S1E7: The Gap

Welcome to Pluribus, the official podcast, an intimate insider conversation about the making of the Apple TV series with the cast and creators behind the show. My name is Chris McKayla, I'm one of the editors of Pluribus and the host of this podcast. This isn't a recap show. This is more of a wide-ranging, round-table discussion about the making of each episode, so I strongly recommend watching before you listen, because we'll be talking openly about everything, spoiling things, etc. This podcast is about episode 107 entitled The Gap, written by Jen Carroll and directed by Adam Bernstein. In this episode, Carroll is determined to have a good time after she leaves Vegas, while Manusos makes an epic journey north across South America. There's so much to get into, so without further ado, please welcome our guests, executive producer and creator of the show Vince Gilligan. Hello, everybody. Writer of the episode, Jen Carroll, Director of this episode in person and live, Adam Bernstein. Thanks, Chris. And Manusos himself, Carlos Manuel Vesca. But Kat is great. Hi, everyone. That is great. Hello. So much of that. The mumbling of those things. And also with us today on The Ones and Tews, assisted editor on the show and for the podcast, our editor and mixer Nicholas Sy. Hello. Hello Nicholas. Hey, Nicholas. Also a lot of singing in this episode. Jen, who's responsible for that? I at what point were the songs chosen? Was that decision made? I assume things had to get cleared way in advance. Talk about that process. I think one thing that we talked about a lot when we were breaking this episode, Vince and I and the rest of the team was what does it do to you to be an isolation for 40 days? And a lot of members of the writers room are big fans, myself included, of the history channel show alone in which Penn's survivalists are dropped out in the wilderness, Vancouver Island or wherever. One thing that inevitably happens when these people are alone for a certain amount of time is they can't stand the silence and they start singing to themselves. I didn't realize that. And the producers are pulling their hair out saying we got to pay for all these now, is there? Well, they don't. They end up making up their own songs. And so there's probably a whole lot more singing that they do that they didn't license, but they always end up sort of writing their own songs and singing to themselves because the silence would drive you nuts. And so that's one thing we talked about with Carol between the teaser when she's humming to herself and then start singing. And just the different ways that she goes about not just entertaining herself, but filling the silence that starts to get to her more and more as the episode continues. So we did pitch most of these songs in the writers room, you know, for golf. We thought, oh, it would be so funny if she did, you know, Kenny Lollins, you know, classic Caddy Shack reference. The REM End of the World is, you know, it just felt perfect for a show that's a post-apocalyptic in a certain way. What I love about the way that we wrote in that Adam Chotton that you cut the first scenes, Chris, the teaser is that it was important to us because we didn't necessarily want to know what Carol was thinking that we cut out before the final line of the chorus that I feel fine. It was always planned that we would do that hard cut out before fine so that the audience would be thinking, is she fine? Is she okay? Has she gone crazy? She's definitely not okay. She's not okay. She's not okay. Yeah, that's the surest sign of madness that you're just singing songs constantly. Hey, Chris, can I say, because Jen won't brag on herself, this is Jen's first script, it's your first script, right? It is, it's the first script I've written for television. Yes, right. Yes. It's a so good one. Yeah, it's all downhill from here. And what a weird one. It's endless montages. It's incredible. I think that's the most interesting assignment I've had in television, which is to do an episode that's so visual, which is kind of like very rare for TV, right? I mean, I know that Vincent shows they make an effort to think of scenes that don't have to rely on dialogue. Absolutely. You guys will talk about that in the writer's room and say, oh, can we just do this without the words, which is amazing for TV. And then this is a whole episode, which is basically that for a director, it's a dream, doesn't come around that often. I think it was important to us as we were breaking this episode to show a contrast between what Carol was going through and what Manusos is going through that we would have Carol's emotional descent in isolation versus Manusos in his rigidity as he's taking this long trip up to try and get to Carol in New Mexico. It was important to show the struggles he was going through that are completely different than the ones Carol is. Carol's seen it a gas station where she just calls, has them fill up the tank versus Manusos siphoning gas off of these cars. He finds on the side of