Now that “Severance” Season 2, Episode 1 is out in the world, it seems impossible to imagine it opening any other way than it did.
Select (Adam Scott) blinks awake in the Lumon Industries elevator – that is, his severed Innie does, immediately after learning that his late wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is still alive and was formerly employed at Lumon as Miss Casey. He rushes through the maze of sterile white corridors, looking for any sign of life – in search of his not-so-dead wife. It’s set to “Burnin’ Coal” by Les McCann to add extra momentum, until Teddy Shapiro’s haunting score creeps back in.
On the official Podcast “Interruption”, Scott and the director Ben Stiller revealed that the opening stemmed from their own conversations. Stiller asked Scott how he would react in that situation, and they moved on from there.
“Innie Mark has just seen this picture of Miss Casey, and he realizes that she’s alive and that she’s his Outie’s wife — and all of a sudden he’s back in the elevator,” Stiller explained. “And I asked you, what would you do, Adam?”
“My first kind of knee-jerk reaction was to just start running and try to find her,” Scott said. “I was just going to run towards the health center.”
Stiller was pleased with the response, which deserved a classic”Severance pay” corridor tracking sequence but “more elevated … in a way we haven’t seen before.” The sequence ended up taking longer and becoming more elaborate than perhaps even Stiller’s imagination (“much to the surprise of our scheduling team” ), which involved the cinematographer, announcers, production designers, gaffers, grips, visual effects, editing and more.
“Something that on the page was maybe half a page or three-quarters of a page… ended up being ten different pieces, each with different needs in terms of what needed to be done with the set.”
Scott said these pieces were shot over the course of about ten months; a mix of green screen shots, one with a treadmill and a motion control camera, robot arm, and sometimes dismantling the hallway set to the point where it couldn’t be used for other scenes. People who have seen the episode ask Scott if he trained for all the running, but he said he did the scene where the education.
“You should have said you trained by watching Tom Cruise run in ‘Mission Impossible,'” Stiller said.
“— which is actually what I did,” Scott said.
New episodes of “Severance” air Fridays on Apple TV+.
