Set in 1965, I Am the Night toggles unevenly between the perspectives of Fauna, who knows nothing, and Jay, who knows way too much. “The 16-year-old girl is the Nancy Drew of the story. She is the noir detective,” Jenkins said. “It’s like, here’s this person with nothing to lose, because she’s never had anything, and she’s the one who is wandering through this murky world, and seeing it all for us. But then the surprising thing is that she has the strongest backbone.”

Because she was raised in a black household, Fauna felt comfortable in Watts or at psychedelic Hollywood parties. Jenkins saw her as the perfect observer, “because nobody knows to even pay attention to her. Her ability to get into all of these different worlds fascinated me.”

Jenkins saw a connection between her obsessions with true crime and superhero genres: “They’re both Trojan horses,” she said. “You’ve got the extreme checked off. Your story is there. And so what you can now do is shade it with all of these real explorations into humanity.” But when I expressed surprise that Jenkins would choose to make a cable-TV true-crime limited series as her follow-up project to the massively successful Wonder Woman, Jenkins sat back on her silver velvet chair and shrugged.

“I don’t have a snobbery about whether it’s TV or movies or whatever,” she said. “I want a shot at making great things. TNT just happened to be the only people that we talked to who I felt were in sync with us.” She said that the response to Wonder Woman hit her like a tidal wave, but she was determined to cram this project into her schedule before she jumped into Wonder Woman 1984. “It just fit!”

Jenkins has been kicking against snobbery since her days as a painting student at New York’s Cooper Union. Conceptual art was in favor then, whereas Jenkins said she preferred painters like Francis Bacon. “I feel like art is this life experience, coming through the lens of you, and back out into something, and so why not have it be the beautiful, big, bold expressions of life,” she said. Some of that art background seeped into I Am the Night, which suggests that art connoisseur George Hodel took the “derangement of the senses” evoked by surrealist painters and thinkers to the point of real-world horror. “Both Sam and I studied painting, and it was interesting to revisit everything that we knew about surrealism through this lens,” Jenkins said. “It rocked my world completely.”

For most of her life, Jenkins was resistant to viewing things through the lens of gender. “I grew up as a product of the 70s, and my mom had been a feminist,” she said. “I was super-aware of the struggles that she’d had, but she did this remarkable job of making me feel like they were over.” Jenkins said she hated being categorized as “a woman director,” especially because what she so often heard was, “Let’s get a woman director to do this male-conceived thing.”

Even after Monster won Charlize Theron a lead-actress Oscar, Jenkins found it hard to get studios interested in her passion projects. “They all wanted me to do their thing,” she said, while a standard response to her ideas was, “I don’t get that kind of story.” Although Jenkins always believed she was interested in telling universal tales, she said “it wasn’t until I had success that I felt like I suddenly could really see the sexism in the world, and in the industry. People weren’t interested in talking about those kinds of stories”—stories like Fauna Hodel’s.