the road. Hopefully the audience will see the way these two are contrasting how they're spending this 40 days of their isolation. Speaking of that gas station, do you want to talk about how lovely the people were there? They were supposed to be, you know, we were looking for when we were scouting a gas station that was going to be Arizona. She's coming back from Vegas, sort of halfway back. It needed to feel like sort of like red rock, Arizona. And we wound up on the Hema's Pueblo right outside the Walla Toa visitor center. Those people are so kind. That was great location. And then we shot, we had a scene that was supposed to be a mountain village in Argentina. Yes. And the really fun challenge of the episode is that some of it was done in New Mexico and some of it was done in the Canary Islands. And Jenna had just written a whole bunch of different scenes in different villages and coastal areas and mountainous areas. And we had to kind of figure out like what's going to be in New Mexico and what's going to be in Spain. And there was a scene where Vesca's character is driving through an Argentinian mountain village. And when we were scouting the gas station, we saw the Hema's Pueblo and it was like, oh, that actually looks pretty similar. It's not easy to get permission to shoot on that Pueblo, but our great location manager Christian, Benagled it. And one of the most interesting aspects of the shoot is that when we went to do the text scout, location manager, Christian went in to the headquarters of the tribe and he said, Adam, they just need you to come in for a second. Jim, were you at the table too? Did you go? No, no, no. So we're going to be. And Bella, me our first idiot, I say it out, tags. We didn't want to overwhelm them with people, but we just wanted to be respectful. Christian, go ahead and say, Adam needs to come in and say hello to the elders. Right. And there was like a meeting of like the administrators of the tribe and the tribal elders where they did a series of prayers. It was amazing. And it was like a 20, 30 minute meeting where they were, I mean, some practical things were discussed, but then they did a series of prayers. It was like, you know, just one of those experiences. That's what would be beautiful. Yeah. They were so supportive. And it really is the sacred land for them. And so you're not even allowed to take photographs. We had to get permission to scout. We were just trying to be as respectful as possible. There were certain areas that we were allowed to photograph and then certain ones that were off limits to us reasonably so. And we had incredible partners, not just in our location scene, but the representatives from the tribe that worked with us. They got us extras also. So background players, so we could get these beautiful faces in and then gave us access to hang our laundry lines and bring all of our set deck in and they were so welcoming. And if you want to go out and visit, you absolutely should because they can take you on guided tours of some of the beautiful red rocks across the gas station. But if you go to the hemispwable and you go to this visitor center, you've got to get the coffee, which is they have a special coffee. It's their hemispread rock mocha. Adam stride it. I've tried it. It's delicious. You could only get it there. But wait, they grow the coffee there? No. No, they roast it there and then they add they have their special. The fresh red rock that they had to. No, no, it gives it that distinctive desert flavor. It is. Right. It's very earthy. It's very, very important. Because it's New Mexico, it's red chili. So that is the red chili. It makes with the mocha. It's so. Yeah, it's great. And we also shot up there what we called chile, they see with the map, the Vesca and the M. J. Right across the way from the gas station and a little further north, the Gilman tunnels. That's right. So large tunnels. That's right. So large tunnels. Such a cool. How did you find those? Were you just aware of them? I think Christian, I guess they're famous. I mean, they shot, was it 310 to Yuma, that Western shot there? They were the remake. Okay. They felt Kilmer was shot there. Yeah. And they were the rail line now. It's for cars to go through, but it quite skinny. I guess before it was just a train, I believe. And Christian did an amazing job scouting, but I feel like Adams also not giving yourself enough credit because there was a lot of driving work, a lot of beauty shots that we needed. Some of which weren't necessarily even scripted, but you had such a vision for how you wanted to shoot it that you felt like, we need a couple more beats before the gas station and you would go out on the weekends and go scouting, looking for exactly the shots that she wanted. So I so appreciated that you were so all in finding the most beautiful spots in the areas we knew we were going to do the bigger scenes in. Yeah. I mean, as I mentioned, one of the great challenges of the episode is that we were splitting locations between New Mexico and Spain