March 2, 2022 • 35 mins
Creator and Showrunner Shonda Rhimes shares her approach and process adapting a true story into a limited series in real time. The powerhouse executive producer dives into how she constructed Anna Sorokin’s (AKA Anna Delvey’s) character, what inspired her decision to anchor the show from a journalist’s perspective, and why scenes with Vivian’s band of misfits in Scriberia were some of her favorites.
Later in the episode, Shonda chats with her closest confidante in creating the series, Jessica Pressler. Jessica wrote the 2018 New York Magazine story that inspired Inventing Anna. She tells Shonda why Anna’s story felt unique and what it was like to meet the fake German heiress for the first time.
To catch up before you listen, make sure you binge Inventing Anna the series on Netflix now.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Inventing Anna the Official Podcast is a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Welcome to Inventing
Anna the Official Podcast. I'm your host, Stacy Wilson Hunt
and this is the podcast for the Shadaland series Inventing Anna.
(00:20):
This show is your exclusive look behind the scenes and
cons of the notorious fake German heiress Anna delve I'll
be unraveling the stories behind the story and speaking with
many of the creatives who brought the story to your
Netflix queue, including some of the real people who got
entangled in Anna Delvie's web. It's been nearly four years
since journalist Jessica Pressler published her explosive New York Magazine
(00:43):
feature on Anna Sarrokan, who'd been arrested for stealing hundreds
of thousands of dollars from New York's social elite. The
story lights up the Internet. Readers can't seem to get
enough of Pressler's juicy reporting on how an unknown twenty
seven year old going by the name of Anna delbe
with no connections or cashet, somehow managed to scam New
York's most exclusive bankers, restaurants, and hotels. Among those readers
(01:06):
was none other than Powerhouse PD producer Shonda Rhymes. Later
in the show we will hear from Jessica and Shonda
about how they're two distinct worlds collided. But first I
had the honor of sitting down with Inventing Anna creator
and showrunner Shonda Rhymes. I Shanna, it's so nice to
(01:30):
be speaking with you about Inventing Anna. Congratulations on this series.
Thank you excited about it? Yes, and I'm so excited
for fans to see it. It's a real wild ride
and as anything that we discussed. In terms of Storytelline,
I'd love to start at the beginning. Let's start with
Jessica Pressler's piece which inspired the series, how Anna Delve
Tricked New York's Party People. This was published online in
(01:52):
The Cut in May, so I'd love to go back
to that period and tell me when you first read
the article and how did it first land on your radar.
I think I was on vacation when it first came out.
I'm pretty sure I read it on the treadmill. I
don't think I said some spa or somewhere trying to
(02:12):
decompress from too much work. By the way, that's very
Anna Delvia you to be at a spa. I don't know.
I don't think I smothering in a Delvie does. But
I was on a treadmill and I read it on
the treadmill, and I remember thinking, this is a really
fascinating article. It was one of those things where you
know you sort of couldn't put it down and you
could see it, like I could sort of see the
(02:33):
whole thing from beginning to end. I don't necessarily think
to myself, I'm inspired by this orm I inspired by that.
I can just sort of see it as a series
in a piece. Once I can visualize something and it
gets under my skin, I get excited about it and
sort of know that it's something that we're gonna want
to make. And this had that quality about it a
lot of just because writing was really visual and really
(02:55):
interesting and felt adaptable, like it felt like a story
you wanted to get inside and walk around. M That
makes sense, And in terms of process, nothing is more
important than writers. And you've worked with so many incredible
writers over the last almost two decades. Tell me what
was most important to you in bringing together the writers
in this room. It's a specific show. It has a
(03:16):
specific tone, a lot of research, a lot of fact checking,
a I have kind of a posse of writers who
I'm always working with. A lot of the writers came from,
you know, my prior shows. Some of the new ones
were people who's just they have original voices. They don't
write anything like me, they don't sound anything like me.
They have their own way of looking at things. I
(03:38):
like people who will argue with me in a room,
and that's generally what gets to hire is your willingness
to argue with me in a room. We assigned every
episode to a writer, and you know, yes there rewrites
and everything, but every writer is the is the architect
of their episode. I wanted every episode to feel different
and to have a different vibe to it. And so
(04:01):
unlike most of my shows where you you know, you
feel like a cadence of dialogue or you feel like
they all have a certain vibe to it, every episode
feels like its own little movie. And because we were
trying to give every episode a different narrator and a
different narrative, it worked so well to have each episode
have a writer be just the architect of that episode,
(04:24):
almost as if you were the editor assigning a journalists
the story, kind of sending them out to do their thing,
and they came back and delivered their own specific telling
of events. So I think that worked out. It made
it so much fun for all of us to have
the writers come back with their own points of view
and their own ideas about what they were going to
put in, and you know, we would argue and we
would debate things, but in the end, you know, what
(04:45):
they created, what they each created was just fabulous. The
big addition to our room this time was we hired
a really incredible, amazing researcher. And having a researcher was
extraordinarily important because we were telling a story that was
based on fact. We needed someone to build an extensive
(05:06):
timeline of events, to dig into little things that we
weren't even sure we're going to matter that ended up mattering,
or sometimes they didn't end up not mattering. We go
down these rabbit holes of facts that ended up we'd
all become obsessed with it ended up not mattering. You know.
We've always had a researcher in the writer's room for medicine,
for everything, but for this particular show, having somebody who
(05:29):
had read every transcript of the trial, who was paying
close attention to every little detail of Anna's life, knew
everything that was to know about, you know, the building
she wanted to buy. All of those things was really
really important, not only because we were dealing with the
show about journalists at the journalism and part right, but
because we also wanted to know what we were thinking,
(05:51):
you know what I mean. We wanted to know what
we were making up. We didn't want to just be
making things up just for the sake of it, right,
And you wanted to be intentional with those fictionalization of events,
right exactly. We wanted to We wanted to intentionally be
fictionalizing moments versus just accidentally be fictionalizing moments. Exactly. It's
always good to be intentional. And it's funny you bring
up the timeline, which makes me think of the wall
(06:14):
that Vivian's character has in the show in her baby room,
and it's I hear that there was actually an Anna
wall at shod Land. Is this true that you were
keeping track of everything? There was a huge wall, and
I think there was actually there was more than one
room and more than one wall, because we had what
I called like our casting wall, like our wall of
all the different pictures of Anna's which was interesting, and
(06:36):
by that I mean just the different ways that the
actual Anna looked and therefore all of the different versions
of Anna's that existed in the world. In our world,
we also had a wall that was just a timeline.
We had a wall that was what each episode was
going to encompass and what that was going to mean.
If we had, you know, an episode that it was
just the trial, what was that going to mean. We
(06:58):
had a wall that was about our characters who were
based on real people versus our characters who were fictionalized
composites of people. M cool. Good thing. You have a
lot of office space at Shonda Land, right, we definitely
needed the walls. I think we I think we actually
outgrew the wall space. It was. It was a lot
so throughout this process for you personally, what was the
(07:19):
most enjoyable about this process in terms of what it
takes to report the story? What aspect of it was
new to you, and what did you enjoy the most
about this? You know, we we had this group of
people that we sort of a little made up group
of people that we we had working at Manhattan Magazine,
which was our made up magazine or made up version
(07:40):
of New York Magazine that we called Scriberia, and they
were like the older, seasoned reporters who had won awards,
who nobody could fire because they were those are my
favorite people, by the way, Yeah that's a kind of
put out a pasture, but they were sort of They
had lots of war stories and so to me, like
one of my favorite parts about getting to do this
(08:01):
was creating the world of scribe Area and those three reporters.
