(Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Task”, especially Season 1, Episode 7.)
In the final scene of “Task”, Tom (Mark Ruffalo) hears the sound of birds outside his window, which sends him into a moment of quiet contemplation before a cut to the end credits, which are also images of birds. That the emotional finale’s closing credits forgo a big musical moment, in favor of the quiet ambient sounds of birds in the wild, underscores how ingrained the animal had become with the themes, characters and filmmaking of “Task.”
When series creator Brad Ingelsby was a guest on this week’s episode of Filmmaker Toolkit podcastasked IndieWire what had inspired the birds. The simple answer: Ingelsby was surrounded by birders when he created the HBO miniseries. Ingelsby’s uncle, a former Augustinian priest who inspired Tom’s character, is a bird watcher. That the actor portraying him also turned out to be an amateur birdwatcher — Ruffalo whipped out his Merlin app to identify a tanager on set — might have been written off as pure coincidence, if it weren’t for the executive producer and bird-loving director Jeremiah Zagar, which became the main driving force behind the animal’s incorporation into “Task”.
“And so, then it just kept expanding,” Ingelsby explained on the podcast. “When we got to the fifth episode in the car, I thought, ‘Well, let’s pay it off.’ I had read about these stray birds that leave their usual territory and often don’t know how to get home.”
To Episode 5 road trip is without a doubt the series’ most defining scene, and the dialogue about the shredding bird its most poignant. After Tom shares the parable of the bird that can’t find its home with Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), the fleeing thief confesses that he saw himself in the bird.
Zagar told IndieWire that once he read Ingelsby’s early pages for Episode 5, aptly named “Vagrant,” it opened the floodgates, something Ingelsby encouraged. One of the reasons Ingelsby initially reached out to the Philly native and “We the Animals“the director would help get his”Mare by Easttown” segue from the realm of domestic drama into nature, and the birds felt like an extension of what the director had already done with the quarry and forest scenes.
In turn, Zagar saw the birds as a visual expression of the ideas Ingelsby explored in his scripts, particularly Tom’s struggle with faith, and Robbie’s free-spirited nature. “The thing about birds is they’re ethereal,” Zagar said. “They fly, and that’s something that we associate with a very spiritual quality. When you see birds and you feel birds, you imagine some kind of higher power.”
One of the first images of “Task” comes from Zagar putting a camera in a bird feeder, which would grow into the creation of a bird unit.
“(Cinematographer) Alex (Disenhof) and I thought of this bird unit day,” Zagar said. “We put up bird feeders everywhere and grew this garden so we could catch as many birds as possible in a day. There’s no green screen in the show, and we had this plethora of bird shots at the end. You see how alive the world is just outside of Philadelphia, where Tom’s house was.”
As IndieWire previously covered, Ingelsby did not want to end the series with the return of Tom’s son Ethan (Andrew Russel), but felt he needed a moment with Tom that captured his acceptance that his son’s return “is going to be challenging, but there’s a spirit in him that’s ready to face what’s coming.” It was thought that the simple final scene of Tom preparing Ethan’s bedroom and giving the always subtly expressive Ruffalo a moment of quiet introspection would do the trick.
“(Executive producer) Mark Roybal and I were on set talking about the ending and (how) something was missing at the end. We didn’t know Robbie, who wasn’t in the last episode,” Zagar said.
“Task” had been structured around the parallel stories of Tom and Robbie, and until Tom held Robbie when he died in episode 6, Pelphrey had been as much the show’s lead and protagonist as Ruffalo.
“‘How could we have Robbie in it without having Robbie in it?'” was the question Roybal asked Zagar. “And it became clear to me that day when he asked that question, I was like, ‘It’s birds.’ The whole thing is that Tom is changed at the end of the series, and he has to feel Robbie’s spiritual presence without Robbie being there. And so the birds are that they’re not prescriptive, they don’t have a specific metaphor, they’re simply Robbie, they’re holding his soul.”
To hear Brad Ingelsbys full interview, subscribe to The Filmmaker’s Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotifyor your favorite podcast platform.
