One of the (techniques) I suggested, which is something which Nikki and I (had) experimented with before, and also has been used in many films before, most famously more in The Silence of the Lambs… is that interview with Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. The camera’s also between them; they’re looking almost directly at the camera. It puts you in the feeling of being under someone’s gaze, and so we thought maybe there’s moments in the story like that.
There’s sort of this empty liberation that you see throughout episode two that was interesting to explore psychologically. Allowing for those characters to speak to themselves. Then, we asked ourselves what it meant to be the heartbeat underneath what was happening. Some of that was style. Some of that was the hum motif and tapping into a real sense of profound yearning on behalf of these two boys.
I loved the wedding dress. I think it’s super special and custom. I think Alan and I love to play with gender. It’s so cool that on a network show like this, we can have him show up in a traditional men’s suit but then add a wedding dress on the bottom, the red flower details, and his crazy finger wave hairs. I just love how that came out.
I think there’s a parallel. In the show, she’s this mysterious ex-girlfriend character that Joanne (Kristen Bell) wants to know more about. I think, in some ways, that was our experience. We couldn’t figure out who Rebecca was. Is she this type A person? Is she this pushy? Like, who is she? I really couldn’t figure it out for a while. Then, once we got on set and you said the words, it coalesced into something tangible in real-time.
As I mentioned, I can’t emphasize this enough: I must underscore how rare it is to meet an actor like Brian Tyree Henry and have that immediate, instant chemistry. We’re the same kind of actor, we’re both fast, and we’re both a little facile. It was like jumping into extremely familiar territory with someone I’d never seen before. We had a marvelous rapport instantly.
They block-shot the season, so a director would do two episodes and another director the next two. We were editing as the dailies were coming in, and we edited episodes four and five at the same time. So four is the day in the life, and five is the bank heist… It gets a little confusing because you’re trying to focus on the story of both and make sure both feel polished. It was a tight schedule, but it was also interesting doing back-to-back episodes.
Most of it is shot on location, certainly the action sequences. So it’s incredibly complicated in Central London with all the restrictions. We wanna have extremely anarchic scenes but keep everything grounded so you fully believe what’s happening to these characters. Even though they’re shootouts in Central London or King’s Cross Station, you wanna feel this isn’t fantasy land.
It’s a paranoid conspiracy thriller. What is truth in a post-truth world? It hit the sweet spot for me, but it didn’t feel like anything I had done. I had no idea what would happen next, which I always loved. So I jumped in and developed it with Eric, Noah, and Mike for the subsequent five hours and directed all of them.
Jazz guys can play it perfectly every time. It’s like they don’t need to rehearse; they play it. Then you go, okay, we’re gonna adjust this, that the dialogue comes in here, and let’s take the horns down a couple dynamics. I put the picture up on the screen, and we’d be playing, and I’d say to Bob, “When she looks through the door, and she sees the body for the first time, put a little something on that.” And then the bass player will go, “Hey, let me try this.” And the piano player wants to do things, it’s so much fun. So, although we did four and a half hours, it was just a pleasure.
I had a cement mixer. We threw things in and tumbled them, lots of ropes and chains and all that. We hired a real blacksmith to forge a lot of hooks and hinges. We used metal straps and even made a bunch of nails. We had our own little cottage industry going. We had anchors in there, dyers in there, construction people, blacksmiths, leather workers, taxidermists, all that.
