Max Winkler — director, screenwriter, and son of Henry Winkler — has spent the past few years becoming Ryan Murphy‘s most trusted collaborator, directing across American Horror Story, Feud, Grotesquerie, and two seasons of Monster, among others. The two have a shorthand built on genuine creative difference: Murphy, by Winkler’s own account, has an almost uncanny instinct for what the culture wants to see. Winkler comes from the world of small, character-driven independent film, where the audience is smaller and the stakes are more personal. Together, they seem to find a middle ground that is both big and intimate.
That balance has never been more visible than in the past year. Monster: The Ed Gein Story, for which Winkler directed six of eight episodes, followed the Wisconsin serial killer whose crimes inspired Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs — but the series was less interested in the crimes than in the isolation and mental illness that produced them. Charlie Hunnam played Gein, with Laurie Metcalf as his domineering mother, Augusta. Then came Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette on FX, for which Winkler directed the pilot — a sweeping, tragic romance starring Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon as two people who fell in love in the full glare of American celebrity and never found their way out of it.
Two more different shows would be hard to imagine. Winkler sat down to talk about both.
Gold Derby: You’re Ryan Murphy’s go-to guy. You’re in the Murphy-verse. Why do you two work so well together?
Max Winkler: I don’t know. We laugh a lot together. Ryan has this thing that very few people have. Taylor Swift has it. Steven Spielberg has it. What he’s interested in happens to also be what other people are interested in. It’s not like he’s trying to be commercial — his expression of art happens to be what everyone else wants to know about. What I’m interested in is what five other people are interested in. And so when we make things together, I think they end up feeling somewhere in between, and it becomes this nice kind of synergy between my background making very small independent movies and his brain, which is very, very connected to cultural movements and zeitgeist. When we talk about the process and I go off and make it, it ends up being this thing that I hope still feels very intimate and kind of handmade.
He has such a clear vision for his shows. What’s the collaboration actually like?
When we’re making pilots together, or with Monster where he says, “Go make the series,” he and Ian Brennan would put the scripts together and we would talk about them and he would say, “This was my inspiration, this is how I did it.” With Love Story there was a finished script — I only directed the pilot because I went off and made the Lizzie Borden series right after. But I’d always really wanted to make a love story. I loved big sweeping romantic movies like Arthur Hiller’s Love Story or Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa. Ryan I think knew that. He sent me the script and said, “Just read it. I know you just got back from Chicago where you were making Ed Gein, but just see if it’s something you’re interested in.” I read it and said, “I’m interested. Here’s what I would want it to feel like.” And we agreed and I went off and did the pilot.
How did the Ed Gein season of Monster come about?
I’d made a movie with Charlie Hunnam called Jungleland and it was one of my greatest working experiences. I told Ryan I really wanted to make something with Charlie and I thought it was going to be something else. Charlie and I went to the Chateau and had dinner with Ryan, and Ryan basically took us through the opera that was Ed Gein’s life and his influence. I had known nothing about Ed Gein. I had known about movies like Silence of the Lambs and Psycho and Texas Chainsaw — I never knew they were all influenced by the same person. And as Ryan took us through it, he explained that the horror of the series is not what this guy did, although that’s titillating and terrifying. The horror is the isolation — to live in this place and this time period in Wisconsin in the 1940s and have such an active mental illness and not be able to have the language or the outlets to say, “I need help.” Someone so connected to his mother, and once his mother went, he had no one else to talk to. That part of the story got me very excited.
Charlie Hunnam and Laurie Metcalf — what was it like behind the camera watching those two?
It’s heaven. They have such different processes but they were so generous with each other. Laurie can just do something once and move on and be done with it. And Charlie really puts himself through it and is exacting. Everything in the show works or doesn’t based on the relationship between those two, and they have very little screen time together while she’s alive. To be able to just give them space to do their job was a thrill.
Episode 302 (“Sick as Your Secrets”) pulls in Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho alongside Ed Gein’s story. Was it intimidating to portray Hitchcock?
We tried to take the myth out of it and just tell the story of a guy who is at a creative crossroads and doesn’t know if the work he’s making is meaningful anymore, and gets inspired and goes about it in a very exacting, complicated, controversial way. When you have Tom Hollander playing Hitchcock and Olivia Williams playing Alma, it’s so inspiring to watch them and to give them as much freedom as you can. What I found fascinating is Hitchcock’s question — before Ed Gein, before World War II, monsters were the Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula. That’s how our horror movies were made. Then World War II happened and they started making these pulpy magazines and comic books and we started seeing the worst of humanity in them. Hitchcock is battling the same questions I think we all are when we make these television shows — who is it for and why are we doing it?
The Love Story pilot opens right before John, Carolyn, and Lauren board the plane. You know from the first scene how it ends. What was it like directing that?
We filmed that last, actually — at the very end. And I think that was really helpful because we’d started with them being in love. I felt like beginning the series there, you’re seeing a woman who is not so different from Princess Diana — in this golden cage with no privacy — the 20-something photographers waiting outside. Seeing them frustrated with each other — she’s late, she’s in traffic, he’s anxious. The most important thing in that moment is their kiss before they get on the plane, when he takes a knee and she’s looking for her cigarettes in her bag. To me that wasn’t just a regular kiss — that was the kiss we were going to ask people to come on this journey with us. Getting that right was very important.
Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly are both relative newcomers carrying an enormous story. How did you approach working with them?
We did two rehearsals, the three of us in a conference room, and I basically just said, “You’re both here for a reason. You’re good enough. We’re going to do this together.” What I wanted to protect was the intimacy between them. We were shooting in New York in the summer — everybody was out, photographers, people watching. My job was to keep it tiny and intimate with the two of them, who were having to do scenes like their first kiss in front of crowds and crowds of people on the other side of the camera watching and applauding and screaming.
You handed off the pilot and the rest of the directors carried it. Is that emotional?
Always. The directors on this after me were so talented — Gillian Robespierre, Jesse Peretz, Crystal Roberson Dorsey, Anthony Hemingway. I felt good. But it’s kind of like a theater director — once the show’s off, they go on to the next thing. I remember my last day with Sarah was at the airport when they board the plane. We both cried a little bit and said goodbye to each other because it was a roller coaster making the show and getting it right. But it’s okay.
Both Monster and Love Story became massive hits. What does that feel like after years of making smaller films?
When people ask you in line at a pizza restaurant, “So what is it you do?” and you’re like, “I’m a director,” and they’re like, “Have we seen anything of yours” — to actually be able to say something that you’re mostly sure they’ve seen is a feeling that’s taken me almost 20 years of my career to get to. And the idea that you can make something and then get feedback from people while it’s out rather than just convincing people to sign up for a streaming service to see your movie that came out during COVID and then wonder why they haven’t followed up. I didn’t even know that was part of the process. I thought it was just: you make it, you pray to God someone sees it, you move on, you make the next one. I didn’t know you actually got to talk about things while they were still in their window.
Horror, crime, romance — what’s the through line for you?
Just the characters. What do they want and how do they go about getting it? I love the tricks of making things and how fun and challenging that can be. But at the end of the day, I just try and find what the heart is of all of it. And if I can protect that as well as I can, then I feel like I’ve done my job.
What’s next — you mentioned a Lizzie Borden series?
We’re in post-production now. Six of the eight episodes, same as Ed Gein. Sarah Adina Smith does the other two, who’s a genius, and I’m really excited for people to see it. I think people will be very, very surprised.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Monster: The Ed Gein Story is available to stream on Netflix. Love Story is available to stream on Hulu and Disney+.