to create all these different parts of South America where this character is on this epic journey. And we actually have one scene where Vesca's character is exhausted, walking in the woods and he collapses in Spain and then wakes up in New Mexico. And we did the collapsing before. Right. Exactly. We shot the aftermath of the collapse. Yeah. We have an albacar in where a helicopter comes to rescue him. Yeah. But we shot the part where he loses steam and falls down in Spain. And even crazier than that, we shot the helicopter arriving in albacarkey. We shot the car burning in Paco's, a different part of New Mexico weeks later. And then of course, yes, we did the other jungle work on La Palma in the Canary Islands, which kicked off our spain work, which was wonderful. It was a, we had sort of a skeleton crew as we were getting people overseas and Adam Paul and our then AD Rich and I were running around the jungle with Vesca to kick off that work. You know, that car is a whole story unto itself. I know. And we'll talk about it. The thing that I find fascinating about that car is normally in a movie or a TV show when you see an actor driving the car, they're not really driving the car. They're on a, usually they're on a trailer and there's a whole crew of people on that trailer and they're just, you know, pretending I'm miming, you know, steering wheel driving. But for almost all the stuff for this montage, Vesca, you're really driving that car because we're, we see it. We have wide shots. We have other shots shots in the car. Do you spend in an ordinary amount of time driving that car? What was that like? It was hard burning that car. I love that car. It was beautiful. It was painful. We really burned that car. By the way, that's not, that's not, that's not, you're really good at driving that car. Yes. Is it hard to drive? I guess it's like, well, no, I mean, I grew up driving. How do you go? Stick stick. Yeah, so it was beautiful. It was just driving that car and I remember on the coast of the Canary Islands, I couldn't believe it. I was there. Beautiful car. It's like a toy car really. It just barely fit in that car. I said it at once. I don't know because you're, we're like the same height. I don't know how you fit in that thing. I could not, I couldn't get in that thing. It was kind of cute driving that car. But what do we have? We had three of them. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes. Still, it was really hard to burn that car. Yeah. And wasn't the one that burned. It was a private owner, right? And they just said, yeah, go ahead and burn that car. We did, we had a couple of dirt. I think it was a purchase. No. It was unrental. No, no, no. There were two that we could drive in America because we rigged one. The one in the Canary Islands. There's another shot that I'm driving past and people and the stick hit like jumping on. Could you go on up a hill? Yeah. Oh, I had to have my hand on the stick. Oh, no. It was driving. Because I was there. So the frowning that I was doing to those people was actually me with the damn car. Yeah. The stick doesn't really work. And I was, so it's real frustration. It made it look great. And again, that was because we looked into shipping the car we shot in in New Mexico. We looked into shipping it to the Canary Islands. And that was just, it was outrageously expensive and would take too long to clear custom. So we had, oh, wow, we found two MGs in Europe, not on the Canary Islands. It's not a car that is that common these days. Oh, no. What year was it? It was a 70. Yeah. Early 70s. Early 70s. And the model that was made in Europe was different than the model that you could get in America. So we ended up finding two and then spent about a month modifying them, not to match just the paint color. Because we had a blue one in a green when we painted that beautiful mustard color. The team in Spain, the transportation team was so detail oriented. And they made a bunch of adjustments to the car so that the dashboard would be the same. So the stick shift would be the same. The badging would be the same so that they would all match. So all told, I believe we had four cars. Well, now that I'm thinking of it, it's like the ones in Europe, most of them were made in Britain or must have been a right hand drive. Indeed. