EO

In the most recent episode, Robert, played by Harry Lawtey, is asked by Sir Henry, played by Kit Harington, to do basic math on the spot. Sir Henry’s like, “You can’t multiply that in your head, what’d you study at Oxford?” And Robert’s like, “I studied geography.” It was epic. Can you walk me through the process of conceptualizing Industry?

MD

The show has developed and evolved massively from where we first started. Our references came from a number of different places. Me and Konrad obviously worked in finance. We met at Oxford. Some of that is the DNA of the show, especially in the first season when the characters lacked power and were coming into a job for the first time. It was about the experience of going into your first job totally green and being the most junior person in the room. Obviously, there are slice of life shows, but lots of them are set in New York, not that many in London. Industry is a show we wanted to make set in London about ambitious people in a way that there weren’t shows like that before. All of the characters on those kinds of shows are sort of millennial caricatures of, “I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know what I want for my life.” And having really no intentionality around their own existence. We wanted to make something more directed that reflected the intensity of what we’ve experienced.

EO

What were you both working on prior to getting into the minutiae of concocting the show?

MD

Konrad and I had made a micro-budget feature film called Gregor. It was the first time we directed something that we wrote because we had to make it ourselves. We made the money on Kickstarter in eight days. It was a very different beast to Industry, but it shared some DNA. It was about an ambitious guy, who was in a place where his ambition was misplaced, who wanted to get up and go. We thought, “Okay, well there’s something interesting in that. A character who actually wants something from their life rather than just sitting on the sofa, smoking weed, and complaining about life.”

EO

What was the inspiration?

MD

Lena Dunham’s Girls was a massive inspiration for the kind of rawness and honesty that is depicted in our characters. It’s funny that Lena ended up directing the first episode of Industry, because she came to us. We really responded to her as a creator. We knew we wanted to have the superstructure of the show be the workplace. As we continued to evolve the concept of the show the workplace became one of the important characters in the show. Konrad and I knew we could write this show because we understand this environment. We understand the minutiae of it, how people talk, and the specificities and idiosyncrasies of the finance world. We also know firsthand what it’s like to be a young person in London and wanted to mesh these two things together. The first thing Konrad and I wrote together was set in the world of finance. It was called Not An Exit, which is a super pretentious title, kind of a nod to brace notice. As a commercial title, it just didn’t work because no one understood what it was. [Laughs.] And then we had other ideas for the title which were even more avant-garde. We were thinking of calling it, “White Elephant,” which is a particular kind of financial phenomenon but also a cool name. There were also versions that reflected an idea of the show that we didn’t want as well. There was The City or Square Mile or stuff that had the word ‘banking’ or ‘finance’ in it, that we were running away from as fast as we could because we didn’t want people to immediately be like, “Oh, it’s a young banking show. Oh, it’s about the Square Mile. Oh, it’s about the City of London. It’s the equivalent of calling it ‘Young Wall Street’ or something.” [Laughs.] We chose Industry because it was inoffensive yet informative. When we were pitching we originally suggested “The Industry,” our collaborators and producers didn’t like it. But when we came back with just Industry, they were into it because it was one word and seemed universal. That universality in the title has been helpful to the development of  the show. Everyone thinks of their respective industry as the industry. If you work in art, fashion, film, or finance, it’s all referred to as “the industry”. Immediately, it felt like you could project whatever you work onto it. Even if you don’t work in finance, if you work in any cutthroat business with lots of young people trying to break in, it’s something you could project your own experience onto. In the third season, which is on now, the show expands beyond finance into tech, politics, and media more prominently.

EO

How did Lena technically get involved?

MD

We’d written four episodes of the show and had been greenlit by HBO. This was the start of 2019. We were trying to find directors for it. Every time we sent a director HBO’s way, they were like, “Okay, this person’s quite interesting, but…” [Laughs.] We had the sense that they had an idea of who they wanted. And well, Lena also has a first-look deal with HBO. She read the first four episodes. She really liked and responded to them. She was like, “I don’t know anything about finance, but there’s something in this that I responded to.” So she came to London, we met with her, and she was like, “I was in your position once being given the show at a particularly young age. But I had Judd Apatow. I’ll be your mentor figure in this.” She also was like, “I want to be a director. I don’t want to overpower the show or be in charge of it. I don’t want to be a showrunner. I’m just going to direct an episode and get on with it.” Which is what she ended up doing. We’re massive fans of hers and still are.

EO

There is so much to address. On one level you’re creating a new framework or standard for dialogue for our generation while also introducing a new young ensemble cast. When did it feel like the show had legs?

