Ben Stiller and Jessica Lee Gagné knew that the cameras of Severance needed to make a statement. The director and cinematographer had previously collaborated on the Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora, but stepped into a whole new world with the Lumon Industries, the shadowy and probably sinister company where much of Severance takes place. Divided between the “innie” world of Lumon, where workers toil with no knowledge of their outside selves, and the “outie” world of a wintry, bleak upstate New York, Severance relies heavily on cinematography to orient viewers and to tell its story—particularly with so many characters who don’t even understand the story themselves.

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In a wide-ranging conversation, Stiller and Gagné revisited some of the most striking images from Severance’s first season, revealing physical challenges, surprising influences, and why a season-long effort to avoid Steadicam fell apart for the astonishing season finale.

On the Table

In the very first shot of the series, Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up splayed out on a conference-room table, disoriented and with no memory of her identity. A voice—later revealed to be Adam Scott’s Mark—begins asking questions from the speaker on the table.

Ben Stiller: Honestly I just looked at the script and it said she was laying on a table and I was trying to figure out: What’s the best way to see this?… Jessica and I knew that the graphic images in the show would be important. The shape of the room was intentionally designed in a way that would work for this aspect ratio too, and we didn’t know what it was going to look like until we lifted the ceiling up. And I know that was a big deal, right Jessica? Having to pull the ceiling.

Jessica Lee Gagné: Actually our stages didn’t have high ceilings, which was fine for most of our sets, but we were right up against the ceiling with this. This was absolutely the highest we could go…. Jeremy [Hindle, the series production designer] and Dan [Erickson, the series creator] had spoken about this being like a womb, to feel like she was being birthed. Did you and Dan talk about that?

Stiller: Not really. I heard him talk about it afterwards, but I never thought of that specific image. Stylistically, I knew this would be something that would be really specific to our style and to the show. And I don’t personally like to overdo it with top shots, they make such a statement, and there are a few other times that we use them in the show. Even our outside shots and some of our establishing shots of Lumon, we tried to stay away from direct overhead shots.

Gagné: And that Lumon location is amazing overhead. So that’s actually kind of tricky. Remember we did one point doing almost like a satellite view of it, but we never—

Stiller: Yeah, because the actual satellite view was one of the first ways we scouted that building. And it’s an incredible view from above, of the Bell Labs building, because the parking lot is in this oval shape around the building. That’s really striking. In season two, we might explore that because we have to come up with some new establishing shots.

Entrance Exam

After finally entering the room and revealing himself to Helly, Mark introduces her to her new life at Lumon.

Gagné: I remember we rehearsed it in the lunch area, everything was taped out because we didn’t have the set built yet. But Ben always gives a lot of space to the actors and it’s really interesting to do the process with him. I’ll be at the rehearsals with him and then he’ll kind of first set up the space with them, see what feels right. And from that we can already start thinking of angles…. I remember looking at our overheads, little camera positions, and being like, we’re gonna need three days to shoot this. And we ended up needing two days—that felt a little cushy, but it really needed it.

Stiller: It’s early on in the show. so we’re trying to establish the visual style too…. In this scene especially, what was challenging was figuring out how, when he walks into the room and then she stands up and moves to the table, there were a couple of places where the blocking shifts before they sit down. And it was just trying to find angles that felt like they were serving the story, but also were graphic and interesting without being too distracting.

And then once they were sitting down, we did these matching reverse angles…. It’s a weird cutting thing when you cut from one person who’s in exactly the same position to the other person, and the background is very, very similar…. I remember just thinking, these are kind of strange angles, but I really love being able to settle into this sort of rhythm between them in the first part. And the wide shots in this room were always really, really fun because of the architecture of the room.

Vanity Fair: And you never really see this room again after this scene, right?

Stiller: Yeah. It’s sort of this special conference room that people get birthed into severance. We did repurpose it though, in a very sort of old school Star Trek sort of way, and take out one of the walls and put a glass wall in it and turn it into the other conference room where they find the book.

Down He Goes

In a shot repeated with numerous characters throughout the series, Mark rides the elevator down to the severed floor and transforms into his severed self.

Stiller: We were trying to show something that was happening internally…. I think the actors just doing it on their own would be effective, and honestly I’d say 50% of what the effect is is the actors just changing their attitude. But if there was too much done or something that felt very visual effects-y, then it would feel like we’re in some sort of a science-fiction reality, and we didn’t want that. That was the idea that Jessica and I talked about pretty early on, but then it was about how to do it in a way that would feel specific to the show and not be too too much…. It was definitely one of the first things we started working on.

