Dickinson Creator Alena Smith On Why Billie Eilish Is Our Modern Emily Dickinson

There's hardly anything new about depicting the teenage experience on screen. There really are multiple films and television shows about coming of age, and what it means to be young and in love, young and mad, and young and totally terrified of the world around you — a global that oftentimes doesn't take young people or their emotions seriously. That experience is universal, and that's precisely what makes Dickinson so refreshing. It's ultimately about a teen — yes, this particular teen is American poet Emily Dickinson (played by Hailee Steinfeld) —  yet it's smart enough to learn that whether you're growing up in 1850 or 2019 things, and then some emotions, never change.


Yet that was all segment of creator and showrunner Alena Smith's plan. Though set in the 19th century, Dickinson isn't a common period piece. The costumes and sets are period-accurate, yet the content is intentionally modern; it's using the events of Dickinson's life in the 1850s, and the themes noticed in her work, to contextualize what's still happening now. Emily wants to pursue her dreams of becoming a published poet, nevertheless her father forbids it, afraid of what the people of Amherst will mention about a women author. Emily is frustrated, sure, nevertheless she's still living. She throws home parties, gets high, and hooks up with her best friend-turned-secret lover Sue Gilbert (Ella Hunt). That youthful excess of emotion and all of its several colors is the heart of the Apple TV+ series — and at the heart of every good coming-of-age story. In Dickinson, the young characters are as eye catching because the wallpaper adorning their bedroom walls.


"All of it comes from her poems," Smith tells MTV News. Any time you read her poems they are packed with wit and irony and deviousness and satire and force and desire. It's all there. People have an idea who they think she is, although they haven't spent enough time reading her work."


In our conversation with Smith, the creator and showrunner talks about creating the show, her own fascination with death and the works of Emily Dickinson, why teens today are vibing with the 1850s, and the eerie relationship between Dickinson and Billie Eilish.


MTV News: Emily Dickinson's relationship with death is at the center of her most famed works. While you were a teen, did you ever have a fascination with death? 


Alena Smith: Not any more or far less than anyone else. Emily Dickinson wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems about death, and in her life she was surrounded by death. There was one year where she lost 35 companions — in one year. Segment of what was so radical about Emily's poetry was that she was questioning the meaning of life with relationship to death in the way that an existentialist philosopher would ask the question. One of her most famed poems, "Because I may not stop for Death," depicts the fantastical experience of the seeker getting picked up by Death and getting taken for a carriage ride around the town. We got to dramatize that in our very first episode. Emily gets picked up by her fantasy version of Death, which is Wiz Khalifa.


MTV News: Why was it so critical to redeveloped that moment in the initial episode?


Smith: I wrote the opening episode way before I wrote the rest of the show, so it was the opening thing that proposed itself to me as her origin story. Emily is told by Death that she's only going to be famed right after she dies, so she says to him, "Can you kill me right now And he says, "No, you're going to live into your old age." And that's setting up the bleak irony of Emily Dickinson's life, which is that, externally, it was pretty boring and not a lot happened to her, nevertheless internally, she was writing some of the greatest works of writings ever seen — routinely waiting to be appreciated in a way that would only happen soon after she was gone.


MTV News: You wrote this pilot a couple of years back. Any time did this idea come along, and what did it take to finally get it made? 


Smith: The idea came from loving her poetry and reading a biography of hers any time If I was in my early twenties plus it really resonating with me. This is the story of a radical, young female artist who is ahead of her time and who is searching to be understood. It was definitely compelling enough that I was able to devote years to the project and seeing it through to it finally getting made by Apple. It's such an ideal space for it because we're all about breaking into a new sort of storytelling, yet one with plenty of heart.


MTV News: I am guessing that Apple gave you space to experiment as a showrunner and room to do things your own way. 


Smith: A show like this may never be made in a long-established network context as the production necessitates are also high. The reason why we are able to execute the ideal period setting with contemporary music and dialogue is because it's more like a movie than a TV show. I had all 10 scripts finished before we began, and we shot the episodes in pairs, with each director coming in for a block of two episodes. We were doing things differently than a long-established model, and yes it allowed the storytelling to be elevated.


