Creative Soulmates Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij on Life After ‘The OA’ With ‘A Murder at the End of the World’
variety.comBrit Marling and Zal Batmanglij — a creative team who’ve been together since their first short film in 2007 — tend to work in the bedrooms of their Los Angeles homes. “We live in small houses on the Eastside,” Marling says during a visit to New York, “so we don’t have room for offices or studies.” In the first of many times one of the pair picks up the other’s ideas and runs, Batmanglij jumps in. “It feels like pantomime to have offices with assistants, and the assistant asks you if you want a bottle of water — the performance of it,” he says. “Take it back to when you were a kid, building a fort.” In the months before the pandemic, Marling, now 41, and Batmanglij, now 42, were doing some fort-building — trying to pin down an idea they’d had the year before, and make it work as a story — when they stumbled upon a character who compelled them. “Zal and I always have a garden of ideas,” Marling says, “and there were other things that were plants that have been growing for 10 years.
Then, Darby sprung up. She existed so robustly between us.” And, suddenly, “A Murder at the End of the World,” revolving around the amateur detective Darby Hart, became the plant to which they were devoted.
They’d intended to pitch the project the week the industry shut down (ending up doing so over Zoom in April 2020), and began writing chapters that year ahead of a 2022 shoot.
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