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Sam Danis: Hi, this is Audible Editor Sam, and I'm here today with Greg O'Connor and Josh Fagin, writers of The Space Within, a new eight-episode Audible Original podcast starring Jessica Chastain, Bobby Cannavale, and Ellen Burstyn, among others. They're both veterans of film and TV, as both producers and writers, fitting experience for this very cinematic sci-fi thriller, which I personally thoroughly enjoyed. Thank you both so much for joining me today.
Greg O'Connor: Thanks for having us.
Josh Fagin: My pleasure.
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SD: First off, I want to hear a little bit about the background of this podcast. Can you tell me a little bit about how you both came together to work on this story?
JF: Well, Greg and I, we've been working together for years, and had previously worked on a television series together that was an ongoing project for the two of us, and had sort of been cooking up ideas on the side. And there were some things that we were interested in exploring. There was a story that we had come across that had sparked an idea, about a guy named John Mack, who was a scientist and worked at Harvard University in the 1980s and ’90s, and had had some interesting interactions with patients who may or may not have been abducted by aliens. The story became a kernel for some conversations between Greg and I, and led to this reimagining of a character set in the present day who had gone through similar trials and tribulations that John Mack had in the academic community.
GO: Yeah, we've known each other for a long time, and when we saw this story, we both said, "Wow, something could be really, really interesting here." And the John Mack story, of course, is true, so we didn't feel like we wanted to pursue the John Mack story itself, because we felt like we wanted the freedom to see where this could take us, and start off in a sort of a very grounded world, an academic world, that expanded into something that had much more of a kind of a sci-fi world to it. That was the original idea, and then we just started to beat out the story.
JF: Yeah, I think one of the things that Greg and I have always been interested in exploring are characters who are relegated to the sidelines, or on the outside looking in, or who tend to be sort of marginalized or alienated because of their convictions and beliefs. The more we started to talk about this character, the character played by Jessica Chastain, Madeline Wyle, it became clear to us that there's a real opportunity to explore and excavate somebody who was really up against the world in terms of her belief system, and also against her own convictions. The character that we were interested in exploring is somebody who has always relied on empirical evidence as a scientist. She's a doctor, she's a psychiatrist, she's renowned, she's respected in her field, and she's put in circumstances that really create for her a kind of inner conflict that sets in motion the story about somebody who is really struggling to accept the possibility that what is happening is perhaps real and true. And so, much of our story deals with a character who kind of goes down this rabbit hole and has to constantly calibrate her own belief system in order to accept what might be happening.
GO: And at the same time, be pitted against a system that does not want to hear this, or hear anything that could be outside the norms of what they would think of as science as we understand it.
SD: So, you both have plenty of experience in the very visual mediums of film and television, and I'd love to know why audio for this project? What about this story felt right to hear versus see?
JF: Well, I think when Greg and I started talking about this character and this entry point into this world, and this notion that we would center the story around this character who is a psychiatrist, it gave us a very intimate backdrop, in a way, to tell a story using conversation, and using the sort of intimacy of space and relationships, and in a very quiet environment. I think, out of those conversations, this idea that we could build an intimate story that would begin to grow in its expanse, this sort of aperture would widen over the course of the story. So, the idea of audio became a really fascinating prospect for us, narratively. I think we were both hooked into this idea that led us to focus on the relationship particularly between Jessica's character and the young girl who comes into her orbit, and let that be the doorway into what will eventually become a much larger canvas. So, the audio as a medium became really fascinating to us, and I think both of us having had no experience doing this and working in this medium prior to this, I think we both fell in love with the possibilities of it narratively. And the toolbox became really vast for us, and really fun, and pushed us to step outside our comfort zone as storytellers.
Greg: "I think the intention for us was to be about alienation, about people who are marginalized."
