When the writer-director Lynn Shelton died in May, it was a devastating loss to film, to moviegoers who knew her for intimate low-budget features like “Humpday” and “Your Sister’s Sister,” and to TV audiences starting to discover her work as a director on series like “GLOW” and “The Morning Show.” On Tuesday, she received a posthumous Emmy directing nomination for the Hulu limited series “Little Fires Everywhere.”
Shelton, 54, left behind family, friends and frequent collaborators who included Marc Maron, the comic, actor and host of the long-running “WTF” podcast. Shelton had directed Maron in her 2019 film, “Sword of Trust,” his stand-up specials “Too Real” (2017) and “End Times Fun” (2020), and his IFC series, “Maron,” among other shows. They had also been romantically involved for about a year, after a lengthy and sometimes awkward courtship that began when Shelton appeared as a guest on “WTF” in 2015.
Maron, 56, has not had much opportunity to mourn Shelton privately. As a comedian and podcaster, he is known for his blunt and relentlessly confessional approach, and he has embraced the notion of candor even in his suffering. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Maron said, it was important to be open about his sorrow for listeners who may be going through their own difficulties as well as for himself. Reflecting on his grief, he said, has not diminished it but has helped him understand it as unavoidable and universal.
“It’s a terrible experience but it is a fundamental human experience,” he said. “It’s as common as love. It’s devastating, but we are built to carry it, for ourselves and for others.”
In a phone interview from Los Angeles, during which Maron also stopped to get a drive-through test for Covid-19 (“I’m not sick,” he explained, “I’m just crazy”), he talked about his memories of Shelton, his appreciation for her work and how he has tried to process her death, publicly and in real time. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
You first met Lynn Shelton when she came on your podcast. How did that come about?
I had seen in one of the trades that she was working on some project with my ex-wife [the writer Mishna Wolff]. I had never really heard of her, but I watched a couple of her movies and she seemed like the real deal. I had her on the podcast and she was very charming and eloquent about her own process and who she was. I got her and she clearly got me. That was the beginning of something that became rather intense.
Listening to that interview now, does it sound like you were already starting to connect with each other?
That was definitely there and we both knew it. But we weren’t in a situation to really do anything about it. [Shelton was married and Maron was in another relationship at the time.] It was difficult. From that connection, we started our creative relationship, because I wanted to see her again and get to know her. I knew she was a great director and why wouldn’t she want to direct my television show?
How did you find it working with her on “Maron”?
She was always very disarming to me. I’m a stubborn, difficult man. And I was difficult with her, too. She had a vision and she was also stubborn. But she wasn’t difficult. I would go through my own thing — “I don’t want to do it that way. Why can’t I do it this way?” It was my show. But she would eventually do it the way she wanted and convince you to do it that way too. And it was usually the right way.
She knew how to get the performance she wanted from you?
It’s not that she was unassuming. You definitely knew she was in charge. But she embraced the collaborative process. She would watch what you did in a take and focus on finding the naturalism that’s possible. Get you away from locking into a line reading, enable you to open up your emotional space and get present in what needs to be done in the scene. She just had a way of doing it that didn’t feel oppressive or wasn’t something I wanted to fight against, come the third time. [Laughs]
You started writing together and she directed you in episodes of “GLOW.” Did she also appreciate you as a stand-up?
She was my best audience. [Chokes up] There was some sort of connection that we had — I lost all my self-consciousness, which is no easy trick. And I don’t even know why. We had similar interests around food, around music, around humor, around film. Intellectually and emotionally — spiritually, I don’t know. She meditated twice a day. I never did that. But she loved to laugh and she was kind of an easy laugh, but that’s OK. I’ll take it. She would go to the Comedy Store with me and, over the years, became acutely sensitive to my process. It got to the point where she would suggest things and I would take the note, even with my stand-up, which is saying a lot.
So it made sense to have her direct your stand-up specials, starting with “Too Real”?
I told Netflix I wanted her to direct it. They were concerned that she had never directed a comedy special. I’m like: “She’s done seven movies! You think this is rocket science?” She’d already made “Outside In,” and that’s a little masterpiece. But she was pretty humble. She got what she wanted as an artist from realizing her vision. Her focus was on the work. But half of this game, for most of us, is getting it out there and that’s the hardest part.
How was Netflix finally persuaded to let her do it?
I told my manager I won’t do the special if she can’t direct it. And they came back with, they’re also going to put another director who’s directed specials with her, to guide her through the process. And I said to my manager, that’s not a great look. Especially if they pull out some dude. You’re going to have some guy teach her? That’s ridiculous. Just let her direct it herself. And that’s all.
Was it a different dynamic on “Sword of Trust,” which, though you starred in it, was ultimately her film?
By that time, we were wrestling with feelings that were deeper than creative and friendship. She was separated [from her husband, the host and actor Kevin Seal] and the tension had become more intense. We’d been working on a script together for years and we just weren’t getting it done. She’s like, “I’m going to write you a movie.” I’m like, “Yeah, OK, sure.” And she did. She and Mike O’Brien came up with an idea — she decided, because she drove past a pawnshop, that I would be a pawnshop owner — and she willed it into existence.
What was the day-to-day experience like on the film?
I was cranky and difficult. It was hot down there [in Birmingham, Ala.]. I felt fat. It was very daunting for me, because I was on set with a lot of monster improvisers. And after a day or two, I said to Lynn, if you don’t reel them in, I’m going to be this dumb straight man to a bunch of over-the-top characters. I’m going to be filled with resentment and I’m not going to be able to ease into this. And Lynn made an interesting choice to act in that movie [as the troubled ex-girlfriend of Maron’s character]. That scene when she comes to pawn that ring [chokes up], the emotions were real. It’s really Lynn holding me open, which is something she did in real life, too. Once it got to a point where she had resolved some stuff in her relationship and we were able to acknowledge a real love for each other, I actually said to her — there was drama here — I said, “Look, if we don’t try this, whatever’s going on here, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life.” And so, we did.