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. That was amazing. Or make crews amazing, find and all this stuff, make it and happen. All our producers. Adam, as a director, when you're handed a script like this, like we've been talking about, there's a series of montages. And I remember it was at Stu Lyons on breaking bad, and better call Saul. He said, Montage is French for overtime. I believe he said over budget. Over budget. That's better. How do you go about preparing something like this? What's your approach to taking a script like this and figuring out how am I going to shoot this? I guess it starts with Jen and all the other writers on this show are super visual writers. So you have that blueprint to go off of. To begin with, and also there is all the scouting. Jen and Vince went in advance and they scouted. It was more like just an embarrassment of riches, of places that we saw. And then it was really just narrowing things down more than anything, because there was too much good stuff. We only had six days over there. So it was sort of fun kind of puzzle to figure out how many areas we could go to on the island. What were the best things in those areas? Visually especially. It's so diverse. And I mean, by necessity, it has to be diverse. So you feel every time you're in a new place, it's not the same shot. It's not the same selection of shots, the same type of angles. Everything feels unique to the place. Is that something that you, as a director, are you thinking about those things? How can I make this particular scene feel different from the other ones? Yeah, there's a lot of storyboarding. I think whenever you do something that's an action scene or a montage, it's not dialogue based, you end up kind of having to storyboard it, especially to maintain what you're talking about, which is diversity, because there is so much driving with Vesca. So you didn't always want to be repeating the same type of shot. Right. Sometimes we mounted the camera to the car. Sometimes we were going car to car, pulling the car. But yeah, I think that was one of the challenges was to mix it up. And also to try to get the most diversity in landscape that we possibly could. One of the funny things was that we started seeing pictures from certain areas in the Canary Islands. Like, that looks like New Mexico to me. No problem. You're there. Over there, you have everything. It's amazing. You have everything in the Canary Islands. They call it a microcontinent, because it has all these different climatic zones. It's amazing. Yeah, it's very, very, very good place to visit. If you drive through the island, you see everything, like pine trees and coconut trees, banana trees, you have everything. A lot of banana plantations. Yeah. And I got a brag on Vesca. Had you ever been to the Canary Islands? Never. You were the guy I kept hearing this story over and over again. You were like a superstar. People were stopping you on the street, asking for your autograph, asking for selfies. It was quite a surprise. It was kind of surprising. I wasn't expecting it because I had never been to the Canary Islands to begin with, but I just suddenly realized if you have something on Netflix, they're going to see it in Spanish. But still, it was a surprise that somebody would come up to me with a Spanish accent asking for a picture or something. I was so humbled. It was really nice. It was very nice people. Yeah, really interesting. The rest of us coming and going, nobody looking twice, but yeah, you could walk five pesos. No, no, no, no. It's a couple of times. There's a couple of times. So people are really, really nice. It's like a driver, the theme of the driver's theme. I was very sweet. So sweet and so smiling all the time. Poza. Friendly driver. Oh, he's friendly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Poza Ramon. The fellow who pulls up and says, can we get you some water? Oh, yeah. I love that guy. And he's a stuntman. He was a stuntman because where we wanted to shoot was a light uphill and the truck we wanted to use was on its last legs. So we needed a stunt driver because we were going to have him in such close proximity to Vesca. So we were auditioning stunt folks. And I think we saw Hota. And he has such a wonderful, bubbly smile. And his performance was so lovely. That's sort of just who he is as a person. He was perfect for being another. Love that guy. Bye bye. Yeah. I love that. I love that. That wasn't script or anything. We used to say, chaito at the end. Because it's the friendly way. And I remember that it was so meaningful for you. As I think you said, if you're a grandmother or family or someone used to say, chaito do you felt very authentically South American? Which is kind of like straightaway. Bye bye, kind of. Yeah, yeah. But it's almost like caressing someone by saying goodbye. Chaito. Because it's diminutive. Yes. So chao is like bye. Oh, okay. It's like the little chao. Little chao. Yeah. Which is kind of like, bye bye. Yeah. Very cute. Chaito. I got surprised. Look, wait, what? Yeah. I was supposed to give him a hateful look when he said chaito. That was like, bye. And it's just, melts even the hardest heart. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's such a bad ass sequence. An amazing sound of the empty theory can. Yeah. The. Uh huh. And all the shots you got, and I'm, I love it. I love the, it blows up. It's just right out of the, you know, like an old western. Meshitty. Yeah. I felt like in a, the Sargele owner. Yeah. Yeah. Now you're talking. