This podcast is spoiler free in regards to today’s final episode of HBO’s limited series Love & Death, “Ssssshh”
On today’s episode of Crew Call we speak with Love & Death EP and episodic director Lesli Linka Glatter who walks us through the psychology, and the symbolic visual imagery of the Southern fried 1970s Wylie, Texas murder of Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) by the seductive Candy Montgomery (Elizabeth Olsen) after the latter had an affair with the former’s husband, Allan Gore (Jesse Plemmons) — all ironically members of the same Methodist congregation.
The final episode, “Ssssshh” which dropped today, finds Candy taking the stand. Will she get off?
It’s also the episode that Glatter and Love & Death creator David E. Kelley are submitting for the Emmys.
What Glatter adores about the episode is how Olsen’s Candy takes the stand and how the audience is thrusted “to go back to that day (of the murder) and see it through her point of view. It’s not like Rashomon.”
“You only see it (the murder) from one point of view. There’s a juxtaposition of who Candy became and back to that particular day,” Glatter tells Crew Call.
Glatter directed the first four episode of the HBO limited series.
“The police in Wylie, TX had never had a crime like this. I don’t know if they had any murder ever. I don’t believe Candy went over with the intention of killing Betty. If a dozen things happened, if that door opened differently, it would never have happened,” explains Glatter.
And as far as that ax Betty had in the garage: “She had been carrying that around,” says Glatter who calls the murder scene in the middle of the series “the most intense thing I’ve shot in my career.”
To that point, as far as Candy Montgomery goes, “she was a terrible murderer. You don’t take a shower in the victim’s house….she left footprints and handprints.”
We talk with Glatter about the tarnish in this white picket fence world; Olsen’s deft, nuanced turn as a woman on the edge, in addition to Betty Gore’s imperfections, all splashed against a golden Texas sunset.
Next up for Glatter, she’s directing and EPing the Netflix political limited series, Zero Day, starring Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan and Connie Britton.
