The Courier: On your website, you write about Newcastle (and Geordies) and how they “formed” you. Have you taken anything of the city to your later projects? How have the city or its people shaped your ethos as a director?
Marc Jobst: It has shaped me in immeasurable numbers of ways, really, but mostly in terms of [being] a Southerner coming to the North East and experiencing a whole different kind of life. I was here during the miners’ strike, during the Thatcherite years, and seeing it in front of my own eyes - what that was doing to the communities here, how it was breaking families apart, good people who were trying to live honest lives - it affected me in a way that I had no expectation of, and it showed me a slice of life that I had no idea about.
And I really cared about what was happening to those families. I really cared about the fact that the people in London, who were making these decisions, had no sense of what it was actually doing, and weren’t putting anything in place to replace that. So it became a defining feature of who I'd become, that sense of wanting to tell the stories about people and what life can do to people; how throughout whatever we go through, there's always a humanity that can rise, as demonstrated by the incredible communities that fought for the miners, fought the the closure of the pits and all the rest of it.
Even when I'm doing these big world building shows that I've done, my my interest is always to come through character. So I come from the “inside out,” rather than from the world building-in. It matters to me enormously that we start from the truth of a character and the truth of what they're wrestling with, rather than tell a story about a fantastical kind of environment in which there are characters. That's driven everything I've done to this point, absolutely.
I remember when Daredevil was airing, and it felt electric, the Netflix shows being markedly different from other MCU projects. The episode you directed from Daredevil series two is possibly the most memorable - it certainly is for me. I love the character-driven elements, the episode feels almost like the climax of a stage play. When adapting comics, manga, and games, how do you work to ensure you remain faithful to the source material and its fanbase while giving the script the space to blossom in an entirely different TV format?
It is the crux of the challenge of adapting a two dimensional comic world into the three dimensional, live-action world, because you it goes back to the very basics of what I was just talking about. Why do we tell a story? Why do we care about stories? Why is what we are doing worth an audience coming and spending their time with
Well, to me, that's because we tell stories in order to learn how to be human. We walk in the shoes of the characters, and we go through the traumas and the difficulties within that story with them, and then at the end of it, we can take the shoes off, and we can become ourselves again.
...we tell stories in order to learn how to be human...
What story is about is a character wanting something, and usually a story has dynamism when that want is denied, there's an obstacle to them getting what they want - which is the story of being human. The first act is all about what this character wants. We all want something, and we sometimes have to work to get what we want. And so the story becomes, how do you overcome the obstacles to what it is that you want? And that becomes your second act.
The character is going to set out in life. We're going to leave Newcastle University, we're going to become something this is what I want to be. Oops, there's a whole load of obstacles that come into the way of me getting what I want. The second act in the story is then all about, how do I overcome these obstacles in order to get what I want?
Then the third act is all about resolution. Did I get what I want? Did I get something different to what I wanted, but actually more akin to who I am as a human being? That's what story is.
And so when you're adapting a two dimensional comic book world in order for it to have resonance with a three dimensional audience, that's what you have to work with. You don't work with all the comic book “whizz”, “bangs”, and drawings. Those can come in, but you start with character. What does Daredevil want? He wants a world which is without crime. He wants those that are bad to be punished. He wants people to have a sense of redemption. What does the Punisher want? He's done with redemption. He wants revenge. His family have been killed. He sees baddies coming out of whatever punishment they've had and being bad again. He doesn't believe in redemption. That episode [New York’s Finest] becomes a struggle between two big themes: do we believe in a world of redemption, or do we believe in a world of revenge? That's got dynamism, and that's what is a story.
Look at the world that's happening now! We're still debating all these different things, and so when you're making these adaptations, you've got to ground them in human truth and make them visceral.
And you can see that in the way that Marvel have gone back with Wonderman, that's just come out. It's gone back to that sort of small world, highly focused story about character, personal development.
That's what Chris Nolan did with Batman in the DC world. You know, he he took that and he grounded it very, very viscerally into something, you know, palpable. And that's what we need to be doing. That's what I tried to do in [the live action] One Piece, even though it's a crazy, mad, fictitious world. These characters still had to feel identifiable. We had to feel like we could relate to them in some form or other, so the back story to these characters was super important.
When we were rehearsing with the actors, when we first started work on them, you know, I didn't work with the script at all. We literally played a lot of games. We made barbecues on the beach in South Africa, we went swimming, we cooked for each other, we laughed, and then sometimes around the fire, we’d talk a bit about character and all the rest of it. But we were building trust. We were building these characters.
