“It was a very unique process the whole shooting of the show,” Rogen told TheWrap during a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Apple. “Everyone who was a guest, we would give them our spiel, basically, and walk them through the process and a part of that spiel was, ‘This is our editor Eric. He will be giving the notes that we essentially would normally be saying behind your back and a few months from now.’ “

Kissack was the only editor Rogen and Goldberg met with when they were planning “The Studio.” The editor, who received a Primetime Emmy award nomination for his work on the series’ first episode, said he knew that Rogen and Goldberg’s plan for the show was an ambitious one, to put it mildly.

“When Seth pitched the show to me and explained how he wanted to do every scene as essentially a oner, my brain started spinning out and I immediately started thinking, ‘OK, how are we going to do this?'” Kissack recalled. “You can pull off a oner. I mean, oners are done often. But pulling off a oner that’s also exciting and dynamic and funny is a really, really hard challenge.”

The solution that Rogen, Kissack and Goldberg landed on was bringing the editor to the set of “The Studio” every day of principal photography so that he could give notes and “live edit” scenes as they went along. That created a dynamic on set that Rogen said only made “The Studio” better.

“The more we got in tune with it, the more we were just like, ‘Tell us how you would edit the scene and what you would be looking for and we can maybe incorporate all of that into the shot,'” Rogen revealed. “[Eric] would be as nuanced as, ‘Oh, I would cut to a reaction shot of Ike [Barinholtz] and then I would go back to you.’ We would do it and he would be like, ‘I would hold on that reaction shot for, like, a split second longer and then I would go back to you.’ Then we would do a whole take again just to hone in on that.”

Kissack’s vocal involvement in the shooting process initially came as a surprise to everyone except Goldberg and Rogen. “In the first week, I noticed a lot of people were like, ‘This editor is crazy. Look how opinionated he is! He won’t stop talking!'” Goldberg remembered with a laugh. “We had to be like, ‘We want him to do this! This is an arrangement we’ve created.'”

“I’ve never heard of an editor being on set in that manner,” “The Studio” co-creator added, and Kissack echoed that remark. “I’ve visited sets on other shows, but never [been] there for all 60 days,” the editor noted. “It was a learning experience for everyone. But by the second or third week, it was sort of like, ‘Oh, yup. Eric’s here. He’s going to help us make this better.'”

Kissack was so involved with the daily making of “The Studio” that he became someone the cast and crew felt like they could truly rely on.

“I think that the actors eventually — our core cast especially — came to see Eric as a safety net,” Goldberg revealed. “They’ve never had that [experience] where they’re being told, ‘That’s not fast enough and I know it and you’re going to do a better job delivering that joke if you speed it up 10%,’ [especially by] an editor.”

“The Studio” is now streaming on Apple TV+.

The post How ‘The Studio’ Mastered the Art of the Unbroken Take: ‘It Was a Learning Experience for Everyone’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“My first cut of [the episode ‘Blame It on the Rain’] was actually pretty serious and straightforward. Then, when I was working with Carl Franklin — my director on that episode — we decided to loosen up some of the moments, go more to the audience and really have the audience tell us how ridiculous that moment was,” Tachdjian told TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Netflix. Watching a son dedicate a breakup song to the mother he murdered was one of the many complicated tonal changes the team behind “Monsters” had to navigate.

The story of the Menendez murders is one of the best known true crime sagas in modern American history. In 1989, Erik and Lyle Menendez shot their parents, José and Kitty. Initially, the brothers told authorities the killings were connected to the mob. But the more police poked into the case, the more the grisly truth came to light and the more the public became fixated on these handsome, wealthy murderers.

According to Tachdjian, it was important to series co-creator Ryan Murphy that the series captured both the weight of these crimes and Erik’s allegations of sexual abuse as well as the public’s fascination with these brothers.

“We were underlining a pre-existing style that had to be a part of the show because appearances is really a part of what made the Menendez story so interesting,” composer Julia Newman said. “What the show does so well, what [Tachdjian] really set the tone for was establishing the psychological spectrum, the emotional spectrum that we were going to be playing with, which was quite large, quite stylish and quite dark. It really hit the most intense points of all of those.”

This care was also baked into the music of the series. The second time “Monsters” shows the murders, the scene is accompanied by a low, ominous hum that later becomes the soundtrack of sorts for the series.

“The whole idea was that when you see the boys kill their parents for the second time, it was meant to elicit something different,” Julia Newman said.

Thomas Newman, who collaborated with his daughter as a composer on the series, agreed, noting the sound is meant to “deepen your sense of the characters, what they are and how far they had to go.”

“It helped give you a sense that these characters had a deep hunger for something,” Thomas Newman said.

