‘Dahmer’ director Carl Franklin on why the show waits to reveal the titular serial killer’s face [Exclusive Video Interview]
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Carl Franklin was deep into work when he learned of his Emmy nomination — the second in his career — for directing the first episode of Netflix’s “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” “I was in New York, as I was doing another pilot on a miniseries, and they knew about it! So someone told me, ‘Hey, man, you’re nominated! And congratulations!'” the director shares with Gold Derby during a recent webchat (watch the exclusive video interview above). “And I started noticing these texts that were coming in, and then people said, ‘You were nominated for an Emmy!’ And I said, ‘Really?!’ So I hadn’t expected to, so I thought, ‘That’s cool, man, that’s nice.'”
The “Dahmer” opener, “Bad Meat” — which is the only one of the show’s 10 installments that Franklin helmed — presented the director with a very peculiar challenge. The first iteration of the “Monster” anthology series from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan follows a nonlinear story structure and opens with the day Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters) is arrested. This occurs, on the show, after he courts his next potential victim, Tracy Edwards (Shaun J. Brown), in a gay bar and takes him to his apartment for a risqué photoshoot, but Edwards is able to escape and flag down the police. What this starting point meant for Franklin is that he had to craft an episode that could ultimately double as both the introduction to the story and the climax thereof.
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“I kind of viewed it as, like, the first act of a movie, wherein you want to introduce the characters, and then at some point, the first major plot point that propels you forward,” Franklin divulges. “Now, the only thing about this is, because we were starting the story at the end, … there were a few things that actually were a little bit tricky. There was that — that we were starting the story at the end of [Dahmer’s] activities — and the other was: We did not want to glamorize Jeffrey Dahmer or apologize, I should say, for him. And so it was important, at the time, that [when] we were introducing our lead character, we also don’t make him sympathetic, and that we somehow don’t necessarily get so involved in him as a human being.”
One of the ways Franklin pulled this off was by not just waiting to reveal Dahmer’s face but then also doing so for the first time from the perspective of his next-door neighbor, Glenda Cleveland (Niecy Nash-Betts), who has concerns about the noises and smells coming through their shared vent. “That was purposeful… And the only time you really read his face is when he came up close to Glenda Cleveland next door and you saw him as a threat,” the Emmy nominee highlights. “And then, the next time when you see him — from then on, he’s a predator. And so we really only discovered [his] apartment, and really get a look at the apartment, when the victim comes to the apartment and we see it from his point of view.”
Another way the show accomplishes its desired objective is by launching the episode not with Dahmer, but with Cleveland — an amalgamation of the real-life Cleveland, who in fact resided in an adjacent building, and Pamela Bass, one of Dahmer’s actual neighbors — to begin with. The hour opens with Cleveland muting her TV program — a news report about five white cops beating a Black man who was on an undercover assignment — after she hears a bunch of grisly sounds coming from Dahmer’s apartment through their shared vent.
“We introduced her big in frame, so that immediately, she’s the first human being that you see. And you see her up close, and then you see her concern, and then you see where she’s looking. And then, we went up to the vent. And then, the vent was the connective tissue between the two,” Franklin explains. “So we introduced the effects of the killer before we introduce the actual killer — how [Cleveland] was hearing it; how it was affecting people around her and, specifically, in this case, her; how that was what she was suspecting next door, and already, at this point, kind of knew that there was something really amiss [happening].”
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