March 23, 2022 • 45 mins
Creator Shonda Rhimes and journalist Jessica Pressler chat about their collaboration and deep investment in Anna’s story. Jessica shares her perspective on Shonda’s adaptation and the depiction of the fictionalized version of herself as “Vivian Kent.” They both recount memorable moments of discovery and how each connects to key story points in the show.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Inventing Anna the Official Podcast is a production of Shonda
Land Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. Welcome to
Inventing Anna the Official Podcast, your exclusive look inside the
making of the Shonda Land series on Netflix. I'm your host,
Stacy Wilson Hunt, and today we are dropping into a
(00:21):
fascinating conversation between series creator and executive producer Shonda Rhymes
and journalist Jessica Pressler, who wrote the New York Magazine
article that Shonda adapted into Inventing Anna. But Jessica didn't
just hand off her story to Shonda Land. Her close
collaboration with Shonda was vital to the creation of the series.
These two powerhouses connected recently for an exclusive one on
(00:44):
one chat about what drew Shonda to Jessica's story, what
Jessica thinks of the series, their theories about Anna Delvey,
and much more. Here we are, Jessica, finally talking about
this whole gigantic project that started with your article. I'm excited.
(01:08):
Do I get to ask questions now because I feel
like we've had a role reversal where I know it
does feel a little bit like a role reversal, but no,
here's what I think we should just have a conversation.
I'm certainly not going to try to be the reporter
interviewing you. I did want to start by just asking you.
You're like the expert on this topic as far as
I'm concerned. Oh my god, you're like the Anna expert.
(01:29):
So I wanted you to set the stage for us
in time, like for people who don't know, like, what
was the summer of scam? What was the summer of scam? Okay,
so we go back to a time long before COVID,
when Donald Trump was president and the Fire Festival was
in the news and everybody was laughing about that cheese
(01:50):
sandwich and Bad Blood had just come out with the
Elizabeth Holmes story about their enves, and Anna kind of
slid in and was the kind of the third thing
that made the Summer of scam a trend, like a
bona fide trend. We've kind of been living with this
scammy culture for a long time before that, and I
(02:13):
think that there was something kind of like relieving in
a way to have the Summer of scam because it
you know, that the Trump scam was so serious, and
then fire Festival and then and it was just like
it was kind of like you got to laugh at
the at the scamminess of the culture a little bit.
It kind of just brought the whole, you know, everybody's
(02:33):
kind of faking it thing kind to the forefront of
the conversation. And then it went on for like a year,
the whole summer. Yeah, it's the longest summer ever. It
was a really long summer. It felt like it allowed
you to laugh at a lot of the ridiculousness of
like Instagram culture are like sort of covetousness of wealth.
(02:54):
But at the same time, the airs that people put on,
I meaning with the thara nosed thing, with the airs
that people put on, the way people pretended to be
something they weren't. Everybody sort of reveled in it. I remember,
like I remember, it was all an all those three topics,
Anna Sars Fire Festival was all anybody was talking about
for the longest time. Yes, you know what it was.
It was really like the end of an era in
(03:16):
some ways. I think it was like the end of
kind of that like techy slogany we work that happened
around the same time this whole kind of like buzzy,
kind of silly Internet culture. It felt like that was
kind of like an endpoint to that, Like, we recognize
that we've been living in this weird Silicon Valley created
(03:37):
filtered world where everybody was kind of um, you know,
not quite themselves and posing as somebody else in some
strange way online and things like that. It was all
a very made up world. And speaking of made up worlds,
like why don't we talk about the creative liberties that
the show took well that I tech with Vivian's interactions
(03:58):
with their bosses is when I read your story about
Anna and the cut, it was clear to me, and
I think it was clear to anybody who read this
article that it was an incredibly fascinating story that deserved
to be told. But in the series, I have Vivian
sort of going head to head with her boss's pollen
land and like just trying to get permission to tell
the story. But in reality, was it easy for you
(04:20):
to get buy in from your boss's to write about
Anna or did you have to fight for it? Yeah?
I mean the show is a dramatized version for sure. Yeah,
you've been sled me. She's supposed to be on the
Wall Street me too. Story can we talk about that though,
she can't just assign herself stories and and brag about
it like she knows best. I don't brag. How can
you justify doing that story? It definitely wasn't a no
(04:45):
brainer like easy sell. I mean, doing a big story
about a non famous person in general is actually kind
of a difficult thing to get into. You know, a
seven to ten thousand word story about a non famous person,
this is a hard sell a little bit um. I
don't wouldn't say that I went to Rikers in secret.
I kind of just when you know, no one was
(05:08):
really kind of keeping track of where I was. But
they would have encouraged me to do that if they
did know. But yeah, I mean that's pretty much my
answer to it is that there was understandable reluctance to
my wanting to do to devote a lot of time
to feature about a non famous person. I mean, I
definitely think that I took advantage of dramatic license in
(05:32):
terms of trying to tell a story about what happens
when you have a story you want to tell and
your boss doesn't want you to tell it. I mean,
otherwise we wouldn't have had the conflict that we needed
to have in order to tell the story, and Vivian
wouldn't have been the hero that she went, you know
what I mean, Like obviously just because a great reporter,
but I needed to amp it up a little bit.
(05:52):
Wall Street Me Too was real, though, that was real.
They did want me to do a Wall Stream a story,
and I did react in pretty much that way. You
did reacted in pretty much that way. And I that
speech that I wrote for her where she says, I
don't want to use these women for clickbait. That whole
idea of why you didn't want to do Wall Street
Me Too? That I got from you, Vivienne, What can
(06:14):
you possibly have against the women of Wall Street proclaiming
me to nothing? But the women of Wall Street are
not proclaiming me too. They are scared to death for
their jobs and seeing therapists and trying to cope with
hands the assholes. And you want to launch a woman
journalist grenade at them to bully them into telling their
stories from public consumption until these women are traumatized and
their careers are pulverized to ship. I'm not against the women.
(06:36):
I'm against you using them for clickbait. Because I was
I was like, why doesn't Wall Street Me to a
good story? And you were like, because it's arm Jodi
and Jody and Rowan and those guys have already done this.
Here's why Wall Street Me two is not a good idea.
I don't want to mind these women's lives for clickbait.
And I was like, that's brilliantly smart about why not
to do it. So there was stuff that was super
on target that I got literally directly from you. And
(06:58):
then there was the stuff that, like the idea that
you were sneaking around and doing your job like against
your boss's will dramatic license. Yeah. Like I also would
never have asked for the money to go to the Hampton's.
I would have just submitted the receipts afterwards. Very smart,
but we had to have you have interactions, you know,
we had you have interactions with your bosses. The other
(07:19):
thing that was real was sort of the description of
a place called Scribe Area. I don't know the people
itself who are in Scribe Area weren't real, but the
idea of scribe Area as being like a spot in
the office there is absolutely real. That is a real place,
was a real place. Yeah, I love that. So much.
I think people are pretty happy about that. Overall. I
(07:40):
would say that, like, those are not our former bosses.
There totally different people. But there was like a spiritually
correct that was pretty much how it went right. I
like that. I like that it wasn't factually correct, it's
emotionally correct. I think that was the idea. Yes, yeah,
(08:02):
I don't think that my goal was ever to make
a documentary about Jessica Pressler and what it was like
to report the story. As a matter of fact, I
think I pretty much promised you I wouldn't be making
a documentary about what it was like torpint the story,
because you know, your journalists trying to do your job,
and you didn't sign up to be a character in
a show, and I think you were a little bit
(08:24):
reluctant when I was like, maybe it's going to be
like a big part of the show. I remember you
being like, Okay, that's yeah. I definitely was like, okay,
like you think that now, but you're going to write
her out of it later. Not so much. I understood
why it was happening, and especially because one of the
(08:46):
writers came to the courthouse like on one of the
first days of the trial, and we were all there
acting like absolute lunatics, like in front of this writer.
So I was like, Okay, I get why they think
this is a good idea, Like there's some really kind
of wacky stuff happening right now. Yeah, but I definitely
(09:06):
thought until probably the very last minute, that the journalist
character was going to get cut. No. I mean also,
we needed a way in. We needed a way in
to understand this unknowable person and to understand all the
different points of view going into it, to interview all
those people, to to step into all of those shoes.
(09:29):
I felt like you really needed somebody, and you also
needed somebody who you trusted. In a world in which
you have an unreliable narrator like Anna, you needed somebody
that you were going to trust no matter what, and
Vivian was going to be that person. I'm not your friend.
You don't need to like me. I'm a journalist. I
(09:49):
want something from you. I want this story. In return,
I can give you what you want. Everybody else had
a motive in the game, had some skin in the game,
and Vivian didn't have any skin in the game. She
was a journalist. Yeah, I was. I was kind of
trying to figure it out and kind of dragged you
(10:12):
guys on that journey with me in some way. You did.
It was kind of great, Yeah, it was. It was strange.