Julia Newman was responsible for crafting the humming melody, which started with her playing low fifths on the piano. She then recorded herself actually humming, though her intention was to have someone rerecord the vocals.

“We were like, ‘Don’t touch it,'” Tachdjian recalled.

“It really set the tone for the nature of our collaboration on the rest of the series,” Julia Newman said.

“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” is now streaming on Netflix.

The post ‘Monsters’ Editor and Composers Talk Navigating the Tonal Shifts in Netflix’s Intricate Menendez Story | How I Did It  appeared first on TheWrap.

“One of the things that we were all adamant about was we wanted, especially the core group [of actors], to be able to do the pages but be able to improvise,” Denis told TheWrap during a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Fox. “So live on set we would be doing what was written and then immediately starting to play with [it].”

Denis Leary stars in “Going Dutch” as Colonel Patrick Quinn, a decorated U.S. military officer who is reassigned to the least important Army base in the world, after going on an offensive rant. Appalled by the leisurely ways of the base, he begins to reshape it to his liking, only to run into resistance from his estranged daughter Maggie (Taylor Misiak), the base’s former commanding officer.

Maggie and Patrick’s relationship is at the heart of “Going Dutch.” As executive producers on the series, both Denis and Jack knew that meant it was of paramount importance that they cast the right actor as Captain Maggie Quinn. “It was a long process of casting [with] the biggest focus, obviously, on casting Taylor’s role,” Jack explained. “We spent a long time going through multiple rounds [of auditions], but Taylor was always at the front [of the line].”

Once Misiak and Leary were on set together, it was quickly made clear to the latter that they had found the right performer to play his on-screen daughter. “I said to our director, ‘Get a medium and a close-up, just because, if we’re going to improvise here, let’s make sure we have it,'” Denis recalled. “And, again, I love when this happens. We started the scene and about four seconds in, I was like, ‘Oh my God, can I keep up with this girl?’ She was already throwing stuff at me.”

“Every take, it was like that, ” Leary said. “It was so electric.”

Jack collaborated professionally with his father for the first time when he worked as a production assistant on the set of the FX dramedy “Rescue Me.” Over the years, the two have found ways to make sure that their personal, familial relationship never gets in the way of their on-set work, and that was the case again when they made Season 1 of “Going Dutch.”

“To his credit, without me having to tell him, ‘You have to treat me like everybody else,’ sometimes he would come in and go, ‘That was really good guys. Denis, that sucked. Do something else,'” the actor recalled with a laugh. 

“I think sometimes it is on me to be the one to tell Denis the thing that everybody else is afraid to tell him, if it’s a bit of direction or this or that,” Jack revealed. “Sometimes, that becomes my expertise, which is fine.” Or, as his father put it, “He’s the Denis whisperer.”

“Going Dutch” Season 1 is now streaming on Hulu.

The post How the ‘Going Dutch’ Team Created an Atmosphere of ‘Electric’ Spontaneity On Set | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

Flashes back to the fated boat ride were interspersed through much of the season, but the moment of Yas’s choice not to tell anyone when her dad drunkenly jumps off the boat as a joke hits hard. Harder still after previous scenes dove deeper into how bleak their father/daughter relationship had become. Abela said the emotions of the entire trip where still with Yas when she confided in Harper after.

“Yasmin did not want to be alone with this information and with this guilt,” Abela told TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by HBO — part three for “Industry” after previous chats with Ken Leung and Harry Lawtey and Sagar Radia. “What was very useful is we kind of shot all of the boat stuff in chronological order — at least in terms of I had done all those scenes with my father already so I had that kind of physical memory and sensual memory of him pinning me down, splashing water in my face and physically holding onto me on the boat. That fear and that hatred and that anger was all really there still.”

For Myha’la, Harper was one of the few people to understand how awful Yas and her dad’s relationship had been so this outcome was not a huge surprise. There are few people better equipped for covering this up under pressure than Harper though.

“We know this about Harper, that she’s quite quick on her feet, she’s a strategist, that is not exclusive to business,” Myha’la said. “She did everything she could do to cover up whatever evidence there could be.”

She added: “That felt like the first genuinely totally selfless thing that I’d seen Harper do in all three seasons. Right, wrong, moral, immoral or otherwise she said ‘cool I’ll help you hide the body’ literally.”

“I think it’s the moment of the most tenderness at least Yasmin experiences on the show,” Abela finished.

“Industry” Season 3 is streaming on Max.