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in Italian. I was practicing. That was my approach to being in Spain. You speak Italian too? No, but I think from Spanish, from Spanish. From Spanish. I can pick up stuff. Yeah. Vesca similar to that. Adam having to sort of keep things different and keep things moving throughout the montage as a performer. And Manusos goes through a real ordeal. And it takes a quite a long time. And there's a real progression of his, his physical state, his emotional state, his mental state. How do you keep track of that? And yet his words are basically the same. So, right. So, I remember to an exercise you do in acting training is that they give you a scene like Europe, Cobb and you're interrogating someone. You have two students. And they can only speak saying the lyrics to Mary Had a little lamb. And you have to play the scene, but you can only say Mary Had a little lamb. It was basically something like you talk about looking for different ways of addressing the same thing with different emotional states. And I remember that exercise, which is a lot of fun. That exercise, somebody interrogating someone just by saying, Mary had a little lamb. And the other one goes, he was white as no. Yes. It's really good. And that gave me the. That's cool. Yeah, it's a great exercise. It's a great exercise. Unfortunately, I had a lot of people reminding me where in the journey he was because we shot everything chronologically except for this. I mean, I was so fortunate that I had everyone reminding me, this is happening at this moment. So, this, you have to be this tire for this moment. And next scene, no, you have to go back and be less tire for this thing. And it was the same for the car. Because we would shoot Ecuador, car. Yeah. And then the next scene would be Chile, which is before. Right. Right. At some point you would tell me it's too much. It's too tired or too stressed. He looks too much in the stress. Don't cry. I remember all of you crying. You would come to me crying. That's the record. Oh, yeah. I remember one who said, you have a puddle in your eye. And it doesn't work. Get rid of it. You're right. You captured such a different tone in the two montages. For us, it's like act two and then act three of the script. The first one where everything you're saying is learning English. So it's bizarre. It's nonsensical. It's like that. The cat is gray stuff. But then in that second montage, it has a different tone. They're both, you know, our Jewish journeys. But the second one, you're doing your mantra over and over and over again. And because Chris, you're hosting, I feel like we got it's our job to ask you the question of how did you approach that as an editor? Like selling that story. I guess it is pertinent that I edited this episode. And you did, because I didn't know it's that. You did a magnificent job. It's amazing. Thank you very much. Yeah. I wouldn't say that made my job easy, but the footage is so good and so well planned and thought out. For me, it was finding where do we want to be when, how do we want to tell this story? And then finding just the right pieces of performance that tied it together. And then cutting it together, we had a music cue that we incredible cue that we ultimately couldn't use. But we did use another cue by the same artists. It has a very similar vibe. And but ultimately, I think works a lot better for the piece as a whole. It's tricky because it's not just like, isn't this cool? Let's put some music on. It's an epic journey and it's an emotional journey. But it's also fun to watch. And it's a big ask for a piece of music, a pre-existing piece of music to hit a lot of these different emotional tones where it's he's having a very hard journey, but it's a hopeful journey. He has this hope in that drive across the Pan American Highway up the entirety of South America. And I do also want to shout out one of the really cool things I thought that was in the script and that was in the conception of the episode was charting this with these kind of like Indiana Jones style maps. And Vince, the way that you describe the maps, you wanted them to be photorealistic. And we wanted to match that kind of red grease pencil that Manusos uses that we see him use practically, but without, you know, a hand without. So it's this kind of trick. You have to trick the brain. You're not inside the map, but you are inside the map and you're watching, you're tracing this path. And I think there are seven shots of those maps. And we had a digital map that was acquired. And then we were trying to figure out how are we going to do this? Is this visual effects? Is this what kind of art? Again, it's another really like bespoke ask for an artist because you have to be technically very savvy to know how to create this digitally and make it look photoreal. You have to have like a filmmaker's sensibility for storytelling because it's not just a to be. There's a pacing to it that the artist actually has to almost be like a performer in creating these moments. And it has to match the timing that we have already locked in. And we were trying to figure it out. The very first person I thought of one of my best friends since we were children. His name is Oliver Scott. He's just this multi-talented artist and filmmaker. And we actually just started doing a movie podcast together about audio commentaries on physical media. It's called commentarily legal. But I thought of him immediately because he had done some similar work on Michael Morris' film, Tulesley, which I edited. He had done a lot of work on the main title in taking these photographs that we made digitally and making them look like they were physical objects in physical space. And even a version and I showed it to Diane and Andrew. And I was just like, I think this is the person to do this. Obviously, let's talk to all of our other people, our other vendors that we go to. But ultimately, he was the right guy for the job. And I just think he nailed it. