It is difficult to determine a lot about the world of ”Departure weight“And the plans from Lumon Industries – of course beyond the eternal flame that burns between IRV (John Turturro) and Burt (Christopher Walken). But it is a constant balance measure to keep the audience on the back foot, especially now when the apple TV+ series is in its second season, and we know we expect a worrying Dolly zoom every time macrodata Refine Mark S. (Adam Scott) enters an elevator.
The eerie atmosphere of ”Departure weight“Is a complete team effort, from Jeremy Hindle’s excessive production design and Sarah Edwards’, dampened and sharp costume choices to Kinematographers Jessica Lee Gagnés, Suzie Lavel’s and David Lanzenberg’s Velocracy Camera move through the deteriorated floor. However, the first two episodes presented a particularly fun challenge to the editors Geoffrey Richman and Joe Landauer.
Section 1, “Hello, MS Cobel,” takes place completely on the cut floor and section 2, “Goodbye, Mrs herself“Takes place entirely in the” Outie “world in the personal lives of the characters. Combined, the sections tell how the macrodata rebels – Mark, Helly (Britt Lower), IRV and Dylan (Zach Cherry) – end up on Lumon and what they hope to achieve there. The editing Team needed to put together each side of the cut story without being too repetitive or losing tension. Yet they still needed to maintain the small disorientation and ironfisted grip on information that makes ”Departure weight“Such a convincing mystery.
Richman edited “Innie” focused section 1 while Landauer tackled the real life for “outies” in section 2, but unlike the MDR team they did not become silent. “Severrance” is edited with an eye against how each scene ripples in the season as a whole, and both Richman and Landauer told IndieWire about the effort and the importance of getting these sections to set up as exactly as the colored pens in MS Huangs (Sarah Bock ) desk.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Indieview: Geoff, I would love to hear about gathering an “Innie” marathon in section 1!
Rich: I love it, the Innie Marathon section. It was fun to play against the expected pattern for the Mark transition in the elevator. This is the first time we use Double Zolly, where we stay with Innie Mark on both sides of the elevator transition. After the Season 1 final, there is obviously a strong desire to reconnect with Outie Mark to see what the aftermaths are up there. So as we continue to find ourselves on the cut floor, we are essentially as captured and disoriented as Innie Mark. To add the off-carpet feeling, the composer (Theodore) Shapiro made the first half of the section with unknown themes and instrumentation. Kind of as if he made a strange alternative world. The “Severance” theme does not return until Dylan, Irving and Helly are back.
Indieview: is it fun to be something More abrupt and off-charter?
Rich: A challenge in editing was that we can normally use intercuting of different stories to keep up and pass the baton from one story thread to the next. But getting stuck on the cut the floor with land forced all the movement in the story to come from him. Meeting the replacement MDR team is fun and strange and new – but we also had to keep the story forward and get our protagonists back together. So we spent a lot of time calculating the right rhythm during the first half of the section – how long we can stay in each scene, how to keep focus on land and create momentum in editing when we introduce each new story, for example writing the note or try to contact the board.
Indiewire: And section 2 is “Outie” marathon – Joe, I imagine it has the same challenges that are reflected back.?
Landauer: It was a brilliant idea to tell these parallel stories in the first episode of the season. In theory we could first have told the Outie page. But in real “severance pay” mode, it is real fun to hold back information, undermine the audience’s expectations and save these answers for the second section. The challenge with section 2 was that many of the plots we tracked had already been revealed in section 1. We knew the team would return to Lumon in the end, so it was a challenge to shape the section around a series of questions we already had many of the answers to . As the editing continued, we spent a lot of time calibrating the speed and rhythm on how scenes were played based on what we already knew from section 1. Since much of the basic plot was covered in the first section, we could spend more time and emphasizing that reveal character and introduce the outie life to our MDR team.
Indieview: It is so cool that the sections could have gone in both order, in theory. Which came first when it comes to production?
Landauer: We started shooting section 1 just before section 2 started. But since section 1 is in the Innie world, shooting was done on stage, which helped things move relatively quickly. Sitting exclusively in the Outie world, 202 probably had most places in one of the sections, which made for a complex and long photography schedule. As a result, I could look at a full congregation of section 1 long before I had all my scenes for section 2. This was very helpful because I could integrate “Hello, MS Cobel” clearer in my strategy to “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig. ” These two episodes speak to each other in a very fun and specific way, so we took a lot of care and had a great time to connect the two timelines in subtle ways.
Indieview: How would you describe the series’s approach to stimulation and the information flow to the audience? Do you feel that you have been able to experiment a little more in season 2?
Richman: We are always aware of how information is delivered. It is a constant balancing of keeping the mystery alive while still revealing answers satisfactorily. That is why it was so useful in the editing to look at several sections at a time and decide where information falls and how much of what we actually need. A scene in one section may require another attitude to a scene two episodes later because of what has already been revealed or not revealed. When we thought about the flow and pace, we really tried to keep an eye on the season’s story and not just a episode.
Landauer: During Season 2 we have the challenge from an established world. The audience comes in with a lot of orientation that they had not entered the first season. It is another set of challenges to build on a world you know – or think you know – than to introduce a world you know nothing about. In section 2, we introduced the life of our MDR team for the first time in the Outie world, which was extremely exciting for me as an editor and allowed us to slow things a bit and enjoy witnessing the lives of our core characters.
Richman: A large part of the fun of editing Season 2 was to take part of the style established in Season 1 and build on it. The world of history expands a lot in writing, so we wanted and had many opportunities to expand the editing language as well. Of course, this enables more fun experiments in editing, but more practically we can express things and deliver information in a more visually interesting way.
Indieview: Can I ask about the resolution between Helly and Mark and then IRV and Dylan towards the end of section 1? The timing of that, especially with the point, is so gripping.
Richman: It was actually a really tricky transition to pull off. We wanted to go from Helly and mark to go to Irving which rounded the corner. The two corridors were different but the same because it feels like a jumping cut. So we have added a resolution and a pace of silence at the head of Irving’s shot to breathe between the scenes. The resolution opened the opportunity to make a seamless match from one hall to the other, but the angles were different enough because we could not make it work in Avid. So we handed it to VFX, and they did a fantastic job of adapting the two shots perfectly. Add to the top of Teddy’s beautiful point and we had a nice emotional bridge from one scene to the next.
Indiewire: One of the great pleasures with “severance pay”, for me, is how it creates fantastic visual and tonal contrasts, and I am curious about how you think about it in editing – mixing fear and absurd humor, moving from a worrying situation it Is especially for someone who is everyday.
Landauer: One of the most fun aspects of editing a show as “Severrance” is that it defies the genre, which introduces many opportunities to experiment with contrasts and unexpected tons. We always had a lot of freedom in the cutting room to experiment, and as a result there are many incredible moments that never make it the final show, which did not fit the story or did not really hit the brand. And again, Teddy Shapiro’s incredible talents as a composer help us through a lot of experiments.
Richman: To figure out that balance only comes from looking at everything in context and measuring how much we can get away without interrupting the emotional flow or breaking the reality of the scene. Music also plays a huge role in making it work. Teddy is a master in mixing tones in the point, such as taking a typically lighter melody and lacing it with excitement so we can feel contradictory feelings at the same time. Everything contributes to the show’s worrying atmosphere.
New episodes of “Severance” will be released every week on Apple TV+ through the final on March 21.
