Much as we viewers try to mentally piece together all the scenes in Severance to better grasp the big picture of its mysteries, Ben Stiller and his team engage in the similar process of considering how to present those scenes to us. On the final episode of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott’s first season, Stiller explains the intricate way he filmed the season finale in pieces, and reveals the original way the final episode was supposed to go.
According to Stiller, who directed the climactic episode, the finale was shot in spurts over the entire nine-month production. If they were shooting a scene at the home of Mark’s sister and her husband for the first episode, they would also shoot Mark’s cliffhanger moment when he yells “She’s alive!” around the same time. That piecemeal style of filming wasn’t the only quirky directing choice made by Stiller, who reveals on the podcast that he originally was going to shoot the entire finale from the Innies’ perspective on the outside.
“I always imagined it was going to be totally different, visually, than the rest of the show because everything is very set and ordered; not a lot of handheld [cameras], if any. But, for episode nine, we were like, ‘We’re going to use Steadicam the whole time, and it’s going to be flowing because we want to be in the point of view of these characters.”
That would mean instead of watching Innie Mark (Adam Scott) try to visibly squirm his way out of talking with a Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) who’s suspicious of whether she’s actually talking to Outie Mark, we would have been staring directly into Arquette’s judgemental eyes as Mark stammered along. As enjoyably immersive as that would’ve been, it would’ve taken away from scenes like Mark’s punctuating ”She’s alive!” moment, which carries an extra emotional weight thanks to Mark’s shocked look. This is a fact Stiller thankfully realized.
“It can’t be in their point of view the whole time because then we’ll never see them.”
The second season of The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott debuts tomorrow, right after the Season 2 premiere is released. They’ll be breaking down all the nuances of the second season so we can better make sense of the mindfuck we’ll be embarking on for the next 10 weeks.
