Payton Russell

A conversation with showrunner and screenwriter, Andy Siara.

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Some people believe time is a finite line, with no overlaps, no repeats, and no ways to go back. Others believe in past lives and parallel universes, picturing time as one giant circle. I, myself, tend to think “finite line”, but, after talking to Andy Siara, I’m starting to sway.

Andy Siara, creator of Palm Springs and The Resort, explores nonlinear time in both projects – but in very different ways. In Palm Springs, time is explored through a Groundhog Day-style loop where Andy Samberg’s character is forced to live the same day over and over. In The Resort, Cristin Milioti’s character discovers that time overlaps on itself, until her troubled past and present become nearly interchangeable.

Similarly, Andy has his own stack of past lives. 

In his twenties, Andy and his brother toured the country with their indie rock band, The Henry Clay People. They were broke – crashing on relatives’ couches and floating on the kindness of strangers. At the end of each show, they’d shout into the audience: “Anyone want to put up five guys tonight?” It worked, and somehow, they didn’t get murdered. Across nine weeks, the band stayed in just two hotels, where they’d bunk all five to a room to save cash.

Years later, after Andy’s success as a showrunner and his time writing on Angelyne and Lodge 49, it’s hard to imagine him sleeping on a stranger’s couch, let alone living the broke rocker life. 

Yet, with Andy’s long hair, smudged glasses, and relaxed, matcha-drinking vibe–it’s also not surprising at all. Clearly, his past informs his present–not only in his relationships, but in the stories he writes and the way he moves through the world. They might be two different lives, but they coexist in one guy, both years apart and somehow at the same time.

At Austin Film Festival, we discussed his time on the road, creating Palm Springs and The Resort, and his path into TV and film.

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From The Henry Clay People into Film

Payton Russell (PR): Can you talk about the decision to leave the band and go into film?

Andy Siara (AS): I wouldn’t say it was so much a decision to leave as much as the band kind of just plateaued. At a certain point, how long can you keep a band going that only a few people in L.A., New York, and scattered around the country care about? It got depressing playing for two people on a Tuesday night in Indianapolis, and waking up the next morning on Wednesday and having to go to the next city where you know no one’s going to be there.

I had this file on my computer that said, “At some point, I want to apply to film school.” I knew that when I’m fifty, if I didn’t at least try to do film, I would hate myself. So, in November of 2012, I looked at all the top film schools, and ended up applying to the American Film Institute (AFI). I applied to both the producing and writing programs, just to hedge my bets, and I got into both. Some buddies encouraged me to do the writing program, so I did that.

Lodge 49

PR: How did you get your first staffing job on Lodge 49?

AS: In my second year at AFI, I was interning at AMC one day a week. One of the executives there put a script on my desk and said, “This is something we have in development. I think you’ll love it.” He just knew my taste—it wasn’t to give coverage or anything. It was a pilot for Lodge 49, and I loved it. It was right up my alley. I had read the creator Jim Gavin’s short stories. It felt like the show was made for me.

So, I remember going into my boss’s office and saying, “If you guys pick this up, I will do anything to be in that writers’ room. I’ll even take out the trash, I don’t care.” I knew they were never going to hire me as a writer, but I asked them to keep me in mind.

This was right when the studios started doing mini-rooms, so it weirdly happened to line up that June of 2015 — the weekend after I graduated — they were putting together the writers’ room. That weekend, I went out to Palm Springs with Max to talk about developing a film based there (which turned out to be Palm Springs).

The next morning, after a long night of drinking and talking about ideas, I got a call while hungover from the showrunner saying they were hiring someone else to be the writers’ assistant, but I could be the writers’ PA. I said, “Yeah, that’d be great!” I notice that, in June, a lot of things tend to happen for me.

PR: Did you have to pitch yourself for a promotion on Lodge 49 to get promoted to staff writer?

AS: Peter Ocko is very much of the tradition of working your way up. So maybe I had mentioned I’d love to write, but that was never a formal conversation. He knew I wanted that, and at some point he said, “If there’s a second season and I can promote you guys—no promises—but I will.” Micah Cratty (the writers’ assistant) and I had been on the show longer than most of the writers, and even longer than Peter, so I didn’t have to explicitly ask for that bump up. Peter is an awesome showrunner, and he gets it. The weird thing is, I never even had to give a writing sample.