Gagné: What we ended up going to, which was so simple when you think about it, it’s called the zolly. So it’s a zoom and a dolly at the same time. We ended up using something that was actually a motion-control device made by Anthony Jacques, who had built this before for Wolf of Wall Street, for another zolly. And it’s, what’s great about it is that it’s not just controlled by a computer, it’s controlled by an actual dolly grip who will push a dolly forward. So there’s a human element…. Conceptually the idea is that we’re merging both worlds, right? The outside world usually would be longer lens, and the inside world would usually be closer and wider. So by doing the zolly, we’re actually achieving the connection of both worlds.

Stiller: What’s really interesting to me about it is how much the focal length changes the shape of the actor’s face. And as an actor myself over the years, you know when the camera’s close on a wider lens, it’s gonna make you look a little more distorted. To me what was specific about this version of it was that we weren’t playing up the background changing. Like that famous shot in Jaws, you just feel the background changing so much. And we really intentionally wanted the background not to change as much…. Because really what the focus is about is how the face is changing.

The Long Walk

There are many, many shots of people walking through anonymous hallways in Severance, but none as long or disorienting as the first shot of Mark walking to work, taking seemingly endless, serpentine turns on the way to the Macrodata Refinement (MDR) room. It’s a similar vibe to the deeply unsettling teaser trailer the series released back in December.

Stiller: Jeremy Hindle had built the set so that all the hallways connected and took up the whole sound stage. Everything actually led somewhere and there were lots of little jogs and side halls that you could go through that made it seem like a maze. We knew we were going to have a sequence of Adam getting off the elevator and walking to MDR the first time we see him go there, and I wanted to make sure that you felt like it was a really long walk. And also it was really confusing. We talked a lot about even maybe having it be different every time somebody walked to MDR, there’d be like a different route, so you could never figure it out. But then that was also a question of the reality of the show. And we ended up settling on there should be a route to go there, we just shouldn’t necessarily know what it is.

So when we were working on that sequence at the very beginning of the shoot, we shot different shots of him walking down the hall with coverage in front of him, behind him, his point of view. And then at the end I said, let’s just do one shot where we just stay on Adam the whole time. It’ll be really, really long, but let’s just see what it feels like.

Gagné: I think the hallways are one of the more challenging parts visually in the show to hack. Every time we had a hallway sequence, we needed to take a minute and be like, we need to talk about this with the A.D., with the art department—we need everyone…. Every time we’re wondering, how do we make it new? How do we make it different? We had to use many different devices.

Stiller: But no Steadicam.

Gagné: Yeah. No Steadicam was an important one. Actually a lot of people in the cinematography world have been asking me if it’s Steadicam, and I’m like, no, it’s a rickshaw or a dolly.

Why was no Steadicam important?

Gagné: It wouldn’t feel like it does. If you watch it, there’s never any up and down side action, it’s very sturdy. When you’re following an actor and you’re adding a human to control the camera like that, it’s not as precise. And we wanted that robotic feeling. [On the severed floor] when we pan, when we move the camera, we didn’t want it to feel human operated. There was a rigid kind of surveillance thing that was part of it as well.

Stiller: We ended up having to do Steadicam a little bit later in the show a couple of times, but that was our rule, that everything would be dolly. One thing about the hallways that I would always stress out about was sound. Like the walk in episode three, when they’re walking to Perpetuity— it’s really hard when you have a lot of dialogue and actors are walking. Everybody works hard to make the bottoms of the shoes soft or put felt on them or things like that, but they couldn’t put down sound blankets. When I think about hallways, I just think, for season two, we gotta figure out a way to make sure that the footsteps don’t get in the way of the sound.

Morning Light

In the pilot episode Mark goes to a dinner party at the home belonging to his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) and her husband, Ricken (Michael Chernus), and spends the night. The next morning, he and Devon catch up next to one of the home’s many enormous plateglass windows.

