If you’re a fan of David Fincher and Love, Death + Robots, you’re about to be very happy. Not only is Love, Death + Robots Volume 3 now streaming on Netflix, David Fincher directed one of the episodes, Bad Travelling, and it’s fantastic. Written by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, it’s about a giant crustacean and a shark-hunting sailing vessel. I’d love to tell you more…but the best thing about Love, Death + Robots is not knowing anything about what you’re going to watch and just letting it happen.

Shortly after watching the episode, I was able to get on the phone with Fincher for a deep dive conversation about directing Bad Travelling and the making of Love, Death + Robots. During the sprawling conversation, Fincher talked about his history with animation, how he decided on the style of animation for his episode, how they decided where something should end, how everyone involved in the series is doing it for the love of the genre, and if they’ve thought about making a Love, Death + Robots feature film or doing a live-action version. In addition, he talked about his love of director Alberto Mielgo’s Jibaro (another Love, Death + Robots Volume 3 episode) and how he’s “never seen anything like it. I’ve never been that mesmerized.”

Trust me, if you’re a fan of Fincher and this amazing series, you’ll learn a lot about how it’s made. Check out what he had to say below.

COLLIDER: First of all, I want to just say a big thank you to you and Tim Miller for making this series because I love it. I know making anything is a huge battle, so I just want to thank you.

DAVID FINCHER: Well, I appreciate that. It's really mostly Tim, I [have] to be honest. But this was fun. I got to at least play another reindeer game this time around.

Before we get into your episode, which I loved, I really want to talk about Jibaro.

FINCHER: It's amazing. He's [episode director Alberto Mielgo] something else. He's otherworldly, this kid.

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Image via Netflix

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His episode really blew me away in terms of the story and the animation. I'm just curious, for you as a producer, what is it like watching the finished version of that for the first time? What was your take on it?

FINCHER: Well, I got forwarded an email that Tim had written. It was the link to the Pinkman.tv [website] because they hadn't uploaded it. It was just their first, "We just finished. We are just online. Take a look." He wrote me and he was like, "You should be sitting down, and don't watch this on your phone." I [have] got to say, I love The Red Balloon, and I love Closed Mondays, and I love Red's Dream. As short films go, I didn't think I would ever see anything better than The Witness, and this is ten times better than that.

I remember I sent it to Steven Soderbergh, and I said, "I want you to watch this and I want you to write me back.” He wrote me back [and] if the thing's 11 minutes long or something like that, it was like 11 minutes and two seconds later [that] I get this email going, "What the fuck is this? I need to know now." So, look, we've all had the same response. It's otherworldly, his skillset.

It's funny because he's very gregarious and personable. You can't explain what this is going to be. We saw storyboards [and] you kind of go, "All right, yeah.” Then you see the animatic and then you see some of the dancers with the physics simulation of all the beads and things on it. So you're semi-prepared for what you're going to see, [then] you get to that final image of the detritus at the bottom of this lake. No one can prepare you for what this level of artistry can do to you.

I remember just thinking to myself, you see something like that [and] you just hope that people aren't going to see it on their phone on a bus. You just hope that they're going to have at least a headset on and they're going to watch it at night. It'll be really interesting to see how it plays on a big screen tonight, because it's really assaultive and the audio is very vertical, and the sound pressure of it. It'll be really interesting to see. It’s also upsetting, and it's upsetting for the reasons that great art is upsetting. It kind of goes to a place that we all hope is hidden, and that's where he starts and he just starts excavating.

He's something else, this Alberto Mielgo. I said to him, "For my money, there's Disney, there's Pixar, and there's you.” In that order. I've never seen anything like it. I've never been that mesmerized. Then when you hear how he makes it; it's literally like it courses through him until it explodes from his fingertips. I'm just happy he's in our lineup, because he not only gets the competitive juices of like, "Fuck, I want to do something like that," or "I want to do something in that," but it's cinema-affirming.

I think it's incredible.

FINCHER: It's the kind of thing that if somebody says to me, "I didn't like it," it's like I get to write that person off. I never have to speak to them again. Just makes my life so much simpler.

One of the things I love about Love, Death + Robots is that you really don't know what the animation [is that] you're going to see until you push play on the episode.