PR: How did you parlay that into your next job on Angelyne?

AS: I remember my manager and agent — I had just gotten an agent that summer — saying, “You need to write. Get a good new TV writing sample before you’re done.” So, any downtime I had during the Lodge 49 Season 2 writers’ room, I would write. At this point, Palm Springs still didn’t exist yet as a finished thing — we were trying to find financing for it — so it couldn’t help with getting that next job.

I was writing this pilot (The Resort), which I finished over the holiday break at the end of 2018. I finished the Lodge 49 writers’ room in January 2019, and by that point, my reps had The Resort to take out. So, I went straight from finishing the room to taking meetings on The Resort.

There were a couple production companies interested, but it was Sam Esmail’s company, Esmail Corp, who brought it to UCP, and they wanted to do it. And at the exact same time, UCP was also staffing Angelyne, so it made sense.

Another thing — going back to AFI — one of my classmates there, Halee Bernard, became an executive at Sam’s company, so she brought The Resort to them. She was pushing The Resort there while also being involved in staffing. So, she put me up for staffing on Angelyne. And then my friend Brennan Elizabeth Peters, who was a writer at AFI, was working on another show with Raelle Tucker — and Raelle’s best friend Nancy Oliver was the original showrunner of Angelyne. Brennan passed me along to her boss, who then passed me along to Nancy.

So, it’s not just “who you know” — it’s the script and the interview that got me the job — but those connections and friends I made at AFI were a big part of it.

Palm Springs

PR: How did you and Max Barbakow go about getting it produced and finding funding?

AS: Once the script was done, Max and I knew it was going to be an uphill battle to get anyone to give money to a first-time director. But my manager pushed it around, and once Andy Samberg and his company, Party Over Here, got it, they got behind Max. We did a couple more months of developing the script, and then they took it out. It was still a huge uphill battle to get anyone to give money to a first-time director, but we ended up getting it fully financed. That was it. Basically, everything changed once Samberg came on.

PR: What was the inspiration for doing a Groundhog Day–style film? Because since Groundhog Day, Palm Springs has been my favorite version of that concept. I was curious what inspired you to go that direction.

AS: When we first went out to Palm Springs in 2015, that weekend we just had a seed of this journey — this character, who he was, and the kind of journey we wanted to take him on. It was all things we were grappling with in our own lives.

There were many, many failed drafts. At first, there was never a time-loop thing. There wasn’t a wedding. At one point, it was a New Year’s Eve party at the end of one long night, but, in the writing process, it kept drifting into a more heightened, almost supernatural element. I didn’t want to do a straight mumblecore movie — nothing against that — I just didn’t know how to do that.

It was two years after I started writing it that the time-loop idea came in. It seemed like the movie wanted to be a time-loop movie because of how we had built this character. When we begin the movie, the guy says, “I’ve felt everything I’ll ever feel, and I’m never gonna feel anything again.” It’s an eye-rolly kind of line, but we thought: What if we make a world that makes that literally true? So how do you do that? Well, a time loop is one way.

What helped me was that in Groundhog Day, at the end, the character figures out what he thinks the meaning of life is, and then he’s gifted a way out. But what if our guy goes through that entire journey, figures it out… and then: nope. He’s stuck here for good. Then what do the next however-many years look like? What do you do at that point? So, he tries to find meaning in a meaningless existence.

The Resort

PR: I was curious how you spaced out the mystery in The Resort, and how much it changed over time. Each episode ended on such a great cliffhanger–what was the development process of pacing that out?

AS: I’ll say the first episode was much easier. I wanted to build up the mystery — finding the phone, planting little seeds — that’s the easy part. My favorite thing was that halfway through the script, or somewhere around there, you cut back to 2027, and I had written: you think this is a show about murder and blood and all that shit, but actually it’s a love story. And then it cuts to Sam and Violet’s story. That part was easy.

From that point on, pacing the mystery — that was one of the hardest things for me. It was a long process of trial and error, mostly error, from last minute page one rewrites on set in Puerto Rico… to last minute edit experiments in Burbank. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. Still unclear.

PR: How did you come up with the ending? Was the ending always there from the beginning?

AS: Yes. Some version of it, yes. Basically, I wanted her to have the ability to officially go back in time — or be stuck in time — and then choose not to.