The post ‘Industry’ Stars Myha’la and Marisa Abela Chart Season 3’s Guilt-Ridden Boat Ride: ‘That Anger Was All Really There’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

Of course, Schaeffer knew that songwriters Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez were the people she needed to call first. The trio had previously worked together on “WandaVision,” Marvel’s first series on Disney+, which also happened to introduce Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness. They did so with another hit song called “Agatha All Along,” which earned a Grammy nomination.

But “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” required a whole lot more lore in its lyrics.

“When we first got the job, Jac gave us a list of things that had to be in this song,” Anderson-Lopez explained to TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Disney+. “It had to include the five elements. It had to include instructions for the road. It had to include a bit of a MacGuffin word that got wrong. There were all these things, like a recipe that had to go into the soup.”

With such a list of ingredients though, Schaeffer noted it became a bit of a balancing act.

“It was a tall order to try and figure out how much plot goes into the actual ballad,” she said. “We knew that it would be a heavy lift, that the lyrics needed to carry our mythology. It was a very dense mythology, and we didn’t want to be too prescriptive in a way that would hamstring us later. We very much leaned on the Lopezes as poets.”

Schaeffer also sent the idea of the ballad to costume designer Daniel Selon early on, to give him a well-rounded idea of the women he needed to come up with looks for.

“She sent me her original outline and it had so much information in it, so much character, so many specific things about placement, time, the feeling tone of each witch, and it also had all the information about the ballad,” he recalled.

“That it was a song, that it was a spell, that it was a story, that it was a myth, that it was a con. I was completely enamored with it. I was able to offer her options and ideas that played into the complexity of that original concept.”

In the end, the Lopezes wrote several versions of the ballad, including a 70s cover version with clear inspiration from multiple rock icons. The duo admits that it was “like being asked to write a hit” single. And shooting each version was nothing short of a concert for everyone on set.

“I really thought we were going to blow the roof off the joint,” Schaeffer said. “It felt more enormous than, I think, anything I’ve been a part of, and it was the combination. Of the music itself, the power of the performers.”

“Even the crew was like, ‘Way to go, that was cool,'” Bobby Lopez recalled. “‘Rockin’ witch song, man!'”

“The Local 1 guys came up and they were ‘That was really awesome. I’ve not seen anything like that,'” Anderson-Lopez agreed with a laugh.

You can watch Jac Schaeffer, Daniel Selon, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez go in-depth on creating “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” in the video above.

“Agatha All Along” is now streaming on Disney+.

The post ‘Agatha All Along’: A Behind the Scenes Look at Crafting the Original Song ‘The Ballad of the Witches’ Road’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

If you haven’t seen “1923” yet, you might want to tread lightly, as we are discussing details from the very end of the series — including the fate of the characters played by Schlaepfer (as Alexandra, a free-spirited British woman who falls in love with Brandon Sklenar’s Spencer Dutton) and Nieves (as Teonna Rainwater, a rebellious Apsáalooke who is on the run from dangerous forces in Season 2).

Schlaepfer’s big moment, unsurprisingly, is her character Alexandra’s reunion with Spencer. They had spent virtually the entire season apart and her character had gone through hell — including, but not limited to, some kindly strangers offering to drive her through a snowstorm to get to him only to freeze to death. (This is the tip of the iceberg.) They finally reconnect and it is perhaps the grandest, most sweeping moment in a series made up almost exclusively of grand, sweeping moments.

“We hadn’t seen her have an ounce of joy all season, so when that reunion scene came we were like, What is that going to be? We don’t want it to be cheesy. What is it? How do you portray that relief and love that she’s feeling,” Schlaepfer told TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Paramount+. “It was almost like a puzzle. Every day we needed to find a new level of pain or heartbreak.”

Nieves spoke about a quieter conclusion for her character that is just as powerful as the bigger moment between Alex and Spencer, which occurs towards the very end of the series. Teonna, having killed a tormenter in the first season, finally faces justice — and the judge just lets her go. It’s oddly fitting, since this is a character that was never allowed a moment’s peace (if there was peace, it was usually accompanied by violence or pain). But at the end she finds herself free — or at least adjacent to an approximation of freedom.

Incredibly, Nieves said, “That was one of the first scenes we ever shot. We did everything completely flipped,” Nieves said. “I was terrified. I wanted to make sure I was doing right for the community and I didn’t want to get anything wrong. To have that be the first scene to come back to was emotional. She’s been through so much.” There were also some practicalities she factored into the day. “We just bawled our eyes out and I tried to keep my hat down, because it kept flying off,” Nieves explained.

Nieves said she wanted her character to “leave with purpose.” She also teased an imagined future for her story. “Ultimately, I believe in my heart that Teonna in that moment, realized she’s never going to back down and she’s always going to do what she’s going to do for her people. We don’t know what she has on her horizon. She could be with child!”

