Interview: Director Minkie Spiro Unpacks Episodes Four, Five and Six of ‘3 Body Problem’

Adapting Liu Cixin‘s 3 Body Problem to the screen seems daunting, especially when the author states that his Remembrance of the Earth’s Past trilogy is unadaptable. But when you have showrunners like David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo steering the ship, who previously adapted another series of incredibly ambitious novels in Game of Thrones, the task of working on the series may become much easier.

However, since the concepts presented in the book are incredibly dense and have no tangible reality of being latched onto, it may be difficult to translate them on the screen. When joining the show to direct episodes four, five, and six, director Minkie Spiro had several discussions with the showrunners to understand their vision and ensure audiences could keep up with what was presented in the episodes, as she tells Awards Radar on Zoom:

“Many of the concepts and the big set pieces are not grounded in any form of reality.  A lot of the science-based world, from Wade’s [Liam Cunningham] perspective, the San-Ti or the Sophon [Sea Shimooka], is very ethereal. There’s nothing tangible to get a bite onto, and so you’re starting with a blank canvas. When I was speaking to David, Dan, and Alexander about other about the Sophon sequence or the nanofiber sequence, I very quickly realized that the best way forward was to sit down with a storyboard artist in the first instance and brainstorm these weird, wonderful, fantastical ideas to build for animation. Everything is available to you. That was exciting and liberating for me as a director. I pitched these to David, Dan, and Alex, and the conversations continued from there. We had to be careful to ensure the audience could keep up with it and stay with it because it took me more than five reads to get my head around the concepts. For example, I wanted to ensure this was a tangible concept with the invisible fibers. How do you explain why these are incredibly powerful fibers? We set it up earlier in the season, but there’s nothing to process or understand how these two poles are winched up across the Panama Canal. I had copious meetings with the science advisor, who explained layman’s terms well. In that respect, I would add a few things to the equation.”

Episode four of the series contains one of its most shocking scenes in which Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) is revealed to be the leader of a cult movement preparing for the arrival of the San-Ti on Earth. This is a particularly personal moment for Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), who realizes she never knew who Ye truly was. In setting up that important moment in the episode, the director admits that it didn’t read as personal on paper, but upon realizing Ye’s impact on Jin, she wanted the betrayal to feel far more gut-wrenching:

“When I was rehearsing, thinking about it more, and understanding Ye Wenjie’s impact on Jin and the Oxford Five growing up, I wanted to make that betrayal feel even more gut-wrenching. The way I blocked it and directed Jess was to amplify how personal that felt, as well as the betrayal that came with it. It’s amazing for the audience to have this shocking moment. Initially, the announcement didn’t say Ye Wenjie. It just said our commander. We changed that in a post because we felt it would hit a bigger punch if we named Ye Wenjie at that moment, as well.”

On the other hand, episode five contains the most technically impressive sequence of the series, where the Judgment Day oil tanker gets sliced down by Auggie’s (Eiza Gonzalez) nanofiber technology. As the visual effects team previously discussed (here), there were many challenges in crafting and shooting that scene, which Spiro reveals was originally planned to be shot on an actual oil tanker until COVID-19-related restrictions made it impossible:

“On something as big as Judgment Day, one had to break it down because originally, we had planned on actually getting an oil tanker and shooting a lot of it on the top of it and in some of the corridors. But with COVID, it was impossible. We designed the top deck of the Judgment Day oil tanker, which the visual effects department then joined together. It was important for me that we had children in the sequence. Not to see them massacred but to remind the audience that this was a community and that they didn’t look like freaks. They were just normal people. What was vital to me was to emotionally engage in this moment before we got to the massacre, which was a minefield because I added more work for myself. But I think it paid off by integrating SFX as much as we could in camera and then amplifying it with the wonderful work that the VFX did. You have this visual and mind-blowing sequence for the audience, but there needed to be enough tangible stuff that it didn’t feel CG. Of course, they had to scam bodies to do the slicing. But we went down to basics. We had magnets over tables every 50 centimeters that had to be spliced. Off camera, it was just as dramatic as on camera because we had like twenty pairs of hand-pulling stuff or triggering magnets so that lights would fall, and tables would fall apart. It is quite a task.”

During our video conversation, seen below, we also had a chance to discuss planning episode four’s shootout sequence, the conversation Wade and Jin have with the Sophon, leading into the “You Are Bugs” cliffhanger in episode five, while also talking about its incredible final shot. Spiro also directed episode six, which is far more character-driven than episodes four and five, allowing us to discuss expanding the relationship Will (Alex Sharp) has with Jin and Saul (Jovan Adepo).

You can watch my full interview with Minkie below and stream all episodes of 3 Body Problem on Netflix today:

[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]