FINCHER: You're not supposed to. We eventually want to get into doing live-action too. If we can do marionettes, I wanted to do a big super-marionettion thing.

I grew up in the 1970s [with] Kai Pindal and the National Film Board of Canada, Spike and Mike's Animation Festival, Fantastic Animation Festival, or even Will Vinton. Whether you saw them on the Academy Awards, or whether you saw them in a revival house before Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or whether you saw them on KQED in San Francisco—you were exposed to this stuff. The fact that sometimes it was 2D cell animation and sometimes it was plasticine, it was always like, when the technique worked for the story, these were palate cleansers that made life worth living. You would get walloped by something out of the left field, and it would just spur you to think about what animation could be.

I grew up around a lot of animators, and even when I was working for Lucasfilm, Phil Tippett was doing his dinosaur project in his garage on the weekends. For me, animation was sort of always around. There was always something going on. I worked for John Korty for a number of years. He had animation stands in his home, which became his studio. It was just always around. As an eight-year-old or a ten-year-old, this was all I would live for. I would live for exactly this kind of thing, to find something that I'd never seen before applied to a story that I didn't know where it was going and had a twist or whatever. That was the kind of shit that I lived for.

It's a difficult thing to get it paid for, but there are a lot of people out there. I think that there's an audience for this kind of material. I think that if we ever default to it being just the three robots—and I love the three robots—but there was a big discussion about whether or not we should do something that hearkens back to something we've already done. I think that the material made it undeniable, but I'm all for couture and bespoke every time out.

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Image via Netflix

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How did you decide on the style of animation that you wanted to use for your episode, knowing that there are so many choices out there in terms of the animation.

FINCHER: Well, it's sort of a process of default. Bad Travelling was something that I wanted to do as an executive producer for Love, Death + Robots because I wanted to see this story as part of Love, Death + Robots. The director side of me was like, "Listen, if you're ever going to do anything that takes place on a boat, you might as well do it in mocap because you're never going to go out on a fucking barge with a Panaflex. You're too smart for that." So for my money, it was kind of like, "Yeah, I want it to be photoreal-ish to a certain extent.”

First of all, Bad Travelling has been around for a long time. A lot of artwork was generated initially to show potential studio homes [and] investors what the show that became Love, Death + Robots was supposed to be. One of the first stories that we proffered to people was “Bad Travelling.” I'd been seeing this artwork in the conference room at Blur for fifteen years or something. When Tim came to me and said, "We're doing Bad Travelling," I was like, "Great." Then I started looking at it and going, “Let's throw some stuff against the wall and see.” It was kind of Powell/Pressburger and/or Thief of Bagdad-adjacent. It was very like a spice trading ship, and the costumes were actually very much more like Jibaro, strangely enough, than where we ended up. It's that thing of when you start to have to tell a story, you begin to look at those elements that help you. What helps you hit the ground running?

What I loved about what Andy [Walker] had written, or what Andy distilled from what Neal [Asher] had written, was [that] he totally embraced the thing that I always loved about Ridley's Alien, which is Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto are absolutely essential to running this oil refinery in outer space, but they're not about to talk to you about the repair schedule until we get the bonus situation worked out. I loved the idea of the enforced—not comradery—but these are the people you're going to have to fucking work with and they have a very different view of what we should do with the crab in the hold and you're going to have to negotiate with a lot of people on, because nobody wants to go down there. Somebody has to answer the question, "What's it doing?" No one wants to be the person who has to do the recon in order to be able to answer that question. So that became a lot of the drama. We want to have not just miscreants on the high seas, but definitely, people whose survival instincts are ratcheted up to eleven.

So in that, one of the things that I kept coming back to was the style of the thing. I think we had 300 shots or something like that. We only had a certain amount of shots and we had to portion the shots, so we went and storyboarded the whole thing. As we were going through that process, it started feeling like something that's a little closer to Deadliest Catch. If I'm going to start a 19-minute or 18-minute, 54-second, whatever it is, thing with, "Look out," and here's the giant crab, I want to get out of the gates pretty quickly. So I need them to look like they're working. Even though the boat's weirdly double-masted or double-bowed and has all this strange, other-worldly stuff going on, I still need the audience that's watching on Netflix to kind of go, "Oh, I see what's going on. These are the deck hands for a ship that's harvesting these sharks out of this weird, black, leaden sea."

