Joe Swanberg Tells Us Why ‘Easy’ Has Him Breaking All His Own Rules

Creator, writer, and director of the Netflix anthology series Easy, Joe Swanberg, had a successful indie film career going for himself before he got into the TV world. But now he’s in it and he has no plans of leaving. Personal rule number one, of many, broken. In returning to characters he’s created for the first time ever, he spoke to Decider about the nerves he was feeling on the eve of season two’s release. Plus, we got his thoughts on including such a strong feminism theme in the show, if he would ever dedicate a full film to any of these characters, and yes, of course, a rather intellectual and enlightened chat about those sex scenes.

Congrats on the second season, I love it even more than the first.

Oh, great. That’s really exciting to hear. I have never done this before, so I am extremely nervous to have a season two of something, and very much hoping that people do like it more than the first season. So thank you for saying that.

Do you feel more nervous about the second season than the first?

Absolutely. I’ve spent the last decade making [movies that you] finish and put out into the world, and then you’re done with them, and your next movie is a totally different beast and you get to start over. So it’s a very new experience for me to be revisiting characters and returning to something that I inevitably know will be compared to last season. It’s been definitely a little more nerve-wracking. I know the characters, so there are aspects of it that are fun and nice and easy, but whoooo. Yeah, we’ll see.

You mention it being a new experience, but was there anything that you were thinking about when you were going into season two? Was there something from season one that you really wanted to double down on and explore even more, or like a vibe, or anything that you wanted to focus on in this season?

I think that the world is a lot crazier than it was last season. To me, season two feels less relationship-focused and a little more community-focused, and I think that was definitely a conscious decision going into season two that I was maybe interested in exploring. A little bit more about neighbor interaction and some ways that maybe groups of people try and solve problems together and figure things out. It’s definitely to me felt a little different and a little more like I was trying to expand beyond these intimate character relationships into maybe some broader social topics.

And one of those being feminism, which I really liked in episode seven, “Lady Cha Cha”. Was there somebody you consulted with? Was it the actresses? What shaped the idea of feminism that is presented on-screen?

Yeah, the actresses definitely. One of the really fun aspects of getting to do a season two of the show was that I had worked with some of these people last season, and they knew their characters really well. It was really fun to get the go-ahead to revisit those characters and then to be able to call Jacqueline (Toboni) and Kiersey (Clemons) and talk through some of those ideas. Jacqueline especially was really into [it]. I sort of pitch everybody, and Jeeze Loueez, the burlesque performer who runs this black queer burlesque show in Chicago, I had met her and really wanted to include her in the episode and started thinking about some of those ideas. And so I called and pitched Jacqueline and she was really into the inner conflict of her character, on the one hand feeling like she is a big, vocal advocate of sex positive and body positive feminism, and then we throw in there that her character goes to strip clubs and is really open to all that. I love the idea of her then having to deal with this internal conflict of something as simple as jealousy. I certainly relate to the idea of attempting to justify and rationalize and intellectualize some things that maybe come down to something as simple as, “It just makes me jealous,” or “It hurts my feelings.” It’s always fun for me to watch characters twist themselves into knots over their inability to say the simple things. It’s also subject matter that as a straight, white guy, I’m always conscious that I’m walking into complicated territory, so it’s really helpful for me to be able to reach out to the actresses and say, “Please be in charge of the voice of your character, and please work with me from the beginning to make sure that we’re getting this right and that it feels right to you.”

A lot of people were drawn to the sex scenes in the first season. There’s something about them that makes them so unpervy and so earned, so how do you balance the amount of emotional vulnerability that we’re seeing from these characters that makes the physical vulnerability pay off?

Well, I really have from the beginning of my career tried to shoot sex scenes the same as I would shoot any other scene. I’m hoping that as I get more experience as a filmmaker and a storyteller, that we’re continuing to pursue this idea that sex scenes and nudity and that stuff only feels really pervy when suddenly the movie or the show takes this other tone when that stuff starts to happen. Obviously the first thing I do is have a lot of conversations with the cast about how we want to approach that, get them involved in that process the same way they are in the improv and writing process and everything else. But then also to make sure that on set and in our approach to it that we’re not suddenly becoming this soft, candlelit, Cinemax-y, weird sort of vibe. And that we’re like, no, this is for Easy, these are still the same characters, this is an aspect of their lives, we should be approaching this seriously and we should be acknowledging that this sex scene is an opportunity to advance the storyline and learn just as much about the character as any other scene would be.