Please stop caring about me. It's horrifying. Hey, it's not
like I want to care about you. I didn't even
want your Inscribe Area, but you're here and you have
a filthy mouth and you're not a revolting millennial, so
fuck you. I care. Hey, kid moudern, I already filed
our stories, so our time is here's you're not me.
(08:24):
I have a big one to write. Trump is threatening
to overthrow our democracy. Trump is threatening to overthrow our
democracy every ten minutes is going to do it again tomorrow.
They were so much fun to write, they were so
much fun to use, and they you know, they're obviously
some really famously talented theater actors who created their own
little world under themselves. I mean, they had their own
(08:46):
they had their own little vibe going that was just
beautiful to watch. And they helped, they helped us tell her,
they helped tell the story. So creating that was really fun.
But for me, there were so many parts of it
that we're just exciting and fun. I loved that we
separated it out and let each episode be a story
undo itself in its own way and let you see
(09:07):
the different versions of Anna through different characters eyes, that
sort of Raschaman structure that I love so much. Yeah,
that was really fun for me. And I have a special,
a really deep affection for nef Um So for me
that episode episode five and nef episode was one of
(09:28):
my favorite things that we've ever done. It just Alexis,
the actor is just beautifully captured enough. The Rosen brothers
just came in. Oh, they said, they didn't know your name?
Why wann't I You're least in a building from them
from that from the day, And if you doing mr
(09:49):
this with the day, how come you're not standing in
one of the sweets? You know, when you have someone
do so many favors, you just want to pay them
back in silence. If you've read the article, much of
the article is that episode, and I really just love
the way it plays out. I'm really proud of the
way that came out well in the article itself opens
(10:12):
with that, with her sliding the bill across the counter
at the hotel. And I think the whole framing of
this case is really so largely through nup side. It
really is. And why was the limited series format as
opposed to a feature or as opposed to an ongoing series.
Why was that the most appealing for telling this story.
I knew we were going to make a show. I
(10:32):
didn't know how many episodes it was gonna be. I
didn't know if it was going to be a limited series,
or if it was going to be a longer running series,
or what we were going to do with it. I
just knew we were going to make a show out
of it. And at a certain point it felt like
maybe we would do ten episodes. We ended up making nine,
And that really just came from the layout of deciding
(10:55):
that we were going to do it. In the formation
of interviews, why I met Jessica, and that was really
the biggest, most interesting part of this for me, was
you know. I talked to Jessica on the phone, you know,
when we were sort of bidding to get the article,
and she really wanted to remain a part of the process,
and that was exciting to me. And she asked if
(11:17):
she could be in the writer's room, and that was
also exciting to me. I was like, sure, could be
in the writer's room. And I think for a lot
of people that might have been threatening. To me, it was.
It was exciting because I knew that she, more than
anybody else, was inside the story. She knew all the players,
She had spent time with everybody, so that I remember
flying to New York to meet her after we'd gotten
(11:38):
the article, and once I'd spent time with Jessica, it
was really simple to discover, like how we were going
to tell the story, because the minute you meet Jessica,
you realized that you want to stand in the reporter's
shoes to tell the story the way she reported the story,
the way she figured out how she was going to
(11:59):
tell the story. It was so interesting to me. From
writing a sort of a fan letter to Anna Delvi
in prison two being pregnant while she was reporting the story,
to having to go to writers to visit Anna. All
of those things were so intriguing to me, the way
she was involved in it and how deeply embedded she
(12:22):
became in telling that story. So I knew we were
going to tell it through that. I also knew that
Anna is an unknowable person, and so the best way
to tell the story was going to be through the
interviews and Jessica's reporting, or creating a character based on
Jessica to do the reporting of Anna and about Anna,
(12:44):
because we were never ever really going to get to
know who Anna was for real, because Anna was never
going to reveal herself. Right, It's interesting when you're talking
about Jessica, who is such an incredible writer. I admire
her greatly. You had almost like two layers of a
cinematic experience. You had her own life. You had the
story that she had created, which is so visual. It
was great stuff. There was great stuff to work within,
(13:06):
great stuff to invent. What was great was discovering how
many other viewpoints there were, and you know, we really
wanted to get those in, and we wanted to be
able to take in and allow Anna to be seen
through all the eyes that really needed to be there.
And there were some stories that were just too good
to be to be missed, that had to be told.
(13:27):
That I enjoyed to tell so many delicious moments that
you couldn't have made up. Well maybe you could have,
but you can't imagine that they really happened. Yeah, I
like to say, there are some things in there that
are true that we can't admit are true. There's some
things in there that are made up. There's a reason
why we say the disclaimer on the front the way
we do, because we're being very careful about how we
(13:50):
how we make clear what's portrayed. People really opened themselves
up and told us things, and some things were true,
some things weren't true, and some things are people's interpretation
of events. And it all works really well together. And
by the way, it encompasses the essence of who Anna
is right there, you know what I mean. Everything's true
until it's not, basically in Anna's world. Okay, we're going
(14:16):
to break here for a moment and be right back.
Welcome back, everybody. Let's continue with the interview. If Anna
(14:37):
is unknowable and we sort of know that from the outset,
what kind of conversations did you have with the writers
about how to portray her, because there is the risk
in making her so unlikable that we almost don't care
what happens to her. But you have done such a
great job in creating empathy for her. But also there's
so many moments where I just don't understand her at all,
and it kind of leaves our head spinning the entire series.
(14:58):
So tell me about those conversations and don how you
drew her as a character. I mean, I think you'd
draw her the way you draw any character. She's a human,
you know, she has humanity, She's somebody who wants something,
and I don't know for me, like, yes, there are
many things that she did wrong, but I like to
look at her from the point of view of she
was a very very intelligent girl, who had very strong ambitions,
(15:23):
who was severely underestimated by a lot of people, who
was treated badly by a lot of people, whose moral
compass may be very off, but who felt passionately about
being seen and was trying really hard to be seen.
And you can see that, you can see how sort
of lost she is. And when you look at how
(15:46):
she treats the different people in their tellings of the story,
and you see who she treats, how how well or
how badly she treats certain people. You begin to understand
a little bit more about who she is and recognize
a little bit more about who she is. I think
the trial episode is one of my favorites simply because
you really begin to understand how important it is to
(16:10):
her to be taken seriously. Right. What's interesting to me
throughout the show and even in the trial itself, her
sort of psychological profile is never really dissected in a
public way, you know, what could be informing these behaviors,
and and I think it's interesting because she does seem
like she's gone through trauma. We get to know later
on that some of the things she experienced as a
(16:31):
young person. Did you have a profile of her in
the writer's room? Did you try to understand that maybe
there's more going on there than just ambition, maybe misplaced ambition? Well,
you do. I mean there's the episode where you watch
Vivian go back and try to dissect Anna's childhood. Right,
we have plenty of information about Anna's childhood and her
(16:54):
journals and all of that stuff. You know, I'm not
a big fan of you know, here's a basic obvious
psychological profile of somebody, and the reality of the situation
is the obvious things that you think about who Anna,
who Anna is and why she is the way she
are not true. They're just not. We, like everybody else,
(17:14):
had our research done where you know, we went and said,
like why would a person do this? And why would
a person do that? They all sound really nice, but
none of them had anything to at any basis. In fact,
there's lots of mystery there. There are lots of holes
left open, and we left them open for a reason.
