1 day ago
4
It’s hard to pin down much about the world of “Severance” and the plans of Lumon Industries — beyond, of course, the eternal flame that burns between Irv (John Turturro) and Burt (Christopher Walken). But it is a constant balancing act to keep audiences on the back foot, especially now that the Apple TV+ series is in its second season, and we know to expect an unsettling dolly-zoom every time Macrodata Refiner Mark S. (Adam Scott) steps into an elevator.
The eerie ambiance on “Severance” is a full team effort, from Jeremy Hindle’s too-pristine production design and Sarah Edwards’ muted and crisp costume choices to cinematographers Jessica Lee Gagné’s, Suzie Lavelle’s, and David Lanzenberg’s velociraptor camera moves through the Severed floor. The first two episodes presented an especially fun challenge for editors Geoffrey Richman and Joe Landauer, though.
Episode 1, “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” takes place entirely on the Severed floor, and Episode 2, “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig,” takes place entirely in the “Outie” world of the characters’ personal lives. Combined, the episodes tell how the Macrodata rebels — Mark, Helly (Britt Lower), Irv, and Dylan (Zach Cherry) — end up back at Lumon and what they hope to achieve there. The editing team needed to put each side of the Severed story together without being overly repetitive or losing tension. Yet they still needed to maintain the slight disorientation and iron-fisted grip on information that makes “Severance” such a compelling mystery.
Richman edited the “Innie”-focused Episode 1 while Landauer tackled the real lives of “Outies” in Episode 2, but unlike the MDR team, they were not siloed. “Severance” is edited with an eye toward how each scene ripples out into the season as a whole, and both Richman and Landauer told IndieWire about the effort and importance of getting these episodes to line up as precisely as the colored pencils in Ms. Huang’s (Sarah Bock) desk.
Tramell Tillman in ‘Severance’Apple TV+This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: Geoff, I’d love to hear about getting to put together an “Innie” marathon in Episode 1!
Richman: I love that, the Innie marathon episode. It was fun to play against the expected pattern of Mark transitioning in the elevator. This is the first time we use the double zolly, where we stay with Innie Mark on both sides of the elevator transition. After the Season 1 finale, there’s obviously a strong desire to reconnect with Outie Mark to see what the aftermath is up there. So when we keep finding ourselves stuck on the severed floor, we’re essentially just as trapped and disoriented as Innie Mark. To add to the off-kilter feeling, the composer [Theodore] Shapiro scored the first half of the episode with unfamiliar themes and instrumentation. Sort of like he was scoring a strange alternate world. The “Severance” theme doesn’t return until Dylan, Irving, and Helly are back.
IndieWire: Is it fun to get to be slightly more abrupt and off-kilter?
Richman: One challenge in the edit was that normally, we can use the intercutting of different storylines to keep momentum alive, passing the baton from one story thread to the next. But being stuck on the Severed floor with Mark forced all the movement in the story to come from him. Meeting the replacement MDR team is funny and weird and new — but we also had to keep the story moving forward and get our main characters back together. So we spent a lot of time figuring out the right rhythm in the first half of the episode — how long we can stay in each scene, how to keep the focus on Mark, and creating momentum in the edit as we introduce each new story beat, such as writing the note or trying to contact the board.
Tramell Tillman in ‘Severance’Apple TV+IndieWire: And Episode 2 is the “Outie” marathon — Joe, I imagine that has the same challenges mirrored back.?
Landauer: It was a brilliant idea to tell these parallel narratives in the first couple of episodes of the season. In theory, we could have told the Outie side first. But in true “Severance” fashion, the real fun is to hold back information, undermine audience expectations, and save these answers for the second episode. The challenge of Episode 2 was that many of the plot turns we were tracking had already been revealed in Episode 1. We knew the team would return to Lumon in the end, so it was a challenge to shape the episode around a series of questions we already had many of the answers to. As the edit progressed, we spent a lot of time calibrating the speed and rhythm of how scenes played out based in part on what we already knew from Episode 1. Because much of the basic plotting was covered in the first episode, we were able to put more time and emphasis on revealing character beats and introducing the Outie lives of our MDR team.