Stiller: Devon is the warmest, most human relationship that Mark has in the show. The goal with Devon and Ricken’s house was to have it feel warmer, but then also exist in this world that is kind of cold and spare. We were looking for a house and we found this amazing Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pleasantville, New York, and then ended up not being able to shoot there because of COVID restrictions. And in that area where that house is located, it’s basically an enclave of all of these beautiful mid-century houses. It wasn’t a Frank Lloyd Wright that we found, but honestly it reminds me of one of my favorite houses that doesn’t exist in movies, the North by Northwest house. But this house had that feeling of those glass walls, and being outside in the winter and just seeing the warm light inside of it. So then that location really then started to dictate how to shoot these scenes in terms of lighting.

Gagné: Because we had so little [daylight], when we had a moment where I could do it, I was like, oh, my gosh, we need to do something special…. This scene, we tried to shoot at a specific time to get the sun doing something specific. Nature was driving a lot more of the decisions for Devon’s, which was interesting.

Stiller: I was concerned that there was possibly too much reflection on the glass, but there was nothing we could really do about it other than just do a few takes and see how it changed.

Burt, Meet Irving

In episode two, in the lobby outside the office of Lumon therapist Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman), John Turturro’s Irving meets Christopher Walken’s Burt for the first time. It’s the beginning of an intense romance between the two, who are framed in conversation as seen here, but also from the point of view of the painting they are looking at together, each sharing a different half of the screen.

Gagné: That was the shot you knew you wanted, and we couldn’t really see it on the rehearsal. We just knew that we were gonna do an angle from behind the painting.

Stiller: Yeah. It was the first scene between the two of them. I know it was Chris’s first time ever having to work shooting during COVID, you know, the actors had to take the masks on and off and wear shields and go through this whole process before the camera would roll. That was really challenging, I think, for the actors. That whole day I remember it being a little bit tense because we wanted it to go well. I hadn’t ever worked with Chris as a director, so I was a little nervous. But I knew these two actors were gonna be so great together.

My idea was it would be great not to have to cut around to coverage and just let these two people be in the frame together. In a way just letting the camera be out of the way and let it be about the two of them. And that was fun because then we got to do a number of takes and I think we might have been like 13 or 14 takes of that. Every take was different because they were really having fun with each other, playing with this idea of these two men who had never met before, and there’s an instant connection.

Petey Gets Unstuck in Time

Hiding out in Mark’s basement after undergoing the controversial “reintegration” process that reunites his severed brain, former Lumon employee Petey (Yul Vazquez) copes with the side effects. Wearing a bathrobe and standing in Mark’s basement bathroom, Petey suddenly imagines himself back in the Lumon office, and then proceeds to whip back and forth between the two places.

Stiller: That’s the one that has the most visual effects in it, but it was really important to try to keep the visual effects down to a minimum in the show, or to feel like that…. We were trying to find a version of something that was organic. We basically had him in the bathroom at Mark’s house and we built a piece of the bathroom in Mark’s house and put it into the bathroom at MDR. And then just panned around with him, and then did a little bit of stitching work to connect it. But then those tracking shots over the shoulder, when he starts to see himself in his robe and Adam is there—basically we did the same move in the basement and the same move in MDR. And there’s no visual effects in those shots at all.

Gagné: There was a lot of layering and a lot of shooting the scenes in different ways. We had to be able to give a bunch of options so that you could really play on where he was, where you wanted him to be at the moment…. You have to shoot like four versions, almost, of it, so that you could have all the options. 

Stiller: We didn’t want to feel like there was a moment where he would obliterate the camera, like wipe it out so you could know where the cut was. So that was something that was important to us to figure out a way to stitch it together…. Jessica and I had experience with that on Dannemora, we had a long oner with Paul Dano when he escapes out of his cell and goes all the way out of the prison, and that was like 17 stitch shots. The same kinds of issues. So you just want it to be invisible.

Defiant Jazz

One of the most famous, infinitely GIF-able sequences from the series, in which the MDR team is rewarded with an in-office dance party, and Dylan (Zach Cherry) reaches a breaking point with office manager Milchick (Tramell Tillman).

Stiller: This is one of the places we had to go with Steadicam, and it made sense because this is where they’re sort of breaking free for a little bit. But it was the only way to really shoot the scene the way that we wanted to, which was to follow [Milchick] as he does this dance journey across MDR and interacts with each person. Tramell is such an amazing actor and dancer and he just did that. We had a choreographer come in and they worked together and then one day they showed me some of the stuff they were doing. Then when he started to do it, he just naturally knew how to work the camera and owned it. And then Jessica, you came with a really simple way of shooting it.