MD

The development of the first season was us trying to figure out what the show was. It being a workplace drama and a slice of life show—we knew they could work together, even though they’re  sometimes contradictory. Is the show super dramatic? Funny? Self-serious? Traumatic?  All those things that have materialized in such a nice way in the third season especially, were in opposition to the first important cuts of season one. Because of the inciting incident of a death from the beginning, setting the tone for the show. We were like, “Well, how are we going to make something that lands on its feet that’s fun and entertaining when we have all of this drama that happens in the first episode?”

The episodes were initially 58 minutes long. We cut them down to 45 minutes, to a relentless pace. We had a really good music supervisor Oliver White, and a great composer in Nathan Micay. The vibes they created carried us through the first season because there’s not much story development. While the characterization and the setting is interesting, how idiosyncratic everything is, the first season of the show is mostly a vibe. It had energy that made us think it worked. In season two, we overcorrected a bit. We had a 10-week writers room. We wanted to show HBO, and ourselves that we could do eight hours of serialized storytelling. So the stuff that felt quite fresh about the first season we lost in service to getting the story right. I think it’s in season three, where we’ve been able to push everything together for the first time. To answer your question, about when we felt like the show has legs. Obviously, it’s running to a certain extent, but I still think it could run faster. [Laughs.]

EO

I know that you, Konrad, worked in banking longer. The show needs to be hyper specific in order for it to really work, to be believable. While these people work in finance, it’s nice that on the show you address how all of these industries are connected and inform one another. In terms of how finance involves art and culture then its political implications and manifestations.

KK

I’m sure there are people who are watching season three and feel the show is fundamentally different from what they signed up for in the first season. On some level it is a different TV show because initially we were almost too wedded to the authenticity of our experience. We were clinging to a documentary-style reality, which when the show finally aired had sort of been taken away by the fact that we had a faster editing style, bold sci-fi type music, Michael Mann musical palette, all of this stuff that went away from documentary. But actually what you saw on the floor when you go back and watch that first season, it’s very low stakes, quite well-observed stuff about how people interact in a real workspace. While the stakes were very small, they were very realistic. I think we had a fear about losing that naturalism, but also a fear about writing about bigger and more ambitious things. For me and Mickey as creators, the lens of the show was small because we didn’t realize that we could write about all of the stuff that actually interested us and execute in a way that was both digestible, non-didactic, and entertaining. So our ambition for the show grew as we kept getting renewed because we kept being like “well, why can’t we try and tell a little bit soapier and more entertaining story,” but not actually betray what was true about the show, which is that it was character driven.

It’s not like we sit there trying to editorialize, but we were like, “If we’re going to make another engaging season of TV and create it, it takes six months for us to write it before we even film it.”  Mickey and I want to be like, “We’re biting off more than we can chew. This feels invigorating, this feels different. This feels like a challenge. This feels like a bar that has to be cleared.” So with season three, we were just like, we were very lucky to get a third season of HBO, we have eight hours, let’s throw everything at the wall. “Let’s burn every idea we have and why don’t we try and link this trading floor to a high British society and media and tech. You’ve got eight hours, you’ve now worked on the show for five years. Why don’t you try and finally put everything into practice?” It was a sort of challenge to us to be like, “Well, how far have you come? Can we pull this off?” That’s the sort of attitude we felt we had when we were writing it, I think.

EO

It’s wild yet prophetic that you have this yacht thread in season three. Last night my friend was telling me about Jonathan Bloomer, the former chairman of Morgan Stanley that died on board that yacht in Sicily, Italy a few days ago with 20 other people or so.  Have you guys seen this?

KK

Yeah, it’s crazy.

MD

It’s very odd. A lot of people have sent it our way. It’s horrific, obviously, and a horrible tragedy. It does feel very weirdly similar to our storyline. [Laughs.]

EO

You guys are in your early 30s now?

MD

Mid. I think firmly in our 30s. [Laughs.]

EO

Do you feel the show’s catching up to your life now or does it feel it’s happening in real time?

MD

The characters are not as old as us but they’re getting to be more accomplished than us. We were never accomplished within the financial industry. I crashed and burned after a year and a bit. Maybe they’re where we thought we would be if we stayed in. Hm no, they’re not at all, they’re a lot more competent than us, but I don’t know. I’d say the seasons reflect more of mine and Konrad’s ambition, our style and temperament. Season one, we were in our late 20s when we wrote that, and it’s very rough around the edges, it’s silly in some respects, it’s slightly too self-serious, it has a bit of an arrogance to it.