We opened the doors and we point to what could
have been. But what's true and what's not true are
(17:35):
they're up for interpretation and that and that is part
of what makes the show special is that it really
does leave it to us to think about it for ourselves.
And I think that's nice that we aren't given she
doesn't have a diagnosis, you know, there isn't this like
perfectly wrapped a reason for her actions. And I think
that's what makes it compelling. And also by the way
she's not she's not a serial killer or something. We're
(17:56):
not watching her murder bodies and and you know where
their skin where it makes seat out of people's skin.
She's just a person, and honestly, I've said this at
thousand times. She hasn't done anything worse than most Wall
Street guys. So what diagnosis are we looking for here
other than ambitious, you know, hopeful person following the American dream.
(18:18):
She hasn't done anything. We really want her to be
a bad person. I think people really want to label
her as a horrible person. I'm not sure why. There's
a lot of behaviors that she doesn't when you really
dissect them and really look at them, I see people
engage in them all the time in your regular small
town in New York City. There, I see people engage
(18:38):
in these behaviors all the time, and I don't think
that they're not they're especially diagnosable. I think that they're
just a lot of it is just human behavior, and
we only call it out when it becomes public and
gets you into trouble. That is very, very true. So
you mentioned the trial, which is very important to the
story and was very impactful to your storytelling process. I'd
(19:00):
love to talk about that. It took place in New
York starting March. What was the timing of the trial
in relation to where you were writing the show, and
tell me about how you got writers in the court room,
because I know that was a very big piece of
year puzzle. One of our writers, Matt Byrne, who wrote
the episode the trial episode, used to be a journalist,
and so we sent him because we thought he would
(19:21):
be the perfect person to go and we needed somebody
to be there. What was great was the writer's Room
was still in session. We were working on the show
while the trial was going on. I remember doing a
dramatic reading of the of Todd's opening statement for the
Writer's Room as we got the transcripts of the trial.
(19:42):
Everyone lies a little bit, whether it's on a resume
or sales pitch or on social media. We think the
world has changed with social media. Every person has become
a brand, an image fed out into the world. A lie.
But what was true for not was true for Sinatra.
Sometimes you gotta fake it till you make it. It
(20:05):
was really interesting to have the trial be going on
and for us to still be working on the show,
not knowing how we were going to end the show,
because for a while we were gonna we were like,
maybe we'll end before we hit the trial. Then the
trial started and we got no, We're gonna wait until
the trial is over. We were writing episodes with an
ending that we didn't know what the ending was. We
were like me with and it goes free if and
(20:27):
it doesn't go free? We we weren't sure. And my
favorite part was, you know, there's that scene where you
see Sciberia sitting at their desks and they're like getting
the verdict. Matt was texting us, slacking us the verdict
as we were all sitting We're all sitting around a
computer like waiting to hear like account one, what did
you get? I account two? Like that was real, that
(20:48):
really happened with us. We were all like, what's happening?
Attempt to steal property from Fortress Investment, Inc. Exceeding one
million dollars? Guilty or not guilty? Come up, come up,
come up, type faster, type of let's go. We were
sort of going crazy waiting to find out. But it
was also you know, it put us in this very
(21:11):
interesting position because at that point we were so invested
in every little piece of it. By then, because we
had waited through the whole trial to try to figure
out what the end of the show was going to be.
And then felt this like overwhelming sense of let down
or done simply because it was over um And what
(21:34):
surprised you most about the verdicts. I think that we
were surprised that she was found guilty on so many counts.
And I think it was because of this idea that
she had to be dangerously close to getting the money,
should be dangerously close to doing it, and we all thought,
(21:55):
in order for her to be dangerously close, they're really
saying that she really was good at what she was doing.
She really she really was actually swindling them, And that
is an admission that we weren't sure that these men
would have been willing to make about this young girl.
So that was interesting. We also felt vindicated in our
own little way that she well half of us did.
(22:16):
It was like a battle in the room that she
was found not guilty of swindling Rachel. That is a
polarizing decision for sure. It was very interesting. We had
a lot with a lot of sympathy for Rachel in
terms of of who that character was and of really
humanizing her. I was very careful that I didn't want
us to be We're not demonizing another woman ever, no
matter what, and there's not like there's a humanity and
(22:37):
ever least one of these characters. But there was a
feeling for the some half of us that like, she
handed over her credit card willingly. You know she had
been along for this ride. She handed it over willingly,
and a lot of us were like, I would never
have done that. And then there are a lot of
people were like, but I would have. So it was
very it was a very interesting debate in our in
(22:58):
our writer's room, right, A lot of the writer's room
was what would you have done in that situation if
you had been with Anna? And I think that's what
was fascinating for us in almost every episode, it was
if you had been with her? Would you have gone
along with her? Right? Well, and so much of the
show is how each of us is prone to wish fulfillment.
I mean, there isn't anyone watching the series who wouldn't
(23:20):
have wanted to be part of this for at least
a little bit, right, go to the restaurants, go to
the parties, experienced that energy. We're all prone to this
type of behavior, I think, or maybe we don't want
to admit it. Well, no, I mean I think, what's
wonderful is like, for instance, Nora, Nora has everything, Nourra
is wealthy beyond belief. She's swindled out of tons of money. Um,
(23:43):
but even Norah falls for it. And what Nora falls
for is how Anna makes her feel. And I think
for all of them, that's what it is. Every last
person who is quote unquote swindled by Anna or taken
in by Anna or pulled into Anna's you know, web,
(24:03):
it's because Anna makes them feel a certain way. They
all come away from Anna forever changed. How do you
think she makes them feel? Exactly? For everybody, it's different,
you know what I mean. For some people it's Anna
needs to be taken care of. For some people, it's
that wonderful moment for Norah where she's sort of saying,
it's so important that we help, you know, young emerging women.
(24:26):
You know the great episode where she's got the the
businessman and he's sort of she's standing in for his
idea of what his daughter should be. Right exactly, there's
Casey and how Anna is really the perfect version of
the client that needs remolding and reshaping. Everybody has something
that they're getting from Anna. They all get something from her,
(24:48):
and in the end, if you ask me, she's the
only person left with nothing. Everybody else got something. That's
a really wonderful point. She is a proxy for each person,
and her genius is knowing what those people need from
her in that moment, and so if there's something to
take away is sort of that intuition that she has
about reading people in an instant, the way she connects
(25:09):
with Nef. She sees Neff as a as an aspirational artist.
She knows that they have that in common, they want
more than what they have, and she spots it in
an instant and it really is fascinating how she does
it over and over and over again. And that's why
she is compelling. And maybe that's why people don't like her,
because she is so talented. Yeah, I mean it's also
white people like her. I mean, it's it's fascinating and
(25:31):
possibly is it her gift or is it her curse?