So it was in that process that you start to go, "Let's try to bring this a little closer together." We went out into the world and had five, or six maybe, even, character designers. I kept coming back to that image of Toren and saying, "I know we're going to have this gigantic, hulking Jorvan character." There's something I like about the very Day of the Dead, almost Picasso, primitive skulls that you can kind of superimpose under these characters. Maybe we get this one studio to do all of them—here's the woman who smokes the pipe all the time and has the tattoos and here's the woman who's playing with a knife—and we kind of talked them through it and we found it. It evolves and it illuminates itself, the story.

We did it in CG because no one should have to go and try and shoot this on the real seas. It made a lot more sense in cut-out animation or cel animation. I think if you're going to do water, water simulations are so much fun. They're expensive, there's a lot of render power behind them, but they're really beautiful. The way that they just play in the background through guardrails on the deck of the ship, and you still see the kind of silvery, shimmering of the white caps, and that becomes kind of the bowl that you're looking down into. It just seemed like an appropriate technical response to the, “How do we want it to look?” and “How do we want that look to feel?” We were doing something that was pretty dark. I created a lot of problems by saying [that] in every scene I wanted to have water splashing on people's faces and running down, and there's cloth simulation, but there's also a lot of times where the cloth is just stuck to the different bodies because of the moisture. So that's how we ended up. It's the long way around of saying trial and error.

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Image via Netflix

One of the things about animation is you can literally put the camera wherever you want it to go and you can design every single aspect of every shot to the littlest thing. I know that you're very exacting with your shots. What was that like for you, where you could control everything? Were there ever points where Tim was like, "David, this shot's done. I'm taking it from you"?

FINCHER: He did that all the time because he's a very bad den mother. Tim takes on an enormous amount of responsibility. If you want to play, when Tim tells you, "Pencils down," you have to kind of take it at face value. There were moments where Tim was like, "Okay, dude, seriously. You are not going to finish on time." He's been in my seat more than he's been in the other, so you have to respect that. We haggled over a couple of things, where I would just say, "Look, it's just not good enough yet. We need to do X, Y, and Z," and he would go, "Okay, fine." We don't want to ruin the opportunity to continue making these, so compromises had to be made, and we got to do what we thought were the best ones. Strangely enough, yeah, you could fiddle-fuck into the next century if you wanted to.

I did this series of horrendous commercials just to set up the pipeline for Benjamin Button. We did it with an ad agency and we were doing facial capture and we were trying to learn how to do the retargeting things so that we could automate it. What was really interesting, and a very painful way to learn was when you start fucking with performance capture, when you start to go, "Okay, well…” I was working with an ad agency on a commercial—and this was to have a spokesperson who was going to be CG—but it was based on a real person who was dead, and we had to retarget from an actor who looked similar to the person that we were emulating, and we would take the performance cues from an actor who's approximately the same age and generation as the person that we were simulating, and then we would apply, retarget and apply that facial capture to a very detailed CG model.

What I learned from that is there are certain things that are inviolate. You can kind of adjust where the pupils are in terms of, "Well, it seems like they should be a little more converged." This was an ad agency that liked to add smiles. One of the weird things about retargeting smiles is [that] a smile is a very personal thing, and it has everything to do with how people feel about themselves when they smile or how much of themselves they want to show [and] how much of their gums [show]. People get uncomfortable seeing pictures of themselves, so they bring everything down. You can't just take one person's smile and use it to retarget another. It's ghoulish, and it's a freak show. What I learned doing this is [that] mocap, you can tweak 3, 4, 5%, but you can't change what you have. You can delay things so they happen four or five frames later or earlier or whatever, but if you get into playing God, [then you might as well do] Buzz Lightyear. If that's what you want to do, create the character, and figure out how to rig it. But to actually port what a human face does onto another thing, if you get in and you get too micro-fractal, you can disappear down a rabbit hole that is unending.

