It was designing many sounds using outboard gear, sort of taking things out of the computer, doing it with modular synths, and just having a blast creating these textural things that played with music. We had Daniel Pemberton’s excellent score, and for the whole episode, we were making sounds harmonized with what he was doing tonally.
Meghann Fahey: I wanna repeat something that Molly shared with us. This idea is that sirens, as we know them, are sort of monsters who make sailors crash their boats, so what we know about sirens is from the male perspective. Molly said, “I thought maybe we should focus on what the song is, and maybe they’re crying for help. You know, what is it? What are they saying?” I think that is the entry point for our characters. By the end, they’ve all sort of put their relationship to power under a microscope in one way or another. I think it’s a very cool unfolding theme to watch happen throughout the series.
I think when you are playing a real person. Trying to work through her in real life in the first trial, her closing argument was 15 hours over three days. I had something like eight pages, which is still an extraordinary amount for a TV show, but it’s not her 15 hours of that. I think the parts of when I felt like I was her defense attorney. You know, It’s an extraordinary piece of work. I wish everyone could watch it. I thought for a minute about doing a one-woman show of 15 hours of her closing because it’s an aria. She’s just really incredible. It was hard not being able to do the whole thing, but wanting to give the spirit of what she did.
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 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.
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.
The elements were brutal enough, but then you add the scalping, which informed the journey of the main character and was almost psychedelic. I want the cinematography to give you the sense of the surreal reality of that environment. I think Pete told me, “Never lose the environment.” So, from a DP standpoint, always connect the actors to what they are experiencing, the cast, and the character to where they are at the moment.