Because is it necessarily a talent that she has or
is it a talent that people have put upon her?
You know, people look at Anna and see what they
want to see, which I think is also very interesting.
It's it's a brain vendor too. It really forces you
to think throughout and I think that's a real gift,
and I just want to congratulate you and your team
on such a great job. Thank you, thank you so much,
(25:53):
Thank you so much for your time. Shanda going to
be here. Hey, there, don't go anywhere a for this break.
We'll hear from the one and only Jessica Pressler on
her own unique introduction to Anna Delbi. Hey, welcome back.
(26:19):
Now let's hear a little bit from Shaunda's closest confident
in creating the series, Jessica Pressler, the journalist who wrote
the New York Magazine story that inspired inventing Anna. Here
she is chatting with Shawda Rhymes. How did you first
hear about Anna? So? I first heard about Anna in
(26:40):
the fall of seventeen, the fall late winter of I
was thinking about doing a book about female con artists
because I had written the story about a group of
former strip club workers that became hustlers. Hustlers everybody hustlers.
Go through that movie, check it out, and there are
(27:01):
elements of that that I thought were really intriguing. I
was thinking about like doing something about female con artists
in general, you know, just kind of different ways that
female connuters work. That are different than men. Anyway, I
called this photographer that I had met during Hustlers. His
name is Stephen Hirsch, and he um hangs out at
like Manhattan criminal core and takes pictures of people for
(27:22):
the tabloids. And he also has this like kind of
great editorial mind, like he has done these like photojournalistic
series about you know, the bunnies living on the bunny
ranch in Nevada and people kidnapped by aliens, which are
topics that entrust me um. So I was like, is
there anyone interesting that's come in any like kind of
female like criminals that, And he was like, oh, you
(27:43):
should check out this woman Anna. And I looked it up,
and the things that struck me as odd about it
were that Fortress the Hedge Fund was mentioned in the complaint,
which is not like a brand name that tent six
year olds want to be socialites are generally aware of.
And also that she went to see Warren Buffett like
(28:03):
she took a plan to go see like a nine
year old in Nebraska. Those two facts felt very strange
to me, and so I wrote her a letter and
U and she called me a few weeks later and said,
I'm not want to be socialized, and that's kind of
how it went from there. I remember just being riveted
asking you for like what did the letters say? You know?
(28:26):
When did she respond? Like how do you get somebody
to respond to you? You know when you want to
interview them in prison? Like that whole thing, and wondering
how do I make this visual? And it was really
kind of cool to get from you. Jessica would write
me these like very elaborate, incredibly entertaining emails that would
(28:47):
sort of tell me how a journalist works and how
she did her job and the story of meeting Anna.
And what was great about it was is I feel
like I learned a ton of details about hopefully how
to be a journalist. I hope we got it right,
and I put them all in the show. I just
got so um kind of obsessed with it. And I
(29:09):
think that that's became my way in really, which is
why the show became the show that was told through
the eyes of a journalist, because I couldn't I couldn't
see it any other way. Once you started telling me
about how how you did your work. That's so funny.
That is a question I was going to ask you
actually because I remember reading in the New York Times. Um,
(29:30):
I'm not going to pretend that I didn't memorize it,
that you read the story while you were on vacation
and that you like saw it immediately. I remember there
was a line that was like I slept better. I
was like, oh, that's nice. Um. So I'm curious, like
if that original vision that you had for the show
remained or if it changed how it changed. Some parts
(29:52):
of the original vision remained. I mean, I thought for
a long time that the whole story would be the article,
you know what I mean, Like would be said at
the hotel, would be that piece of it. But then
I started talking to you, And the more I started
talking to you, and the more I talked to you,
the more I realized that a Anna is unknowable in
(30:17):
a lot of ways. There were so many different versions
of Anna to be found. But also there was so
much more to the story. Like you know, there was
what happened in Morocco. There was what happened once we
got to trial. There were all these things that was
what happened when she went to California. There were all
the things that happened afterwards that I thought were super interesting.
So it sort of expanded the story so much that
(30:40):
I really wanted to find a way in that it
made sense. And then, you know, we would talk about
these things that just captivated me, some of these things
that were sort of inspired by facts, but we're basically,
you know, sort of fictionalized. Which were episodes two and
three that just captivated me so much that I felt
like we had to grab those because I felt like
(31:01):
they explained so much of who Anna is or how
she came to be. Who am I? This club, this
foundation will be who I am, what I am. I
have to build this so artists and people like me
(31:21):
finally have a home somewhere safe, applies where they belonged,
a place where I Okay, so the first time you
met Anna in person, I know, it wasn't anything like
what I wrote. She didn't insult your fashion. What was
(31:44):
it like for you the first time you met Anna
in person? You know, I remember being like, this is
twenty seven year old girl, This is just an year
old girl. And we had a fairly normal conversation and
she said a lot of things that sounded very reasonable.
(32:05):
Uh yeah, What's what's different is that I did not
convince her to go to trial. She told me in
our first conversation that she wanted to go to trial,
that she thought her case was very sloppily put together,
and that she wanted to go to trial, and even
though her lawyers thought that it was scary to go
to trial, she wanted the truth to be out there,
or you know, she wanted to to see if she
(32:27):
could win a trial, and she kind of made a
case for it that sounded very reasonable. And I had
the first of many experiences with Anna where I left
being like, oh, that was like totally reasonable and she's
totally normal. And then once I was out of the
Riker's complex in the situation, I was like, wait a minute,
that's just like Banana's Like why would you why would
(32:50):
you go to trial? What do you mean like that
the case is sloppily put together? You literally forged? Why
are transferred statements like why would she want to take
this to trial? It makes sense when you're talking to her,
But yeah, she's magnetic. I think a lot of the
things that she says in the first episode when we
(33:10):
first meet her are things that she said in the
video interview, because I found them fascinating. Macaw is pent
in a public picture of me as a dumb, shallow,
superficial person who's just after money. I want you to
know that's not me at all. I'm trying to build
(33:32):
a business. There were so many things that she said
that sounded so reasonable. Literally, like I felt like we
couldn't even put in on the show. I was like, they,
I don't think gonna be believed me. When you said like,
what are you happy at? Happiest? And she said right now,
right now, I'm happiest right now, And I'm like, you're
in prison. How can you be happiest right now. Yeah.
(33:53):
I still haven't gotten my head around that one. But honestly,
I think once again, she's did her own version of
what a character is and how she wants to be
seen in real life, and so it makes her very unknowable.
(34:14):
That's it for now. We'll hear much more from Shaunda
and Jessica's conversation in a future episode. Thank you for
joining us for the premiere of Inventing Anna the official podcast.
Tune in next week when I break down key moments
from the show with Emmy nominated actor Anna Klumsky, who
plays journalists Vivian Kent I think she does like shiny things,
(34:35):
and I do think that she This is backstory stuff
you know that I built, but like she was driven
by the idea that well, if I just cracked the code,
they'll let me in. If you're enjoying this show, please subscribe,
share with your friends, rate, or leave us a review.
All that good stuff. And if you haven't finished binging
Shawnda Land's Inventing Anna on Netflix, please go do that.
