‘Severance’ Cast and Crew Break Down the Cliffhanger Finale | Making A Scene

i'll be right back okay okay okay thanks ms cobell i remember when i read that on the page that i call her miscovel i like dropped the script and walked across the room i was like no no no no no no no hi there i'm ben stiller and i'm the executive producer and one of the directors of severance my name is adam scott i play mark my name is britt lauer i play helly r my name is trammell tillman and i play milcheck i'm jessica ligonier the cinematographer i'm jeff richmond and i'm the editor and this is variety's making a scene the goddamn otc's been triggered what that's not possible get to the security office and shut it off now i never knew that the last episode would be he's such a focal point of the show and someone who's been around for a while making stuff but you know people really do care about where you take a story in a series and the idea of being able to satisfy the commitment people have made to the to watching the season but then also leaving questions for the next season that balance is really important everything's sort of been building towards this moment where these three get to open that the door to the outside world and have this question answered this mystery revealed to them they've never looked at the sky before let alone been in the outside and had to kind of keep up this facade of of being someone else it really hits the fan in this episode we saw mill check really unravel this is a guy who is used to being in control and knows how to get what he wants and now here we are and it's all falling apart so the big challenge was making sure that i fought for to get what i wanted if the the finale works for people i think it's because the the writing is there in terms of really trying to address all these questions that have been posed during the season not necessarily answer all of them but answer enough of them you know the audience ended up having lots of questions by the time episode nine rolled around but so did the characters really not up until when we aired the uh the finale was i i don't even think then i was confident that people would be totally satisfied with it you know it it tracks with this show because there's cliffhanger after cliffhanger after cliffhanger and the stakes just get higher and higher i was absolutely engrossed in it and i was enraged you know um i i remember reading on my laptop and seeing that i only had a couple pages left and i said wait a minute they're not going to end the finale like this this is not how it's going to go down and then it ends the way it does with me tackling and adam like screaming to the top of his lungs and i'm like no no no no no i was absolutely floored i remember my heart was pounding while i was reading the script which i don't think has ever happened to me in my career i got to the end and gasped i was desperate for more just like the audiences right now i confer upon you the advanced role of department chief congratulations a handshake is available upon request thank you may i have a handshake we didn't shoot the season in order episode by episode we shot it like a movie and because of covid and because of weather and because of all sorts of scheduling issues over the course of the shoot we had to change things around a lot it was really tricky not only were we going from one episode to another we were also going from one director to another the entire crew there were days where we were doing half a day with ifa and half a day with ben it helped on episode nine that we knew stylistically we were going to go for this idea of being very very subjective and that sort of was different than anything i think we had done in the show up to that point for episode 9 which is such a flow episode we were changing the language completely of the show for those for those scenes in that episode every time we got to an episode 9 scene we it was almost like much clearer in terms of how we had to shoot it and what we had to do and how to prep it even but what indeed is you good luck tonight it's great to meet you helena pretty early on ben told me the idea he had for executing it which is this one continuous flow through the episode when we were cutting we were always aware of the movement of the camera and like always trying to keep the camera alive basically originally and the first idea i had was would be great if this could all be one shot can it all be one shot because we're with them and let's keep the continuity of that and very quickly i realized that was impossible to do it in one shot how are you going to do that how are you going to see their faces and then also see their pov that was also a completely different feeling on set we were now you know it was almost like we're making an action uh thriller all of a sudden in addition to just choosing takes based on performance the camera was as much a performer so that it's always kind of flowing we went with steadicam in the end which is really untraditional for us because ben and i actually both usually dislike doing steadicam it's not our medium it's not our language but it was the language for episode nine that made the most sense because it could connect the camera to the actor my hope was every time we go into a scene i just try to set up a shot that could go as long as it possibly could go it was kind of like trusting that we just were going to figure out our own language for this that wouldn't be associated with some other specific look that has been done before so it's simple trying to keep it simple and then we started to play with this idea of these fritz cuts what they're basically is it's just like random intervals of like one and two frame edits that go back and forth between the outgoing scene and the incoming scene it was something that just tied in for us in a way that we thought okay we can go between the consciousness of the three characters even though they're not connected we should connect them as you know for an audience it's actually not a sound effect it's a um a piece of the score like even in the title sequence that like final image of mark ini and audi mark on the bed it's like and that is both visual and also an element that's in the score that teddy wrote into the