Hannah Fidell Reimaging Her Own 'A Teacher' Indie Into An FX Mini-Series & More [Deep Focus]

Indie filmmaker Hannah Fidell is circling back to her roots. While she has made relationship dramas like "6 Years," the Netflix comedy, "The Long Dumb Road," and directed TV ("Casual," "Sorry For Your Loss"), her latest project is the most ambitious of her career.  It’s a remake and reimagining of her own work, her 2013 directorial debut “A Teacher,” about a female teacher who has an affair with one of her students, and the implosion of those events. 2020’s “A Teacher,” now a 10-part FX series is much different. Influenced by the events of #MeToo and her own personal experiences, “A Teacher,” changes the perspective and point of view of the film and reconfigures it to also give space to the victim, in this case, Nick Robinson. Starring Kate Mara as the teacher, “A Teacher” also expands the story, in Fidell’s view, more of a proper beginning, middle, and end, but also with a long epilogue about consequences and the impacts of abuse.

In this Deep Focus episode, we spoke to Fidell about “A Teacher,” the ways she wanted the audience to feel complicit in the relationship, a new political series that she is writing she calls a cross between “Euphoria” and “House of Cards” and she tells us about directing on the upcoming Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee sex tape mini-series for Hulu.