for Easy. “When I pitched [the show] to Netflix, I talked about things like Boyhood and the Seven Up! documentary series that Michael Apted did and the idea that this anthology format would allow us, with each subsequent season, to introduce new characters and come back to the characters who we’ve already met in Season One,” he explained. “My dream for the show is that the longer it can go on, the more complicated these people’s relationships with each other can become and also the more we as an audience will get to learn and know about them.”

“I’m also excited by these year long gaps between the seasons where we don’t get to see what’s happening,” he said. “There’s a couple in this season that’s trying to have a baby. Maybe when we come back in Season Two, she’s pregnant but there are other complicating factors that we haven’t gotten to see in the gap in between. I love the idea of sort of knowing a lot about these characters but never really knowing everything.”

However, for all of the show’s interpersonal complexities and difficult situations, each episode of Easy ends on a generally upbeat note. According to Swanberg, that’s intentional. “I just wanted it to feel real,” he said. “Ending on any note other than a neutral and open-ended note felt off to me. Like, real life is always punctuated by laughter no matter who you are and what your situations are.”

[Where to watch Easy]