Usually when you're reporting one of these stories, it's sort
of like circles back on itself, like you start hearing
the same thing from people, and you kind of know
that it's done when when you stopped hearing new stuff.
But this was just like I kept getting new stuff
(10:34):
even after the story was published, Like people would call
me and tell me about some experience that they had
had or their friends had had, and it was just
like this endless series of anecdotes about crazy stuff, like
the time that she lived with me and sent me
a dead peacock in the mail. I love the peacock. Yeah,
(10:58):
the stories did keep expanding, ending, And what was great
was we were already in the writer's room. We were
already working, you know, already working on the stories. And
not only were we doing it while the trial was unfolding,
but before that, like you went to Germany while we
were writing, and the writers and working, and you were
like saying like, oh my god, I discovered this, or
(11:19):
oh I found that. It was just fascinating to be
in the middle of that process while you were sort
of still reporting and still researching. Yeah, let's talk about
the fact that, um, we did make this into a series,
and that I was like, Hey, you know what about
this article? I want to make it into a series.
What did you think at first? I mean, you've already
had an experience with hustlers, so where you like really
(11:41):
open to the idea where you reluctant? Were you not
sure how you want to you know that you wanted
to do it again. What made you think like, yeah,
I'm cool with turning this into a series. Well, I
didn't really feel like there was a choice. Frankly, Um,
it was like a kind of insane situation where it
was going to happen. Someone was going to do it.
(12:04):
It wasn't entirely my decision in New York Magazine was
part of their decision to Yeah, so it was going
to happen. Somebody was going to make a show or
a movie about this, And for me, it just kind
of became about like, Okay, if you're going to use
like the characters that I brought into it, then it
should be the correct person to you know, right enough
(12:26):
for or a Casey or a Todd Spodeck. So when
you came, it was like, oh, thank god, I felt
so excited and felt so um. We have these sort
of video interviews with Todd and with Nef and with
Casey and even with Anna in the Writer's Room. I mean, Anna,
(12:49):
you just went to writer's and you interviewer for us.
But but what was amazing about that was we all
felt this huge amount of responsibility to like portray these
people in a way that felt respectful and honorable because
they're real people. And I know, like as a journalist,
I mean that's literally your job. And so how did
(13:12):
it feel to you to see them turned into characters
television characters? Yeah, I mean, looking back at this, like
the fact that Hustlers was happening at the same time
definitely had like kind of a big effect on that,
because Hustlers, you know, started shooting right when Anna's trial happened,
Like it was almost the same day that the Writer's
(13:34):
Room open. Hustlers started shooting, and the women in that
the real women, you know, we're texting me because they
were seeing pictures you know, of Constance Wu and like
THI high boots and reacting to it and you know,
being like we never wore boots like that. I mean,
no one was unhappy, everyone was excited. It was just
kind of like a h it's hard to explain. Like
(13:56):
many years ago, I and tribute Michael Lewis when they
were in the middle of making Moneyball of the movie
and some of the real people were there and and
he was like, yeah, they're all really scared because you know,
a hundred thousand people at best read a magazine article,
but like forty million people see a movie and people
(14:16):
who don't have any context for you as a human being,
that becomes who you are, like the person on the
screen becomes who you are. So I kind of was
thinking about that, and Hustlers was a pretty intense thing
because that was, you know, something terrible that these women did,
that they had gotten past and now there was going
to be a movie about it, and that was a
(14:37):
very intense experience for them, and like so kind of
like wanting to like kind of stick around and like
they kind of needed somebody to talk to you about that,
And it's it's not something you can talk to your
friends about. It's not like a relatable problem. To feel
like I'm being played by pop star in a movie.
They're making a movie about me. Yeah, So I think
(14:57):
that that like very much affected kind of how I
approached this with these guys too. I was like, okay,
like we're all like in this together, and we're going
to be like, you know, I'm gonna like listen to
you complain about things if you need to complain about them,
And I cared very much about who was going to
tell their story. It was for me, it was like
that's been like that in forefront of my mind, like
(15:19):
kind of being like, Okay, this is going to be
how people perceived these people possibly forever. It's kind of
a big deal, but it is a big deal. And
when you put it like that, you know you want
these people to be perceived well. For me, what was
interesting is, you know, I don't know, like I fell
(15:39):
in love with who net was just by like reading
the articles and what she had to say. That woman
is so interesting and so complex and so funny, and
some of the things that came out of her mouth,
I just thought they were just brilliant. But her observations
were also really interesting and really great and really three dimensional.
(16:03):
And I felt the same way about Casey Duke, who
was couldn't be more different than that. You know, like,
these women were fascinating to me, and I wanted to
capture them in a way that felt like it honored
who they were. And then you know, you're throwing Todd,
who is Todd but isn't Todd at all in the show,
but you want to honor them, and even Rachel, who
(16:25):
wasn't really part of the project, but you want to
honor that because, first of all, you never want to
destroy your demeanor write a woman badly. You want to
make sure that everybody feels three dimensional and you can
sort of walk in their shoes. But it was really
an interesting process to write all of these people and
their sides of their story. Yeah, especially Anna. It was
(16:48):
hard because you you both needed to judge her and
not judge her at the same time, and it's a
tough one exactly. Yeah. And she's very She's a complicated
person and I think definitely unknowable in some ways. I mean,
she created a persona to not be known, so it's
(17:12):
hard to get to know her, and I feel like
I do in some ways. In other ways, I don't
know her at all, But yeah, I did like uniquely,
you know, Adore. All of those people are really really
fantastic characters in real life. Um, you spent a lot
of time with all of them. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
I think neugh like was the story for me, Like
(17:33):
because I was having a hard time getting to know
Anna when I was writing a magazine story. I didn't
understand it, and then I met NEF and she was
just being enough, like telling the story about meeting macaulay
culkin or possibly not mcaulay culkin. It's it's a fact
debated all the NEF maintains that it was mcaulay culkin. Um,
(17:55):
I should just say disclaimer that messages on mcaulay culkin's
cell phone were not returned. So I did attempt to
check that fact. But yeah, I mean, she was just
such a fantastic character that I literally labeled the interview
with her and her boyfriend at the time like the
best people in the world. They were just so much
fun to talk to, And I mean Anna always said
(18:17):
she created a great team. So okay, if your one,
it's about that time. Just a quick message from our
sponsors and now we're back to the interview. Okay, So
(18:45):
you came out to l A and you visited the
Shonda Land Inventing Anna Writer's room, And I'm really curious
to know what you made of that visit. It's very surreal,
and I immediately attempted to forget all about it. Really,
um my picture was on the wall, and I was
like trying to act normal about that and feeling like
(19:08):
really strange that like there was a room where, like
I was like discussed it had to be weird because
you were in a room full of people who were like,
basically you're super fans. Like everybody that room was obsessed
with you, but not me, no, with you, because we've
been basically living off of the Bible of Jessica Pressler says.
You know, Jessica Pressler says that this is how something
(19:30):
is reported. Jessica Pressler says that this is how Rikers works.
Jessica Pressler says, oh my god. So it was like
this room of Jessica Pressler accolytes who were like Jessica
Pressler's actually with us. It was a big deal in
a good way. Weird. Well, you know, I think it
was like I think I've said this to you before,
Like it was like healthy for me to like go
through that experience because I, you know, ask people to
(19:53):
do that all the time, like, you know, give me
your story and let me like make a TV show
out of it and or you know, let me make
an article out of it. But yeah, that's really crazy.
I guess I still kind of can't believe it's a
real thing. Like I remember Jessica saying to me, like
Google never forgets, and so the room would constantly just
be like Google forget. Remember Jessica said, people never forget,
(20:15):
Like there would just be these things that you would
say that like became like the words that we lived by.
And for a writer making a show, it was great
to have an actual, living, breathing source to speak to.
You know. I'd had that on Scandal, but in a
different way, because you know, Scandal was just inspired by
a person, but you were actually inspired by a person,
(20:39):
but about a certain particular event. So it was like,
call Jessica and asked her to tell you what it's
like to go to Rikers, and I get this very
detailed thing about what it's like to go to Rikers,
and the audience doesn't get to see this, but I
wrote like a ten page scene about going to Rikers,
and they shot this thing that it's like when it
(21:00):
together was like thirty minutes long, about exactly what Jessica
said was like to go to Rikers and I swear
to you like it's perfect. I loved it so much
and I wanted to keep it in the show so badly.
I kept trying to find ways to keep this like
thirty minute visit in because of all the buses and everything.
But you know, even the lady with glitter eyeshadow and
the sign that says you can hug your kids, like
(21:20):
all those little details that you gave really built the
show for us. They also had the murder wall, Like
I didn't have the pictures on the wall, but they
actually did have that in the writers are Yeah there,
hell we did. We did have the wall with everyone's
photos on them, and we had the crazy, crazy timeline.
(21:41):
We had the whole thing, and we were obsessed with it.
You didn't have that in your apartment and your baby's nursery.