GO: Yeah, it was really interesting to think about how to tell the story without the visuals and have the audio be at the forefront. And because the story was about a psychiatrist and her sessions with some of these potential abductee patients, we thought it'd be really interesting because it's all about the dialogue between the two. And quite honestly, it gives us a little bit more control, because I think as storytellers, we love the idea of something that there wasn't all the other people that are required to do more of a visual medium. And so it really just comes down to the writing and a small team of people to bring this thing to life, and I think that idea was very compelling for us.
JF: Both of us probably think visually, and so very often in the writing of something, you begin to trust a camera and the lens of a camera and the point of view that the audience is sort of inheriting in a moment, in a scene. And with that comes the opportunity, of course, for subtext, so that, in other words, characters can say something but the camera begins to reflect something else emotionally or psychologically. And what begins to present itself here are these challenges, right? Because you don't have that perspective, so what you find are these opportunities to mine the audio world, this sort of sonic landscape for other things. And so we had a wonderful sound designer named Jonathan Siri and a great engineer and producer named Vin Cacchione, both of whom were intrinsically involved in building that kind of landscape.
But there are moments in the show, in going back and sort of building a sound design where you realize, "Okay, what we're hearing in the background, there are things that sort of begin to operate almost as surrogates for subtext." There's a moment I think back in episode 2, Jessica's character, Maddie, is cooking, for instance. And she's chopping vegetables and she's preparing a meal for herself, and she gets a phone call from Michael Stuhlbarg's character. And the two of them have this conversation and there's a kind of underlying tension. We recorded it, of course, with this intent that she's just cooking and we're hearing that in the background, but then what you begin to discover is that, "Well, why not use the sounds that we're hearing in the background to suggest the underlying things that are happening emotionally and psychologically for Jessica's character?" So that's where the subtext begins to present itself.
GO: And I also think one of the things we found really interesting was in listening to an audio series that, oftentimes, you hear people saying what’s going on because they feel like they need to orient the listener, and so—
JF: Greg and I never wanted a character to walk into a room and say, "I'm opening the fridge and I'm grabbing a beer." [laughs]
GO: "I'm opening the door." Yeah. So, it was really interesting for us to see how far we could push not doing that, and knowing that the audience would, even if they were disoriented slightly in the beginning, would catch up. And I think that was really an interesting challenge for us, to not point out everything and just trust that the audience is going to be there and understand what's going on and fill in the gaps.
JF: There's an evolution, I think. There's a sort of language that I think the audience is beginning to learn over the course of a story, and we built this notion that it's okay to not handhold always. To let the audience be a little bit behind in order to discover the context, the situation that is happening, who's talking, where are we. The sounds of the world inform that without it being announced as a sort of headline at the tops of scenes. There's a scene that takes place, for instance, at an aquarium, and it's like there's something very disembodied about the sound, and it feels very strange and almost otherworldly, and you begin to understand expositionally where we are.
Josh: "We're so grateful and so lucky to have somebody like Jessica [Chastain]. She began to show us certain things about the character that maybe we didn't even know ourselves."
SD: I think it's interesting you guys mention that, because that's one of the things that really stuck out at me listening to the story, is there are little moments where you're not oriented. The audience is left to discover where they are and what's going on and what the emotions are themselves. Even in the very beginning of the story, you're listening to a conversation, and it's not for a minute or so that you realize it's not a live conversation happening. Maddie is listening to a recording, which orients you to her line of work and how seriously she takes it, which I thought was very interesting. I wanted to ask if there were any particular moments in the podcast that felt important to get just right in audio. Did you have any very specific concepts of how certain moments would sound or feel?
JF: There's a thing that we sort of stumbled across. I wish I had a fancy name for what it is, but it was a very subjective kind of audio trick that we were messing around with, and that was a way of really trying to get inside of Jessica's character's voice, of Maddie's voice and head. There were moments along the way where we really felt compelled to understand internally what the character is going through, and so those inherent challenges are always in front of you. It's a character who is very isolated, right? I mean, she has relationships with a revolving door of people throughout the show, but despite the show having incredible building tension, and having elements of what feel like a thriller, there's a very isolating feeling around Maddie. As the story evolves, that only becomes more pronounced, the walls are sort of closing in, and there's a feeling that she is going through this thing alone because she's not being heard and people don't believe her, or she doesn't trust that she can be truthful about what she's experiencing.