MTV News: This was your first time as a creator-showrunner. What was that experience like for you, and what is one thing you learned about yourself? 


Smith: Making it even crazier that I was doing this for the initial time is that also had twins As soon as I was making the show. I learned how essential it is to surround yourself with positive people. It is a really hard job, and what was so pretty about the experience was how much each person thought in it. We had a really cohesive, positive set. That comes through in the end.


MTV News: Was there room for group effort between you and the actors on set? 


Smith: Absolutely. I come from theater. And most of my skill set as a TV showrunner is rooted in my training a playwright as well as someone who produced my own plays in New York immediately after grad school. I'm habitually coming at things from an ensemble mindset. Each person from the production designer to the music supervisor, we're all in conversation together and discovering the special tone of the show together.


MTV News: Was John Mulaney routinely your first decision to play Henry David Thoreau? 


Smith: He was! We were so lucky. We kept getting our first choices. There was a fantastic meeting of the minds because I think [John] is so funny, and he really got why I thought Thoreau was so funny. It's very gratifying any time the people whose jokes you like also like your jokes.


MTV News: Between Dickinson and Little Women coming out later this year, the 1850s are really having a pop culture moment. 


Smith: And we have Zosia Mamet playing Louisa May Alcott in our Christmas episode.


MTV News: how come do you suggest young females now are really vibing with the 1850s? 


Smith: Well, we all did grow up reading Little Women, right? A lot of children's literary texts is set in the 19th century, so I think some of it is just seeped into our unconscious. Although I also think that America today is in a very combustible place with relationship to gender and sexuality and race and we can actually benefit by looking back at our history and at the time leading up the Civil War and seeing the kinds of fault lines that were alive in the culture then and seeing the ways in which some of the same ones are happening today.


MTV News: Little Women and the 1994 film are so impactful to my entire girlhood in so several ways. What were some of your coming-of-age influences? 


Smith: Certainly Little Women and Anne of Green Gables. And in some ways I think that Dickinson is a twisted version of Anne of Green Gables. I also loved The Royal Tenenbaums, which is another reference point that I've used to talk about the Dickinson family member. They are a crazy categorize of aristocrats who never leave each other's sides — they're codependent and overly involved together. And once you watch The Royal Tenenbaums and a lot of Wes Anderson's movies, you don't necessarily know what period it's in. So that was something that I was attempting to do with Dickinson — construct a global where you lose track of the present or the past. And then naturally Clueless, a key literary adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. It brought it into the 90s and reinvented what the 90s were as a result. And My So-Called Life, which is what made me wish to prepare television.


MTV News: I've already began to be able to see fans online shipping Emily and Sue. I love that the show dives into that relationship. What was the decision in back of bringing that ship to life? 


Smith: One of the things that's been happening in Dickinson scholarship within the past decade is this huge investigation of the connection between Emily and Sue. We have come to learn that the image that we perceive of Emily Dickinson as this virginal spinster in a white dress who did not have any sexual experiences was false. It was created intentionally by her first editors. However once you look at who Emily Dickinson really was needless to say you find somebody who was brimming with passion and desire, and that was expressed in all of her poems. Any time as soon as she crushed, she crushed hard. She had relationships with several different people, all of whom she yearned to be understood by, although the person who came the closest to understanding her was Sue, who was her childhood friend who became her sister-in-law.


I don't think any of us know the truth of Emily and Sue's relationship, nevertheless in this show we think about it as a queer romantic friendship between two young girls who are following very different paths into womenhood. Where Sue is going to put on a veil and become a bride and, ultimately, a mother, Emily is going to devote herself single-mindedly to her art. The two of these are going to remain embedded in every other's lives and Emily is going to write some of her greatest poems and letters to Sue.


MTV News: Who did you find yourself connecting to during this process? 


