‘DTF St. Louis’ Creator Steven Conrad Has No Plans to Make More Movies

When he was 19 years old, Steven Conrad sold his first screenplay, for Wrestling Ernest Hemingway . In the nearly 40 years since, the Florida native has gone on to write Oscar-nominated films ( The Pursuit of Happyness ) and create acclaimed TV series ( Patriot ), but he’s found a kind of career landmark with DTF St. Louis , his savvy exploration of middle-aged friendship and sexuality among Floyd (David Harbour), his wife, Carol (Linda Cardellini), and his new friend Clark (Jason Bateman). “I don’t think I’d been nominated for anything before,” Conrad says. Now he’s up for Emmys for producing, writing and directing the HBO limited series — which received 13 nominations. “I haven’t made anything that had this kind of attachment to this thing in our business,” he says. “It’s all new, and I don’t know quite what it means. But I’m happy that people are watching the show. That means a lot to me.” Related Stories TV 'The Pitt' Showrunner Admits Season One's Notoriety Amped Up Pressure For Season Two: "We Had to Prove That It Wasn't Just a Fluke" TV 'The Beast in Me' Showrunner Knows That the Violent Murder Scene Was a "Potential Tune-Out Point" For Some Viewers

Conrad talks with THR about exploring male friendships, directing his own writing and why he’s focusing on television for now.

There’s a lot of admiration for the way that you explored modern male friendship in this show. Can you talk about the approach you took and the conversations it’s sparked?

It’s the sort of thing that can go missing from your life — a meaningful friendship, one that you can invest some of your emotional life in, to get good news and then want to share it with this person. When you’re a kid, maybe it just happens a little more regularly, but when you grow up, it can really vanish without you even knowing that it did. There can be periods where you just have a realization that you just don’t have all that many people that you would consider friends. Most of us have colleagues and family members, extended family members.

When you are able to absorb the entire run of DTF , it’s positioned initially as this MacGuffin, with this murder case. What it really amounts to between the characters, Clark and Floyd, is some means to organize their friendship around some naughty thing that they can talk about in the fort privately. It had more to do with stimulating their friendship than stimulating their sexual lives. And then I guess it latched on to a period where men were starting to realize in real life that these friendships were not there.

There’s also a unique exploration of sexuality among the three of them. What were you hoping to find there?

Carol’s sexuality is very different from Clark’s, which is very different from Floyd’s. If you have these things, these appetites like Clark has — to want to do X, Y, Z with an intimate partner, and he hasn’t explored those with his partner — they don’t go away. He doesn’t have the courage to incorporate this into his marriage, so what is your obligation to those kinks? Clark allowed me to write about that type of individual sexuality, the person who has forestalled an exploration of the depths of their sexuality.