I didn't know. I had like spreadsheets, which were way
less cool. Real people have spreadsheets. Spreadsheets never work on
television shows. You have to have like some sort of
taping up on a wall all situation somehow in order
(22:01):
for it to be like a big visual thing. The
Internet stuff is hard. That's another thing that I feel
like the show does really well, Like you guys integrate
the Instagram posts and the and the internet einess and
the texts. We tried really hard with that because of
how important Instagram was to the concept of image, do
(22:22):
you know what I mean, Like the image of who
Anna was, and also the idea of Anna's court room
Instagram fashion thing. Like, we really needed to figure out
ways in which to make the Instagram work for us.
And I know people probably ask you this all the time,
but was there like a thing that you know, before
we ever started talking like that drew you to an
(22:44):
a character In particular, it was the article, I'm telling you.
The article was so brilliantly written. It was beautifully written
and painted such a clear picture. It almost felt like
a show into itself, like you could read it and
see the whole thing in your mind. That's what really
drew me in immediately. It wasn't necessarily Anna herself. It
(23:07):
was the world that you've created for us that explained
to us who Anna was and what was going on,
And it made me want to delve deeper. The way
the article lays out is it's really clear to me
that you need a net piece and a Casey piece
and a Rachel piece. But as you look at it more,
(23:28):
and then as I, you know, started talking to you
and be hand to realize, well, you know, I'm going
to tell the story the eyes of a journalist in
order to get all the pieces of the story. And
then there are these little pieces of story that you
can't really just fold into one of those characters, you know,
like the what did you call him in the article?
(23:48):
The character that we call Chase the futurist, the futurist,
And I was like, we have to find a way
to capture the futurist um and how are we going
to do that? And how are we going to capture
the the stuffed Peacock story, which I thought was just
an amazing story that had to be told. So once
we started thinking about those things, it really became about
(24:11):
like finding who the interviewee would be so that we
could lay the stories out in a way that allowed
us to tell all the pieces of Anna's story so
that they made sense. For instance, like the financial part,
the Wall Street part was hard because we we had
to kind of invent our way into telling that story correctly,
(24:34):
using the pieces of your story, the pieces that you
told us about financial the financial crimes, and the financial reporting,
to get in there and figure out a way to
tell these stories. That's why it became about telling it
through the eyes of the reporter, Like telling it through
Vivian's eyes gave me a way into every last person's
(24:55):
story in a way that made it possible to have
a different narratives, to jump around a little bit too.
Everything did not necessarily need to match up because Vivian
was gathering and you know this information. It also allowed
us to slowly build the relationship between Vivian and Todd,
which I really wanted to do. I thought their friendship
(25:16):
was so great and so interesting. Um. I wanted to
portray like a good marriage, which I thought was important.
You know, you see these shows and you have these characters,
and their marriages are always like either the guy's a
jerk or he's kind of useless or whatever. And I
just wanted to portray like, here's what a good marriage
(25:37):
looks like, where a woman is really into her job
and her husband's actually comfortable with her power. My husband
loves that character. Good. I'm good. I'm glad because I
wanted him to be somebody who, like you want to
be married to him, like you want somebody to be
want to be married to him. And the other thing
(25:57):
is is, I don't know if people in their audience
know this. Jessica was pregnant. She really was like super
pregnant while trying to report the story, and like you
said to me, like I finished the article because I
had to have the baby, right, And I loved that.
For some reason, that detail like blew my mind. I
just thought, like that is the ultimate badass thing, and
(26:19):
I really wanted to put it in the show. And
I got so excited by that. I mean, you weren't
Let's be clear, she wasn't Vivian like super like reluctant
to have a kid and not that interested in being
a mother. Like none of that was true. I think
you already had a child, right, yes, yes, this is
my second child. But I just I loved the idea
of somebody like reporting right up to the minute that
they're basically like leaving to give birth. It just sounded
(26:41):
so badass to me, and I wanted to put that
in the show. So a lot of the things that
you told me after we met ended up being sort
of how we shaped the show into its segments, mainly
because it helped me build the timeline the German An
episode that going to Germany California. That whole episode it
(27:04):
was really interesting because it was the aftermath. It was
how do we tell the story of what happens after
the article is published? How do we get ourselves to
the trial right? I was super impressed with how you
guys structured it because I do feel like I just
gave you like stuff from my handbag. It was like,
here's like a raisin and three quarters and like some
(27:24):
gum rappers, Like I just kind of gave you all
this like random stuff, and you put it together in
such an unbelievably clever way, did you guys? The funny
thing about like real life, I remember saying this to
like one of the writers, is that it you know,
it doesn't end right, so it's really hard to find
an ending point. Was that like a challenge for you
guys to kind of come up with with how to
(27:45):
like wrap it up? It was really hard to figure
out how to end it. I remember we had a
tenth episode planned for a while where and I went
to prison and all the things that happened in a
whole bunch of stuff to happ to Anna in prison
and Vivian visiting her in prison and choosing to stop
visiting her. What was interesting was it felt like where
(28:10):
we ended felt right, you know, with the last interaction
between Vivian and Anna felt right to me, You'll come visiting,
You'll come visit Ovias. But also like that moment on
the bus felt right. She's headed off to like a
(28:33):
whole other series of events in parts unknown, and it's
not going to be that good. It's not going to
be great, and I don't know. To me, like it
felt like that was the best place to end it.
And when I called you, I think, I don't know
if people know this, but you're the person who gave
the where are they now? You gave me the where
are they now? Remember that we put at the ends
(28:53):
of the end of the series, because who else to
ask about the journalists like where is everybody now? And
you gave me these where are they now? Is that
we're so helpful because you wanted to know where everybody
ended up and how everybody ended up and you could
have kept going. I mean, there was so much more
we could have done with these characters. We could have
kept going for a while, and so it did feel
(29:16):
right to just stop when we did. But it was
hard to decide when there's much more to the story
coming up right after this. M okay, everybody, welcome back
(29:39):
to Inventing Anna the official podcast. Mm hmm. Here's a question,
because we were talking about the journalism of the piece,
what do you feel like Inventing Anna got like wrong
about showing how journalism works for people Like you were
(30:00):
an aspiring journalist and you watched Inventing Anna, and he thought, like,
that's what being a journalist is. Like, what did we
get wrong? You know, it would be hard for me
to point to something that you got wrong, even when
I would say, like, maybe, oh, I didn't have these
like friends who were helping me, who had the time
to like kind of do some research for me. That's true,
(30:21):
But it was also not true because I did have
these researchers in Germany that I like PayPal to like
do some research for me, and we did like have
some like so even like that is a little bit true.
I mean I think that there are different kinds of journalists,
and most journalists are not long form staff writers at magazines.
Like it's almost like I had like the last job,
(30:44):
like one of the last jobs like that in the world,
so that it wouldn't be like super recognizable to a
lot of working journalists, Like I would have to be
doing a lot more blog posts and kind of a
lot more like content turn But that's very typical well
of like TV stuff. It's like, yeah, you can't like
like but there's not like an episode where I'm like
writing a blog that's kind of pouring, you know, or
(31:07):
like you know, being on slack, Like you can't put
slack into it constantly. It's like you can't. So the
show paints Vivian, our journalist in the show, as being
sort of super concerned about Anna and as someone who
has a really hard time remaining neutral in her role
as a journalist. But for you, like in real life,
(31:28):
how hard was it to maintain that objectivity with the
subject of your story And how concerned were you about
maintaining that objectivity in real life? Oh wow? Um, I
mean I can get into the weeds on this one.
I think Vivian is a lot more concerned about that
than I am personally. The stuff that we're talking about
that she gets worried about it is like the courtroom
(31:50):
stuff where she's like buying the clothes for her a trial,
and I'm in court. I can't leave to go shopping.
You can't participating in its defense. That would be unethical,
crossing a line journalistically. Well, I'm a fucking guy. You
at least tell me, well, fucking pantyhos one of the funks,
you think panty fine At that exact moment, I was
(32:13):
not reporting on the story. I wasn't doing what she's doing,
which is covering the trial. So she's in a slightly
different situation. But I would say, like in general, again,
it's like a little bit of a different kind of journalism.
Like it's not like I work at the New York
Times and I'm doing breaking news, like I worked in
New York Magazine and it has this history of of
(32:35):
narrative style reporting of first person of you know, gaytales
and like Joan Didion, like you know, going to parties
with people. You know. It's it's a certain type of journalism.
We're allowed to have feelings, were allowed to have opinions,
were allowed to vote in elections and like a lot
(32:55):
of political journalists I know, And what I think is
so interesting staying about the show. One of the things
that's so great. It does a thing that I haven't
seen before. That you guys kind of got the kind
of like emotional aspect of working on these stories. I
haven't really seen that. I don't think anywhere like that.