“1923” is now streaming on Paramount+.

The post How ‘1923’ Stars Julia Schlaepfer and Aminah Nieves Found the Emotional Space for Their Big Finale Moments | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

The 15-episode series follows a team of doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals through an eventful shift at a Pittsburgh trauma center in real time. While most medical shows would lean into rare diseases or romantic plotlines to add drama to the proceedings, the team behind “The Pitt” leaned into a verité approach to its storytelling and filming — a move that has given the show a rare stamp of approval from the medical community.

“The idea for the show was really to have this immersive feeling with the camera, we are a part of the team in the ER and we’re following them through this journey,” director of photography Johanna Coelho told TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by Max.

Knowing the team’s mission from the start, production designer Nina Ruscio said she designed the show’s Los Angeles set — a sprawling emergency room setup with everything, except running water — to provide 360-degree views around the main room and more intimate spaces to allow the camera to follow the action documentary-style.

The first 10 installments immersed viewers into a more typical day in the ER, dropping breadcrumbs to a potential catastrophe to come. By Episode 13, a nearby mass shooting has sent the hospital into disarray with an avalanche of injured patients coming in for treatment. Things take a turn for the worse when Robby’s stepson Jake (Taj Speights) and girlfriend Leah arrive with injuries of their own — and Leah is quickly circling the drain.

“He can’t save his stepson’s girlfriend. Probably the only healthy relationship in his life is going to be jeopardized by not being able to save this girl,” Wyle said recalling the heartwrenching episode. “He knows that everybody else is right, and he knows that this is a futile exercise, but he can’t quite admit it to himself.”

In filming the sequence, Coelho’s team opted to switch camera lenses to spotlight the moment Robby realizes there’s nothing left to do for Leah. And there’s little time for Robby to process the loss before he has to tell Jake the news — a difficult conversation all medical professionals face, though rarely for their own loved ones — which Wyle said he approached by letting his scene partner take the lead. 

“I just remember trying to be as simple and clear, and put all my attention on him and take all my cues and behavior off of what I felt like I needed to shore him up and make sure that he was going to be as OK as possible,” Wyle added. “Taj is such a beautiful actor, I really can’t take any credit for that scene — because it’s really his scene — and we’d earned out of all of that chaos this one quiet moment to have this one devastating conversation.”

That commitment to realism paid off, as “The Pitt” was quickly renewed for a second season, and boasted impressive audience growth to reach an average of 10 million viewers globally per episode. But that success has not steered them off the show’s initial mission.

“People really identify with these characters and where they are emotionally. So all we really have to do is say, ‘Where are they now? How do they feel now?’ And we’re in the ballpark,” Wyle said.

“It almost feels like we’re also hospital staff. We come back for another day of work,” Ruscio added. “There’ll be successes, there’ll be failures, but we will do our absolute best.”

“The Pitt” is now streaming on Max.

The post ‘The Pitt’ Team, Noah Wyle Break Down Immersive Approach to Filming Robby’s ‘Devastating’ Loss in Episode 13 | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

The moment comes after both characters have their own troubling nights. Eric (Leung) spends the evening on a bender and then hits the trade floor wired for a long day riding weird energy. Robert (Lawtey) suffers his own breakdown and visibly cracks at the start of the day. It’s after that where Eric pulls Robert aside and has him shouting the mantra “I’m a man and I’m relentless,” which then resonated with many viewers.

“I remember when we were shooting it it was too much,” Leung told TheWrap during a new installment of How I Did It, presented by HBO — our second for “Industry” after our chat with Sagar Radia. “Too much, too fast, too soon. We kind of found or felt our way to what eventually became the scene as you see it.”

He added about the finished product: “I remember feeling like we just went through something.”

Lawtey wondered how long Eric had used that saying as a mantra to push him through the days on the trade floor, and Leung countered that it might not have been something he’d verbalized before.

“I think it was improvised to use that as a pep talk,” Leung said. “I think it speaks to his state of ‘today is a huge day and I’m not in the state for it.’ So there is no time to talk about losing clients or feeling bad. There’s no time for any of this. We have to just get on our horse. I think that’s where the man/relentless thing comes from.”

Lawtey said he was not expecting that moment to resonate with fans – or of all the questionable things Robert has done in the series this would be what he was approached about.

“Of all the peculiar things I’ve said and done in the show, this is the one that garners the most attention from just like out and about,” he said. “If I meet people on the street or whatever, I’m surprised how regularly people will say this back to me now.”

“Industry” Season 3 is streaming on Max.