(34:58):
We really don't want to spoil it for you. Inventing
Anna the Official Podcast is executive produced by Sandy Bailey,
Lauren Homan, Tyler Clang, and Gabrielle Collins. Our producer and
editor is Nicholas Harder, and the show is produced and
hosted by me Stacy Wilson Hunt. Inventing Anna the Official
(35:22):
Podcast is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Inventing Anna the Official Podcast is a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Welcome to Inventing
Anna the Official Podcast. I'm your host, Stacy Wilson Hunt
and this is the podcast for the Shadaland series Inventing Anna.
(00:20):
This show is your exclusive look behind the scenes and
cons of the notorious fake German heiress Anna delve I'll
be unraveling the stories behind the story and speaking with
many of the creatives who brought the story to your
Netflix queue, including some of the real people who got
entangled in Anna Delvie's web. It's been nearly four years
since journalist Jessica Pressler published her explosive New York Magazine
(00:43):
feature on Anna Sarrokan, who'd been arrested for stealing hundreds
of thousands of dollars from New York's social elite. The
story lights up the Internet. Readers can't seem to get
enough of Pressler's juicy reporting on how an unknown twenty
seven year old going by the name of Anna delbe
with no connections or cashet, somehow managed to scam New
York's most exclusive bankers, restaurants, and hotels. Among those readers
(01:06):
was none other than Powerhouse PD producer Shonda Rhymes. Later
in the show we will hear from Jessica and Shonda
about how they're two distinct worlds collided. But first I
had the honor of sitting down with Inventing Anna creator
and showrunner Shonda Rhymes. I Shanna, it's so nice to
(01:30):
be speaking with you about Inventing Anna. Congratulations on this series.
Thank you excited about it? Yes, and I'm so excited
for fans to see it. It's a real wild ride
and as anything that we discussed. In terms of Storytelline,
I'd love to start at the beginning. Let's start with
Jessica Pressler's piece which inspired the series, how Anna Delve
Tricked New York's Party People. This was published online in
(01:52):
The Cut in May, so I'd love to go back
to that period and tell me when you first read
the article and how did it first land on your radar.
I think I was on vacation when it first came out.
I'm pretty sure I read it on the treadmill. I
don't think I said some spa or somewhere trying to
(02:12):
decompress from too much work. By the way, that's very
Anna Delvia you to be at a spa. I don't know.
I don't think I smothering in a Delvie does. But
I was on a treadmill and I read it on
the treadmill, and I remember thinking, this is a really
fascinating article. It was one of those things where you
know you sort of couldn't put it down and you
could see it, like I could sort of see the
(02:33):
whole thing from beginning to end. I don't necessarily think
to myself, I'm inspired by this orm I inspired by that.
I can just sort of see it as a series
in a piece. Once I can visualize something and it
gets under my skin, I get excited about it and
sort of know that it's something that we're gonna want
to make. And this had that quality about it a
lot of just because writing was really visual and really
(02:55):
interesting and felt adaptable, like it felt like a story
you wanted to get inside and walk around. M That
makes sense, And in terms of process, nothing is more
important than writers. And you've worked with so many incredible
writers over the last almost two decades. Tell me what
was most important to you in bringing together the writers
in this room. It's a specific show. It has a
(03:16):
specific tone, a lot of research, a lot of fact checking,
a I have kind of a posse of writers who
I'm always working with. A lot of the writers came from,
you know, my prior shows. Some of the new ones
were people who's just they have original voices. They don't
write anything like me, they don't sound anything like me.
They have their own way of looking at things. I
(03:38):
like people who will argue with me in a room,
and that's generally what gets to hire is your willingness
to argue with me in a room. We assigned every
episode to a writer, and you know, yes there rewrites
and everything, but every writer is the is the architect
of their episode. I wanted every episode to feel different
and to have a different vibe to it. And so
(04:01):
unlike most of my shows where you you know, you
feel like a cadence of dialogue or you feel like
they all have a certain vibe to it, every episode
feels like its own little movie. And because we were
trying to give every episode a different narrator and a
different narrative, it worked so well to have each episode
have a writer be just the architect of that episode,
(04:24):
almost as if you were the editor assigning a journalists
the story, kind of sending them out to do their thing,
and they came back and delivered their own specific telling
of events. So I think that worked out. It made
it so much fun for all of us to have
the writers come back with their own points of view
and their own ideas about what they were going to
put in, and you know, we would argue and we
would debate things, but in the end, you know, what
(04:45):
they created, what they each created was just fabulous. The
big addition to our room this time was we hired
a really incredible, amazing researcher. And having a researcher was
extraordinarily important because we were telling a story that was
based on fact. We needed someone to build an extensive
(05:06):
timeline of events, to dig into little things that we
weren't even sure we're going to matter that ended up mattering,
or sometimes they didn't end up not mattering. We go
down these rabbit holes of facts that ended up we'd
all become obsessed with it ended up not mattering. You know.
We've always had a researcher in the writer's room for medicine,
for everything, but for this particular show, having somebody who
(05:29):
had read every transcript of the trial, who was paying
close attention to every little detail of Anna's life, knew
everything that was to know about, you know, the building
she wanted to buy. All of those things was really
really important, not only because we were dealing with the
show about journalists at the journalism and part right, but
because we also wanted to know what we were thinking,
(05:51):
you know what I mean. We wanted to know what
we were making up. We didn't want to just be
making things up just for the sake of it, right,
And you wanted to be intentional with those fictionalization of events,
right exactly. We wanted to We wanted to intentionally be
fictionalizing moments versus just accidentally be fictionalizing moments. Exactly. It's
always good to be intentional. And it's funny you bring
up the timeline, which makes me think of the wall
(06:14):
that Vivian's character has in the show in her baby room,
and it's I hear that there was actually an Anna
wall at shod Land. Is this true that you were
keeping track of everything? There was a huge wall, and
I think there was actually there was more than one
room and more than one wall, because we had what
I called like our casting wall, like our wall of
all the different pictures of Anna's which was interesting, and
(06:36):
by that I mean just the different ways that the
actual Anna looked and therefore all of the different versions
of Anna's that existed in the world. In our world,
we also had a wall that was just a timeline.
We had a wall that was what each episode was
going to encompass and what that was going to mean.
If we had, you know, an episode that it was
just the trial, what was that going to mean. We
(06:58):
had a wall that was about our characters who were
based on real people versus our characters who were fictionalized
composites of people. M cool. Good thing. You have a
lot of office space at Shonda Land, right, we definitely
needed the walls. I think we I think we actually
outgrew the wall space. It was. It was a lot
so throughout this process for you personally, what was the
(07:19):
most enjoyable about this process in terms of what it
takes to report the story? What aspect of it was
new to you, and what did you enjoy the most
about this? You know, we we had this group of
people that we sort of a little made up group
of people that we we had working at Manhattan Magazine,
which was our made up magazine or made up version
(07:40):
of New York Magazine that we called Scriberia, and they
were like the older, seasoned reporters who had won awards,
who nobody could fire because they were those are my
favorite people, by the way, Yeah that's a kind of
put out a pasture, but they were sort of They
had lots of war stories and so to me, like
one of my favorite parts about getting to do this
(08:01):
was creating the world of scribe Area and those three reporters.
