Just like us, the audience, we try to mentally put all the scenes together Cutting off to better grasp the bigger picture of its mysteries, Ben Stiller and his team engage in a similar process, figuring out how to present these scenes to us. In the last episode The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scottfirst season, Stiller explains the intricate way he filmed the season finale in fragments and reveals the original way the final episode was supposed to play out.
According to Stiller, who directed the climactic episode, the finale was shot in spurts throughout the nine-month production. If they were filming the scene at the house of Mark’s sister and her husband in the first episode, they would also film the moment where Mark shouts “She’s alive!” around the same time. This piecemeal shooting style wasn’t Stiller’s only odd directorial decision, as he reveals in the podcast that he originally intended to shoot the entire finale from the outsider’s perspective of Innies.
This would mean that instead of watching Innie Mark (Adam Scott) clearly trying to get out of talking to Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who is suspicious of whether he is actually talking to Outie Mark, we would be staring directly into Arquette’s judgmental eyes while Mark stuttered. While this would be pleasantly engaging, it would take away from scenes like Mark’s interrupted “She’s alive!” a moment that carries extra emotional weight due to Mark’s shocked expression. This is a fact that Stiller has fortunately realized.
“It can’t be from their point of view all the time, because then we’ll never see them.”
Second season The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott will debut tomorrow, right after the premiere of the second season. They will be explaining all the nuances of the second season so that we can better understand the madness we will be engaged in over the next 10 weeks.