Once we had made the decision to do it in mocap we knew that there were little things that we could adjust, but I did not want to get into, “I'd like that to look sarcastic." It's like, "Well, what does that mean? How do we actually act on that?" So when you get into retargeting stuff, if you're going to pick a take and you're watching an actor go through something and you go, "That's the one I like," and then you're going to retarget that. It's just enough work to be able to take an actor whose face isn't really like the thing and give it life. If you start to really fiddle-fuck with it, the whole thing can break very quickly. But the look of it was kind of Deadliest Catch meets a ship that looks like it requires nine people to keep it on tack.

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Image via Netflix

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I love so many of the episodes of this series, and I'm so curious, have you guys talked about expanding any of the stories into a feature or staying in that world in some way, shape, or form of some of the episodes, or is it one of these things where it's not at all?

FINCHER: We have. I can see a world where there could be an LDR feature. Right now we just want to walk, we don't want to run yet. We're three volumes in. I would like each volume to have 18 to 22 episodes. I would love to have them deliverable on a one-year clock. But the reality of it is as expensive as the show is, and I'm sure within Netflix, they're like, "How much longer can we do this?" It's still a lot of people killing themselves, not for free, but for a lot less. This show is a labor of love. This volume is a labor of love of like 1,300 people. Bad Travelling is almost 18 months of work, maybe two years, close to 18 to 20 months. Jibaro, I'm imagining that's got to be two years because he does that with a very, very small team. I think it was like 75 or 80 people.

That's crazy.

FINCHER: Yeah, it's unbelievable. We're making this stuff during a pandemic, which, of course, was a whole other nightmare. Directing shorts over Zoom [and] a lot of it is these teleconferencing meetings where you're talking about what you're trying to get across. Some of these studios are in Asia and Eastern Europe—even mine—which we did the mocap in Venice, or Marina del Rey. I've done mocap before. I've done some Nike commercials that were mocap, and I've obviously done mocap for Benjamin Button. But doing that with glasses, goggles, full face mask, and visor, in the green zone, the orange zone, the yellow zone, and the red zone. I didn't realize how much of my directing is with my eyebrows and me making goofy faces, because once I'm all bundled up, it just took forever for me to impart what I was trying to. You're suffocating inside this. Everyone's on an iron lung. That was far more difficult than having teleconferencing animation catch-ups and compositing or effects or fluid simulation.

For all the stuff that we were doing at Blur, that was easier on a weekly basis to come in and do it in a Zoom environment. The actual mocap with all of the shit on was like a nuclear jumper. I looked like I'm one of the extras in the back of China Syndrome wandering around containment. So that was weirder. I'm going to be very glad when this whole pandemic thing is over, because making anything during a pandemic is really problematic.

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One of the many things I love about Love, Death + Robots is that not only do you not know what the animation is going to be when you push play, but you also don't know where it's going to end. Every episode can end at the most random place.

FINCHER: But that's what short stories are. That's what that art form is. Short stories are not just a novelist who has ADHD. It's a skill set that is specific to how do you tell the important elements of a series of interactions that paint a much broader, deeper picture? There's the famous story of Orson Wells shooting the big crane pullback with Agnes Moorehead in Citizen Kane. He's been shooting this one shot all fucking morning long, and so the guy from RKO comes over and says, "What are you doing? This is taking so long.” They get the pullback and the crane to be right, and he goes, "Okay, back on schedule." Sometimes you spend all of your time doing something that looks like it's a one-er or super easy, and sometimes you're shooting fucking coverage. It all has to be part and parcel of what the specific story is that you're trying to tell.

I wanted to ask you specifically about your episode. How did you decide where you wanted it to end? Was it always that ending?

FINCHER: Yeah, it was always that ending. The thing that was a big question was, were we going to spend the $10,000 to build the circular staircase? Because I was like, "I want a circular staircase." I want him to run up the stairs and have the thing try to get its tendrils on him, and he goes through the door, and the crack of the door, and the door flies and he jumps over the side of the thing. Tim was like, "10 grand for–” I was like, "We have to do it, man. It's the end of the whole thing." So we got our money's worth out of that.

But no, Andy Walker took Neal's short story, and there was some back and forth because Tim was like, "All these guys are doing is boating." I was like, "Simmer down. It's going to be fine." There were these concerns about doing another five grizzled miscreants. First, they draw straws. Now, they're checking boxes. Why do we have to sit through this? I was like, "It's just a different kind of drama, but there will be some drama to this." So when Andy delivered the script, then you just break it down and you go, "Okay, this moment is going to be about coming into the thing, thinking where the thing's going to be, and it's on the ceiling. This moment is going to be about coming into the thing, thinking that.” I basically had four interactions with the creature, and we had to make each and every one of them slightly different.