Please stop caring about me. It's horrifying. Hey, it's not
like I want to care about you. I didn't even
want your Inscribe Area, but you're here and you have
a filthy mouth and you're not a revolting millennial, so
fuck you. I care. Hey, kid moudern, I already filed
our stories, so our time is here's you're not me.
(08:24):
I have a big one to write. Trump is threatening
to overthrow our democracy. Trump is threatening to overthrow our
democracy every ten minutes is going to do it again tomorrow.
They were so much fun to write, they were so
much fun to use, and they you know, they're obviously
some really famously talented theater actors who created their own
little world under themselves. I mean, they had their own
(08:46):
they had their own little vibe going that was just
beautiful to watch. And they helped, they helped us tell her,
they helped tell the story. So creating that was really fun.
But for me, there were so many parts of it
that we're just exciting and fun. I loved that we
separated it out and let each episode be a story
undo itself in its own way and let you see
(09:07):
the different versions of Anna through different characters eyes, that
sort of Raschaman structure that I love so much. Yeah,
that was really fun for me. And I have a special,
a really deep affection for nef Um So for me
that episode episode five and nef episode was one of
(09:28):
my favorite things that we've ever done. It just Alexis,
the actor is just beautifully captured enough. The Rosen brothers
just came in. Oh, they said, they didn't know your name?
Why wann't I You're least in a building from them
from that from the day, And if you doing mr
(09:49):
this with the day, how come you're not standing in
one of the sweets? You know, when you have someone
do so many favors, you just want to pay them
back in silence. If you've read the article, much of
the article is that episode, and I really just love
the way it plays out. I'm really proud of the
way that came out well in the article itself opens
(10:12):
with that, with her sliding the bill across the counter
at the hotel. And I think the whole framing of
this case is really so largely through nup side. It
really is. And why was the limited series format as
opposed to a feature or as opposed to an ongoing series.
Why was that the most appealing for telling this story.
I knew we were going to make a show. I
(10:32):
didn't know how many episodes it was gonna be. I
didn't know if it was going to be a limited series,
or if it was going to be a longer running series,
or what we were going to do with it. I
just knew we were going to make a show out
of it. And at a certain point it felt like
maybe we would do ten episodes. We ended up making nine,
And that really just came from the layout of deciding
(10:55):
that we were going to do it. In the formation
of interviews, why I met Jessica, and that was really
the biggest, most interesting part of this for me, was
you know. I talked to Jessica on the phone, you know,
when we were sort of bidding to get the article,
and she really wanted to remain a part of the process,
and that was exciting to me. And she asked if
(11:17):
she could be in the writer's room, and that was
also exciting to me. I was like, sure, could be
in the writer's room. And I think for a lot
of people that might have been threatening. To me, it was.
It was exciting because I knew that she, more than
anybody else, was inside the story. She knew all the players,
She had spent time with everybody, so that I remember
flying to New York to meet her after we'd gotten
(11:38):
the article, and once I'd spent time with Jessica, it
was really simple to discover, like how we were going
to tell the story, because the minute you meet Jessica,
you realized that you want to stand in the reporter's
shoes to tell the story the way she reported the story,
the way she figured out how she was going to
(11:59):
tell the story. It was so interesting to me. From
writing a sort of a fan letter to Anna Delvi
in prison two being pregnant while she was reporting the story,
to having to go to writers to visit Anna. All
of those things were so intriguing to me, the way
she was involved in it and how deeply embedded she
(12:22):
became in telling that story. So I knew we were
going to tell it through that. I also knew that
Anna is an unknowable person, and so the best way
to tell the story was going to be through the
interviews and Jessica's reporting, or creating a character based on
Jessica to do the reporting of Anna and about Anna,
(12:44):
because we were never ever really going to get to
know who Anna was for real, because Anna was never
going to reveal herself. Right, It's interesting when you're talking
about Jessica, who is such an incredible writer. I admire
her greatly. You had almost like two layers of a
cinematic experience. You had her own life. You had the
story that she had created, which is so visual. It
was great stuff. There was great stuff to work within,
(13:06):
great stuff to invent. What was great was discovering how
many other viewpoints there were, and you know, we really
wanted to get those in, and we wanted to be
able to take in and allow Anna to be seen
through all the eyes that really needed to be there.
And there were some stories that were just too good
to be to be missed, that had to be told.
(13:27):
That I enjoyed to tell so many delicious moments that
you couldn't have made up. Well maybe you could have,
but you can't imagine that they really happened. Yeah, I
like to say, there are some things in there that
are true that we can't admit are true. There's some
things in there that are made up. There's a reason
why we say the disclaimer on the front the way
we do, because we're being very careful about how we
(13:50):
how we make clear what's portrayed. People really opened themselves
up and told us things, and some things were true,
some things weren't true, and some things are people's interpretation
of events. And it all works really well together. And
by the way, it encompasses the essence of who Anna
is right there, you know what I mean. Everything's true
until it's not, basically in Anna's world. Okay, we're going
(14:16):
to break here for a moment and be right back.
Welcome back, everybody. Let's continue with the interview. If Anna
(14:37):
is unknowable and we sort of know that from the outset,
what kind of conversations did you have with the writers
about how to portray her, because there is the risk
in making her so unlikable that we almost don't care
what happens to her. But you have done such a
great job in creating empathy for her. But also there's
so many moments where I just don't understand her at all,
and it kind of leaves our head spinning the entire series.
(14:58):
So tell me about those conversations and don how you
drew her as a character. I mean, I think you'd
draw her the way you draw any character. She's a human,
you know, she has humanity, She's somebody who wants something,
and I don't know for me, like, yes, there are
many things that she did wrong, but I like to
look at her from the point of view of she
was a very very intelligent girl, who had very strong ambitions,
(15:23):
who was severely underestimated by a lot of people, who
was treated badly by a lot of people, whose moral
compass may be very off, but who felt passionately about
being seen and was trying really hard to be seen.
And you can see that, you can see how sort
of lost she is. And when you look at how
(15:46):
she treats the different people in their tellings of the story,
and you see who she treats, how how well or
how badly she treats certain people. You begin to understand
a little bit more about who she is and recognize
a little bit more about who she is. I think
the trial episode is one of my favorites simply because
you really begin to understand how important it is to
(16:10):
her to be taken seriously. Right. What's interesting to me
throughout the show and even in the trial itself, her
sort of psychological profile is never really dissected in a
public way, you know, what could be informing these behaviors,
and and I think it's interesting because she does seem
like she's gone through trauma. We get to know later
on that some of the things she experienced as a
(16:31):
young person. Did you have a profile of her in
the writer's room? Did you try to understand that maybe
there's more going on there than just ambition, maybe misplaced ambition? Well,
you do. I mean there's the episode where you watch
Vivian go back and try to dissect Anna's childhood. Right,
we have plenty of information about Anna's childhood and her
(16:54):
journals and all of that stuff. You know, I'm not
a big fan of you know, here's a basic obvious
psychological profile of somebody, and the reality of the situation
is the obvious things that you think about who Anna,
who Anna is and why she is the way she
are not true. They're just not. We, like everybody else,
(17:14):
had our research done where you know, we went and said,
like why would a person do this? And why would
a person do that? They all sound really nice, but
none of them had anything to at any basis. In fact,
there's lots of mystery there. There are lots of holes
left open, and we left them open for a reason.
