But if you assume that gives Roach the freedom to make whatever he wants,think again. He gets pigeonholed. “I mainly get sent comedies and political films,” notes the filmmaker with a rueful smile.
Director Jay Roach has been responsible for the hit comedy franchises Austin Powers and Meet The Parents. His latest work is the eight-part comic noir High Desert.Apple TV+
The 65-year-old filmmaker eventually told his agents that what he wanted to work on were movies with an unpredictable tone,such as thrillers that were quirky instead of menacing. But when they sent him the perfect script,a giddily compelling comic noir update set in the Californian backblocks and titledHigh Desert,it turned out to be the pilot for a streaming series instead of a feature film. Roach was not fazed.
“I read episodes three and four and five and eventually I said,‘I’ll do all eight!’ My agent thought I was crazy,but I really fell for these scripts,” Roach says. “This is the first time I’ve taken on the scope of a show’s entire eight episodes and I hope to do more of these because it’s been a blast.”
Spry and cheerful – he signs off this video interview for Apple TV+’sHigh Desert launch with “peace,man!” – Roach spent much of a year prepping and shooting the show in the Yucca Valley on California’s southern border. He’s come back with one of the best new series of 2023:a hilarious,confounding comedy about addiction,grief,art fraud,and unlikely career paths headlined by a force-of-nature lead performance from Patricia Arquette.
Patricia Arquette is Peggy in the brilliant,bonkersHigh Desert.Supplied
Adding to her run of stellar television performances inEscape at Dannemora,The Act and last year’sSeverance,Arquette plays Peggy Newman,a blithe former drug addict and dealer who avoided jail,unlike her shifty husband Denny (Matt Dillon),but is consumed by grief for her beloved late mother,Rosalyn (Bernadette Peters),all the while risking being marginalised after falling out with her impatient siblings who want to sell the family home she lives in.
“I’m like Mary Tyler Moore on methadone,” declares Peggy,who has a huckster’s persuasive patter,nothing but loving support for her friends,and a questionable grasp on sobriety. When Peggy correctly decides that as well as working in a frontier theme park she’d make a great private investigator,she simply bustles into the life of failing private eye Bruce Harvey (Everybody Loves Raymond’s Brad Garrett) and persuades him to hire her on the grounds that she can drum up business.
“Peggy’s a badass and a survivor. She’s Bugs Bunny and a Martin Scorsese character. Those contradictions are so enjoyable to me. Peggy just believes that she can be a private investigator,a former drug addict and punk rocker,” Roach says. “She goes up against a deliberately trope-y private investigator in Bruce,who’s almost a throwback but is also someone in their own reality no one can force them out of.”
High Desert was created by a trio of female writers and producers – long-time collaborators Nancy Fichman and Jennifer Hoppe (Nurse Jackie,Damages),along with Katie Ford (Miss Congeniality) – and it draws on family figures with a history of eccentric energy and addiction issues. Arquette added further ideas,influenced by her late sister Alexis,so that Peggy came into sharp focus but was never easily defined. The character has moments of buoyant optimism,but from another angle they can easily suggest dangerous self-delusion.
“We all have addiction issues,we’re all addicted to certain presumptions and delusions about the way the world is,” Roach says. “We condemn people with chemical addictions as just being lost,but the show is about going past that to see how rich someone’s humanity is and how they deserve a second choice and a third choice. Working with these women,I felt lucky to have my own eyes opened by what they and the people they loved have been through.”
Bernadette Peters in High Desert.Apple TV+
Roach,who has been married to Susanna Hoffs,frontwoman of the Bangles,since 1993,grew up on the outskirts of Albuquerque,a city surrounded by desert in New Mexico. His feel for the environment was crucial toHigh Desert,which positions the Yucca Valley as a place where people can simply remake themselves or avoid unpleasant self-truths.
“The beauty of it is so overwhelming,but so is the danger. It’s so sparsely populated that it becomes a weird reality,” Roach says. “It’s a perfect setting for Peggy because she’s always a misfit,but seems to force everyone around her to fit her reality and cope with her dysfunction. But she also has a love of people and a desire to inspire and challenge.”
The concise episodes are forever shifting in tone,so that an everyday conversation can veer into the absurd or a jocular mood can give way to the threatening without letting the smile slip. The narrative is studded with crimes both big and small,with the latter generated by a newsreader turned shady self-help maven named Guru Bob (Rupert Friend). There are trace elements of Elmore Leonard’s classic crime novels,Coen Brothers movies,and recent shape-shifting television series such asRussian Doll.
Brad Garrett plays failing private eye Bruce Harvey,who is convinced by Peggy (Patricia Arquette) that she’d make a good detective.Apple TV+
“The authenticity of that takes a lot to capture because often an audience tunes in expecting to narrow a show down to one segment of the human experience,” Roach says. “The key to tone is casting:if you have actors who can portray the characters,then their own individual reality is so complicated that it earns your interest.... Casting earns the audience’s permission to show a breadth of human experience.
“I wanted to cast people who could play that and have a good time. It’s an anxiety dream at times,but at others you cope by laughing,” he adds. “These are people trying to get away from other people,but they end up making a whole other kind of community.”
Roach and writer Danny Strong (Empire),who collaborated onRecount andGame Change,are looking to do another political movie for HBO,with US election denial as the topic,but for now the director is more than happy to enthuse aboutHigh Desert and its leading lady.
“I think I would follow Patricia into anything,” Roach says. “This was her thing and I tried to make it something where Patricia was surrounded by cast and crew who could be inspired by her.”
High Desert is on Apple TV+.
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