Season 2 Episode 4 of Westworld is quite possibly one of my favorite episodes of any TV show ever. “The Riddle of the Sphinx” is a haunting story of how mankind is caught in an endless cycle of simultaneously trying to prevent its own destruction and inadvertently speeding it up. The episode is dripping with powerful, thought-provoking symbolism and laced with engaging, creative cinematography.
Just as interesting as the episode itself, however, is the personal story of the episode’s director, Lisa Joy. As a first-generation daughter of British and Taiwanese descent, Joy certainly followed an unconventional path to directing. In an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, Joy explained that she was always interested in writing from a young age, but that writing as a profession had seemed “far away and inconceivable, like wanting to be an astronaut or a pop star.” Thus, upon graduating from Stanford, Joy entered the corporate world. Yet Joy continued to indulge in her passions of writing every day, authoring several short stories and TV scripts.
After two years with the esteemed management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, followed by a brief corporate strategy stint with Universal Studios, Joy decided to attend Harvard law school (it’s casual). It was during law school that Joy wrote her first proper TV script and submitted it to Hollywood screenwriters. Upon completing law school, Joy found herself back at McKinsey in San Francisco. Two weeks later, Joy got a call in the middle of one of her McKinsey meetings, offering her to chance to work on a new TV show called Pushing Daisies on the condition that she quit her job and fly to L.A. immediately. After some deliberation, Joy called the partners at McKinsey and quit on the spot to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. Nine years later, Joy co-produces the critically acclaimed HBO drama, Westworld, along with her husband Jonathan Nolan. Her directorial debut, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” is arguably one of the greatest episodes of modern television and stands as the best episode of the entire Westworld series.
But Joy’s unique path was certainly not without obstacles. In addition to the enormous gamble she took abandoning her high-paying McKinsey job with her crippling law school debt, Joy faced tremendous adversity as an Asian woman entering an industry dominated by white men. As Joy explained in an interview with Esquire, “[as a woman], it’s hard to get that first chance, and if you mess up, you just don’t get a second chance, right? So you always want to exceed expectations out of the gate.”
Early on during her time with Pushing Daisies, Joy was pulled aside by another junior writer and told “you really shouldn’t talk in a room because you’re just a diversity hire, and no one wants to hear from the diversity hire.” Yet Joy’s encounters with racism and sexism didn’t deter her efforts. As Joy explains, “Being told by that one writer to stay silent had the opposite effect: I figured I had nothing to lose and that feeling was liberating.” Joy’s second Hollywood gig was as a writer for the popular USA network show, Burn Notice. Joy once again bucked the trend as the only female writer for the show, creating funny, masculine characters despite the pervasive counternarratives in Hollywood that women can’t write men or be funny.
Westworld comes natural to Joy. Like the strong female characters in the show, Joy has fought to remove the shackles that confine her. “[Westworld] is a summation of 30-plus years of living as a woman put into fiction,” Joy explains. “It’s a story that explores [the shackles] and talks about the need for rebellion.”