We opened the doors and we point to what could
have been. But what's true and what's not true are
(17:35):
they're up for interpretation and that and that is part
of what makes the show special is that it really
does leave it to us to think about it for ourselves.
And I think that's nice that we aren't given she
doesn't have a diagnosis, you know, there isn't this like
perfectly wrapped a reason for her actions. And I think
that's what makes it compelling. And also by the way
she's not she's not a serial killer or something. We're
(17:56):
not watching her murder bodies and and you know where
their skin where it makes seat out of people's skin.
She's just a person, and honestly, I've said this at
thousand times. She hasn't done anything worse than most Wall
Street guys. So what diagnosis are we looking for here
other than ambitious, you know, hopeful person following the American dream.
(18:18):
She hasn't done anything. We really want her to be
a bad person. I think people really want to label
her as a horrible person. I'm not sure why. There's
a lot of behaviors that she doesn't when you really
dissect them and really look at them, I see people
engage in them all the time in your regular small
town in New York City. There, I see people engage
(18:38):
in these behaviors all the time, and I don't think
that they're not they're especially diagnosable. I think that they're
just a lot of it is just human behavior, and
we only call it out when it becomes public and
gets you into trouble. That is very, very true. So
you mentioned the trial, which is very important to the
story and was very impactful to your storytelling process. I'd
(19:00):
love to talk about that. It took place in New
York starting March. What was the timing of the trial
in relation to where you were writing the show, and
tell me about how you got writers in the court room,
because I know that was a very big piece of
year puzzle. One of our writers, Matt Byrne, who wrote
the episode the trial episode, used to be a journalist,
and so we sent him because we thought he would
(19:21):
be the perfect person to go and we needed somebody
to be there. What was great was the writer's Room
was still in session. We were working on the show
while the trial was going on. I remember doing a
dramatic reading of the of Todd's opening statement for the
Writer's Room as we got the transcripts of the trial.
(19:42):
Everyone lies a little bit, whether it's on a resume
or sales pitch or on social media. We think the
world has changed with social media. Every person has become
a brand, an image fed out into the world. A lie.
But what was true for not was true for Sinatra.
Sometimes you gotta fake it till you make it. It
(20:05):
was really interesting to have the trial be going on
and for us to still be working on the show,
not knowing how we were going to end the show,
because for a while we were gonna we were like,
maybe we'll end before we hit the trial. Then the
trial started and we got no, We're gonna wait until
the trial is over. We were writing episodes with an
ending that we didn't know what the ending was. We
were like me with and it goes free if and
(20:27):
it doesn't go free? We we weren't sure. And my
favorite part was, you know, there's that scene where you
see Sciberia sitting at their desks and they're like getting
the verdict. Matt was texting us, slacking us the verdict
as we were all sitting We're all sitting around a
computer like waiting to hear like account one, what did
you get? I account two? Like that was real, that
(20:48):
really happened with us. We were all like, what's happening?
Attempt to steal property from Fortress Investment, Inc. Exceeding one
million dollars? Guilty or not guilty? Come up, come up,
come up, type faster, type of let's go. We were
sort of going crazy waiting to find out. But it
was also you know, it put us in this very
(21:11):
interesting position because at that point we were so invested
in every little piece of it. By then, because we
had waited through the whole trial to try to figure
out what the end of the show was going to be.
And then felt this like overwhelming sense of let down
or done simply because it was over um And what
(21:34):
surprised you most about the verdicts. I think that we
were surprised that she was found guilty on so many counts.
And I think it was because of this idea that
she had to be dangerously close to getting the money,
should be dangerously close to doing it, and we all thought,
(21:55):
in order for her to be dangerously close, they're really
saying that she really was good at what she was doing.
She really she really was actually swindling them, And that
is an admission that we weren't sure that these men
would have been willing to make about this young girl.
So that was interesting. We also felt vindicated in our
own little way that she well half of us did.
(22:16):
It was like a battle in the room that she
was found not guilty of swindling Rachel. That is a
polarizing decision for sure. It was very interesting. We had
a lot with a lot of sympathy for Rachel in
terms of of who that character was and of really
humanizing her. I was very careful that I didn't want
us to be We're not demonizing another woman ever, no
matter what, and there's not like there's a humanity and
(22:37):
ever least one of these characters. But there was a
feeling for the some half of us that like, she
handed over her credit card willingly. You know she had
been along for this ride. She handed it over willingly,
and a lot of us were like, I would never
have done that. And then there are a lot of
people were like, but I would have. So it was
very it was a very interesting debate in our in
(22:58):
our writer's room, right, A lot of the writer's room
was what would you have done in that situation if
you had been with Anna? And I think that's what
was fascinating for us in almost every episode, it was
if you had been with her? Would you have gone
along with her? Right? Well, and so much of the
show is how each of us is prone to wish fulfillment.
I mean, there isn't anyone watching the series who wouldn't
(23:20):
have wanted to be part of this for at least
a little bit, right, go to the restaurants, go to
the parties, experienced that energy. We're all prone to this
type of behavior, I think, or maybe we don't want
to admit it. Well, no, I mean I think, what's
wonderful is like, for instance, Nora, Nora has everything, Nourra
is wealthy beyond belief. She's swindled out of tons of money. Um,
(23:43):
but even Norah falls for it. And what Nora falls
for is how Anna makes her feel. And I think
for all of them, that's what it is. Every last
person who is quote unquote swindled by Anna or taken
in by Anna or pulled into Anna's you know, web,
(24:03):
it's because Anna makes them feel a certain way. They
all come away from Anna forever changed. How do you
think she makes them feel? Exactly? For everybody, it's different,
you know what I mean. For some people it's Anna
needs to be taken care of. For some people, it's
that wonderful moment for Norah where she's sort of saying,
it's so important that we help, you know, young emerging women.
(24:26):
You know the great episode where she's got the the
businessman and he's sort of she's standing in for his
idea of what his daughter should be. Right exactly, there's
Casey and how Anna is really the perfect version of
the client that needs remolding and reshaping. Everybody has something
that they're getting from Anna. They all get something from her,
(24:48):
and in the end, if you ask me, she's the
only person left with nothing. Everybody else got something. That's
a really wonderful point. She is a proxy for each person,
and her genius is knowing what those people need from
her in that moment, and so if there's something to
take away is sort of that intuition that she has
about reading people in an instant, the way she connects
(25:09):
with Nef. She sees Neff as a as an aspirational artist.
She knows that they have that in common, they want
more than what they have, and she spots it in
an instant and it really is fascinating how she does
it over and over and over again. And that's why
she is compelling. And maybe that's why people don't like her,
because she is so talented. Yeah, I mean it's also
white people like her. I mean, it's it's fascinating and
(25:31):
possibly is it her gift or is it her curse?
Because is it necessarily a talent that she has or
is it a talent that people have put upon her?
You know, people look at Anna and see what they
want to see, which I think is also very interesting.
It's it's a brain vendor too. It really forces you
to think throughout and I think that's a real gift,
and I just want to congratulate you and your team
on such a great job. Thank you, thank you so much,
(25:53):
Thank you so much for your time. Shanda going to
be here. Hey, there, don't go anywhere a for this break.
