Owen Harris (‘Mrs. Davis’ director) got the 1st script and wondered, ‘What on Earth have I just read?’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“They sent me the pilot, and I read it, and I think I sent a message to my agent saying, ‘What on Earth have I just read?’ And then that was quickly followed up by another email where I said, ‘But I love it, and I really want to make it,'” remembers director Owen Harris about first encountering the script for the series “Mrs. Davis.” “It was just something that had a tonality to it that felt incredibly refreshing.” We talked to Harris as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above. Click the CC button on the video for closed captioning subtitles.
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“Mrs. Davis” tells that age-old story of a nun (played by Betty Gilpin) who is on a mission to destroy an all-seeing, all-knowing computer algorithm while also on a quest to obtain the Holy Grail. “It had a real sense of everything that people had been experiencing during the pandemic: a sense of feeling a bit lost, wanting to find answers, wanting to feel reassurance.” But it explores its themes of faith and technology with a “sense of joy and optimism, which I found very appealing at the time.”
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“It’s a really fun challenge” to balance the unique tones of a show like “Mrs. Davis.” The sci-fi series “takes these big wild leaps and genre-surfs in the way that it does. I think that part of that high-wire act is enjoying the mystery and the dropping of the breadcrumbs, but also knowing when enough is enough and when to start to reward.” He previously directed three episodes of the dystopian technological anthology series “Black Mirror,” and even then “I was always drawn to the stories that had a sense of soul and relationships at their heart. And certainly ‘Mrs. Davis’ does the same. It keeps those very grounded relationships as the core, and then it allows you to spin off into these wild flights of fantasy, which is really fun.”
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