Director Joshua Butler on The Honesty of Syfy’s ‘The Magicians’ [Exclusive Interview]

From the time he was eight-years old, Joshua Butler knew he wanted to be a director, and he never even considered other career options.

Now, Butler is an award-winning director who has worked on several popular television series, including The Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, Limitless, and most recently, Syfy’s The Magicians.

I got the chance to speak with Butler about his work on The Magicians as well as the ways working in television has changed in recent years.

The opportunity to work on The Magicians was something Butler was particularly excited about. “What I loved about the approach to the magic was, of course, this kind of adult sensibility. I looked at the material, and it felt a lot more to me like Dead Poet’s Society than an adult Harry Potter, which is a label it gets a lot. It’s where magic is used as a metaphor for people who are coming of age and wrestling with identity. And wrestling with the ability to have powers in this world, but not really sure what to do with them,” Butler explained.

“That was what was so exciting about these stories,” Butler continued. “It’s like, you know, college-aged students and their coming of age stories: sex, drugs, and magic, basically. They happen to have these gifts, and they really just don’t have any idea what to do with them. They don’t know how to reconcile that gift with the rest of their lives.”

For Butler, this show is just one example of the ways television has been raising the bar in recent years. “I think that the showrunners John McNamara and Sera Gamble, who adapted the books for television, really, really wanted to make a show that was as honest as possible about growing up. And that’s not necessarily an honesty you’d expect from a Syfy Channel show. But even Syfy Channel has definitely — in the last year — kind of taken on a mandate to produce shows that you would not normally expect from Syfy. This is not a Sharknado type of a series. This is real stuff. This is good, human drama. They were very careful about coming up with a really stellar cast.”

That kind of honesty is something Butler was able to explore in the episode he directed, which will air on March 21st. “My episode that I was hired to direct is very much a look at an entire family that’s wrestling with the gifts of magic. It gets deep into some very interesting family issues that I dealt with, you know, personally,” Butler said. “I think a lot of people can relate to it because it’s a very human story, and I think the magic is secondary to what’s really going on in the series.”

Butler went to USC film school during the mid-nineties, when the perception of television was very different than it is now. “At the time, film was the Holy Grail, and TV was a bit of a stepchild,” Butler said. “As I started working in television, I realized that the perception of television was wrong in the sense that you can, you know, do really exciting work and do filmmaking in the pretentious sense of the word. Even in the context of television.”

“And then as we’ve all witnessed in the last few years, TV […] finally got the respect it deserved as a medium, and in some ways it surpassed film,” he said.

The quality of television has improved in big ways, and the expectations are much higher. “What I think is happening now is that producers and showrunners and executives are all wanting to up the game in terms of the aesthetics of television. They want a feature film look. They want feature film-like set pieces. They want action scenes. They want exciting camera moves. They want production value in terms of the locations. They want a lot of locations. They want a lot of visual effects. They want a lot of special effects,” Butler explained.

Some things, however, haven’t changed quite so much. “What’s difficult is that the budgets and schedules haven’t changed from back in the early days of television, when those shows were designed to have, you know, four or five people speaking in a court room, or six people in a hospital or four people in a police precinct. There’s reasons why TV was designed to be very simple and have people talking and why the procedural is so enduring, because it’s just a very sort of efficient formula and it’s very easy to make those shows. But then, if you’re basically being given a 42 minute feature film script and asked to do it in the same amount of time for the same amount of money it’s just, it’s become a much more challenging job.”

For Butler, one of the most challenging projects he’s worked on recently was an episode of the CBS series, Limitless. The episode he directed was Limitless Season 1 Episode 5, “Personality Crisis.” Butler described the show as, “a perfect example of how they basically spun a feature film that cost a hundred million dollars starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro, into a TV show.”

“Their ambition is wanting to keep the same look and feel of the movie, and it was extremely challenging,” Butler continued. “It was a great show; it was a lot of fun. I’m very proud of the episode I did.”

No matter how challenging, Butler puts everything he has into any episode he directs. “The interesting thing about working in television as an episodic director is that you go from show to show. You’re hired basically one episode at a time,” Butler explained. “So you are able to really put your heart and soul into a story that’s part of the bigger picture. And for me it’s about a one month commitment of my life in terms of prepping and shooting and editing. So I put a month of my heart and soul into an episode of television and then move on to the next one. And sometimes I get to revisit old friends, but a lot of times it’s about just coming into a show and putting my stamp on it as a filmmaker.”

Don’t miss Butler’s upcoming episode of The Magicians, airing Monday, March 21st at 9/8c on Syfy.