Yahoo News Francesca Sloane on the Wet, Wild Joke That Encapsulates the Creative Ethos of ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ — and Her Growing Career
On June 6, the 2024 IndieWire Honors ceremony will celebrate 13 creators and stars responsible for some of the most stellar work of the TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, the event is a new edition of previous IndieWire Honors ceremonies, this time focused entirely on television. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles celebration.
For as long as she can remember, Francesca Sloane has been writing stories.
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Even from the age of four, the co-creator and showrunner of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” remembers “watching people want things, observing their desires, observing their emotions, and wanting to construct that into characters into little books.” Reading, writing, and imagining scenes in her head became Sloane’s happy place, a way of connecting with and making sense of the world around her as a shy child (teachers would blame it on her bilingual household, but speaking more English at home “didn’t do a damn thing”).
Turning that storytelling refuge into anything more than a hobby was the one thing she never dared imagine. “I never even allowed myself to go there in my mind,” Sloane told IndieWire during a recent interview.
On June 6, Sloane will receive the Breakthrough Award at this year’s IndieWire Honors, an accolade for industry minds we’ve had our eye on and whose work ascended a new level in the past year. “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” is sharp and intimate, a showcase for stars Maya Erskine and Donald Glover’s tone and timing. The show wouldn’t be possible without Sloane, working closely with long-time collaborators, including Donald and Stephen Glover. Sloane describes their kinship as one where they would have been friends as children; they grew up in “tough, magical, beautiful cities” (Atlanta and Philadelphia), they share similar obscure references, they laugh at the things you’re not supposed to laugh at.
They are grown-up “children who were really afraid by the magnitude of their large imaginations and had no idea where to put it, and so found it in this way of expressing it through creativity and dark sense of humor. I think people who have that language are my people,” Sloane said.
Sloane attended the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Philadelphia, where she said she barely graduated because she spent so much time exploring North Philadelphia and watching movies at the Landmark Ritz Five, a multi-screen theater specializing in independent, foreign, and documentary film. When she did do her schoolwork, she pursued her passion in film class, making “silly little films” with her friends (one of these involves a “hell portal” located in a school toilet; another is about two queer girls who conspire to murder their possessive boyfriends).
They were supportive, but Sloane’s parents insisted that she get an undergraduate degree, which led her to the California Institute of the Arts. “It was not the greatest decision for a non-trust fund kid with zero access to financial aid,” she admitted, but the curriculum helped Sloane fall in love with longform filmmaking. “I became a really anti-narrative storyteller,” she recalled.
It was a professor named Nicole Panter who encouraged Sloane’s writing during a screenwriting class, but even then Sloane didn’t embrace it as a career. “I was just like, ‘Wow, what a beautiful medium to tell a story … such a simple yet potent way to express scene work.’ I’d sit at home I’d write these scripts, and they’d sit in my room for no one.”
And then Sloane embarked on the artist hustle: unpaid projects, working in a doughnut shop, nannying for celebrities, the works. She and a friend even started a cleaning company called Neat Freaks which led to a misunderstanding with a potential client.
She recalled: “One guy did call and said, ‘Hey, so you girls are the girls that come and clean in your bathing suits, right?’ I was so offended and I said, ‘Absolutely not’ — and then my stomach was rumbling and I was like, ‘But for how much?’”
Through it all, Sloane kept writing, eventually deciding to pursue a masters at UCLA and potentially become a writing teacher like Panter. It was meant to be one pivot and turned into another; when her feature script “Headbangers” won a UCLA screenwriting competition, Sloane earned meetings with industry professionals and signed her manager David Katsman right there in the room.
Working a writers room sounded “horrible” to a former shy kid who used writing as a quiet, personal safe space, but it was there at least that Sloane felt everything click into place. “It was there that I realized writers room are just a bunch of other nerds world building, and I had never been happier … it was some place where I fit in, where my brain was utilized at the best of its capacity. I wanted it for the rest of my life.”
Sloane views a lot of her career as “dumb luck,” but insists that she’s not being humble. The industry is always changing, and Sloane came up in tandem with the rise of character work, nonlinear storytelling, and diversity initiatives for which she’s grateful. “The stars aligned, timing-wise, that my voice was actually something that can work right now in this industry, and I really do value that,” she said. “I really do wonder where I would be, or maybe I’d still be scrubbing toilets in my bikini.”
Back when “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” premiered on Prime Video, Sloane told IndieWire that the production experience was “weird, small, intimate theater troupe of dorks.” Because she and her collaborators speak the same language and had the same goals, Sloane said they could be in a position to respectfully challenge each other when it made sense to, and somehow enjoy even that part in service of the work.
“It felt a lot like a really difficult summer camp with very high stakes because your ass is so so far on the line. But you’re getting to create something with your best friends,” she said.
The best example can be summed up in two words: water bar. Sloane and Donald Glover — somewhat jokingly — had the idea for a water bar in John and Jane’s home, in line with the “lifestyle hipster dream porn” of the apartment. It’s barely visible for most of the show, but production turned it into reality.
“Here we have all of these incredibly talented people designing a water bar, building the water bar, putting water into it, seeing the way that the camera will get the reflections in terms of showing off if we ever wanted a shot where it doesn’t just feel like an insert,” she recalled. “How does it you tell a story while it’s tucked away in the corner that way? How often do we want to see it? All because Donald and I made a joke about a fucking water bar.”
But that feeling holds true for the big picture as well; set design and stunt coordination and “these incredible actors who are actually delivering, so honestly, these silly words that you wrote on a page, with such a level of sincerity and generosity.”
“I just could not believe the magnitude of what happened from literally me banging my head against a wall sitting in front of my dirty computer … to turn into this world that I created with my friends,” she said.
Sloane said she “gave everything she had” to “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” which was renewed for a second season and will pick up with a new pair of Smiths. Now? She feels “like a kid in a candy shop” at the opportunity to make more, emboldened by a story idea and a season’s worth of experience.
“I can’t believe that I get to do this, because I get to be who I am and support myself and my family being exactly who I am, using the same brain that thought up a hell portal when I was 16 years old,” Sloane said. Anything that isn’t true to yourself, she said, “it’s no longer authentic and people can sniff that on you.”
She hopes to keep paying it forward the way Donald Glover did for her, and to keep working with friends and highlighting other people’s passions. “I want to just keep making weird, interesting things that I’d want to watch and my friends would want to watch, and then hope that other people do too,” she said.
“Mr. & Mrs. Smith” is now streaming on Prime Video.
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