There’s a kind of, “We don’t give a fuck about the rules of writing a TV show,” we can just do whatever we want over eight hours and I think to some respects it works quite well and others, it makes me cringe because it feels YA almost. Maybe that’s the kind of stuff that some people really liked about it. Watching back actually, there’s a charm to it that I didn’t see as much when we were doing season two. We wrote season two during Covid, it’s set during COVID, and that specter of COVID hangs over it massively.

EO

It’s strange and disorienting to watch TV happen in real time. There’s no timeline about the show which I appreciate, it’s just life unfolding in this distended universe.

MD

It’s not set in a specific timeline. There are references to 2024 in this season, and it’s supposed to feel contemporary. There’s some contemporary stories that reflect within the financial world, and, as we said, by accident I guess the world of yachting disasters. But it’s a reflection of what the world is like and that’s just because it’s a reflection of what Konrad and I were like at a certain time. Season one has this sort of energy of “fuck we’re doing this for this for the first time,” and we imbue our characters in that because we were doing it for the first time and it felt very scary and it was a lot of pressure and it didn’t go right all the time. But we created something that felt cobbled together and was somewhat of a success. And season two is a reflection of us trying to be serious and professional, and what we got was something that felt a lot more serious and professional. And then three is, we don’t know whether we’re going to get a fourth. Konrad said, “We’re just going to throw everything at the wall and write about the stuff that we like writing about,” and a lot of that is taken from contemporary life. And then we’re going try and make it feel like it’s London of 2024, and the characters a reflection of that. When you write something, anything, a lot of it is just the tone. It’s about using things we find funny. It’s all stuff that orbits around our real lives. It’s hard not to write about stuff that in the real world that affects you.

EO

Are you developing other projects in tandem or were there other projects before?

MD

There were other projects, especially the way that you developed stuff in the UK is you develop a lot of things at the same time because there’s no writer’s rooms, or there wasn’t at the time, so you basically sell loads of ideas for not that much money to lots of different production companies. Then you write loads of stuff at the same time. It got to a point where we were really focusing on two different projects and one of them was for Cinemax and it was a period drama about a black female highway woman, so bandit, in Regency England, and it was a very pulpy, almost comic book, graphic novel type thing. And it was really fun but that was the thing that we were doing before we sold Industry. We put all our eggs into the basket of Industry. We were like, “If this doesn’t work, then we’re going to have to fucking find other jobs” because all the other projects we were doing we put to one side to focus on this.

EO

How old were you when the show got picked up?

MD

I was 29. We’ve only ever made Industry. We just delivered the show in February or March and the show came out in August. These past few months have been the first time we’ve actually not been working on Industry every single day. We always go from development to writing to production to post and then the show is out. Then we start developing the next season and then the show gets picked up and then we just go straight to writing and then production again. We’ve been doing that as a cycle for six years now, so this was the first time we could take a pause to think about other stuff. So we started thinking about movie ideas and doing rewrites for other people’s movies and working on new ideas for TV shows. This time off has allowed us to think about other stuff too. It was quite nice to go somewhere else and flex a different muscle and then get back to the Industry universe.

EO

Across a few different projects, it seems you guys have really been focused on having female leads. Why was that?

KK

Cynically, at the start of our career, we just thought it was a more interesting way of getting things made, to be perfectly honest.

EO

In what sense?

KK

As two male writers, if we could write strong female protagonists at the time, culturally, it was a thing that was selling quite a lot. With Industry, we’re talking about a hyper-masculine workspace. To us, the stories that hadn’t been told in that space were a female experience in those hyper-toxic masculine environments was at the center. When I went to Morgan Stanley, a lot of my female friends had stories that you just wouldn’t believe. This was just slightly pre-MeToo. But it felt like an original way of exploring a territory that people knew really well. The lens that’s been chosen to show that world has always been old, white, and male. So we thought it would be a subversive way to tell the story in a way that would organically track. I always thought it was interesting how women navigated their own femininity in those spaces. What I noticed predominantly was that, this is a huge generalization, but I’m talking about this in very broad strokes, women would become either hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine. So they would either toughen themselves up and become one of the boys, or they’d become a kind of object of desire for the boys. That’s a very reductive way of looking at it. But in terms of the way I saw successful women behave, it was always one of those two archetypes.

EO

Is this something you explicitly reflect on in the writing process?