And so we figured out a way to sort of—I hate to use the word "montage," but it's almost like a collage, or an audio tapestry of sounds and voices, very often feeling kind of disembodied, and not necessarily clear in terms of what we're listening to, but I think the takeaway is that there's an emotion, there's a feeling, there's a sort of sense of we're inside her state of mind.
Once we figured out we can do that, and by the way, I'm sure it's been done a million times before, but for us, it was like, "Oh, man, this is great. We feel like there's a way of internalizing what she's going through." But getting that right was always a challenge. So, in other words, what were the pieces? What are the ingredients of the things inside her head? What are the strands of dialogue that we're pulling? How are we designing the sound here? What are we doing with score? All of those things, they were all put in this blender. And there were a few moments when we go to that well, and each time it required its own kind of calculus of choices and options.
GO: And I think, in the broader sense, what we really wanted to do was to have the sound and the music kind of meld together, so the soundscape that we've created is a combination of music and sound effects, and oftentimes one really bleeds into another, and that was something that was very specific that we wanted to do.
JF: Yeah, it was like a laboratory. I think there was a lot of communicating in terms of what we wanted, and so the conversations were very often about how do we make those things come to life, right? I mean, very often they're accidents. Things happen that you don't expect, and so you hear a little something and it opens a door, and suddenly you're like, "Let's follow that." We had a wonderful team that was really adept at improvising and finding interesting ways, compelling ways, to tell the story from an audio standpoint.
SD: I really like that. Writing is rewriting, even when you're in the midst of recording.
JF: Absolutely.
SD: I want to get a little bit into the plot itself. The Space Within, ultimately, is about a psychiatrist whose reputation and very concept of reality is tested when she encounters this string of patients with these eerily similar repressed memories that are all pointing to something really not of this known world. The main character, Dr. Madeline Wyle, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist, and she specializes in trauma and PTSD. There's a clear connection for me there between the scrutiny and disbelief that trauma victims and folks going through mental health struggles go through, and the kind of disbelief that these characters are facing from the community itself. I'm curious, what about this approach intrigued you for this story?
JF: Well, I think anytime you enter this world it's quite precarious because, for Greg and I, as storytellers, we're very mindful of the minefield of tropes that we're stepping into here. And so I think it's crucial for us to kind of really uncover the truths of each of these characters. If there's anything we're really focused on, it's less about the spectacle nature of the story, and more about the authenticity of it. And especially with an actress as wonderful as Jessica, you're going to find layers, right? There's so much going on below the surface, and so much of the story is about excavating each of these characters and tapping into both from a scientific standpoint, but also from a humanistic standpoint. You have this opportunity to really begin to uncover characters who have things that are not readily apparent to the audience.
Clearly Jessica's character, Maddie—that kind of work is, I think Greg and I are both really in awe of it, but it requires just a bottomless well of compassion and empathy, and this idea that she can recognize the struggles in the people around her became really fascinating for us to explore. But it also made us realize that we have to confront who she is, and the things that she has buried within herself and her own kind of personal trauma, which does get unearthed over the course of the story. So those two things were sort of interwoven and really meaningful in terms of the plot, because so much of what Maddie goes through is informed by her own personal tragedy, and the decisions she makes are all kind of calibrated by her sense of being alone in the universe, having been estranged from her family temporarily, becoming a pariah professionally.