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Shout that out. Because I really love how that looks. And it's just kind of big Lebowski style ties the room together. It's just it really. I just I love that stuff. And I'm really happy with how that montage and the next one turned out as well, which is stylistically totally different. And there was a version that had music. And it was different style of music. And then the chunga palms every single time anybody watches that sequence when you fall on the between your face and physical body performance. And then the sound effects. It is so convincing. It viscerally affects me. And I've seen it a million times. And every time it never stops being like, oh, no. Full body wins. Yes. Single time. Yeah. For me, it was clear what I was supposed to do to achieve it was another matter. But the figure of a chunga tree was so clear to me. This is the monster. But then I went back home to Columbia and I started talking about it. In Columbia, it hasn't a different name. The ethnic communities in that region in Columbia, they call it Wurri. And for them is like a holy tree that has nothing dangerous about for them is they build everything from that tree. I call it holy because it leaves holes in you. Holy hold. That's how it leaves you. So I thought that's amazing for someone who doesn't belong to that place. That thing is terrifying. And it is terrifying for someone who lives in that place. It's like a friend is like, oh, I make things out of this. This is my friend. I can needle things with it. I can bail stuff with it. So I actually felt bad because I thought, I'm a Columbia. I should know. And I don't. So it was a learning experience for me, the chunga tree, the Wurri. That's really fascinating. It's something like the blowfish. There's a way to prepare blowfish that's totally safe. And if you know what you're doing and you have the traditions and you understand, it's completely safe. And if you don't, it can kill you. Right. I think there are probably a lot of things like that for one community and incredibly positive thing. And for an outsider who doesn't know what they're doing. It encounters them and maybe doesn't take the proper precautions. Sure. You know, it could be death. Yeah. I love the way you play that. And I love the way you directed that. I love it. I remember listening to you guys talking about the blocking of it. And for a while there, it was my first thought was he slides down a hill and it's one line. It's all sound the hill. Yeah. But your version is so much better because it's simpler. It's 999 times out of a thousand, simpler, it's better. And the way when you grab, when you, when that close up to your foot on the little boulder, little rock and it goes out from under you and it's just a sound effect of that rock hitting the other rock, then Adam cuts to you and you're flailing and you reach up and you grab that. There's one last chance you get grabbed that vine that it breaks. And I just literally shut my eyes every time I see that thing. It's just, it's so good. And you guys remember the rock that I exploded? It's in the gag reel, in fact. Like a giant star. We had like giant styrofoam rocks. Everything's styrofoam. But I thought they were solid. I was sure that they were solid. So that's why I just, I went to it. Yes. You launched yourself forward off of the spine and into the rocks in front of you. And luckily the rocks in front of you were indeed styrofoam rock. And it just, it was hollow and it just exploded. I was so worried. I was so worried about you. I was worried about that. But you were fine. I was worried about art department. I was like, oh my god. Luckily that was one of the last shots of the day or I think there would have been some tears from our beautiful painters. Good thing we didn't fill it with junk of pumps. I know. I know. Just put some stuff in it. Like the toy surprise and say. Yes. It was interesting that where we shot that was a protected nature preserve where they, one of the asks is that we didn't move any rocks. Yes, it was a national park. So we had that is true. We had to bring our own painted styrofoam rocks. We didn't disturb the rocks that were there. And the chunga trees are all shipped in. Denise manufactured those trees spikes. We