KK

Well, we never lived them and thought, “This would make good TV fodder.” It was more when we came to make the show, part of the excitement of HBO and the production company Bad Wolf, is that we’d actually lived through it to some degree. So it became one of the USPs of the show: this could only be written by two guys who have experienced this world and aren’t just speculating. I think the press tends to over-egg or overdo how autobiographical the show is, because it’s the easiest thing to write about, especially in its first two seasons. They were like, “What is it? Oh, these two guys met in college, they worked in a bank. Oh, we can write about that.” [Laughs.] Because I don’t think they had anything to say about the show. And that’s not to say that there wasn’t anything to say. I think they felt either intimidated by the world or intimidated by the jargon. They couldn’t make head or tail of the tone, so they didn’t know where to place it. So instead, they wrote about mine and Mickey’s biography, which was the only sexy point of the show for them at the time. But I think the level of autobiography about the show itself has been massively oversold.

EO

What has the show revealed to you as you approach writing for an ensemble cast? Or does it feel the best when you’re doing more character-driven episodes?

MD

I was actually thinking about this the other day about whether, if we were to do more seasons, would we have more single character-focused episodes? We struggled to do that in season one, when we were trying to set the stall of what the show is about and what this place actually is. The show works in, I think, a number of different ways. It can be a business drama that gives you some insight into that kind of world. It can be a character study about certain characters through strivers and outsiders. It can feel like a slice of life show of living in London. I think it could feel like a very frenetic, fast-paced, almost quasi-action movie in some respects.

What was revealed to me when we directed the last two episodes is that the show can actually be quite romantic, and not melodramatic, but it can actually wear its heart on its sleeve in a way that I didn’t think it could before. I thought we’re writing about a really cold world full of very cold people, working very hard and very fast and in service to making money, and that means that there can be no romance in it, when actually there can be quite a lot of romance. And what we uncovered in directing, especially that last episode, is that the show can have an emotional heart, which I didn’t think was there as much as it probably should have been a focal point for us.

KK

I think the experience of the first two seasons has sort of taught us how to write it, in the sense that we didn’t really know what the show was about in season one. As Mickey said, we found a very fast editing style because we were scared we didn’t have enough material and that wedded us to it. And then we would go back and diagnostically we’d be like, “Which episodes worked the best in the previous seasons?” And then we’d be like, “Oh, episode four of season one was the best episode of season one probably.” So that kind of became the rubric for how we wrote season two. We’d be like, “Well, everything needs to have a very clear story structure. Something needs to go wrong in the first 10 minutes, everybody needs an obstacle to overcome.” This is basic screenwriting structure thinking.

The show functions very well when it feels everything’s in the constant state of emergency. It helps us write it. It helps the characters play it, and it makes for a compelling and visceral viewing experience. A lot of season three plays like there’s a fire alarm going off somewhere and all the characters are having to man the pump.

MD

I think the reason that this last episode (S3, E2) is good is because it’s not that. Otherwise, the show could run the risk of being repetitive. We’ve done so many episodes where it’s a ticking clock. I think the surprising thing about the last episode is that it breaks away from that formula. That’s not to say that in future episodes we’re not going to have that formula because that formula is very successful. But I think we proved to ourselves that the show can actually switch modes, while feeling very different can still be successful.

KK

Dynamism is basically all that we care about. We just care about the show feeling engaging, moment to moment.

EO

What does it feel like writing that chaos?

KK

It’s way more boring than it sounds.

MD

It’s almost mathematical. As Konrad said, there are things that have to happen in the first 10 minutes to set the tone for the rest of the episode. We have to lay the groundwork for some sort of challenge to our characters that will be resolved or left open-ended at the end. That’s just writing a TV show. The writer’s room is not chaotic at all. Everyone’s very funny and dynamic and anything can go and people say what’s on their mind. We all mine our own experiences and it’s a great creative arena, but we’re very rigid in what we need. We were very chaotic in the way we approached writing season one which manifested, as we said, in the literal making of a chaotic season.

EO

What changed for season three?

MD

We were professional. We knew how to finally run a writer’s room, we also had much more intention about what we wanted.We didn’t know what the show was in season one, we were trying to figure it out, and thankfully we had been given an opportunity to figure out on an HBO budget for three seasons. And now we think we know what it is, but that said, we’re going into season four. Maybe the show will evolve again and be totally different. That’s the beauty of it.

KK

The whole thing has felt an evolution and the challenge of season four will be to keep pushing ourselves beyond the bar of the previous season. We want to make the show feel like something else again, something new entirely, and that’s part of the fun. It’s all part of what scares us and part of what invigorates us about doing it. It has to feel like a challenge.

EO

Did you approach this last season like a film? Or are you still thinking about TV?

KK

No, it’s TV. It’s episodic. Every episode works as a full story. We have huge reverence for the fact that we’re making a TV show, not a film. If we wanted to make a film, we’d make a film. They’re totally different mediums.