The thing that was in the short story, the thing that sold me on wanting to be involved in it, was the idea of the ventriloquist carcass. Because we all know that moment when you watch some poor, under-appreciated, and probably bad ventriloquist at a kid's party, and the kid's looking right at the ventriloquist who is trying to get the kid's attention with the doll. Or the opposite, where the three-year-old is just wrapt and can't understand, "How is this possible? This thing is talking to me and it's my size." I love the idea of Toren looking at the eyes on stocks. What should he be looking at? Is it the fact that this guy's been snapped in half? Is that bad form to look at the creatures being puppeted? I just thought that was funny. So there was a bunch of back and forth. You kind of agree on what the pearls are, and Andy gave us a great thread that they all were strung with.

Then Jennifer Yuh Nelson was lovely enough to help storyboard the thing because I could send her a shot list, which is what I'm more comfortable doing now, at this point in my career because at one point I tried to do really, really elaborate pre-vis and found that it just diminished and depressed the thespians who had to take responsibility. I could take responsibility for where they were going to be, but they wanted to have some thought and authorship of that. Since then, I haven't done a lot of storyboarding because I feel like it makes everybody go, "Oh, well, this is all we're doing. We're just doing that. Just do that. Just give them another”

Instead, I want it to be a conversation. I want them to do it with me. So on this, it was back to doing storyboards, but I'm a little out of practice with, "Okay, this should be..." To be honest with you, I didn't want to. There's a thing that happens in storyboarding a lot where the storyboard artist gets away with murder, right? The background's on an 85 at a T1.4, and the foreground's on a 35 at a TA. So you have this person kind of meshing what would really happen. They're making this sort of hodgepodge, this new creation, that's kludging these two elements together. So I wanted to make sure that I was dealing with somebody who knew my pain. It's not just a storyboard artist, it's a director.

Jen would sit down with me for an hour on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I would talk her through [it]. "I want to be looking down and I want to see the ship is rocking back and forth, and I want to see, as Toren goes across, as he comes back, we see Deacon with a knife in his teeth coming up." It was kind of like having a production meeting. I would kind of let her know what I wanted to see, and then she would thumbnail the stuff, and then they would send it to this amazing storyboard artist who generated the storyboards that everyone could actually work from. But I needed to work really fast because I only had an hour three days a week. How amazing to be able to pull up Jen Nelson and go, "I need to download you on what it is."

That's kind of what Love, Death + Robots has always been. It's like, "How do you help out? Robert Valley wants to do this. “Okay, we got to rob Peter to pay Paul.” “He needs a little more time for this, or he's going to need another." That's what Tim does. Tim is the wizard behind the curtain making it all turn out okay.

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Image via Netflix

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One of the things about Love, Death + Robots is that most of the episodes are on average 10-to-15 minutes. Obviously, some are shorter, some are longer. How did you decide on the runtime of yours? Did you ever have a longer version?

FINCHER: No, our whole thing is to try to make it as short as you can possibly make it. It's the Hollywood storytelling adage, how late into the scene can you come in, and how early can you get out? That is the discipline that informs everything. That is what it is to be a discipline storyteller. So there's no magic number. I think Bad Travelling has 300 shots in it. I could be wrong. At some point in the process, Tim was saying to me, "We can afford 300 shots. With all the water that you want to see, and the deck moving and the lamp swinging, and the lens flares and all that stuff that you want to do, you [have] got to stay the 300 shots, dude." There were times when he would show up with his stopwatch and go, "I got to pull flag on the play here." But for the most part, it was an open dialogue.

We have always endeavored to make each short as short as it can be because we feel that it's the most respectful to the budget and it's the most respectful to the viewer. Omar Sharif's arrival in Lawrence of Arabia is worth four minutes. That guy, I give it over. That's not what Love, Death + Robots is. That's the one side of the sandbox it can't play in.

Have you guys had ideas pitched to you that are much longer, and you've said, "This is great, but we can't do a 30 or 40-minute episode"?