We'll hear from the one and only Jessica Pressler on
her own unique introduction to Anna Delbi. Hey, welcome back.
(26:19):
Now let's hear a little bit from Shaunda's closest confident
in creating the series, Jessica Pressler, the journalist who wrote
the New York Magazine story that inspired inventing Anna. Here
she is chatting with Shawda Rhymes. How did you first
hear about Anna? So? I first heard about Anna in
(26:40):
the fall of seventeen, the fall late winter of I
was thinking about doing a book about female con artists
because I had written the story about a group of
former strip club workers that became hustlers. Hustlers everybody hustlers.
Go through that movie, check it out, and there are
(27:01):
elements of that that I thought were really intriguing. I
was thinking about like doing something about female con artists
in general, you know, just kind of different ways that
female connuters work. That are different than men. Anyway, I
called this photographer that I had met during Hustlers. His
name is Stephen Hirsch, and he um hangs out at
like Manhattan criminal core and takes pictures of people for
(27:22):
the tabloids. And he also has this like kind of
great editorial mind, like he has done these like photojournalistic
series about you know, the bunnies living on the bunny
ranch in Nevada and people kidnapped by aliens, which are
topics that entrust me um. So I was like, is
there anyone interesting that's come in any like kind of
female like criminals that, And he was like, oh, you
(27:43):
should check out this woman Anna. And I looked it up,
and the things that struck me as odd about it
were that Fortress the Hedge Fund was mentioned in the complaint,
which is not like a brand name that tent six
year olds want to be socialites are generally aware of.
And also that she went to see Warren Buffett like
(28:03):
she took a plan to go see like a nine
year old in Nebraska. Those two facts felt very strange
to me, and so I wrote her a letter and
U and she called me a few weeks later and said,
I'm not want to be socialized, and that's kind of
how it went from there. I remember just being riveted
asking you for like what did the letters say? You know?
(28:26):
When did she respond? Like how do you get somebody
to respond to you? You know when you want to
interview them in prison? Like that whole thing, and wondering
how do I make this visual? And it was really
kind of cool to get from you. Jessica would write
me these like very elaborate, incredibly entertaining emails that would
(28:47):
sort of tell me how a journalist works and how
she did her job and the story of meeting Anna.
And what was great about it was is I feel
like I learned a ton of details about hopefully how
to be a journalist. I hope we got it right,
and I put them all in the show. I just
got so um kind of obsessed with it. And I
(29:09):
think that that's became my way in really, which is
why the show became the show that was told through
the eyes of a journalist, because I couldn't I couldn't
see it any other way. Once you started telling me
about how how you did your work. That's so funny.
That is a question I was going to ask you
actually because I remember reading in the New York Times. Um,
(29:30):
I'm not going to pretend that I didn't memorize it,
that you read the story while you were on vacation
and that you like saw it immediately. I remember there
was a line that was like I slept better. I
was like, oh, that's nice. Um. So I'm curious, like
if that original vision that you had for the show
remained or if it changed how it changed. Some parts
(29:52):
of the original vision remained. I mean, I thought for
a long time that the whole story would be the article,
you know what I mean, Like would be said at
the hotel, would be that piece of it. But then
I started talking to you, And the more I started
talking to you, and the more I talked to you,
the more I realized that a Anna is unknowable in
(30:17):
a lot of ways. There were so many different versions
of Anna to be found. But also there was so
much more to the story. Like you know, there was
what happened in Morocco. There was what happened once we
got to trial. There were all these things that was
what happened when she went to California. There were all
the things that happened afterwards that I thought were super interesting.
So it sort of expanded the story so much that
(30:40):
I really wanted to find a way in that it
made sense. And then, you know, we would talk about
these things that just captivated me, some of these things
that were sort of inspired by facts, but we're basically,
you know, sort of fictionalized. Which were episodes two and
three that just captivated me so much that I felt
like we had to grab those because I felt like
(31:01):
they explained so much of who Anna is or how
she came to be. Who am I? This club, this
foundation will be who I am, what I am. I
have to build this so artists and people like me
(31:21):
finally have a home somewhere safe, applies where they belonged,
a place where I Okay, so the first time you
met Anna in person, I know, it wasn't anything like
what I wrote. She didn't insult your fashion. What was
(31:44):
it like for you the first time you met Anna
in person? You know, I remember being like, this is
twenty seven year old girl, This is just an year
old girl. And we had a fairly normal conversation and
she said a lot of things that sounded very reasonable.
(32:05):
Uh yeah, What's what's different is that I did not
convince her to go to trial. She told me in
our first conversation that she wanted to go to trial,
that she thought her case was very sloppily put together,
and that she wanted to go to trial, and even
though her lawyers thought that it was scary to go
to trial, she wanted the truth to be out there,
or you know, she wanted to to see if she
(32:27):
could win a trial, and she kind of made a
case for it that sounded very reasonable. And I had
the first of many experiences with Anna where I left
being like, oh, that was like totally reasonable and she's
totally normal. And then once I was out of the
Riker's complex in the situation, I was like, wait a minute,
that's just like Banana's Like why would you why would
(32:50):
you go to trial? What do you mean like that
the case is sloppily put together? You literally forged? Why
are transferred statements like why would she want to take
this to trial? It makes sense when you're talking to her,
But yeah, she's magnetic. I think a lot of the
things that she says in the first episode when we
(33:10):
first meet her are things that she said in the
video interview, because I found them fascinating. Macaw is pent
in a public picture of me as a dumb, shallow,
superficial person who's just after money. I want you to
know that's not me at all. I'm trying to build
(33:32):
a business. There were so many things that she said
that sounded so reasonable. Literally, like I felt like we
couldn't even put in on the show. I was like, they,
I don't think gonna be believed me. When you said like,
what are you happy at? Happiest? And she said right now,
right now, I'm happiest right now, And I'm like, you're
in prison. How can you be happiest right now. Yeah.
(33:53):
I still haven't gotten my head around that one. But honestly,
I think once again, she's did her own version of
what a character is and how she wants to be
seen in real life, and so it makes her very unknowable.
(34:14):
That's it for now. We'll hear much more from Shaunda
and Jessica's conversation in a future episode. Thank you for
joining us for the premiere of Inventing Anna the official podcast.
Tune in next week when I break down key moments
from the show with Emmy nominated actor Anna Klumsky, who
plays journalists Vivian Kent I think she does like shiny things,
(34:35):
and I do think that she This is backstory stuff
you know that I built, but like she was driven
by the idea that well, if I just cracked the code,
they'll let me in. If you're enjoying this show, please subscribe,
share with your friends, rate, or leave us a review.
All that good stuff. And if you haven't finished binging
Shawnda Land's Inventing Anna on Netflix, please go do that.
(34:58):
We really don't want to spoil it for you. Inventing
Anna the Official Podcast is executive produced by Sandy Bailey,
Lauren Homan, Tyler Clang, and Gabrielle Collins. Our producer and
editor is Nicholas Harder, and the show is produced and
hosted by me Stacy Wilson Hunt. Inventing Anna the Official
(35:22):
Podcast is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, visit
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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