Were you hesitant to acknowledge your relationship on the podcast?
It took a long time and I’ve learned a lot of lessons around that. My audience has been through several relationships with me. When you talk about somebody, they don’t have a voice in it. So choose what you’re doing there. Once Lynn and I were able to start seeing each other, we kept a low profile for like three to six months and then she started to ease into the conversation. I think she was getting upset with it. She was like: “When can we be who we are? Enough already.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right.” This quarantine was not the greatest of situations but it accelerated things. It enabled us to double up our time together. She had moved all her stuff down here and we were together all the time. We were cooking and talking and eventually we started working on the script again.
In the time you were together with her, did you see any warnings that her health was at risk?
She was not a big doctor person. She was used to a fairly elaborate daily regimen of supplements and talking to her naturopath. She had swollen glands in her throat on a Friday. She went and got the Covid test immediately. It was negative. We got an online appointment with a physician. She started antibiotics on Saturday. Come Monday, she had a 104-point-something fever. On Wednesday she said her throat didn’t hurt anymore but the fever was relentless. On Thursday, I’m like, we’ve got to go to the doctor. She was going to go in that Friday morning to get a blood panel and that’s when I woke up to her collapsed. I called the ambulance and she was dead within 18 hours. Acute myeloid leukemia is what’s on the death certificate. Organ failure is the primary cause and then acute myeloid leukemia is what they signed off on.
I went [to the hospital] that night and spent a few minutes with her body. It was the heaviest thing I’ve ever done. It was just devastating. I was blown out, totally traumatized. Totally heartbroken.
You never took a break from your podcast. Did you consider taking any time off from the show?
I didn’t think I owed it to anybody but myself. This is the type of thing I do. My producer was like: “Dude, we don’t have to do anything. You just tell me what you want to do.” And I said, I have no control over these feelings. They’re monstrous. But they’re real. So we posted the posthumous episode [of Shelton’s 2015 interview]. I got on the mic and stayed in what I was feeling to [introduce] that episode. And I thought, this is going to be good for me. The people that have been in my audience for a decade can handle it. Ultimately, I felt like it was the right thing.
Do you find it at all difficult to ask for people’s sympathies or for acknowledgment of your grief during a global pandemic?
That’s one of the reasons I thought it was good to do it. There’s nothing but grief around. It’s a tough emotion for people to sit in and accept. The one thing the pandemic has given me is time to process and sit with the feelings. I cry every day. The shock and the trauma have dissipated a little bit, so now I deal with the loss. I have her jacket that she always wore, and her hat and boots. I have the shirt that I met her in. I touch these things when I can and try to keep her with me. But to answer your question, it’s been challenging to be in this much sadness in a fairly hopeless world. In terms of really experiencing the feelings that one has with grief and loss, I’ve had the presence to be in those. Because I have nothing else to do, man.
Having been able to mourn her with other friends, family members and colleagues, has that affected your understanding of her?
I didn’t know her as well as many people knew her, which is something I found out at memorial events. My history with her was pretty short and sweet in a way. Romantically it was just a year and change. There are people who have known her for 25 years. Hearing everybody’s experiences with her, working on all these films, I’m like, what stories do I have? But I realized we had a unique frequency to our connection. We saw ourselves through each other’s eyes. I was really the best version of me, the way she saw me.
Will you do anything with the screenplay that the two of you were working on?
It’s a complicated story. We wrote the draft over a period of years and there’s a lot of funny stuff in it. We just needed to tighten up this final scene, and it revolves around how this main character dies of cancer. [Pauses] Yeah. So. That was the unfinished business. I’ve gotten some people who are asking me, like, why don’t you finish that script and make it happen? Maybe find another woman to direct it. I don’t know that it would honor her. Because this was always the thing that she was going to direct me in. That was the whole idea of it. It would be upsetting.
You said in a recent podcast that your grief for Lynn was “expanding your sense of what love can be.” What did you mean by that?
I knew that we were just beginning something and I was very excited to have felt that. I was still difficult — it wasn’t hostile, it was just kind of childish. But she seemed to understand that. That opened up my heart aperture a little bit, to experience things differently. Once I’d gotten to that place, I could take that openness in the world. I didn’t have to be afraid of it anymore. The challenge now is to not get bitter or sad or angry. How do I not do that? How do you stay loving in something as relentless as what’s going on now? I don’t know. I sit on my porch and it’s nice out here. It was a lot to lose. But I just try to stay in her light as much as I can.
You sounded a little more exuberant at the start of Monday’s show. Is that an accurate reflection of how you were feeling at the time?
Yesterday, when I recorded that, was a fairly awful day. There’s a whole arc of feelings that happen to me every day, and every day in quarantine’s like a week. I’ve got to wake up and battle the darkness. I’m going to get up, I’ll make my bed. I’m going to look at a picture of Lynn. I’m going to maybe pray to nothing, because it feels like a meditation of some kind. A little trick I learned in sobriety. And then I’m going to wonder if it’s worth being alive for a while and wonder if there’s a way to hang myself from the exercise belt that you hook to the door of the closet. [Laughs] And then that goes away, and I cook some breakfast and I go hike up the mountain or listen to some music. Feelings aren’t facts. You should have them but don’t act on anything too rashly. Move through them. So I guess by the time I got to the garage [where he records the podcast], I was having a good 10 minutes and I was able to capture that. [Laughs]
"that" - Google News
July 31, 2020 at 06:00PM
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The Lynn Shelton That Marc Maron Knew - The New York Times
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