Making It Look Easy
After 15 years of working from home or in coffee shops or on spare couches, the filmmaker Joe Swanberg finally rented an office. It’s comfortable, but nothing extravagant: a signless concrete storefront on the North Side of Chicago next to a Central Asian restaurant. There’s a studio apartment upstairs with a kitchenette and built-in shelves. “All these books were in my house as of a week ago, driving my wife bonkers,” he says, folding spare towels. “Just that alone is worth the rental price.”
Swanberg, 36, had spent August and his Chicago-set Netflix anthology series, the second season of which debuts on December 1. In truth, he’s still getting the place set up. (It took him three tries to figure out how the ceiling fan worked.) That the office feels to Swanberg more like “a bonus” than a necessity isn’t remotely surprising: Few directors working today have done more with less.