Did you feel like it was an aspect that people connected with last season? Did you feel any pressure or want to make sure that sex scenes were included in this season, or were you just like, if it fists the story, then great?

Yeah, I’m interested in it. When I became interested in being a filmmaker and started thinking about the work that I want to make, I think early on a lot of that was an investigation of why this stuff is taboo and why we represent it the way we do in the media. My early projects were very much about trying to normalize sex and seeing what it felt like to tell stories that involved characters and their sexuality. That remains a subject of interest to me, and I think, increasingly, we don’t see many representations of sexuality, and so every time out, it still feels like maybe a vital part of what I can contribute or what I’m interested in talking about. A big part of that is the hope to normalize that stuff. To live in a world where the media we consume is as complicated and adult and nuanced as our lives are as opposed to maybe the way we change everything when a sex scene comes on or like hyperfocus on it or shoot it in a certain way. Just to deglamorize it and go for it. It comes pretty naturally that as I start to think about characters, I’m factoring in their sex lives the same way that I would think about the job they have, how much money they make, what neighborhood they live in, all these other aspects of their life.

As far as doing the second season now too, how does Easy fit in your mind career-wise? Does it feel like a palate cleanser in between films? How are you compartmentalizing it?

I would say that these days it has become a primary focus for me. It maybe caught me a little off guard. I never thought I would work in TV. I was always very much a cinephile film person. But the possibilities of the show are so endless, and the opportunity to get to tell this many stories in a short amount of time and to get to work with this many talented actors has really made the show a big part of my year the last two years. While I am planning to make a feature next, I would say that I’m always, all year long, whether I’m working on the show or not, thinking of ideas for Easy, reading stories in the news and wondering how characters we’ve already established maybe would talk about certain things. More than a palate cleanser, I would say, it’s becoming a major project for me that I hope to do for a long time, and that the movies were maybe an original goal, but now the movies are maybe going to be a palate cleanser between seasons of Easy.

Are there any of these characters that the more you work with them, the more you think, “Should I break this out and make it its own film?” Or do you want them to just exist in the Easy world?

That’s a really good question. It is always fun for me to be able to do a thirty minute episode and to be able to begin and end a story and to feel the satisfaction with that aspect of Easy, which I love. And then simultaneously, yeah, the more I get to work with these actors and the better I get to know the characters, the more I’m like, god, I could do an entire season about any one of these couples. So I don’t know how I’m going to deal with that. In season one, the brewery brothers story line sort of constituted two of the eight episodes. I would say it’s probably conceivable that if I get to do more seasons of this show, certain story lines might take on two or three episode arcs, but that’s always going to be doing battle with what originally drew me to the concept, which is that I could pop in and tell these short stories without getting too heavily into the world of TV where an audience has to follow everything. This is, primarily, based on how I consume media myself. Which is, often it is challenging to me to commit to a season of television because I’ll end up getting a couple episodes in and I’ll end up getting distracted or I’ll start another project. It’s always easier for me to watch another anthology series or something where every episode is standalone because the commitment level is lower. When I conceived of Easy, I was like, great. I’m going to make the most low-commitment show that I can possibly make, where anybody can dive in at any time. And so the more I serialize it, the less I’m sticking to what was originally appealing. But the desire is obviously there because these actors are so good and some of these storylines are so rich that I could easily make a bunch of episodes about them.

Yeah. For what it’s worth, I would watch a full movie about Dave Franco changing diapers, so feel free to run with that.

I suspect that Dave Franco as a full-time childcare provider will be a season three plot line. No doubt about it. Because that also sounds really fun to me.

Yeah! And I know you’re thinking about it all year, but are the actors also coming to you with ideas or stories about their characters? Because you seem to be running an exceptionally collaborative environment with this show.

It definitely is, and I love that aspect about it. Certainly I’m dropping people lines when I read a story in the news or something that feels like it’s connected with a character so that we do have this ongoing around the year collaboration even when we’re not shooting the show. I would say that that’s probably going to increase as time goes on if we can do multiple seasons, that these characters are going to become even more real and nuanced. It would be a dream to me if the actors were pitching me concepts and it really became this huge melting pot where a lot of the characters are crossing into each other’s story lines in the show and it continues to introduce new people while complicating and expanding upon the characters that already exist.

Where to watch Easy