GO: And I think we really were very attracted to this whole idea of, to your point, Sam, the sort of sense of alienation. It is about, ultimately, extraterrestrials, but we always want to bring it down to a more human level. I think the intention for us was to be about alienation, about people who are marginalized. And there is this small group of people that she is discovering—and we find out in the last episode that it is a larger small group of people—but still a small group of people who are going through something. And in the rest of the world's minds, what they have gone through is either not credible, or they're crazy, or whatever it is, and so there is the sense of a group of people who are alienated, and that's part of Maddie's journey also, is she's becoming kind of alienated from her colleagues and her professional life.
JF: And I think that there's an open mindedness in a character like Maddie's, right? I think it's necessary for that work. I think this idea that there's an acceptance of the tragedies and traumas that are around her, and the understanding that the intersection with Sophie's character is really a kind of pivot for her. What we uncover, though, is she’s stymied, and there is also a deeper connection on a personal level that Maddie begins to feel toward this young girl, and that becomes a doorway for the audience, right? And we use Ellen Burstyn's character as a sort of proxy for that. So, she becomes an opportunity for the audience to understand what Maddie is internalizing and is afraid to open up about. The goal really with Maddie is she receives these transmissions from these people from a therapeutic standpoint, but it really begins to reshape her own sense of self.
SD: Getting a little bit deeper, too, into the character of Maddie, Madeline Wyle, obviously portrayed by Jessica Chastain, which I think is just so perfect, considering that she's really shone in content like this before, sci-fi thrillers like Interstellar, The Martian. Just one of those perfect casting fits for me. Did you have someone like her in mind when you were writing this character, and what was most important to you when you were casting the characters?
JF: The someone in mind was Jessica [laughing].
GO: Yeah. We really did have her in mind.
JF: Yeah. It really was that voice, and she is obviously a magnificent actor, has this incredible ability to compartmentalize and to tuck away these wells and silos of emotion. There are moments where a kind of vulnerability begins to show itself. And she's so judicious about where and when to reveal that, and I think that that's where you get this incredible layering of performance, because I think she knows that the audience is sort of waiting for that. I think that there's a sense that she's going to give just enough to make us feel that there's a complete iceberg underneath the surface. I think for us we're so grateful and so lucky to have somebody like Jessica. She began to show us certain things about the character that maybe we didn't even know ourselves.
GO: Yeah, Jessica really was literally from the very beginning who we had thought about. We wanted somebody that was believable in the role, who was very heady and intellectual, and you could totally believe her as this PhD, high-level psychiatrist, head of University of Pennsylvania Psychiatry Department, all of that kind of stuff. As Josh said, it's kind of a vulnerability that you ultimately can be with her on an emotional level, and I think that Jessica brings both of those things, and ultimately what you want to do is invest in her character. She's just uncanny the way that just her voice, and it's amazing to watch her and to hear her as we were recording, just the little tremor in her voice or something, at certain times, or whatever it might be, that just is perfect. When you're writing something for Jessica Chastain, the bar is high, and you're kind of like, "Okay. We've got to make sure that we write this at a level that she is going to feel great about performing." And she was incredible.
JF: There's a fearlessness in her, obviously. I mean, I think it shows in the incredible body of work, but when you get down to it, and you're actually inside a character and you're doing all of this sort of forensics that you need to do for a character. She was really so adept at processing, synthesizing, understanding, and when she questioned things, it was really about pushing us to make sure that we understood, that we had a sense of the things that have been informing this character.
SD: I think it's a fantastic performance, and as much as she is a presence on screen, it was interesting to me that I didn't feel like I was missing that component while listening. She really gave her all to the audio. I'm also curious about the genre. You've both written for various television series such as Law & Order: Organized Crime, as well as produced films. What interested you both about writing a story with sci-fi elements?
GO: Here's what I would say about that. I'm very interested in ideas. I think what sci-fi can do is allow you to explore things in a different way, so I think I would say supernatural or sci-fi is not something that I would necessarily say is a genre that I'm always interested in working in, but I find myself personally—and I think Josh and I would probably be on a similar page about this—interested in ideas, interested in things that are outside the realm of the day-to-day, what you can see and what you can touch. And so I think that sci-fi allows you an opportunity to do that.