The post ‘Industry’ Stars Harry Lawtey and Ken Leung Unpack Viral ‘I’m a Man’ Pep Talk: ‘People Say This Back to Me Now’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

Episode 4, titled “White Mischief,” follows a day in the chaotic life of the Pierpoint associate — kicking off with the reveal that Rishi is deep in debt with loan sharks hot on his tail. The hour, written by series creators Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, shows how Rishi gambles and cheats his way out of the impossible situation as his personal life also begins to fall apart.

“It’s a crazy mindset to be in,” Sagar Radia told TheWrap in a new installment of How I Did It, presented by HBO. “The interesting thing about the gambling scenes was that it was my day one of shooting [this episode.] It was actually a really tough place to start. It picks up where Rishi is arguably at his worst in terms of the addiction and the illness he’s suffering.”

During an office Christmas party, Rishi collects £8,000 from several employees after some horse race betting and gambles it in a casino. He initially wins big and uses it to party, leading to a fist fight with another patron. Then he keeps gambling and loses everything, even pondering using his wedding ring to keep going.

Upon his return home, his wife Diana (Brittany Ashworth) admonishes Rishi for his infidelity and gambling addiction, especially for it putting their family’s lives at risk. The argument brings out that she too has been cheating on Rishi, with a family friend whose cricket pavilion he has been renovating in his off-time. Radia praised the show’s creative team for giving him the platform to showcase a range of emotions through the wild episode.

“I played Rishi for three years at this point, so I kind of know who he is. But when you have an episode like I do, I kind of just need someone to emotionally tell me where I am on that graph on any given day,” Radia said. “Our wonderful director Zoé Wittock was great at guiding me emotionally [throughout shooting].”

When hope seems lost, Pierpoint learns that the UK chancellor is approving a rumored tax cut that raises the value of the pound and leaves Rishi £18 million richer — a lifeline to settle his debts with the loan sharks and at work.

To celebrate, Rishi destroys the pavilion the next day and calls his loan shark to say he’s recovered the money. Then he takes out one more loan.

“The cycle starts again,” Radia said. “I think everyone’s left thinking, ‘Oh crap. Nothing’s changed here. Same old Rishi.”

“Industry” Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Max.

The post ‘Industry’ Star Sagar Radia on Rishi’s Brutal Standalone Episode: ‘A Crazy Mindset to Be In’ | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.

“The challenge with this movie was that we both had to give people what they were expecting, but also surprise them,” Ball told TheWrap for a new installment of How I Did It, presented by 20th Century Studios. “We’re standing on what’s done before and elevating [it] into a level that wasn’t possible a couple years ago.”

The starting point for Winquist, who earned a Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination this year for “Kingdom,” was returning to the work he did on the previous “Apes” trilogy. “One of the first things I did when we began prepping this movie was to gather a collection of shots from the previous three movies that illustrated what we photographed on the day and why we shot things the way we shot them,” he recounted. “It helps everybody understand what we are all about to embark upon together.”

The process of putting “Kingdom” together, which Ball equated to “making a puzzle piece by piece,” required taking entire mo-cap rigs into the Australian wilderness where production took place so that the movie’s production team could shoot Teague and his co-stars on location in their performance capture gear. “The benefit of that is that we’re able to capture our actors in a natural environment and really kind of get the best performances out of our cast,” Winquist explained.

This filming technique demanded not only that multiple, multipurpose cameras be used on set, but also that at least two versions of every mo-cap scene in “Kingdom” be shot: first with the movie’s “Ape” actors in the frame and then again without them. “The goal for us was to try and get what we call a clean plate where there’s no performers that have to be painted out,” Winquist said. That may seem tedious on paper, but the freedom it provided Ball and his team during post-production was invaluable and well worth the extra effort.

“One of the great things about that process is that we’re able to actually go through and not just stitch performances together. Now that, with the cameras, we’re recreating the backgrounds, we can actually stitch those cameras together,” Story noted. “So that just opened up a whole new level of possibilities for Wes and the editors.” This meant that Ball and co. could combine their favorite performance takes with their favorite environment shots.

“The benefit of performance capture is we can actually take the performance of that one character from take three and put them with the camera from take five,” Winquist revealed. 

The longtime VFX supervisor believes that “Kingdom” and its fellow modern “Apes” movies have proven that performance capture can be utilized no matter where a film may be set. Filmmakers need no longer be constrained by the requirements of the technology.

“I think what these films have shown is that it’s possible to take this kind of performance capture approach to wherever a filmmaker wants to make their movie,” he revealed. “”The future, I think, is pretty bright in terms of where we can go from here.”

The post ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Reached New Heights for VFX and Performance Capture | How I Did It appeared first on TheWrap.