🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
Florida Man creator Donald Todd knows you know what a film noir is, how a private eye investigates and what a femme fatale looks like. “I’m not pretending Florida Man is anything we haven’t seen,” he tells Tudum. “What I want to say is: it’s a new look at a lot of things we have seen.”
Most noirs don’t take place in sunny locations, so Florida Man is already a twist on the form: The limited series follows Mike Valentine (Edgar Ramírez), an ex-cop who is reluctantly pulled back to his home state to find his mob boss’ runaway girlfriend, Delly West (Abbey Lee). When Netflix presented the opportunity to create posters based on Florida Man that look ripped from the cover of a pulp fiction novel, it felt like the perfect nod to the series’ influences. “I loved it because it harkens to a certain kind of viewer of the show, who will go, ‘Oh I get what we’re doing here,’” says Todd.
But the Florida Man team was careful about using the words “noir” and “pulp” to describe the show’s style. “Noir just means so many different things to so many people,” Todd says. “Pulp can have humor, and noir really doesn’t — it’s all delicate. The Florida I know is very much a pulpy state, with grime and no polish. There are strong shadows and light, obviously, which is the idea of noir where you’re caught between light and dark all the time. We talked about these things constantly when we were making the show.”
The posters are just the beginning. Todd breaks down all the specific noir and pulp references featured in Florida Man below:
When the Netflix marketing department came up with the concept for our posters, they didn’t realize that one of my main inspirations for the show was Night Moves with Gene Hackman. It’s this great existential Florida private eye in the classic, “this may or may not work out” form. Mike doesn’t mean to be a private eye, and I love any of the old existential private eyes. The Maltese Falcon (1941), you know? That’s what noir is — when the guy’s always in a place of gray morality and can be dragged one way or the other. That’s very much Mike.
Melanie Griffith played this 16-year-old girl who runs away to Florida and needs to be brought back — and her name was Delly. I also named Sonny’s boat Night Moves. Problem is, we never shot the boat from the back, where the name is. It only appears when Mike is looking up the GPA coordinates of the boat — meaning where Delly is, on it — in a logbook in the finale.
There’s a lot of ways to do femme fatale, and we did the shot of Delly on the bed with the gun at the end of Episode 1 very specifically. It’s staged to absolutely be a classic cover. We said to the director, “Let’s make this the cover of a pulp novel,” with Mike standing there, the camera over his shoulder looking at her. You can’t do any better than that. It’s a Body Heat, Palmetto type of reference, but we only do it once. We’re trying to let you know that this is the relationship you should be paying attention to — and it’s dangerous.
The picture of Rita Hayworth on Delly’s mirror when we meet her in Episode 1 is from Gilda. She doesn’t know who she is, but she knows she’s with a mobster [played by Emory Cohen]. The idea of her looking in the mirror and at the picture is, “Who am I putting on tonight? Who am I this time?” What I wanted [the picture] to say was that she’s prepared to be whoever she needs to be. We just don’t know that ahead of time. But in retrospect, we can look back and say that she’s prepared to play whatever role she needs to play [to survive]. Because she will.
Bonnie and Clyde wasn’t a reference as much as Mike and Delly became [them]. You can’t not reference that or [The Highwaymen (2019)] with Woody Harrelson. Once you’ve become partners in crime, you’re going to wonder if Bonnie and Clyde comes up. That’s why Sonny wants to point out to Mike in Episode 4 that it didn’t end well [for them]. If Delly thinks they’re going to be a Bonnie and Clyde, Sonny’s saying, “Finish the movie first.”
My favorite movie star is Barbara Stanwyck. It didn’t even occur to me until now that Delly basically was Barbara Stanwyck, even though Sonny tells Mike in the finale that Delly has a bit of Barbara Stanwyck in her. I was looking up a Barbara Stanwyck quote for him to say, and I found the one about gold from Wagon Train: “Is it wrong to want the gold that gives you a better life?” I didn’t do it on purpose, but Delly is Barbara Stanwyck to me. That’s what I like in a female heroine. The way that Barbara Stanwyck was funny as hell, but no one pushed her around. I admire that so much.
Florida Man is now streaming on Netflix.
