In 2019, Max Winkler was an indie film director about to level up.
Having cut his teeth directing sitcoms in the ’10s — including “New Girl,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Fresh Off the Boat” — 2017’s dark comedy “Flower” was warmly received by audiences. His next film was the gritty boxing drama “Jungleland,” which starred Charlie Hunnam and Jack O’Connell. Debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival, it got solid reviews, and seemed like it could be a commercial hit — maybe even get some awards consideration.
“I made this movie that I thought was my best movie,” Winkler says. “It came out in the middle of COVID in theaters. It was part of a junk deal from the financier to sell to Paramount. It was so crushing, and I had no money and I had just bought a house and was completely broke. My wife was pregnant at the time. At a certain point — I’m still an artist, but I stopped pretending I was someone else. I stopped pretending like I had to try and be Paul Thomas Anderson, which I’m never gonna be, because there’s only one Paul Thomas Anderson. I became a craftsman in a way, and I was just like, ‘All right, fuck it. I need to make money.’”
Winkler first entered the Ryan Murphy vast universe of television shows through directing episodes of both “American Horror Stories” and “American Horror Story” in 2021. What he admired about Murphy’s vision was how his fascinations aligned with populist ideas.
“The interesting thing about Ryan, same thing with Spielberg, is what they’re interested in happens to be the thing that the rest of the world is interested in,” Winkler says. “It’s insane. If I was left to my own devices, my interest is, ‘How do I make it feel like “The Last Detail,” which appeals to you and me and seven other people?’ With kids and the actual fire of ‘No, I have to work,’ I was able to say, ‘How can I take these ideas that are a little bigger than I’m comfortable doing? How can I still make it the way I made my movies, with a specificity and, God willing, a craftsmanship and a level of care?’”
Ultimately, the pair kicked off a robust collaboration that grew and grew, with Winkler directing episodes of and executive producing nearly every Murphy project, from the “Monster” franchise to “Love Story,” “The Shards” to “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans”
“I think we both genuinely like to impress one another,” Winkler says. “He writes the script and the scripts are really, really good. Or he does the dramaturgy for it, and says, ‘Are you interested in this?’ If it’s something I feel like I connect to, I love working with him. I find his brain fascinating, and the fact that I happen to find him to be truly singular and brilliant is the first part of it. So when he turns over a script and says, ‘Are you interested?’ I’ll go and I’ll make it, and we’ll talk about it. And we talk about what our influences are and what we want it to feel like. And then I will try really, really, really hard to surprise him and impress him and shock him by the time he sees a cut. We go back and forth and back and forth, and it’s like a dare. My collaboration with him is something that is really important to me.”
Even though Winkler is in Murphy’s inner circle, the creator is constantly full of surprises, as Murphy takes unexpected turns. For example, Winkler first caught wind of “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story” while in the middle of keeping things running on two wildly different series.
“I read pages without knowing anything about it,” Winkler says. “I was shooting ‘Love Story’ and I was editing ‘Ed Gein’ at the same time. I thought that maybe ‘Monster’ was going to take a break. And Ryan called me. I knew Ryan and [‘Monster’ showrunner] Ian [Brennan] were thinking about a different version of the show with some different people involved. He called me and said, ‘What do you know about Lizzie Borden?’ I was immediately floored by the rhythms of the writing, the sense of humor and the energy and the femininity of it. I felt so much empathy for Lizzie, and who she is when we meet her. Ian and Ryan are genuinely funny human beings, and I could feel their black humor in this — and it excited me tremendously.”
That penchant for dark humor reverberates through Winkler onto the set. Hunnam, who became friends with Winkler after “Jungleland,” and has worked with him such on projects as “Ed Gein” and “Lizzie Borden,” says that Winkler’s wit helped formalize the tricky tone on “Lizzie Borden.”
“One of the great joys of my career is getting to make Max laugh,” Hunnam says. “He laughs a lot during takes behind the monitor, and you try with something that you think is going to be funny and play it out. Whether you hear that laugh or you don’t is a barometer of how successful you’ve been. If we were making him laugh, we felt like, ‘All right, this is probably on the right track.’”
Despite his laughter, Ella Beatty, who plays Lizzie, says that Winkler also has an openness that allowed her to experiment in portraying the complex character.
“He has such a spirit of play and emotional availability,” she says. “So there really was an environment of trusting what happened and getting really specific on your homework in the beginning, so that you can come in and not show any of it and you can just play.”
Working so closely on so many of Murphy’s shows not only gave Winkler a creative charge — “OK, I can express myself in a different way and still do what I do well” — but the newfound spotlight of high-profile projects also gave him an exciting new relationship with art.
“I want to make really good things for people that actually get to go and see them, because I’ve never had that experience,” he says. “I didn’t know you got to talk about the things you made while they were out. These last few years, I’ve made things — between ‘Ed Gein’ and ‘Love Story’ and, I hope, ‘Lizzie’ — where I’m actually getting to interact with people in its intended window. It’s delightful. A really nice part of it is to just feel like you exist. You’re embarrassed to admit it sometimes, but you do want people to see this shit. You work so hard on it, and in your greatest moments, you feel like Orson Welles. In your worst moments, you feel like the biggest fucking loser hack of all time. Being present in the process and not making anything for a result is super important. But having kids allowed me to say yes to things that I was afraid to say yes to because I was an idiot, and still find a way to express myself and build a career that I have now, which is way different from when I was in film school and had a very small view of what a career could look like.”