The latest episode of Severance just feels different. Yes, it’s the first time we explore the relationship of Mark (Adam Scott) and his thought-to-be-deceased wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman), but beyond that, it has a more fluid, lyrical, mind-trip quality well beyond the norm for the Apple TV+ show. That’s thanks to Jessica Lee Gagné, the show’s usual director of photography who made her directorial debut with the episode. In a new interview, she detailed some of the super cool aesthetic choices she made directing “Chikhai Bardo.”
We won’t spoil anything here so if you haven’t seen the episode, do that as soon as possible. However, it’s not a big spoiler to reveal the story is split into multiple timeframes, one being the past when Mark and Gemma first meet and fall in love. To make sure those scenes looked different and more welcoming than scenes that take place at Lumon, Gagné chose to shoot them on film. Here’s what she said when speaking to Collider.
“I’m not the type of person who pushes to shoot on film to just shoot on film,” she said. “I love the medium and I think it’s a privilege to work with it. This was a very contained thing in Severance, but the idea was: what will give you the most immediate natural feeling of nostalgia? What will evoke that warm emotion within people of memories? There is no better medium than that. So it was an obvious choice, but it’s not a simple thing to deal with. But I think it’s what made it easy to shoot memories without having to slap on an aesthetic.”
Throughout the episode, there are multiple scenes with time-lapse to show Mark and Gemma’s life passing by, many of which take place in their house. Well, a fun fact about that is the house they shot in is the one Gagné was living at at the time. So she used down times to film scenes she knew she’d use in her episode.
“I lived in the house, and I needed to shoot things that showed the passage of time, or else this was going to be flat,” Gagné said. “So the gaffer lent me his Bolex and I shot time-lapses in the house. We’d be shooting Severance, and in the morning, I’d be popping off frames for my time-lapse. I actually left the camera there while there was snow falling, snow melting, and because I lived in the house, I could do that.”
“A lot of those extra moments, I let Ben [Stiller] go off and shoot them while we were doing other scenes,” she continued. “While we’d be working on lighting or whatever, he would go off and shoot some stuff with them outside in the flowers and all these things. It became a big, big side project collage thing that I knew was going to become handy.”
This might be the most mind-blowing one, though. The episode has multiple scenes where moments of Mark and Gemma’s past seamlessly transition back either to Lumon or another location. Many of these moments were shot in camera. A few are obvious, like Mark opening a door from one place to another, but a few others are not.
“I wanted to do something that would go from Ms. Casey and Mark and then into the cables and show the room below them, so that was all shot in camera, and it was very challenging to do,” Gagné said. “There are stitches, but still. And then the shower scene, coming out from him, that sequence going from the [spoiler] all the way to the guys at the computers down there, that was a ginormous risk. I had no other… It was [either] that, or cut it.”
Don’t take it from us, though. Adam Scott spoke to Entertainment Weekly and had nothing but praise for his “Chikhai Bardo.” director. “Everything culturally about the show Severance changed when we made this episode, all the way down to the noise the cameras made was completely different,” Scott said. “The equipment was different, and so we needed to shift how we made the show, and I think it looks beautiful. I think Jess did an unbelievable job.”
You can read much, much more from Gagné over at Collider and watch her episode of Severance on Apple TV+ right now.
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