FINCHER: I think we could do a 30 or 40-minute episode. But the budget for the show is somewhere where we can do 18 or 16 or however many it is. It's not that 20 minutes necessarily costs double of what 10 minutes does, but there are certain things you can advertise and there are certain efficiencies that you can get. For the most part, we're right on the ragged edge of losing the emotional support of the people who are being asked to work their asses off for way less than they normally get. That's the magic draw of it, and it's also a responsibility. It's a nice thing that people want to be part of this. We can't take advantage of that above and beyond what we've been taking advantage of. We have to be respectful. They're not employees; they're fellow artists and friends!

I joke with Tim all the time that he's slowly putting his competition in the game space out of business by giving them Love, Death + Robots shorts to do. That's not the case, but I do tease him mercilessly about this. We can only presume so much. I love the idea of doing a 30 or 40-minute episode, and I think that can cover shorts. I'm violently opposed to anything that's in the network television half-hour or hour range, so I would never do anything that's 22 minutes, 44 to 47 minutes, but I would do 20 and 40, for sure.

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Image via Netflix

You mentioned earlier in this conversation that you guys have talked about doing a live-action version of Love, Death + Robots. How serious are you guys about this? Is this something that's actually making progress?

FINCHER: No, it's not making progress yet, but it's something we've talked about. Listen, we've got to get this volume out and we've got to get the viewership up. It's not a charity for anybody. I would love Love, Death + Robots to become synonymous with, you just don't know how long it is or when it's going to end or whether it's going to be animation or whether it's going to be cel animation, 3D animation, marionettes, hand puppets, claymation, live-action. I love the idea that Love, Death + Robots become synonymous with, don't open that box; there’s children in the room! I'd love that to be on our headstones.

This is maybe me being crazy, but have you ever reached out to a Studio Ghibli and been like, "Hey, do you have any interest in this?"

FINCHER: I don't know [about] Studio Ghibli, but we've talked to a lot of different people. A lot of people have come and wanted to be part of it, and we were like, "Fantastic, let's do this," then you get into certain realities. There was a very high-end creator of video games who we all desperately wanted to include, but we couldn't. He's used to owning a certain amount of his IP and being able to exploit it in certain [ways] and Love, Death + Robots didn't allow for that. Even though we were bereft and felt this would've been a perfect creator to allow into our little thing. In the end, people get used to a certain way of doing business, and because he wasn't in the movie business, none of our models apply. We had to make the case to him, "Hey, if Netflix is paying for it, they want to own it. That doesn't seem outrageous to me.” He's saying, "No, I got no issue with that. But just understand, normally I get these four things that they won't even discuss.” You go, "Okay, maybe next time." There's been a couple of situations like that.

The biggest thing is just how long it takes to do these. We originally went to Zack Snyder and Gore Verbinski and Ridley and Jim Cameron. We went to a bunch of people when we were trying to do it as a movie, and everybody wanted to play, but you can't go to Jim Cameron and go, "When do you have 18 months that we could hijack you 25 to 30 hours a week? And by the way, there's no ownership in it." It becomes a difficult thing.

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Image via Netflix

The series has won a lot of Emmys. I'm wondering, how much do those awards help? How much do the Emmys sort of protect the series, or does that not factor in at all?

FINCHER: Netflix's model is pretty simple. It's like, how do we get everyone with two eyes to watch one channel? Look, Emmys are nice. It's icing on the cake. If you're going to work for 18 months and you have to endure Zoom conversations with me three times a week, and at the end of it you're still not going to run into anybody on the street who's seen what you've been doing for the last 18 months or maybe you do. Maybe there are two or three people. It's nice when Alberto picks up an Emmy, a well-earned Emmy, for The Witness. It's lovely. But it's icing on the cake.

The cake is, we're getting to make the thing. If the legacy of Love, Death + Robots is that there are a handful, fifteen people, ten years from now who became directors or became animators or became motion capture performers or doing voice work because they were such big Love, Death + Robots fans, that's all I care about right now. This show was never going to pay for your Gulf Stream. You're either here because you want to be here or you're not here. We're hoping desperately to get to waste more of our lives toiling in obscurity.

Love, Death + Robots Volume 3 is now streaming on Netflix.