The Discovery (2017)

He and his DP, Sturla Branth Grøvlen, watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master three times before shooting, studying the use of color as well as the eccentric pacing. The result is a film whose bleakness suffuses each frame, from the severity of the rising suicide counters displayed like PSAs in public areas to the unforgiving grayness of the ocean. You can practically see the wind.



To get that kind of specificity on the short shooting schedules of independent film, extensive pre-production is a must. McDowell and Grøvlen spent significant time walking around Newport and the mansion prior to shooting, scouting locations and planning out their shots, and Segel got in a month early. The Discovery is unapologetically a visual movie, and Netflix might initially seem like an odd fit. Those of us who went to Sundance are probably the only people who will get to see The Discovery on a movie-theater-size screen. That fact isn’t lost on McDowell, who describes his first reaction to the company’s interest as “mixed.”

“I just remember a supreme calmness. He’s always had that behind the camera: the self-assuredness of someone who knows what they want and when they’ve gotten it,” Segel says. “When we were filming The Discovery, there were moments where we would do three takes of something and he’d say, ‘All right, moving on.’ As an actor, that can almost make you nervous. Like, ‘Do you have it, are you sure you got it?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah, I got it. There’s one more line that I need to get, but I want to get it from a different angle.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s already editing.’”