IndieWire: It’s so cool that the episodes could have gone in either order, in theory. Which came first in terms of production?
Landauer: We began shooting Episode 1 shortly before Episode 2 got underway. But because Episode 1 is contained in the Innie world, shooting was done on the stage, which helped things move relatively quickly. Set exclusively in the Outie world, 202 had probably the most locations of any of the episodes, which made for a complex and lengthy shooting schedule. As a result, I was able to watch a full assembly of Episode 1 long before I had all of my scenes for Episode 2. This was a great help because I was able to incorporate “Hello, Ms. Cobel” more clearly into my approach to “Goodbye, Mrs. Selvig.” These two episodes speak to each other in a very fun and specific way, so we took great care and had a great time connecting the two timelines in subtle ways.
Patricia Arquette in ‘Severance’ Apple TV+IndieWire: How would you describe the series’ approach to pacing and to the flow of information to the audience? Do you feel like you’ve been able to experiment a little bit more in Season 2?
Richman: We’re always acutely aware of how information is being delivered. It’s a constant balancing act of keeping the mystery alive while still revealing answers in a satisfying way. That’s why it was so helpful in the edit to look at multiple episodes at a time and make decisions about where information falls and how much of it we actually need. A scene in one episode might call for a different approach to a scene two episodes later because of what’s already been revealed or not revealed. When thinking about the flow and pace, we really tried to keep an eye on the season’s story and not just one episode.
Landauer: In Season 2, we have the challenge of an established world. The audience comes in with a lot of orientation they didn’t have going into the first season. It is a different set of challenges to build on a world you know — or think you know — than to introduce a world you know nothing about. In Episode 2, we were introducing the lives of our MDR team for the first time in the Outie world, which was incredibly exciting for me as an editor and allowed us to slow things down a bit and enjoy witnessing the lives of our core characters.
‘Severance’Apple TV+Richman: A big part of the fun of editing Season 2 was taking some of the style established in Season 1 and building on it. The world of the story expands a lot in the writing, so we wanted to, and had lots of opportunities to, expand the language of the edit as well. This, of course, allows for more fun experimentation in the edit, but more practically, we’re able to express things and deliver information in a more visually interesting way.
IndieWire: Can I ask about the dissolve between Helly and Mark and then Irv and Dylan towards the end of Episode 1? The timing of it, especially with the score, is so poignant.
Richman: That was actually a really tricky transition to pull off. We wanted to go from Helly and Mark walking away to Irving rounding the corner. The two hallways were different but similar enough to make it feel like a jump cut. So we added a dissolve and a beat of silence at the head of Irving’s shot to breathe between the scenes. The dissolve opened up the opportunity to make a seamless match from one hallway to the other, but the angles were different enough that we couldn’t get it to work in the Avid. So we handed it over to VFX, and they did an amazing job aligning the two shots perfectly. Add on top of that Teddy’s beautiful score and we had a nice emotional bridge from one scene to the next.
John Turturro and Zach Cherry in ‘Severance’Apple TV+IndieWire: One of the great pleasures of “Severance,” for me, is how it creates fantastic visual and tonal contrasts, and I’m curious how you think about that in the edit — mixing dread and absurd humor, moving from an unsettling situation that’s particular to one that’s mundane.
Landauer: One of the most enjoyable aspects of editing a show like “Severance” is that it defies genre, which introduces a lot of opportunities to experiment with contrasts and unexpected tonal turns. We always had a lot of freedom in the cutting room to experiment, and as a result, there are a lot of incredible moments that never make it into the final show, that didn’t fit the narrative or were tonally not quite hitting the mark. And again, Teddy Shapiro’s incredible talents as a composer help guide us through a lot of experimentation.
Richman: Figuring out that balance just comes from watching everything in context and gauging how much we can get away with without interrupting the emotional flow or breaking the reality of the scene. Music plays a huge role in making it work, too. Teddy is a master of mixing tones in the score, like taking a typically lighter melody and lacing it with tension so we’re able to feel conflicting emotions simultaneously. It all contributes to the unsettling atmosphere of the show.
New episodes of “Severance” will be released weekly on Apple TV+ through the finale on March 21.
English (US) ·