had five or six that we had to carefully place them. They're only so high. We could only photograph up to a certain point. Without visual effects. Expensive. And the trees that you're chopping too, didn't we bring those in as well? Yeah. Those are our trees. Yeah, because we couldn't cut any vegetation to the scenes where Manusius is. With the mishet of the rocks. The ferns. We had to create our own little fern tunnels. As we sort of wrap up this conversation, I just wanted to talk about two other things quickly. This is our first in the series, kind of our first big time jump. I mean, we've been in, not real time, but we've been, you know, sort of experiencing this with Carol and with Manusius. And we go through this ordeal with Manusius. We sort of leave on him in grave peril and grave danger. And then we come back and it's been, what if you weeks later? Weeks, yeah. And Carol is no longer singing her happy tunes and she's silent. She's upgraded in certain ways over those 40 days. She's in isolation at first. She's entertaining herself. That act one is very much like Carol's best day ever, you know, she's going to the spa. She's golfing the only person on the golf course. She's, she's living her best life in a certain way and singing to herself. And you think maybe, you know, she feels rebellious. She is doing okay. And then we have this big time jump forward to what it ends up being the end of her isolation, though when you watch it, you don't know that at first. Now she's got a boom box that's blaring music at max volume, you know, something we, in the mix, we made sure like take it till it breaks as we say, like she's got this Judas Priests has to be so loud. She's not golfing on a golf course anymore. She's, you know, whacking balls off of parking rush. She's taken over the city in a different way and she herself is silent. And when we talked about in the writers room was that there were a lot of ways to show Carol's descent. You can show it incrementally over the course of many weeks, you know, check in with her day three, day seven, day 12. But often when things break in your brain in a certain way, this punishment, this psychological torture, she's going through, she's alone in the city. Sometimes things break all at once. And you know, in your find, it's right up until the point that you're not. And so for Carol, I think it was important for us to show the beginning of her journey and the end because those are the two most interesting, most important moments. And the audience can decide what they think all the middle days are. But Vince, would you say that's true? Like as we were breaking. I think this is one of those episodes in part because they're so little dialogue. It was a little hard for folks to wrap their heads around in the reading of it. And then when you see it, you're like, oh, I get it. Oh, but by the way, it was any glass actually broken in the making of that scene where she's. Where she's driving golf balls off of the building at the other one. Oh, tons, tons. Now, it's all that. It's all a beautiful visual effect. We just sort of slunk out of there. We didn't tell anyone. Yeah, we'd appreciate it if you not tell anybody either of you listening. Don't tell the city. I would forget that was us. That's amazing. The all visual effects is all. Yes, it's a real golf ball. She's hitting, but it was one that was tied to a string. And then in Adam's planning of the shots, he just knew we were going to have to knock out a bunch of glass. And you added one of my favorite details. Adam was the glasses on the desk that get pulled off by special effects right when the golf ball. Right. We tried a couple of things. We tried the glasses. We tried the wedding portrait. A couple of things got knocked over. But it's a real pair of glasses to get jerked off the desktop with a fish line. But then the golf ball hitting them is completely created digitally. And the glass breaking is completely. It's just where reality stops and computer generated images take over is it's amazing. It's kind of scary too. But it's really is also in this episode. The fireworks scene because that is a real wonderful mix of practical effects and visual effects. And I think that combination is what hides the fact that it's not all the effects. We didn't actually set off any fireworks there. However, we did have special effects fill those mortars with whatever that explosive is. We did exactly with the mix of ingredients. So the low level explosion, the light where the rocket would be shooting out. That's all practical. There's real smoke coming by her. The seasons are practical. Exactly. But then Waelin our chief lighting technician, our gaffer, he had these giant LED lights that were timed to certain colors. You know, it adds like, oh, I want a blue one and then a purple firework. That's all lights because we needed that interactive light on Carol. And then our VFX team rodeo would put in the actual firework in the sky as needed. Yeah. And her acting and that's been she's a guy to think