It takes like an emotional toll to work on these
(33:17):
kinds of stories and to get really close to people
that they're like in your life. You do get close
to them, and I the whole thing about objectivity, I
just never really I don't really believe that, Like I like,
it's almost like you can't deny that you're a person
or that you have thoughts or the like. Just because
I like somebody that I'm reporting on, it doesn't change
(33:38):
the truth or the facts of the story. So I
don't know how necessary objectivity is. Like I'm not going
to I know myself, like I'm not going to leave
something out of a story because I like somebody or
because it reflects badly on me. Because the job is
kind of like righte what happened? And if you're kind
of forcing this objective upon yourself. It's almost like you're
(34:01):
starting out from like a weird place of like untruth,
because you're like denying that. What was interesting to me
is that what I felt like I was seeing with you,
not necessarily how I portrayed it, but what I felt
I was seeing with you in real life was that
your feelings for Anna were relatively complex. I mean, you
could see her for the for the fault that she had,
(34:22):
but you still really cared about her as a person,
and it didn't stop the fact that you had, you know,
a sense of humanity that felt for her and what
she was going through, and that you could feel sorry
for her and also be like, she's done some bad
things and she's you know, has some laws as a person.
So it felt like you you did remain objective in
(34:43):
your reporting, but you also did get emotionally invested and
you became really good friends with Todd. I thought that
was really interesting because you're right, you were no longer
reporting on the story, You're done reporting on the story,
and yet you stayed involved. But you did it in
a way that wasn't you, you you know, like you lost
yourself or you let go, or you went too far,
(35:04):
you know, you did seem to keep those boundaries, and
I love what you said about the difference between like
working at the New York Times and sort of doing
narrative journalism too. Yeah, I think at the end of
the day, it's your job is to write what happened,
and as long as you are doing that, as long
as you're telling the truth about what happened, it doesn't
(35:25):
really matter kind of what your personal feelings are, if
that makes any sense. Um, And yeah, I definitely veered between.
Like I definitely also felt like a sense of responsibility
to her in the same way that I did the
other characters, where it's like I feel like when I
go into a situation, I'm like kind of like a goofy,
non threatening person. But I've kind of come to realize
(35:46):
that in fact, like you know, you're you're a little
bit scary to people because you're going to record their
truth and you know that's going to be a thing
that sticks with them for a long time, especially with
the Internet. So it's just kind of, Um, it's a
weird relationship that we have with sources, and I think
that the show is really honest about that, and uh,
it's cool, it's really a neat thing. One of the
(36:08):
things that we keep talking about is how unknowable Anna is.
And it's one of the things that I felt so
strongly while making the series. And I like to say
everything about Anna is true until it's not. Um, do
you feel like you know her after this entire experience? Okay,
so you know, it's been a roller coaster with Anna
(36:29):
because I do like this person. And one of the
things that I think is so great about the show
is that it really captures the experience of knowing Anna
that I had, where you're kind of like veering back
and forth between like is this a good person? Is
this a bad person? And I'm still kind of in
(36:51):
that place with her, like I she will have these
moments of incredible sweetness and incredible clarity and the very
reasonab will and then you know, I will read those
long text exchanges with Rachel Williams that are just an
absolute horror movie that came out in court. It just
is it's terrifying, and it too see that, so it's
(37:15):
it's complicated. How did you feel about the I'm not
sorry interview she gave after that I'm not stary? Interview?
Was so classic Anna and that she feels she's being
very reasonable and pragmatic and also just like shooting herself
in the foot at the same time. What was interesting
about that is that she was kind of doing the defense.
(37:39):
Like the defense was that to be convicted of grand larceny,
you have to prove that somebody intended to defraud somebody, right,
So the position that the defense took was and I
didn't intend to defraud people. She intended to pay people back.
She intended to make the foundation. She intended to you know,
(38:00):
make everyone whole again. If the people around me had
just donned the jobs and the loans would have been approved,
my trust would have come through, and now I'd be
sitting on Park Avenue instead of hel with you. That's
a fact, and whether it was true or not, she
adamantly swore that that was the case. And so she
(38:21):
wasn't sorry, Like she wasn't sorry because she did intend
to pay people back, but she was just kind of
rudely interrupted by the justice system and people's inability to
sue withstand pressure she put it. Anna says things, It's
so interesting because when I was writing this story, I
think somebody said this, like like now for somebody's like,
she'll say these things that are like so like outlandish,
(38:44):
Like she'll be like, do you know that, like it's
really easy to get somebody killed? And then you're like,
that's just kind of Anna being Anna, imparting information that
it's actually really easy. And then but I would repeat
that to somebody and they'd be like horrified, like is
she threatening you? Like, oh my god, Like she just
says this stuff. She doesn't come off the way that
(39:04):
she wants to all the time. Anyway, She's a complicated person.
I don't really feel like I know her at the
end of the day. By the way, like we'll separate
out Anna Sarokan, who is a real person from Anna
delvinnasar Rokan is a real person, and I know her
a little bit and also not at all. And I
think that she will reveal herself or not when she
(39:28):
wants to. That's like kind of her story. And Adelvi
is like a character, it's a persona and I think
like at the end of the day, I've kind of
settled on that she's like a shape shifter and she
is whatever anybody wants her to be in the moment,
and that's kind of why it's a little bit difficult
to grab a hold of who she is, and being
(39:49):
a shape shifter and whoever anybody wants to be, she's
kind of like a reflection of whoever she's in front of,
so of all of us. Really, in some ways took
on characteristics of mine. She took on characteristics of Nets
and Rachel. Yeah, she's a complicated person, but she did
call me a few times. She's in jail. I don't
(40:10):
understand why she's still in jail, Like she should be deported.
I think she's resisting being deported and that's why she's
still in custody. Mm hmm. It's very confusing. So the
last time I spoke to her, I was like, why
are you still in jail? Go home? And she just
really wants to stay in the US. And that to
(40:32):
me goes back to my theory of Anna, which is
maybe not right at all. And I speak frankly and
that the only Anna I've met is through you. I've
never actually met Anna, and that was on purpose. But
my theory of Anna is the character Anna who is
a reflection of a lot of people who found herself
(40:55):
seen here, do you know what I mean? Like it
is that thing that Vivian says, I will make you
famous over the world, will know who you are. She
is seen here, she has known here, and maybe if
she goes home, she's not so known. Maybe it's not
as viable for her to leave the country and to
(41:16):
go be somebody else. She did come here in pursuit
of the American dream, and maybe, by God, she's going
to get it. I don't know, but you know, people
always ask me, like, what do you want people to
take away from the series, or what do you think
the series is. I don't have an answer for that.
I can never tell people what what it is I've made.
I just hope that we've reflected the characters in a
(41:40):
way that feels organic and truthful for the audience. But Anna,
Anna's a difficult one, she really is. Yeah. I mean
I did see her when she so she was out
of jail for like a month, a few weeks or
something like that. I did have dinner with her, and
it was nice. You know, I should put their reservation
under her name, and I had to go say it,
(42:01):
and then they kind of gave me a look and
it was a little bit weird. But she had like
grand plans she's She's got several publicists working with her
that I've heard from on occasion. We definitely have not
seen the last of her. But she needs to get
out of jail. It's very strange that she's still in there. Yeah,
I think it's strange that she's stole in there. And honestly,
(42:22):
you know me, I'm on the side of like, everybody
else got something out of this and Anna went to jail.
So I'm not so sure that that that's fair, do
you know what I mean? Like, I understand that she
did something wrong when I get that, but everybody else
got something out of this and Anna went to jail.
I don't know how I feel about that. It was
also the sentence was successive. Yes, I think the judge
(42:47):
said at the sentence saying like she had four to
twelve years right, and she said she was giving her
that longest sentence as a message. I'm not sure exactly
what the message was. It it did seem like it
was punishment for being a public figure speaking out saying
you weren't sorry, which is not the crime that she committed. Actually,
(43:11):
she kind of seemed like she was being punished for
her behavior during the trial and while she was incarcerated,
and not for the actual crimes that she did, which
at the end of the day, again all very bad things,
but it was like it was like two dollars maybe
which she paid back. It doesn't actually make any sense. Um, Yeah,
she's in jail for maximizing her public image in a way,
(43:34):
in a lot of ways. You're right. I think that's
a lot of it. Yeah, it's a sad thing. I
don't know if I answered the question or not. I
don't know either, but yeah, it's complicated, complicated. Indeed, thank
you so much for listening everyone. Next week, I'll be
(43:56):
back with the real Nef Davis, Anna's hotel concierge for
and confidante. I'm loyal to Anna, but I'm not a dummy.
I'm friends with Anna, but I do have boundaries and
most importantly, Anna will never come before my money. If
you're enjoying this show, please subscribe, share with your friends, rate,
(44:19):
or leave us a review. All of that good stuff.
And if you haven't finished Shonda Lands Inventing Anna on Netflix,
please go do that. We really don't want to spoil
it for you. Inventing Anna, the official podcast is executive
produced by Sandy Bailey, Lauren Hohman, Tyler Klang, and Gabrielle Collins.
Our producer and editor is Nicholas Harder, and the show
(44:41):
was produced and hosted by me Stacy Wilson Hunt Inventing Anna.