like the individual stems of a lot of the cues that he wrote so we took that element from one of his cues then just did like a little back and forth that sort of like has this severed feeling it ended up being really fun because it was not planned ahead of time at all in terms of the visual transitions it almost accidentally created these really cool transitions that we didn't expect when we were moving the scenes around you know you'd push into irving's closet and you know the door was dark and then it fritz cuts to heli coming out of the from the dark door into the gala and it ends up looking like an interesting visual almost thought out transition that was totally not and that just kind of helped keep this feeling of like everything being one continuous scene almost like one uh uninterrupted flow so i'm severing is kind of a combination of two main different aesthetics an aesthetic that you find in the mdr underground world and then an aesthetic that you find on the outside world where people are unsevered and then you have like this weird intersection of those worlds and that's the elevator or transitional scenes where people are going from the image to the audi i always thought of any as being just a subtraction from audi because audi has all this 40 odd years of life experience and any is two and a half years old for all intents and purposes so it was just sort of a quick turnover internally an internal shift when you hugged me before you suddenly became tense what was that sorry it's just parties at the moment when any mark and ms cobell are talking at the party and she doesn't know that it's any mark but she's on the verge of figuring something out she has a feeling did you mean what you said before about your plans of course i remember saying to patricia and ben we've got them at this point if the audience is invested and and is you know liking the show this is going to be such a fun moment such an oh oh my god moment i knew we wanted to have a moment during each person's story that they would see themselves in the mirror because i thought that was a really important moment for each character in the episode they see themselves on the outside yeah they've seen themselves in the mirror at work but this is them seeing themselves in their world in a world they've never been in and i think it's really powerful when you can have the actors looking right at you forgive me for the harm i have caused this world for my actions but me that was actually a last-minute decision to put that into that scene and i'm so glad uh it's there it's the only piece of text that heli r has memorized so i love that she is kind of reclaiming it as a rally cry that's prepping her to go and basically hold herself accountable for her actions uh as helena for trammell it's very enclosed and it's a little claustrophobic for milcheck it's his territory man this is where he shines this is his spot it is his dominion and milcheck reigns milchex knows these people he knows their weaknesses and he knows their strengths so when he's throwing out his aces and it's not working i think it makes milkshake nervous i can get you any perk you want dylan hey this stuff you don't even know about there's there's paintball there's coffee cozies dylan come on he's willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done now whether or not what he's saying is true that's the fun about it i mean there's definitely coffee cozies i i am pretty sure just say the word and i'll get you a coffee cozy literally right now telling you know he has to dig more and find okay you know the coffee cozies that's not working okay so what is it gonna take for me to distract him while i get through this door and also to get him back on my side i talked to ben i said where did this come from like just all of a sudden just like i think that's that's also part of his arsenal i don't think he's ever had to to use it on anybody you know i don't think it's that level of violence but you know if there's things that just need to be cut or maneuvered or switched around i think he just has a utility tool you know on hand just in case she's alive we shot it a lot we ended up doing it a bunch of times because we had to get me running um down the hallway and then running towards the camera and stuff and and it was important to get it right i'm glad we got to do it a bunch of times because it is a specific kind of outrage and terror it's always like this quasi-embarrassing process like if you're in a bar or a party or a restaurant on a show everyone all the background actors and everyone has to be super quiet and you have to raise your voice up but with this it was it was that kind of cranked up to 11 because i was screaming uh bloody murder in a silent house because keeping everything as quiet as possible because i think for any mark as much as his view and relationship with this company has changed over the first season this is a step he never imagined they would take it all comes crumbling down seeing this photo is more than he would have ever imagined here we are and it's the finale so we think okay we're going to get some answers we don't i mean we get we get a couple we're still confused i'm still complex and still want to know more and i think that's the success of this show it's captivating it brings people in without giving too much and you always want to come back for more i felt that there never was any question in terms of how the season was going to end that it had to end on some sort of a cliffhanger but hopefully one that people would feel by the end of the episode that they had had enough answers to certain things but i knew that answering the question of what was going on what the numbers meant and all those things was too much to do in the first season i remember thinking when before we were renewed it's like all right well if it is a one season show it'll be a really interesting one-season show that people will always wonder what happened and someday they might you know ask for another season if they uh if they don't renew it [Music] you

Channel: Variety

Views: 327,145

Keywords: Variety, Variety Studio, making a scene, severance, adam scott, adam scott interview

Id: JsdDwKc6eWg

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2022