We did a big community project - unfortunately, it was cut short by Covid - but I wanted us to give something back to Cape Town, where we were working. So we we did a project on stray dogs, giving them a home. We went to go and work with these stray dogs and to support them and feed them and and build a bond with them, and it was A, a way of giving back to South Africa, but B, doing something together that was binding us together as truthful human beings. It sounds very pretentious, but when you're shooting a very big show with so much expectation and so much money being spent on it, you still walked through to the centre of this, this incredible beast, to the stillness of the stage area, and we trusted each other. We knew each other and we were safe, and that's what then builds that sense of being able to be honest in your performances.
While we're on One Piece - I understand that part of it was filmed in South Africa, but also that you were born in Zimbabwe, where your dad was a cowboy. Did the homecoming - your return to Africa, to the pastoral - take you back to the earlier parts of your career?
The physicality of the landscape means a huge amount to me; I've obviously worked in that landscape very viscerally through being a shepherd and being a cowboy myself, and I love the relationship that farm workers, land workers have to the land.
I don't particularly like seeing location or landscape as being ‘other’, and it's very easy when you're doing big world building shows for it to feel like you're somewhere ‘other’, somewhere created. One of the ways that I work with worked with the production designers on One Piece was to say: every different world that we go to, every different island that in series one, must feel like it pre-existed before we arrive there. It has to have a history, a sense of ancestry. Everything that we put - every prop, every set that's built - needs to be broken down so it feels like it's been there for a long time. I want every single prop to have a story to it.
Richard Bridgeland, the production designer, the cinematographer, Nicole Whittaker, and I would sometimes go around the set, and we'd pick up a plate or a mug or something or other, and say: “what's the story behind this?”, and the prop department would say, “well, this belonged to the person who lived here's grandmother”. That gave those locations a sense of history and a sense of other human beings having lived in it. I think that comes across in the overall feel of it; it didn't feel like this is a set that'd been built for us to do a big show called One Piece in, it felt like we were entering into a pre-existing world that had a history, and I think that's partly to do with my relationship to the landscape.
The setting needs to become a character of its own. It can't just be as a backdrop! That’s really lovely to hear in terms of natural landscape. My dad's a huge fan of Country File - when I was growing up, he had dominance over the living room and what was on TV twice a week: when the Boro played away and when Country File was on. I think it's so important what the show does to show that this region isn't just grey and industrial, and that we have so much natural beauty here in the North East. I was hoping you’d share if you had a favourite place here, from university, your time with Tyne Tees, or from Country File?
I had a girlfriend who had a cottage in Ingram, which is in the Cheviots. When I was a student here, we used to go there, and there was a horse that we could borrow, so from time to time, would ride in the Cheviot Hills. I later worked as a shepherd up there in the Cheviot Hills, and I love the vastness of it all, and that sort of sense of perspective that scale gives you.
I love the fact that it can be dangerous if you get up into the Cheviot Hills and the weather comes in, and the clouds fall down, and suddenly you can get lost. I love that sense, because it keeps you aware and alert. And I love the smell of it.
That would be where I'd always go back to; I seem to need wildness in my life from time to time. That's why I do quite a lot of hiking. You know, going into the mountains and just feeling like I'm part of something. It's very easy, isn't it, as a human being, to always feel like we're in charge. We're not in charge! We need to participate in our world. One of the great ways to do that, to feel like we are the co-creators of this incredible world that we live in, is to is to feel humbled by it.
I love that about Newcastle. I love the fact that, when I was a student here, I could go out to the seaside, and I could see the vastness of the sea. I could go out to the - when I was a student here - the Side Gallery, and then there's and there's the theatres, and there's the Tyneside Cinema. You know, not only have you got this amazing landscape all around you, but you've got arts, you've got creativity, and you've got the football club, you know, and you've got the Bigg Market! I mean, what's not to love about all of that? It's extraordinary.
You wrote on your website about Tin Star and Hannibal being vital educational experiences for you, “baptism[s] by fire”. I was wondering how the transition period was for you, from when you were primarily working on smaller scale British projects - that would be seen by Britain, but not by the rest of the world - but then you started working on global cultural phenomena.
Hannibal, you know, in many ways, is probably one of the most influential shows I've ever shot. There's an aesthetic to it which I had no idea I'd ever have the permission to be able to explore. Brian Fuller and Steve Lightfoot, who were the showrunners on it, dared to push the envelope of what you could do in television, particularly for network television. It was NBC, so it's not a streamer or a cable television, it's a network show - they'd usually do the standard sort of stuff. But here we were on NBC doing what Brian would describe as operatic horror.
