[Editor’s note: This interview contains spoilers for “Death by Lightning.”]
We all only have one wild and precious life to live, and while James A. Garfield couldn’t spend any of his watching a Netflix miniseries, director Matt Ross wants any story we do spend two or four or 10 hours on to be worth it. Ross immediately knew he’d found such a story on reading Mike Makowsky’s script for “Death by Lightning,” which follows both Garfield (Michael Shannon) and his eventual assassin Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) from the former’s surprise nomination for President at the 1880 Republican National Convention through the latter’s hanging for murder. He wanted to take on the challenge of making the visual storytelling feel as immediate, surprising, and modern as Makowsky’s script read.
Much of that work, Ross told IndieWire, has nothing to do with the cinematic apparatus itself. “I want to be taken away and not the whole time think, ‘Oh, great shot. Oh, that’s an interesting costume choice. Oh, why did they choose to shoot it that way?’” Ross said. “I want to have an intellectual and emotional response.”
The intellectual and emotional response to “Death by Lightning,” for Ross, is all wrapped up in people — and in picnic tables. “[The script] wasn’t a history lesson. It was through the prism of these two men who I think represented very polar opposites of a desire for legacy — a thing men probably, historically, had more of a desire for because of women’s lack of agency in patriarchal societies, right? There’s this desire to matter,” Ross said. “The meaning of the entire thing is the last scene with Crete [Betty Gilpin] and her children… These two men are left with nothing. They’re both dead. The actual legacy is our friends and our family — the love we share, the people we connect with while we’re alive.”
Ross’s task for “Death by Lightning,” then, was to realize a group of people and make their surprising complexity be the thing that matters far more than any turn of the plot — which is, after all, just a Wikipedia article away. Knowing that thematic idea is the destination the series is driving toward allowed Ross to build a team and direct accordingly.
When thinking about Garfield and Guiteau, Ross wanted to bring on actors who could flex new sides of themselves and slightly play with an audience’s expectation of their personas. It is a testament to Matthew Macfadyen’s acting chops (and awful haircut) that you really do believe no one in the Oneida free love commune to which Guiteau belonged for five years wants to have sex with Mr. Darcy. Michael Shannon has a history of playing, shall we say, rather intense individuals; “Death by Lightning” was a chance for him to embody much more of a Clark Kent than a General Zod.
“ I try and cast, personally, the same way one casts in theater — which is to say, you’re assuming that this person can do anything. So what have they not done recently that might be fun for them to do, you know?” Ross said. “Then it just becomes a conversation of how you illuminate the humanity of the characters, because for me, I didn’t want Garfield to be a one-note good guy. I wanted him to be grumpy and complicated and angry at times, frustrated, and have his own maybe nascent ambitions.”
Ross gives full credit to the actors — “I learned like 35 years ago, and it’s true, that there’s a misconception about an actor/director relationship that somehow a director is getting something from an actor. I think that’s a negation of an actor’s talent. I don’t get anything from them that they don’t want to give me,” Ross said. There’s only the work of collaborating on the right levels on the day, trying something a little more or a little less, or experimenting with different eyes, and there is the small, invisible work that Ross does behind the camera to properly focus the audience on an actor’s performance.
An example of this is the scene where Guiteau is hanged for Garfield’s assassination. The setup is quite simple. We follow Guiteau across the prison yard from the front (the better to see the poem he has written for the grand occasion) and behind, two other views of the crowd (spotty) and the gallows (simple). Once on the gallows, Ross mostly sticks to a pretty straight-on medium closeup of Guiteau as the noose is put around his neck. We get the most devastatingly silent “Wow, is this thing on?” reaction shot from the observers after Guiteau sings “I’m Going to the Lordy” and laughs, thrilled at his own handiwork. It’s all perfectly serviceable, invisible filmmaking.
Then just as simply and invisibly, Ross tightens the visual noose. The camera slowly pushes in on Guiteau’s face as he absorbs the silence, and lets out an “Oh” so horrified you can almost hear the italics. “We thought that would be powerful,” Ross said. “Matthew and I talked about what that would be — I mean, here’s a man who was in prison for murder and he was writing a manifesto and trying to solicit a wife and all this craziness, and he thought it would change everything and that he would be saved and loved and he was making jokes on the way to the gallows, but… would it not be profound for this man, if at the very last moment, he realizes his insignificance.”
A dance between performer and camera like that one requires a clear, shared vision for the emotional intent of a scene, a willingness to play and experiment, and trust that the story is, in fact, worth the four hours. “I could spend an hour discussing what each actor brought, whether it’s, you know, the emotional power that Betty brings or Nick [Offerman, or Shea Wigham], but with each person, I just want to illuminate them and their work. We’re only as good as the people with whom we play, and they all brought their A game and were so willing to explore and to try to push the characters in different ways.”
“Death by Lightning” is now streaming on Netflix.