[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Severance” Season 2, Episode 10, “Cold Harbor.”]
Of the many twists and turns lurking within the corridors of “Severance‘s” Season 2 finale, no fan should be surprised when, waiting behind the episode’s final bend, is Ben Stiller’s name. Officially the director and executive producer but unofficially the “conjurer” of Apple’s acclaimed corporate thriller (as dubbed by Adam Scott), Stiller’s “directed by” credit has graced 11 of the show’s 19 total episodes so far.
After handling the first and last three entries of Season 1 — including the tone-setting introduction that hooked untold millions, as well as the buzzed-about finale that brought them all back for more — the DGA Award winner had to choose five entries for himself among the second season’s 10 hour-long entries.
But which ones?
“What I was attracted to in the second season was taking some chances,” Stiller said in an interview with IndieWire. “Because I felt like if we just sort of tried to stay within the bounds of what we’d done, it would feel like we were treading water.”
That call of the unknown resulted in Stiller helming Episode 1 (“Hello, Ms. Cobel”), Episode 3 (“Who Is Alive?”), Episode 4 (“Woe’s Hollow”), Episode 8 (“Sweet Vitriol”), and the Season 2 finale, Episode 10 (“Cold Harbor”). Within those entries, a pattern emerged. In one way or another, most of Stiller’s episodes function as departure episodes. The premiere breaks from tradition and never leaves the severed floor. “Woe’s Hollow” follows the MDR team on their first corporate retreat, and “Sweet Vitriol” visits the tiny town where Harmony grew up. Stiller himself described “Cold Harbor” as a “standalone episode.”
“That was fun to go off on location and do those things, but it’s also interesting when you watch the whole season because every episode kind of has its own personality,” Stiller said. “You’re kind of going, ‘OK, we’re going to try something else here that hopefully will live in the world of the show.’ But you’re definitely taking chances to be able to expand the lexicon of the show.”
Below, Stiller digs a little deeper into the Season 2 finale — how it serves as a bridge between the very first episode and what’s coming in Season 3, the scene they were “worried” about getting right, what inspired the final shot, and how his directorial approach helps to keep audiences attuned to the weird, twisty vibes of “Severance.”
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
IndieWire: I love that Season 2 starts with Mark running into the office, looking for Gemma, and then it ends with him running back into the office, leaving her behind. Was that kind of symmetry important to you?
Ben Stiller: Yeah, definitely. In fact, I’d say it’s probably the first thing that we came up with. Knowing where you’re going, obviously, is very important. On this show, it’s always clear where we’re going, but the creative process — it’s different getting there. The idea of having that beginning opening shot and that ending of him in the hallways, it made a lot of sense.
In the beginning, when we first thought about it, we didn’t know if we were going to go as far as him going with Helly all the way, but then as we were going along, we felt like we really should go that far because I didn’t want to do another cliffhanger type of ending where you didn’t know what he was going to do. I felt like, “OK, let’s go a little further with this because this makes sense,” and it also sets up a new reality for going forward in the show.
Hallways were a big deal this season.
Also, the beginning of Season 2 for me was a little bit of an echo to the beginning of Season 1 — when Mark’s walking around in the hallways the first time. It also felt like, “OK, well this is the objective of Season 2: Mark is trying to find Gemma. She’s alive. [Running through the hallways] is the natural next step.” So yeah, that imagery was there from the very beginning. Stylistically, we didn’t want to [shoot the finale] exactly the same way as the beginning of the season, which was a lot more robotic and smoother, since it felt like the end is going to be a lot more chaotic. But it’s still the same idea.
How did you land on that freeze-frame for the final shot?
For me, that image was just in my head from the beginning — when we said, OK, we’re going to go this far and this is where we’re going to take it. You don’t see freeze-frames at the end of movies that often these days, but it used to be done a lot more. It’s just kind of this moment in time where you’re like, “Oh, wow, this is the end of the movie, but it’s going to keep going. We just don’t know where it’s going to go.” You marinate in this moment. It reminded me of movies that I watched growing up. This slow zoom in on the freeze-frame reminded me of ’70s movies a little bit.
We actually— we shoot this show digitally, but we transferred that last shot to film and then re-transferred it because we wanted to have the grain to zoom in on. So it felt like a movie that would’ve been shot on film where they would’ve had an optical printer that would’ve zoomed in on it. And it goes to red, which we haven’t really gone to before. I think it’s kind of signaling, “Hey, we’re going into a different tone here now. We are going into a different reality for these people.”
When I first saw it, my brain immediately went to “The Graduate,” even though that doesn’t end on a freeze-frame.
Maybe it’s a mix of “The Graduate” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” [But] that’s such an amazing movie and that ending, I always think about that ending. It’s sort of everything. The protagonist gets what he wants and then it’s like, “OK, you got what you want. Now what?” And it’s the rest of your life, you know?
Because Season 1’s closing shot is so striking — a feeling that only intensified as people waited for Season 2 to come out — did you feel any extra pressure to produce another indelible image this time? Something people will really remember while they wait for Season 3?
