Like Swarm? The showrunner wants you to watch these movies and shows

polygon.com:

There are certain influences on Swarm, the new Prime Video show from Janine Nabers and Donald Glover, that are quite obvious. Both of them wrote for Atlanta, which Glover co-created. And of course there’s the Beyoncé of it all, with Swarm following Dre (played by Dominique Fishback), whose life and obsession with a Beyoncé-like pop star (Ni’Jah, in the world of the show) takes a dark turn.

But the list doesn’t stop there. “We watched a lot of movies. We had a lot of film fans in our writers room. We all have subscriptions to the Criterion Collection. So we were just watching a lot,” Nabers tells Polygon, saying she and Glover watched everything from documentaries to features to “so, so, so, so” much more, “just to think outside the box of the way we see TV right now.”

Considering the level of detail Nabers and her crew put into even a visual album we’d only see for a few seconds on screen, it’s worth unpacking the wealth or influences (cited or not) that you can see on screen in Swarm.

Nabers says she and Glover are both really big fans of Michael Haneke, citing Caché as one of her favorite films (and, indeed, it’s pretty clear to see the similarities between that movie’s poster and Swarm’s). But for Swarm, Nabers said she pulled more from The Piano Teacher, “one of the wildest journeys I’ve ever gone on in terms of just as a viewer.”

“You’re watching a woman who you’re just completely mesmerized by, but also terrified by. And I think just that feeling ofI’m leaning into something, but I just don’t know what I’m gonna get, and just having that feeling kind of be reshaped in every single episode that we watch with this character, was definitely something that was very important to us when telling this story.”

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