Smith: This is Emily's story, and as it's her story it's also my story. And one of the fun things about Emily Dickinson is that we all get to make our own version of her, and this is mine. I don't think it's the definitive one. Or the authoritative one. It's my own creative response to the spirit that I feel in her poems. And to the facts in her biography that resonated most with me and my coming-of-age experience. I feel the most connected to Emily, although as a playwright, my training is that the writer has to play all of the parts, which is really hard, especially any time some of the parts are in fights together. I love all of the characters and can visualize the world from each of their perspectives, which is the joy of screenwriting and playwriting for me.


MTV News: Did one character's voice come a little bit also conveniently to you? 


Smith: Death? I certainly wasn't expecting Wiz Khalifa to understand the role as much as he did. I felt like that was pretty wild. There was some mind-melding happening between us.


MTV News: You said Wes Anderson being a reference point for the series. Once I think of a Wes Anderson film, I think of the vibrancy of the world and the color palette. Dickinson is also a really colorful landscape, which is a nice contrast to the themes of Emily's poems. What was the process like to make the visual beauty of the show?


Smith: Myself and all the designers immersed ourselves in the most specific, accurate specifics of the period. And we were never breaking the rules of the period, yet we were habitually searching for the specifics that felt uncannily relevant or fresh today. As an example, the patterns and colors on the clothes and on the wallpaper. Picking these really bold and psychedelic prints — although all of those are period-accurate and people did dress in those clothes and put that wallpaper on their walls. Also, apparently, they were changing their wallpaper all of the time. Making the period explode with color because that's not how we think about it in our minds.


My set decorator noticed these collages that were made by, essentially, bored girls in the 1850s who were cutting faces out of newspapers and magazines and gluing them onto these weird watercolor drawings of butterflies and bugs. There could be ducks in a pond with funny human faces. That seems exactly like something you'd visualize in Rookie mag today. It's the exact sort of surrealist aesthetic that could be on the world wide web, on someone's Tumblr. We recreated some of these collages and put them on the wall of Emily's bedroom. We took that space and brought it to life by having some ferns and feathers or organic specimens that Emily would find on her walks and certainly these collages and drawings that Emily would have done herself.


MTV News: It goes to show how the bedroom walls of teenage females really haven't changed all that much during history. 


Smith: Exactly! Once I went to the Dickinson homestead, I went to the Evergreens, which is the home that Sue and Austin lived in. You go upstairs to the nursery and there really are Victorian paper dolls glued to the walls that were from the kids. They put them there in the 1860s. Once I saw that, I felt a chill in my body. Because kids do that right now. That's the aspiration of my show is to have each person look around and wonder what year it is, in fun ways and creepy ways. I don't think things have changed that much.


MTV News: with the exception of the music in the show, which is very contemporary.


Smith: There were routinely specific music cues. In the pilot I wrote, in the initial beat, I wrote that Kendrick Lamar was playing. We didn't just be using a Kendrick Lamar song, although that was the tone. It was habitually going to be a period show with contemporary music. Then we got to have the fun of picking the cues, both with my perfect music supervisor — he has the hugest catalog of music in his brain — and working with Apple Music, where they would send us a Billie Eilish song that hadn't been released nevertheless and before I even knew who Billie Eilish was. We got to imagine Emily Dickinson's mixtape and show the way that her inner consciousness was bursting at the seams of this repressive period she was stuck in.


MTV News: I think if Emily were a teenager in 2019 she would certainly be listening to Billie Eilish, just as I think Billie is probably reading Emily's poems right now. 


Smith: there really are a lot of eerie connections between Billie Eilish and Emily Dickinson. I got sort of freaked out While I first heard it. I was like, "Is this Emily?" There's a phrase that's been used to describe Billie's music, and that's "gloom-pop." I think that phrase properly captures the aesthetic of Dickinson. It is gloom-pop. And I think that's how younger folks are feeling these days. Life is serious. A lot of shows about young people depict their problems as trivial; this is a show about young people dealing with heavy stuff, and we do deal with heavy stuff any time we're young — and we make fantastic art out of it.