As I heard people react to the finale of the first season — it seemed like people really responded to it — you definitely start to think about that. [Laughs] What are we going to do for the next finale? And the only thing that was in our head, really, was just like, “Well, let’s just not do the same thing.” I don’t want to do the same thing, but I do want to have something that’s hopefully memorable and stays with you and feels visceral. But it’s not a cliffhanger like that. I feel like that [Season 1] finale is so specific to the season because all the threads are coming together. I think the reason why that finale works for people is that it’s tying up all these loose ends from the season, and I feel like this finale, hopefully, is more of a standalone episode in its own way. It’s just its own thing, a little bit more, hopefully.
For me, Season 2 really confronted one of the ideas at the root of the show, which is whether you can separate the work from the worker. As much as some people want to say, “Work is just what I do, it’s not who I am,” that’s not necessarily true — not when you’re devoting so much of your time to a job, to a place, to the people who work there. There’s an investment there, on some level, whether you want it or not.
What that made me think of was Milchick’s arc, because I feel like while he’s an employee, but he’s [also] management. In this season, he’s really dealing with feeling the limitations of the company and how they treat him and what his place is in the company. He has to advocate for himself. I thought that was a really worthwhile thing to explore. Because with Mark, his trajectory is so much about trying to figure out his loyalty to his Outie and also his feelings for Helly. To me, his storyline is much more kind of personal in that way.
But the Milchick one is most indicative of how you navigate within a company and when you advocate for yourself or not, and all this corporate kind of crap that you have to deal with. The other layer to it is when you work at Lumon, it’s not just you’re working for the company. You’re either severed, where you don’t know anything else about the world except the company, or you’re someone who in management is committed to the Eagan philosophy and the Lumon ideology and is kind of a zealot. So it’s very connected to the ethos of the company, the culture of the company.
Which makes me think about Burt.
He’s also at a point in his life where he’s committed. How do you reconcile all the hours and time you put into a job, whether you’re doing something that’s nefarious or not? What part of your identity is what you have done for the company? And if the company is doing things that are bad, how do you justify that? But it’s really more like: Who am I if my identity is not linked to what I do?
OK, let’s talk about the conversation between Mark’s Innie and Outie. How did prepare for that scene as a director? What were those conversations like, and what were you worried about?
We were definitely worried about it going in because we knew it was a climactic point, but it was also the actual dialogue between the two of them. What were they going to talk about? How were they going to get to the core of what their issues are? And every time we would rehearse it, or there would be a draft of it that Dan [Erickson] would write, we’d have these discussions about it — Adam and Dan and myself and Beau Willmon — we were all talking about, like, what is this conversation? Where is Outie Mark coming from? How is Innie Mark going to take it in?
So there was the content of it, which we kept rewriting every time we rehearsed it, and then there was the question I was thinking about as a director: How are we going to do this that’s going to make it interesting visually because it’s a long-ish scene? Just the mechanics of the fact that he has to go [inside and outside]. You can’t just show it in real time. The scene would go on forever and be so boring.
Once we finally rehearsed it on set, Jessica [Lee Gagné] and I just came up with very simple rules [for shooting it]. Like, Innie Mark will be on the right, Outie Mark’s on the left, every time. I knew that we eventually wanted [the frame] to kind of get tighter and tighter, so I just tried to shoot enough angles that it would get more and more intense and build more and more tension. Then the blocking of it, figuring it out with Adam: When would he stand up, if he stood up? And it felt like, well, he’s the same person, so when he stands up as his Outie, his Innie is going to get pissed off and he’ll stand up too because they kind of have the same instincts? So we figured out that blocking and then just tried to keep it as simple as possible, so you’re not really thinking about the camera as much as just being able to follow the conversation.
How exacting did you end up getting with Adam in terms of blocking out those movements?
Having worked with Adam on the show for the last almost five years or whatever — it’s crazy we started doing it that long ago — I feel like I know him well enough, and he knows me. The way we’ll approach working on a scene is I want to hear what his instincts are as an actor. So part of me is like, “Oh, this would be easier if nobody ever stands up and we’re just in one place all the time, but is that right for the scene?” Then he’s like, “No, I think I might be walking around.” “So what point would you get up?” “Well, probably when he gets upset here.” So we work it out together and I make sure he feels comfortable. The key for any scene is that the blocking feels organic, and that it feels real and motivated to the actors.
So I can’t give enough credit to Adam in a scene like that because he’s having to play two characters. He’s thinking about what he should be saying because that’s important to him, and then he’s figuring out how Outie Mark is going to play it. He made this choice: that Outie Mark is really trying to convince Innie Mark — that he’s underestimating Innie Mark a little bit. He made that choice, and that was very important to him. He was like, “Hey, I think I have to be trying to manipulate him a little bit.” And Innie Mark picks up on that. That made a huge difference in the scene, too.
Once you’d shot it, did you know you had it? Or not until the editing room? Or not even then?
No, I did not know. Honestly, I was stressed out about it. When [the editor] Geoff Richman said, “Yeah, I have a first cut of it. It’s like 18 minutes long,” I was like, “Oh, shit!” [laughs] But I have to say, when we would go in the editing room and start watching, even the long cut of it, I would get caught up in the conversation. So when I first started watching it, I thought, “OK, I think that’s a good sign as someone who’s read it and shot it, that I’m getting caught up in the conversation that Adam’s having, the writing is making sense.” So that was a clue that, OK, this could be working well.
“Severance” Season 2 is available on Apple TV+. The series has been renewed for Season 3.