The official podcast is a production of Shonda land Audio
in partnership with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shonda lan Audio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:02):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Inventing Anna the Official Podcast is a production of Shonda
Land Audio and partnership with I Heart Radio. Welcome to
Inventing Anna the Official Podcast, your exclusive look inside the
making of the Shonda Land series on Netflix. I'm your host,
Stacy Wilson Hunt, and today we are dropping into a
(00:21):
fascinating conversation between series creator and executive producer Shonda Rhymes
and journalist Jessica Pressler, who wrote the New York Magazine
article that Shonda adapted into Inventing Anna. But Jessica didn't
just hand off her story to Shonda Land. Her close
collaboration with Shonda was vital to the creation of the series.
These two powerhouses connected recently for an exclusive one on
(00:44):
one chat about what drew Shonda to Jessica's story, what
Jessica thinks of the series, their theories about Anna Delvey,
and much more. Here we are, Jessica, finally talking about
this whole gigantic project that started with your article. I'm excited.
(01:08):
Do I get to ask questions now because I feel
like we've had a role reversal where I know it
does feel a little bit like a role reversal, but no,
here's what I think we should just have a conversation.
I'm certainly not going to try to be the reporter
interviewing you. I did want to start by just asking you.
You're like the expert on this topic as far as
I'm concerned. Oh my god, you're like the Anna expert.
(01:29):
So I wanted you to set the stage for us
in time, like for people who don't know, like, what
was the summer of scam? What was the summer of scam? Okay,
so we go back to a time long before COVID,
when Donald Trump was president and the Fire Festival was
in the news and everybody was laughing about that cheese
(01:50):
sandwich and Bad Blood had just come out with the
Elizabeth Holmes story about their enves, and Anna kind of
slid in and was the kind of the third thing
that made the Summer of scam a trend, like a
bona fide trend. We've kind of been living with this
scammy culture for a long time before that, and I
(02:13):
think that there was something kind of like relieving in
a way to have the Summer of scam because it
you know, that the Trump scam was so serious, and
then fire Festival and then and it was just like
it was kind of like you got to laugh at
the at the scamminess of the culture a little bit.
It kind of just brought the whole, you know, everybody's
(02:33):
kind of faking it thing kind to the forefront of
the conversation. And then it went on for like a year,
the whole summer. Yeah, it's the longest summer ever. It
was a really long summer. It felt like it allowed
you to laugh at a lot of the ridiculousness of
like Instagram culture are like sort of covetousness of wealth.
(02:54):
But at the same time, the airs that people put on,
I meaning with the thara nosed thing, with the airs
that people put on, the way people pretended to be
something they weren't. Everybody sort of reveled in it. I remember,
like I remember, it was all an all those three topics,
Anna Sars Fire Festival was all anybody was talking about
for the longest time. Yes, you know what it was.
It was really like the end of an era in
(03:16):
some ways. I think it was like the end of
kind of that like techy slogany we work that happened
around the same time this whole kind of like buzzy,
kind of silly Internet culture. It felt like that was
kind of like an endpoint to that, Like, we recognize
that we've been living in this weird Silicon Valley created
(03:37):
filtered world where everybody was kind of um, you know,
not quite themselves and posing as somebody else in some
strange way online and things like that. It was all
a very made up world. And speaking of made up worlds,
like why don't we talk about the creative liberties that
the show took well that I tech with Vivian's interactions
(03:58):
with their bosses is when I read your story about
Anna and the cut, it was clear to me, and
I think it was clear to anybody who read this
article that it was an incredibly fascinating story that deserved
to be told. But in the series, I have Vivian
sort of going head to head with her boss's pollen
land and like just trying to get permission to tell
the story. But in reality, was it easy for you
(04:20):
to get buy in from your boss's to write about
Anna or did you have to fight for it? Yeah?
I mean the show is a dramatized version for sure. Yeah,
you've been sled me. She's supposed to be on the
Wall Street me too. Story can we talk about that though,
she can't just assign herself stories and and brag about
it like she knows best. I don't brag. How can
you justify doing that story? It definitely wasn't a no
(04:45):
brainer like easy sell. I mean, doing a big story
about a non famous person in general is actually kind
of a difficult thing to get into. You know, a
seven to ten thousand word story about a non famous person,
this is a hard sell a little bit um. I
don't wouldn't say that I went to Rikers in secret.
I kind of just when you know, no one was
(05:08):
really kind of keeping track of where I was. But
they would have encouraged me to do that if they
did know. But yeah, I mean that's pretty much my
answer to it is that there was understandable reluctance to
my wanting to do to devote a lot of time
to feature about a non famous person. I mean, I
definitely think that I took advantage of dramatic license in
(05:32):
terms of trying to tell a story about what happens
when you have a story you want to tell and
your boss doesn't want you to tell it. I mean,
otherwise we wouldn't have had the conflict that we needed
to have in order to tell the story, and Vivian
wouldn't have been the hero that she went, you know
what I mean, Like obviously just because a great reporter,
but I needed to amp it up a little bit.
(05:52):
Wall Street Me Too was real, though, that was real.
They did want me to do a Wall Stream a story,
and I did react in pretty much that way. You
did reacted in pretty much that way. And I that
speech that I wrote for her where she says, I
don't want to use these women for clickbait. That whole
idea of why you didn't want to do Wall Street
Me Too? That I got from you, Vivienne, What can
(06:14):
you possibly have against the women of Wall Street proclaiming
me to nothing? But the women of Wall Street are
not proclaiming me too. They are scared to death for
their jobs and seeing therapists and trying to cope with
hands the assholes. And you want to launch a woman
journalist grenade at them to bully them into telling their
stories from public consumption until these women are traumatized and
their careers are pulverized to ship. I'm not against the women.
(06:36):
I'm against you using them for clickbait. Because I was
I was like, why doesn't Wall Street Me to a
good story? And you were like, because it's arm Jodi
and Jody and Rowan and those guys have already done this.
Here's why Wall Street Me two is not a good idea.
I don't want to mind these women's lives for clickbait.
And I was like, that's brilliantly smart about why not
to do it. So there was stuff that was super
on target that I got literally directly from you. And
(06:58):
then there was the stuff that, like the idea that
you were sneaking around and doing your job like against
your boss's will dramatic license. Yeah. Like I also would
never have asked for the money to go to the Hampton's.
I would have just submitted the receipts afterwards. Very smart,
but we had to have you have interactions, you know,
we had you have interactions with your bosses. The other
(07:19):
thing that was real was sort of the description of
a place called Scribe Area. I don't know the people
itself who are in Scribe Area weren't real, but the
idea of scribe Area as being like a spot in
the office there is absolutely real. That is a real place,
was a real place. Yeah, I love that. So much.
I think people are pretty happy about that. Overall. I
(07:40):
would say that, like, those are not our former bosses.
There totally different people. But there was like a spiritually
correct that was pretty much how it went right. I
like that. I like that it wasn't factually correct, it's
emotionally correct. I think that was the idea. Yes, yeah,
(08:02):
I don't think that my goal was ever to make
a documentary about Jessica Pressler and what it was like
to report the story. As a matter of fact, I
think I pretty much promised you I wouldn't be making
a documentary about what it was like torpint the story,
because you know, your journalists trying to do your job,
and you didn't sign up to be a character in
a show, and I think you were a little bit
(08:24):
reluctant when I was like, maybe it's going to be
like a big part of the show. I remember you
being like, Okay, that's yeah. I definitely was like, okay,
like you think that now, but you're going to write
her out of it later. Not so much. I understood
why it was happening, and especially because one of the
(08:46):
writers came to the courthouse like on one of the
first days of the trial, and we were all there
acting like absolute lunatics, like in front of this writer.
So I was like, Okay, I get why they think
this is a good idea, Like there's some really kind
of wacky stuff happening right now. Yeah, but I definitely
(09:06):
thought until probably the very last minute, that the journalist
character was going to get cut. No. I mean also,
we needed a way in. We needed a way in
to understand this unknowable person and to understand all the
different points of view going into it, to interview all
those people, to to step into all of those shoes.
(09:29):
I felt like you really needed somebody, and you also
needed somebody who you trusted. In a world in which
you have an unreliable narrator like Anna, you needed somebody
that you were going to trust no matter what, and
Vivian was going to be that person. I'm not your friend.
You don't need to like me. I'm a journalist. I
(09:49):
want something from you. I want this story. In return,
I can give you what you want. Everybody else had
a motive in the game, had some skin in the game,
and Vivian didn't have any skin in the game. She
was a journalist. Yeah, I was. I was kind of
trying to figure it out and kind of dragged you
(10:12):
guys on that journey with me in some way. You did.
It was kind of great, Yeah, it was. It was strange.
Usually when you're reporting one of these stories, it's sort
of like circles back on itself, like you start hearing
the same thing from people, and you kind of know
that it's done when when you stopped hearing new stuff.
