🎧 Tony Gilroy & Diego Luna: How to Survive Hollywood’s Worst Moment
'Andor' is an exception in a 'terrible time in the business', but also filled with hope. Plus: Richard Rushfield predicts an indie renaissance
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Tony Gilroy is not one to mince words. “It’s a terrible time in the business,” the director of Michael Clayton and creator of Andor tells me on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “It’s tough to get a movie off right now and the world sucks.”
But for storytellers, both veterans like Gilroy and those getting started in the still-expansive world of television, “Man, it’s anything goes,” he says. “It’s fantastic. Creatively, it’s just so nourishing.”
As I wrote last week, Gilroy and his Andor star and executive producer, Diego Luna, who joined him for our podcast conversation, have just pulled off one of the unlikeliest feats in modern TV history. Though seemingly every streamer and network has tried to adapt existing IP into an extended TV franchise, precious few have actually pulled it off. Even Andor’s sibling Star Wars series have struggled to capture the same scope and excitement within the galaxy far, far away.
So even though the expensive, ambitious Andor may be an emblem of a TV era that’s gone by, it can still serve as a beacon for the possibilities of what TV can do. As Luna tells me, “There are opportunities here that you won’t find anywhere else. It’s beautiful to talk about the freedom that this new format can bring — like, thank God we can have a new format, let’s play with it.”
That sense of creative freedom doesn’t always feel easy to come by in Hollywood, but this week’s podcast also includes a conversation with my colleague Richard Rushfield about how we might be able to find it again. Richard thinks there’s an indie film renaissance in our near future — but even sooner than that, he remains confident that there will still be people with money who want to break into the business, and might throw some cash at the next Andor in the process.
Listen to this week’s episode and let me know if we’ve convinced you that better things are still ahead.