It took me a moment to really understand the grammar of it all and the artistry of it all, and and how you achieve that. Because, you know, as you rightly said, I'd been working on some pretty big, you know, British shows, but they were not on that kind of scale, and not with Mads Mickelson or Laurence Fishburne or Gillian Anderson or, you know, that level of star, really. When I first started working on it, I had to binge watch it, and it's quite a dark show. And so I would in between, I'd watch the watch Friends or something like that, to dilute it slightly, you know.
Then you walk on to set, and the director of photography lit it so dark that I honestly couldn't read my script. I had to have a little torch to be able to read my script and not bump into the furniture! The dark, that created its own aesthetic. When you walked on the set, there was a hush, because it was very dark, and so that really starts to shift the paradigms of filmmaking that you can use.
there were quite a few times where I had to take a few deep breaths, because it's intimidating. Some really brilliant filmmakers, David Slade from Jensen Atari, brilliant directors who'd come before me, had done beautiful work on that show, and then suddenly, here I am following them. That's really exciting - you know, that edge of fear and excitement is where you want to sit. I felt like I was working all the time with people who were so much better than me. That's where I always want to be, because that really pushes you. It makes you nervous.
When you're working with an actor like Tim Roth, who's such an extraordinary film actor, you want to be at the top of your game because you don't want to fall short. It's such an opportunity also to work with that level of cast, to watch and to learn, you know? I would say it is probably the most terrifying thing to do, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything, and it's made me absolutely dare to push all the time what we're doing so we don't just do ‘stuff’.
I was wondering, in terms of expectations and standards, if you had any interaction with fandom when you were shooting the Netflix Marvel shows, One Piece, The Witcher, or Hannibal. How did it change your perspective on audience impact, if you ever came across their opinions? Did you feel pressure to conform to their standards rather than your own vision?
Yes. I mean, the fandom is quite something to deal with. My computer was hacked! On that Daredevil episode, we were shooting on the rooftops in Manhattan, from five in the afternoon until five in the morning. At three o'clock or four o'clock in the morning one night, this flash came from somewhere, and a fan had managed to get up to the rooftop; heaven knows how, because we had so many security around the place. Suddenly, you think “nobody's interested in me, but those poor actors - who's watching them all the time?”
As a director, you're trying to create a safe space where the actor can forget about who they are and be the character, but as soon as somebody starts clicking, or a flash comes, they suddenly become self conscious. So that was, that was very tricky. We had to manage that.
In terms of the fandom, if you start to worry too much about what's being said, it can completely paralyse you in your creative freedom. I got quite a lot of uncomfortable mail from from the One Piece fans about me shooting it, quite nasty stuff, saying, “you're a Marvel director, you're just going to do Marvel, it's going to ruin it, it's going to kill it.” Or, “it's not One Piece, and you're the wrong person. We should get, you know, Taika Waititi, to do it!”. Taika would be fantastic, he’s amazing, but, you know, I think he might be unavailable.
You've got to hold to your own truth, and you've got to believe in that, and you have to be prepared to take the consequences, you know? When you wake up in the middle of the night and you think, “am I the right person to be doing this? Are we doing the right thing over here?” All those kinds of questions that come in in the middle of the night, the dark night of the soul, you've got to be aware of all that. But ultimately, if you are trying to please one group of people, chances are you won't please another group of people, and it's a mugs game to try to do that. What you have to do is create a vision, share that vision with your creative collaborators, and if they're all with you on that, move forward with that and trust. One way or another, as a director, you're going to get the blame. You're the freelancer. If it's a huge success, everybody else would probably take credit for it. If it's a huge failure, it'll be your fault. David Fincher always says you may as well fail on your terms, rather than failing because you're trying to do what you think somebody else wants. So that's my view, but it's very hard.
You have to really work to to separate yourself off from all that clamour that's going on outside. It's difficult when you have doubters, because we all have some doubt, don’t we? That's just human nature. So, when people come in and support your worst fears, you have to work very hard to push it away. But in the end, you've got to believe in what you're doing and move forward.
Finally, do you have any plans for the future, for your passion projects or anything else?
I'm flying out to LA on Friday with various projects that I'm attached to. Some of them are very big. Some of them are not quite so big. Some of them are big, world building, fantasy shows. Some of them are thrillers. Whatever it is they're all shows that I believe in. I believe in the true north of what they're about.
I think storytelling and filmmakers have a power right now in the world. We film stories [that] have a power, and we need to think about how we're using that power as storytellers, because we've fallen out of love with each other - it feels to me - as a world, and we need to start telling stories that help us to fall back in love with each other, and remind ourselves that actually we're great and it's a beautiful world. That doesn't mean being cheesy, but it does mean that your true north takes you somewhere out of the darkness into the light.