But this was just like I kept getting new stuff
(10:34):
even after the story was published, Like people would call
me and tell me about some experience that they had
had or their friends had had, and it was just
like this endless series of anecdotes about crazy stuff, like
the time that she lived with me and sent me
a dead peacock in the mail. I love the peacock. Yeah,
(10:58):
the stories did keep expanding, ending, And what was great
was we were already in the writer's room. We were
already working, you know, already working on the stories. And
not only were we doing it while the trial was unfolding,
but before that, like you went to Germany while we
were writing, and the writers and working, and you were
like saying like, oh my god, I discovered this, or
(11:19):
oh I found that. It was just fascinating to be
in the middle of that process while you were sort
of still reporting and still researching. Yeah, let's talk about
the fact that, um, we did make this into a series,
and that I was like, Hey, you know what about
this article? I want to make it into a series.
What did you think at first? I mean, you've already
had an experience with hustlers, so where you like really
(11:41):
open to the idea where you reluctant? Were you not
sure how you want to you know that you wanted
to do it again. What made you think like, yeah,
I'm cool with turning this into a series. Well, I
didn't really feel like there was a choice. Frankly, Um,
it was like a kind of insane situation where it
was going to happen. Someone was going to do it.
(12:04):
It wasn't entirely my decision in New York Magazine was
part of their decision to Yeah, so it was going
to happen. Somebody was going to make a show or
a movie about this, And for me, it just kind
of became about like, Okay, if you're going to use
like the characters that I brought into it, then it
should be the correct person to you know, right enough
(12:26):
for or a Casey or a Todd Spodeck. So when
you came, it was like, oh, thank god, I felt
so excited and felt so um. We have these sort
of video interviews with Todd and with Nef and with
Casey and even with Anna in the Writer's Room. I mean, Anna,
(12:49):
you just went to writer's and you interviewer for us.
But but what was amazing about that was we all
felt this huge amount of responsibility to like portray these
people in a way that felt respectful and honorable because
they're real people. And I know, like as a journalist,
I mean that's literally your job. And so how did
(13:12):
it feel to you to see them turned into characters
television characters? Yeah, I mean, looking back at this, like
the fact that Hustlers was happening at the same time
definitely had like kind of a big effect on that,
because Hustlers, you know, started shooting right when Anna's trial happened,
Like it was almost the same day that the Writer's
(13:34):
Room open. Hustlers started shooting, and the women in that
the real women, you know, we're texting me because they
were seeing pictures you know, of Constance Wu and like
THI high boots and reacting to it and you know,
being like we never wore boots like that. I mean,
no one was unhappy, everyone was excited. It was just
kind of like a h it's hard to explain. Like
(13:56):
many years ago, I and tribute Michael Lewis when they
were in the middle of making Moneyball of the movie
and some of the real people were there and and
he was like, yeah, they're all really scared because you know,
a hundred thousand people at best read a magazine article,
but like forty million people see a movie and people
(14:16):
who don't have any context for you as a human being,
that becomes who you are, like the person on the
screen becomes who you are. So I kind of was
thinking about that, and Hustlers was a pretty intense thing
because that was, you know, something terrible that these women did,
that they had gotten past and now there was going
to be a movie about it, and that was a
(14:37):
very intense experience for them, and like so kind of
like wanting to like kind of stick around and like
they kind of needed somebody to talk to you about that,
And it's it's not something you can talk to your
friends about. It's not like a relatable problem. To feel
like I'm being played by pop star in a movie.
They're making a movie about me. Yeah, So I think
(14:57):
that that like very much affected kind of how I
approached this with these guys too. I was like, okay,
like we're all like in this together, and we're going
to be like, you know, I'm gonna like listen to
you complain about things if you need to complain about them,
And I cared very much about who was going to
tell their story. It was for me, it was like
that's been like that in forefront of my mind, like
(15:19):
kind of being like, Okay, this is going to be
how people perceived these people possibly forever. It's kind of
a big deal, but it is a big deal. And
when you put it like that, you know you want
these people to be perceived well. For me, what was
interesting is, you know, I don't know, like I fell
(15:39):
in love with who net was just by like reading
the articles and what she had to say. That woman
is so interesting and so complex and so funny, and
some of the things that came out of her mouth,
I just thought they were just brilliant. But her observations
were also really interesting and really great and really three dimensional.
(16:03):
And I felt the same way about Casey Duke, who
was couldn't be more different than that. You know, like,
these women were fascinating to me, and I wanted to
capture them in a way that felt like it honored
who they were. And then you know, you're throwing Todd,
who is Todd but isn't Todd at all in the show,
but you want to honor them, and even Rachel, who
(16:25):
wasn't really part of the project, but you want to
honor that because, first of all, you never want to
destroy your demeanor write a woman badly. You want to
make sure that everybody feels three dimensional and you can
sort of walk in their shoes. But it was really
an interesting process to write all of these people and
their sides of their story. Yeah, especially Anna. It was
(16:48):
hard because you you both needed to judge her and
not judge her at the same time, and it's a
tough one exactly. Yeah. And she's very She's a complicated
person and I think definitely unknowable in some ways. I mean,
she created a persona to not be known, so it's
(17:12):
hard to get to know her, and I feel like
I do in some ways. In other ways, I don't
know her at all, But yeah, I did like uniquely,
you know, Adore. All of those people are really really
fantastic characters in real life. Um, you spent a lot
of time with all of them. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
I think neugh like was the story for me, Like
(17:33):
because I was having a hard time getting to know
Anna when I was writing a magazine story. I didn't
understand it, and then I met NEF and she was
just being enough, like telling the story about meeting macaulay
culkin or possibly not mcaulay culkin. It's it's a fact
debated all the NEF maintains that it was mcaulay culkin. Um,
(17:55):
I should just say disclaimer that messages on mcaulay culkin's
cell phone were not returned. So I did attempt to
check that fact. But yeah, I mean, she was just
such a fantastic character that I literally labeled the interview
with her and her boyfriend at the time like the
best people in the world. They were just so much
fun to talk to, And I mean Anna always said
(18:17):
she created a great team. So okay, if your one,
it's about that time. Just a quick message from our
sponsors and now we're back to the interview. Okay, So
(18:45):
you came out to l A and you visited the
Shonda Land Inventing Anna Writer's room, And I'm really curious
to know what you made of that visit. It's very surreal,
and I immediately attempted to forget all about it. Really,
um my picture was on the wall, and I was
like trying to act normal about that and feeling like
(19:08):
really strange that like there was a room where, like
I was like discussed it had to be weird because
you were in a room full of people who were like,
basically you're super fans. Like everybody that room was obsessed
with you, but not me, no, with you, because we've
been basically living off of the Bible of Jessica Pressler says.
You know, Jessica Pressler says that this is how something
(19:30):
is reported. Jessica Pressler says that this is how Rikers works.
Jessica Pressler says, oh my god. So it was like
this room of Jessica Pressler accolytes who were like Jessica
Pressler's actually with us. It was a big deal in
a good way. Weird. Well, you know, I think it
was like I think I've said this to you before,
Like it was like healthy for me to like go
through that experience because I, you know, ask people to
(19:53):
do that all the time, like, you know, give me
your story and let me like make a TV show
out of it and or you know, let me make
an article out of it. But yeah, that's really crazy.
I guess I still kind of can't believe it's a
real thing. Like I remember Jessica saying to me, like
Google never forgets, and so the room would constantly just
be like Google forget. Remember Jessica said, people never forget,
(20:15):
Like there would just be these things that you would
say that like became like the words that we lived by.
And for a writer making a show, it was great
to have an actual, living, breathing source to speak to.
You know. I'd had that on Scandal, but in a
different way, because you know, Scandal was just inspired by
a person, but you were actually inspired by a person,
(20:39):
but about a certain particular event. So it was like,
call Jessica and asked her to tell you what it's
like to go to Rikers, and I get this very
detailed thing about what it's like to go to Rikers,
and the audience doesn't get to see this, but I
wrote like a ten page scene about going to Rikers,
and they shot this thing that it's like when it
(21:00):
together was like thirty minutes long, about exactly what Jessica
said was like to go to Rikers and I swear
to you like it's perfect. I loved it so much
and I wanted to keep it in the show so badly.
I kept trying to find ways to keep this like
thirty minute visit in because of all the buses and everything.
But you know, even the lady with glitter eyeshadow and
the sign that says you can hug your kids, like
(21:20):
all those little details that you gave really built the
show for us. They also had the murder wall, Like
I didn't have the pictures on the wall, but they
actually did have that in the writers are Yeah there,
hell we did. We did have the wall with everyone's
photos on them, and we had the crazy, crazy timeline.
(21:41):
We had the whole thing, and we were obsessed with it.
You didn't have that in your apartment and your baby's nursery.