Greg: "I think what sci-fi can do is allow you to explore things in a different way."
And for me, even when you look at this story and you don't really know where it's going, I think we can say that we're not interested in telling a War of the Worlds kind of a story. It's not a big action kind of a thing. It's much more meditative, it's much more grounded. I think that kind of thing, that's got a supernatural element, to me, is super, super interesting, and I love telling stories about characters who are put in extraordinary circumstances. I feel like this show, in a way, doesn't hit the genre straight ahead. The genre's sort of on the outsides of it, and it takes a long time to even get to the point where we say anything about aliens, because we're really not trying to hit the genre dead in the center. I think we're trying to explore a world and a character that sort of seeps outside the boundaries of reality.
JF: One of the things that we kept talking about was—in fact, I at some point had to unearth it, but I had a piece of paper above my computer that says, "What if?" I mean, it was like those two words were a mantra throughout the writing of this thing, and by that I mean, “Can we hold ourselves to the truth of the story?” So, in the sense that, “What if this were all real?” Like, what if this is really happening? And if so, then how will this thing organically evolve and proceed? You take a character like Maddie's, and you take parents like John and Cynthia—Bobby Cannavale and Carmen Ejogo—so we have these characters sort of orbiting around each other, and what became interesting to us is that the story begins almost like a procedural, in the sense that this girl, this beautiful, innocent young girl had gone missing for a period of time. Where do our heads go naturally, right? It was imperative for us to follow that course and see where that is going to take us narratively, and there are moments when it felt to us that we were dancing around almost a police procedural. Yes, it's sci-fi because that's where the logic of the story is taking us, but it wasn't built necessarily like that from the very beginning.
SD: Right. I love it. I do think “What if?” is kind of the crux of sci-fi, and it's what I really like about it. But to your point, I do think this story is very much grounded in that reality, that this is literally someone in the scientific community dealing with something that thus far has defied scientific understanding, so that really grounds the listener as well in the story.
My final question: Following this experience—which it sounds like was a pretty eye-opening, interesting one, and hopefully rewarding for you two—can you see yourselves writing more podcasts or audio-first projects? Any other concepts you'd like to work on and experiment with in that space?
JF: I think for sure. I think we're somewhat agnostic in terms of, does the story want to be X,Y, or Z? I think the story will give us the answer itself. But, for sure, I definitely fell in love with the medium and writing for audio. I think it was an incredible experience and challenge, and really, really gratifying, and just feel really excited about the possibilities of continuing to work in the medium.
GO: Yeah. I would say the same. I loved it, and I feel like as a creator, again, just on a practical level, you have so much more control over it. It's somewhere in between being an author and just writing a book, which is just you and you have total control, right? Or doing it as a film or television series, which then involves lots of other people and cinematographers and all kinds of big crew. This sits in the middle of that, and it allows you, I think, as a creator to tell a story—I feel like you can do something more enigmatic, in a way. Maybe there's just less cooks in the kitchen, or whatever it is. It's more contained.
I probably listen to podcasts more than I watch television, so for me as an audience member, this is the kind of thing that I want to listen to, or the kind of content I want to ingest. So, to be able to have the opportunity to make that for people, it's just amazing, it's an amazing medium to work in. I would love to do more of it if we could find the right things. As Josh said, not everything is meant to be an audio series, right? But if it is, I would be looking for the kind of thing that we could do that with again, because it's just a really gratifying experience.
SD: That's great. I'm glad you guys decided this story for this medium because I did really enjoy listening to it, and I really think our listeners are going to be pretty excited when they get a chance to hear it.
GO: We hope so.
SD: That's all my questions for today. Josh, Greg, thank you so much for chatting with me. I'm super excited for listeners to hear the podcast. And listeners, you can find all eight episodes of The Space Within right now on Audible.
