There's a fantastic, thousand-page book by David Thomson about [David O. Selznick]. Again, it's not the best argument or the best advertisement for his story, because most people aren't going to read a thousand-page book. But I feel like the rise and fall and the work [Mayer] produced - not just the movies, but the memos, the volume of writing - he's just so passionate, and that's really exciting.

I was trying to see if I could produce an episode - completely write it and research it and record it and edit it - all by myself in a week.

You read these stories of people who were in Hollywood in the late '60s. After they found out about the murders, everybody was like, "Have you met [Charles] Manson? Have you been to that ranch?" In some way, everybody felt connected, but what was it like for people who really were connected.

There's a fantastic, thousand-page book by David Thomson about [David O. Selznick]. Again, it's not the best argument or the best advertisement for his story, because most people aren't going to read a thousand-page book. But I feel like the rise and fall and the work [Mayer] produced - not just the movies, but the memos, the volume of writing - he's just so passionate, and that's really exciting.

The stuff that I've been doing lately is political. It's not always about people who are super famous movie stars. The fact that people are still taking a chance and listening to the blacklist episodes is really exciting.

There are [in Hollywood] some endemic problems and some things that happen over and over again. There's the problem of representation of basically anybody but white men. These are things that we talk about a lot in contemporary culture, and it's interesting to me to go look at film history from the perspective of today.

Between the action sequences, the pleasure lies in observing impeccably dressed Brits exchanging barbed witticisms - making it, basically, Downton Abbey with cyber crime and shower sex.