I didn't know. I had like spreadsheets, which were way
less cool. Real people have spreadsheets. Spreadsheets never work on
television shows. You have to have like some sort of
taping up on a wall all situation somehow in order
(22:01):
for it to be like a big visual thing. The
Internet stuff is hard. That's another thing that I feel
like the show does really well, Like you guys integrate
the Instagram posts and the and the internet einess and
the texts. We tried really hard with that because of
how important Instagram was to the concept of image, do
(22:22):
you know what I mean, Like the image of who
Anna was, and also the idea of Anna's court room
Instagram fashion thing. Like, we really needed to figure out
ways in which to make the Instagram work for us.
And I know people probably ask you this all the time,
but was there like a thing that you know, before
we ever started talking like that drew you to an
(22:44):
a character In particular, it was the article, I'm telling you.
The article was so brilliantly written. It was beautifully written
and painted such a clear picture. It almost felt like
a show into itself, like you could read it and
see the whole thing in your mind. That's what really
drew me in immediately. It wasn't necessarily Anna herself. It
(23:07):
was the world that you've created for us that explained
to us who Anna was and what was going on,
And it made me want to delve deeper. The way
the article lays out is it's really clear to me
that you need a net piece and a Casey piece
and a Rachel piece. But as you look at it more,
(23:28):
and then as I, you know, started talking to you
and be hand to realize, well, you know, I'm going
to tell the story the eyes of a journalist in
order to get all the pieces of the story. And
then there are these little pieces of story that you
can't really just fold into one of those characters, you know,
like the what did you call him in the article?
(23:48):
The character that we call Chase the futurist, the futurist,
And I was like, we have to find a way
to capture the futurist um and how are we going
to do that? And how are we going to capture
the the stuffed Peacock story, which I thought was just
an amazing story that had to be told. So once
we started thinking about those things, it really became about
(24:11):
like finding who the interviewee would be so that we
could lay the stories out in a way that allowed
us to tell all the pieces of Anna's story so
that they made sense. For instance, like the financial part,
the Wall Street part was hard because we we had
to kind of invent our way into telling that story correctly,
(24:34):
using the pieces of your story, the pieces that you
told us about financial the financial crimes, and the financial reporting,
to get in there and figure out a way to
tell these stories. That's why it became about telling it
through the eyes of the reporter, Like telling it through
Vivian's eyes gave me a way into every last person's
(24:55):
story in a way that made it possible to have
a different narratives, to jump around a little bit too.
Everything did not necessarily need to match up because Vivian
was gathering and you know this information. It also allowed
us to slowly build the relationship between Vivian and Todd,
which I really wanted to do. I thought their friendship
(25:16):
was so great and so interesting. Um. I wanted to
portray like a good marriage, which I thought was important.
You know, you see these shows and you have these characters,
and their marriages are always like either the guy's a
jerk or he's kind of useless or whatever. And I
just wanted to portray like, here's what a good marriage
(25:37):
looks like, where a woman is really into her job
and her husband's actually comfortable with her power. My husband
loves that character. Good. I'm good. I'm glad because I
wanted him to be somebody who, like you want to
be married to him, like you want somebody to be
want to be married to him. And the other thing
(25:57):
is is, I don't know if people in their audience
know this. Jessica was pregnant. She really was like super
pregnant while trying to report the story, and like you
said to me, like I finished the article because I
had to have the baby, right, And I loved that.
For some reason, that detail like blew my mind. I
just thought, like that is the ultimate badass thing, and
(26:19):
I really wanted to put it in the show. And
I got so excited by that. I mean, you weren't
Let's be clear, she wasn't Vivian like super like reluctant
to have a kid and not that interested in being
a mother. Like none of that was true. I think
you already had a child, right, yes, yes, this is
my second child. But I just I loved the idea
of somebody like reporting right up to the minute that
they're basically like leaving to give birth. It just sounded
(26:41):
so badass to me, and I wanted to put that
in the show. So a lot of the things that
you told me after we met ended up being sort
of how we shaped the show into its segments, mainly
because it helped me build the timeline the German An
episode that going to Germany California. That whole episode it
(27:04):
was really interesting because it was the aftermath. It was
how do we tell the story of what happens after
the article is published? How do we get ourselves to
the trial right? I was super impressed with how you
guys structured it because I do feel like I just
gave you like stuff from my handbag. It was like,
here's like a raisin and three quarters and like some
(27:24):
gum rappers, Like I just kind of gave you all
this like random stuff, and you put it together in
such an unbelievably clever way, did you guys? The funny
thing about like real life, I remember saying this to
like one of the writers, is that it you know,
it doesn't end right, so it's really hard to find
an ending point. Was that like a challenge for you
guys to kind of come up with with how to
(27:45):
like wrap it up? It was really hard to figure
out how to end it. I remember we had a
tenth episode planned for a while where and I went
to prison and all the things that happened in a
whole bunch of stuff to happ to Anna in prison
and Vivian visiting her in prison and choosing to stop
visiting her. What was interesting was it felt like where
(28:10):
we ended felt right, you know, with the last interaction
between Vivian and Anna felt right to me, You'll come visiting,
You'll come visit Ovias. But also like that moment on
the bus felt right. She's headed off to like a
(28:33):
whole other series of events in parts unknown, and it's
not going to be that good. It's not going to
be great, and I don't know. To me, like it
felt like that was the best place to end it.
And when I called you, I think, I don't know
if people know this, but you're the person who gave
the where are they now? You gave me the where
are they now? Remember that we put at the ends
(28:53):
of the end of the series, because who else to
ask about the journalists like where is everybody now? And
you gave me these where are they now? Is that
we're so helpful because you wanted to know where everybody
ended up and how everybody ended up and you could
have kept going. I mean, there was so much more
we could have done with these characters. We could have
kept going for a while, and so it did feel
(29:16):
right to just stop when we did. But it was
hard to decide when there's much more to the story
coming up right after this. M okay, everybody, welcome back
(29:39):
to Inventing Anna the official podcast. Mm hmm. Here's a question,
because we were talking about the journalism of the piece,
what do you feel like Inventing Anna got like wrong
about showing how journalism works for people Like you were
(30:00):
an aspiring journalist and you watched Inventing Anna, and he thought, like,
that's what being a journalist is. Like, what did we
get wrong? You know, it would be hard for me
to point to something that you got wrong, even when
I would say, like, maybe, oh, I didn't have these
like friends who were helping me, who had the time
to like kind of do some research for me. That's true,
(30:21):
But it was also not true because I did have
these researchers in Germany that I like PayPal to like
do some research for me, and we did like have
some like so even like that is a little bit true.
I mean I think that there are different kinds of journalists,
and most journalists are not long form staff writers at magazines.
Like it's almost like I had like the last job,
(30:44):
like one of the last jobs like that in the world,
so that it wouldn't be like super recognizable to a
lot of working journalists, Like I would have to be
doing a lot more blog posts and kind of a
lot more like content turn But that's very typical well
of like TV stuff. It's like, yeah, you can't like
like but there's not like an episode where I'm like
writing a blog that's kind of pouring, you know, or
(31:07):
like you know, being on slack, Like you can't put
slack into it constantly. It's like you can't. So the
show paints Vivian, our journalist in the show, as being
sort of super concerned about Anna and as someone who
has a really hard time remaining neutral in her role
as a journalist. But for you, like in real life,
(31:28):
how hard was it to maintain that objectivity with the
subject of your story And how concerned were you about
maintaining that objectivity in real life? Oh wow? Um, I
mean I can get into the weeds on this one.
I think Vivian is a lot more concerned about that
than I am personally. The stuff that we're talking about
that she gets worried about it is like the courtroom
(31:50):
stuff where she's like buying the clothes for her a trial,
and I'm in court. I can't leave to go shopping.
You can't participating in its defense. That would be unethical,
crossing a line journalistically. Well, I'm a fucking guy. You
at least tell me, well, fucking pantyhos one of the funks,
you think panty fine At that exact moment, I was
(32:13):
not reporting on the story. I wasn't doing what she's doing,
which is covering the trial. So she's in a slightly
different situation. But I would say, like in general, again,
it's like a little bit of a different kind of journalism.
Like it's not like I work at the New York
Times and I'm doing breaking news, like I worked in
New York Magazine and it has this history of of
(32:35):
narrative style reporting of first person of you know, gaytales
and like Joan Didion, like you know, going to parties
with people. You know. It's it's a certain type of journalism.
We're allowed to have feelings, were allowed to have opinions,
were allowed to vote in elections and like a lot
(32:55):
of political journalists I know, And what I think is
so interesting staying about the show. One of the things
that's so great. It does a thing that I haven't
seen before. That you guys kind of got the kind
of like emotional aspect of working on these stories. I
haven't really seen that. I don't think anywhere like that.