and maybe I don't know if you what you guys think about it, but she seems to have everything material at her hand. You know, she has everything she wants. And yet she she looks empty. And this other guy who's struggling in the middle of a jungle, he doesn't have anything. And yet he has a purpose. You know, I got me to think how contemporary world works where you can have everything everything you want, but you don't concern yourself too much about what you need. Yeah. That's where I'll put. I like the way you say it. So you were talking about the contrast between Carol's and Manusa's situations and how they are. I just started thinking this show, so many layers that you can read into it. Because for me, it was like a commentary on how we've been taught that happiness is in things that we get outside yourself, like happiness is exogenous, where I think it's endogenous. It's in yourself. And this guy has something in himself, a purpose that he has and that fills his life, that pulls him through the jungle, through the jungle, through the whole thing. She has everything. And yet she's empty. Yeah. They're right. Chris, I know we have to wrap up soon, but I would love to give a shout out if I can to the wonderful folks at the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, who allowed us to license the painting Beledana, which is the one that Carol seals from the Georgia O'Keefe Museum. And they were really wonderful partners the whole way. The team there, Renee and Liz and Jennifer and Cody in the podcast episode two. You guys talk about how early we started talking about Air Force One. Right alongside that was as soon as we broke this episode in the writers room, I started talking to our clearances manager, Janine, about Georgia O'Keefe. Because to license real art takes time. And we knew we were going to need both access to the museum, though ultimately we ended up building the museum under their supervision because it turns out to shoot in the actual museum around priceless art. We would not have been able to bring in lights. We could have a crew of seven and we didn't want to rob Adam of any riches. So we built a portion that Adam and Denise, our production designer, figured out exactly how much of the gallery we needed to recreate based on his shots. But we recreated all of the artworks there and we used the Georgia O'Keefe Museum's real framing company to frame the painting, the replica that we did. And we had them bless not just the set and the replica, but every single decision we made along the way was in partnership with them. But it took quite a long, long time. It took a year of lead time, right? Yeah. It was a hell of a producing job. You guys did it. And then all the very amazingly recreated works of art that are made to perfection, that the recreations, I don't want to say fakes because that's not the word you would use. But then they all had to be destroyed after a grain. Yes, though, perhaps we have not destroyed the one that is in Carol's house set. Just in case we needed any pickups at any point. So at the end of the show, we'll be a district. But we partnered with these guys on Breaking Bad and in the past, they have been such great partners. The trickiest part about the painting we chose because we did say to the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, do you have a preference for what painting we use? And they gave us a short list of a few, including Belidana, then we chose that one. The trickiest part about it is getting Georgia O'Keefe's white, the white paint, because they gave us a high res file of the painting scanned, which we printed out on canvas. And then ultimately, the white was never, no matter how many times we printed out, we could never get it to look quite right. And so finally, we had our onset painter, one of our prepping painters figure out exactly what the right shade of white would be. And then paint on top of the printed canvas to both to get that texture, but to get the white exactly to the Georgia O'Keefe Museum standards. Have we known that? Perhaps we wouldn't have chosen a white flower, but it makes it all the more delicious knowing how much work went into getting it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Guys, everybody for coming on in on a Sunday and thank you for listening. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, everybody. All right. Thank you so much to Carlos Manuel Vesca, Adam Bernstein, Jen Carroll, and Vince Gilligan. And thank you for listening to Pluribus, the official podcast, an Apple TV podcast, produced by Hiberge Productions and Sony Pictures Television. Be sure to follow on Apple podcasts to get the next episode in your feed, including those bonus episodes, and watch Pluribus on Apple TV. We're available. Our editor and mixer is Nicholas Sy, The Music by Dave Porter. Associate producers are Alana Hoffman, Justin Verbeast, and Nicholas Sy. Executive producers are Jen Carroll, and me, your host, Chris McKaylor. Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.