Gagné: I’ve shot some music videos, and Steadicam is the go-to tool to film someone doing a dance like this. So I was like, we gotta do like a music video.

Stiller: You know, if you look at the dailies of it, there’s two or three runs of each angle of him just going from Helly to Mark to Irving all the way up to where he goes behind Dylan. So he just did it. We had a lighting cue set up where the lights were changing as it went, and they got crazier and crazier. It was really fun too, because it was just so weird.

Are those lights a gift when you’ve been trying to think of new ways to shoot this one room or does it just create all these new headaches and challenges?

Gagné: Oh, I mean, I was dying to do sequences like this. It was an event, you know? I think it was even something for the crew. So Ben gave us the music because these are all individual lights and the system that we have, like with the dimmer board, you have to individually program this thing. It’s actually very complicated…. So we kind of just started putting something together in four parts and then we’d bring Ben in, he’d look at it and then we’d have notes and we’d get back to it and we kept working on it. But every time we would turn the lights on, it did something to us. We would just start dancing.

Into the Black

Fired from Lumon, just after the audience has learned she is actually the wife Mark believed was dead, Ms. Casey is ushered into a black hallway where she’ll ascend the elevator one last time. The pitch-black hallway with its ominous red light has already appeared in the paintings Irving is doing at home—a hint at something future seasons of Severance might reveal.

Stiller: It’s a weird set. It was exciting also because it was a new set too. We talked a lot about the texture on the walls, having it feel like it matched the painting. It’s the most science fiction-y kind of set in the show, just the surreal nature of it. But it was really fun to get in there because you could see like there was just so much negative space. There were a lot of really fun angles to play with.

Gagné: We have a lot of moments where it kind of falls off to darkness in these hallways when they’re walking, like where are they going? It’s like the unknown of Lumon. And this specific component of the show narratively is one of the biggest unknowns, like, where is she going?… It seemed like the black in the underground Lumon world is referring to that unknown, and how much we really don’t know yet.

Grand Finale

The Severance season finale follows Mark, Helly, and Irving as they awake in the “outie” world and attempt to find help while also understanding, for the first time, what their outside lives are like. The episode plays out nearly in real time, with the clock ticking as Dylan physically holds down the levers that allows these innies to experience the outside world.

Stiller: This was all dictated by the script and the real-time nature of this episode. So in my mind, everything was about trying to keep as continuous as possible with each actor, with each story…. It was a mix of different styles in the episode, which Jessica and I talked about for months and months. I would talk to you about my concerns about how we were mixing things stylistically, but not being able to have one specific way of shooting the whole episode.

Gagné: I think it was just a concern of having to commit to some Steadicam. A lot of this is Steadicam, and there’s such a commitment with it…having to break away from the style so strongly and do this one thing was a real challenge.

Stiller: It was a little scary, because it was an intentional break from the style of the rest of the show…. But in terms of the lighting and the color, I felt that we really were able to control Helly’s— the gala that had a very specific color palette and cool-bluish tone to it. And Mark at Devon and Ricken’s had these very warm kinds of pastels and darker burgundy. And then Irving was also in his own world, kind of cooler. It was a definite juxtaposition color-wise between those worlds, which I think really worked well.

And the shot of Burt seeing Irving and his husband through the window, and how isolated he feels.

Stiller: I’d say the biggest challenge of shooting this episode was that we shot the show over the course of 8 or 9 or 10 months or whatever. There were a lot of different locations but not shot in order. We just couldn’t. So when we shot Irving coming up to Burt’s door, that was really early in the schedule. And we were just having to sort of fly blind with this idea. We hadn’t shot most of the episode yet. So we were like, okay, we’re gonna do a continuous and we’re gonna pan back and forth and it’s all gonna be Steadicam. The whole shoot, whenever we’d get to something in episode nine and like, all right, let’s get the Steadicam out, let’s see what we can do here. But it wasn’t ever like shooting it all together, which made it challenging. It was not really until the very end of the shoot when we had all the pieces and we could edit it together that we could really get a sense of how it was working. And then it really came to life in the edit.

Gagné: Episode nine is so much editing. I think you guys did an insane job there…. And you had the idea for really doing it differently for episode nine during the shoot, I don’t think you talked about it at the beginning. So we were in this process and you’re like, I think we need to do episode nine Steadicam. I’m like, you know you hate Steadicam, but okay…

Stiller: I must embrace what I hate.

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