It takes like an emotional toll to work on these
(33:17):
kinds of stories and to get really close to people
that they're like in your life. You do get close
to them, and I the whole thing about objectivity, I
just never really I don't really believe that, Like I like,
it's almost like you can't deny that you're a person
or that you have thoughts or the like. Just because
I like somebody that I'm reporting on, it doesn't change
(33:38):
the truth or the facts of the story. So I
don't know how necessary objectivity is. Like I'm not going
to I know myself, like I'm not going to leave
something out of a story because I like somebody or
because it reflects badly on me. Because the job is
kind of like righte what happened? And if you're kind
of forcing this objective upon yourself. It's almost like you're
(34:01):
starting out from like a weird place of like untruth,
because you're like denying that. What was interesting to me
is that what I felt like I was seeing with you,
not necessarily how I portrayed it, but what I felt
I was seeing with you in real life was that
your feelings for Anna were relatively complex. I mean, you
could see her for the for the fault that she had,
(34:22):
but you still really cared about her as a person,
and it didn't stop the fact that you had, you know,
a sense of humanity that felt for her and what
she was going through, and that you could feel sorry
for her and also be like, she's done some bad
things and she's you know, has some laws as a person.
So it felt like you you did remain objective in
(34:43):
your reporting, but you also did get emotionally invested and
you became really good friends with Todd. I thought that
was really interesting because you're right, you were no longer
reporting on the story, You're done reporting on the story,
and yet you stayed involved. But you did it in
a way that wasn't you, you you know, like you lost
yourself or you let go, or you went too far,
(35:04):
you know, you did seem to keep those boundaries, and
I love what you said about the difference between like
working at the New York Times and sort of doing
narrative journalism too. Yeah, I think at the end of
the day, it's your job is to write what happened,
and as long as you are doing that, as long
as you're telling the truth about what happened, it doesn't
(35:25):
really matter kind of what your personal feelings are, if
that makes any sense. Um, And yeah, I definitely veered between.
Like I definitely also felt like a sense of responsibility
to her in the same way that I did the
other characters, where it's like I feel like when I
go into a situation, I'm like kind of like a goofy,
non threatening person. But I've kind of come to realize
(35:46):
that in fact, like you know, you're you're a little
bit scary to people because you're going to record their
truth and you know that's going to be a thing
that sticks with them for a long time, especially with
the Internet. So it's just kind of, Um, it's a
weird relationship that we have with sources, and I think
that the show is really honest about that, and uh,
it's cool, it's really a neat thing. One of the
(36:08):
things that we keep talking about is how unknowable Anna is.
And it's one of the things that I felt so
strongly while making the series. And I like to say
everything about Anna is true until it's not. Um, do
you feel like you know her after this entire experience? Okay,
so you know, it's been a roller coaster with Anna
(36:29):
because I do like this person. And one of the
things that I think is so great about the show
is that it really captures the experience of knowing Anna
that I had, where you're kind of like veering back
and forth between like is this a good person? Is
this a bad person? And I'm still kind of in
(36:51):
that place with her, like I she will have these
moments of incredible sweetness and incredible clarity and the very
reasonab will and then you know, I will read those
long text exchanges with Rachel Williams that are just an
absolute horror movie that came out in court. It just
is it's terrifying, and it too see that, so it's
(37:15):
it's complicated. How did you feel about the I'm not
sorry interview she gave after that I'm not stary? Interview?
Was so classic Anna and that she feels she's being
very reasonable and pragmatic and also just like shooting herself
in the foot at the same time. What was interesting
about that is that she was kind of doing the defense.
(37:39):
Like the defense was that to be convicted of grand larceny,
you have to prove that somebody intended to defraud somebody, right,
So the position that the defense took was and I
didn't intend to defraud people. She intended to pay people back.
She intended to make the foundation. She intended to you know,
(38:00):
make everyone whole again. If the people around me had
just donned the jobs and the loans would have been approved,
my trust would have come through, and now I'd be
sitting on Park Avenue instead of hel with you. That's
a fact, and whether it was true or not, she
adamantly swore that that was the case. And so she
(38:21):
wasn't sorry, Like she wasn't sorry because she did intend
to pay people back, but she was just kind of
rudely interrupted by the justice system and people's inability to
sue withstand pressure she put it. Anna says things, It's
so interesting because when I was writing this story, I
think somebody said this, like like now for somebody's like,
she'll say these things that are like so like outlandish,
(38:44):
Like she'll be like, do you know that, like it's
really easy to get somebody killed? And then you're like,
that's just kind of Anna being Anna, imparting information that
it's actually really easy. And then but I would repeat
that to somebody and they'd be like horrified, like is
she threatening you? Like, oh my god, Like she just
says this stuff. She doesn't come off the way that
(39:04):
she wants to all the time. Anyway, She's a complicated person.
I don't really feel like I know her at the
end of the day. By the way, like we'll separate
out Anna Sarokan, who is a real person from Anna
delvinnasar Rokan is a real person, and I know her
a little bit and also not at all. And I
think that she will reveal herself or not when she
(39:28):
wants to. That's like kind of her story. And Adelvi
is like a character, it's a persona and I think
like at the end of the day, I've kind of
settled on that she's like a shape shifter and she
is whatever anybody wants her to be in the moment,
and that's kind of why it's a little bit difficult
to grab a hold of who she is, and being
(39:49):
a shape shifter and whoever anybody wants to be, she's
kind of like a reflection of whoever she's in front of,
so of all of us. Really, in some ways took
on characteristics of mine. She took on characteristics of Nets
and Rachel. Yeah, she's a complicated person, but she did
call me a few times. She's in jail. I don't
(40:10):
understand why she's still in jail, Like she should be deported.
I think she's resisting being deported and that's why she's
still in custody. Mm hmm. It's very confusing. So the
last time I spoke to her, I was like, why
are you still in jail? Go home? And she just
really wants to stay in the US. And that to
(40:32):
me goes back to my theory of Anna, which is
maybe not right at all. And I speak frankly and
that the only Anna I've met is through you. I've
never actually met Anna, and that was on purpose. But
my theory of Anna is the character Anna who is
a reflection of a lot of people who found herself
(40:55):
seen here, do you know what I mean? Like it
is that thing that Vivian says, I will make you
famous over the world, will know who you are. She
is seen here, she has known here, and maybe if
she goes home, she's not so known. Maybe it's not
as viable for her to leave the country and to
(41:16):
go be somebody else. She did come here in pursuit
of the American dream, and maybe, by God, she's going
to get it. I don't know, but you know, people
always ask me, like, what do you want people to
take away from the series, or what do you think
the series is. I don't have an answer for that.
I can never tell people what what it is I've made.
I just hope that we've reflected the characters in a
(41:40):
way that feels organic and truthful for the audience. But Anna,
Anna's a difficult one, she really is. Yeah. I mean
I did see her when she so she was out
of jail for like a month, a few weeks or
something like that. I did have dinner with her, and
it was nice. You know, I should put their reservation
under her name, and I had to go say it,
(42:01):
and then they kind of gave me a look and
it was a little bit weird. But she had like
grand plans she's She's got several publicists working with her
that I've heard from on occasion. We definitely have not
seen the last of her. But she needs to get
out of jail. It's very strange that she's still in there. Yeah,
I think it's strange that she's stole in there. And honestly,
(42:22):
you know me, I'm on the side of like, everybody
else got something out of this and Anna went to jail.
So I'm not so sure that that that's fair, do
you know what I mean? Like, I understand that she
did something wrong when I get that, but everybody else
got something out of this and Anna went to jail.
I don't know how I feel about that. It was
also the sentence was successive. Yes, I think the judge
(42:47):
said at the sentence saying like she had four to
twelve years right, and she said she was giving her
that longest sentence as a message. I'm not sure exactly
what the message was. It it did seem like it
was punishment for being a public figure speaking out saying
you weren't sorry, which is not the crime that she committed. Actually,
(43:11):
she kind of seemed like she was being punished for
her behavior during the trial and while she was incarcerated,
and not for the actual crimes that she did, which
at the end of the day, again all very bad things,
but it was like it was like two dollars maybe
which she paid back. It doesn't actually make any sense. Um, Yeah,
she's in jail for maximizing her public image in a way,
(43:34):
in a lot of ways. You're right. I think that's
a lot of it. Yeah, it's a sad thing. I
don't know if I answered the question or not. I
don't know either, but yeah, it's complicated, complicated. Indeed, thank
you so much for listening everyone. Next week, I'll be
(43:56):
back with the real Nef Davis, Anna's hotel concierge for
and confidante. I'm loyal to Anna, but I'm not a dummy.
I'm friends with Anna, but I do have boundaries and
most importantly, Anna will never come before my money. If
you're enjoying this show, please subscribe, share with your friends, rate,
(44:19):
or leave us a review. All of that good stuff.
And if you haven't finished Shonda Lands Inventing Anna on Netflix,
please go do that. We really don't want to spoil
it for you. Inventing Anna, the official podcast is executive
produced by Sandy Bailey, Lauren Hohman, Tyler Klang, and Gabrielle Collins.
Our producer and editor is Nicholas Harder, and the show
(44:41):
was produced and hosted by me Stacy Wilson Hunt Inventing Anna.
The official podcast is a production of Shonda land Audio
in partnership with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shonda lan Audio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
(45:02):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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