A running theme of your series The OA is parallelism: parallel timelines, parallel dimensions, the parallels between the groups of people. It’s also something that is a theme in some of your past work— Another Earth , especially, Brit. Where does the interest in this idea of parallelism come from?

Brit Marling

One feels as one gets older that the choices you make really send you off on these forking paths. The farther you get out on a limb, you make one decision, and you go one way instead of the other—and then another way into another. Eventually you’re very far out on a quite fragile limb, and it’s hard to go back to the trunk of that tree.

And so, I think you kind of become caught in the idea of wondering, Well, what if I had gone that other way? Back when we were making Another Earth, I thought a lot about, What if I had stayed in the investment banking world? Zal and our friend Mike Cahill had come up to New York one weekend while I was working at Goldman, and they were like, “We’re doing the 48 Hour Film Project, let’s do it together.” And I had so much work to do, and I was like, “Ah! Should I really do this?”

We ended up making a film in 48 hours together. I don’t think it was very good, but the film kind of put into sharp relief this idea of working hard at banking during the week, versus working hard over that weekend, telling a story I cared about with people that I love. And that juxtaposition made me choose one direction over the other. But that was such a strange, fated moment. You know, what if Zal hadn’t come up that weekend to do the 48 Hour Film Project? Would I still have found my way to storytelling? Would I still be in New York working at a bank? It’s just interesting to think about alternate destinies and the idea that, perhaps in a version where there’s a multiverse and all these things are existing on top of each other, maybe we are living out simultaneous, different versions of the same life.