Transcript of S1E2: Pirate Lady

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 McCalib. I'm one of the editors of Pluribus and the host of this podcast. This isn't a recap show. Instead, we favor a free wheeling unscripted discussion about the making of each episode. This podcast is about episode 102 entitled Pirate Lady, written and directed by Vince Gilligan. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome our guests, creator and writer director of this episode, Vince Gilligan.

Hey, everybody.

Executive producer, Diane Mercer.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Production designer, Denise Pizzini.

Hello.

And Zosha herself, Carolina Vidra.

Hi.

Well, this is 102. It's a big episode. The world got much, much bigger. We met a ton of new people, including Zosha. First, let's talk about this. I know this episode was shot over the longest period of time. We shot half of it with episode one in March, and then the Air Force One interiors and exteriors in September, and then the exteriors in Spain in late November and early December. That's a lot of time covered for one episode.

I forgot about that, but that's- I will take your word for it.

The whole thing is just a dim blur. But yeah, it was That was a long one. Oh, my God. When we talk about Air Force One, I'm so glad we got Denise here. Oh, yeah. We had to do the whole podcast.

We'll never get to everything we have to talk about, but we can't not talk about Air Force One. Let's talk about it. How So that was the real Air Force One, and that was no trickery or building or visual effects involved at all, right?

Well, the art department, we started out with a door to Air Force One, and then it grew a little bigger so we We could have, well, we'll just have the sides of Air Force One, and we'll have stairs going up. And it eventually ended up where we had a huge side of the plane, practical, built around the door, but you could go into the Air Force One. We had to lay slab, and we built this huge structure so we could take the stairs up to Air Force One, and the cast could walk all the way up into this set that we built. And then we built the whole interior of Air Force One on stage.

Right.

So it was a big deal. The structure we built was a little terrifying to me because it was huge, and I kept thinking, Oh, my gosh, there's this big metal sail in the New Mexico wind that's going to blow and kill somebody. But we had engineers involved, and like I said, we have an amazing welder who's worked with this group, I think, since Breaking Bad. Peter. Peter. He's a genius. He's a genius. He figured all out. We had a lot of airplane parts, too. We went to the airplane graveyard in Arizona. Diane went with Chet, our art director, and they picked parts and stuff, and we put them all together. But we had the door that we needed, and we built everything around that door.

Is that the one in Tucson?

Yes, outside of Mesa.

Outside of Davis, Martha.

Yeah, that's where I grew up, mostly in Tucson, Arizona. I've seen the graveyard of all those. It's just like, airplane, airplane, airplane, airplane. It's like thousands Millions of airplanes, millions of parts of different airplanes.

Multiple 747.

Then we got the landing gear, the wheels and stuff for the landing gear there, too, which was super important.

Right. The nose wheel, the nose gear. That's Sarah Sarah Moya, one of our wonderful-Oh, she's wonderful. I love Sarah. Sarah Moya. That's her chalk in the nose wheel.

She's our onset dresser.

Our onset dresser.

I just want to say that this really all started from just knowing how Vince was going to want to shoot it. It's like anyone else on a normal TV budget schedule, you would not be able to get the scope in the shot. And we knew that he wanted to see these people watching the plane come in, and he wanted to be able to carry them all the way from the ground up into the plane. And really, the only way to do that without the green screen curse was to actually build as much as we could, practically, so that the actors could interact with it. And that was how it all started, because we could have done it with just a door, but it would not have turned out as great as it did.

So when you read that in the script, because then that was one of the scripts that at least parts of it, I know, pre-existeed, that was in your original conception. Is that right, Vince?

No, it was written quite a number of years ago at this point. Yeah.

Right. But when you read that, Diane and Denise, how far in advance are you starting to prepare? It's like, Okay, Air Force One and a C-130 and a commercial wheyfair airline.

Those are the first things I had meetings about. I mean, before anybody even really came on. I mean, the first meetings we had. I started talking to our VFX house, which is Rodeo in Montreal. We started talking to them almost immediately. There was just so much. There was a lot of back and forth. Obviously, Vince wanted to shoot. He was like, Can we get a real 747? It turned out that was really hard to do. Also, It's really, really hard to shoot it. Sure. Really hard to shoot it. And so we have- Because you're so small. But I mean, the corridors are tight, and you can't... How are you going to pull walls and put a camera somewhere?

It actually would be small.

It would be very small. It's really high up. So how do you light it? How do you light outside?

And how do you get your crew in and out? And where do you place everybody?

Would that be also safety? Seeing how it's done inside?

We explored all those options. We absolutely did. We went to Roswell. There's another plane. I guess it was an Air Force base at one point, but it's another plain graveyard. We went and we explored all those options and thought, Well, maybe we can get pieces from there. Maybe we shoot it out there in their big hangar, what we built. But it ended up we just built the whole thing from scratch with our door.

You did an amazing job.

That's such a huge undertaking. Then, Carolina, it's true that you know how to operate and fly every one of those airplanes, and you had to learn that as a part of your prep for the show.

Method actor.

Yes, exactly. That was the coolest thing ever. Taxing the C-130, that was pretty special. I still think about that, and it still blows my mind that I got a chance to do that. But also the interior of the Air Force ones was unreal. Just walking onto the set and just seeing the massiveness of it and just the details that Denise, you did with that plane. It's just everything. It's just so surreal. So incredible. I mean, even shooting outside that whole thing of just seeing the piece of the plane coming in and us reacting to it and then walking up. It was just so big that what you're saying, when you read it and then you actually see it all happening, it's just wild.

I'm going to brag on Carolina because that was really... We do a lot of trickery, visual effects trickery, thanks to Rodeo and thanks to Diane. A lot of stuff looking at does not really exist in the real world. But when you see Carolina taxiing that, I think, 70,000- That plane, the one that we had, it could carry 40,000 pounds alone.

So just, yeah.

It's amazing. And it came from Malaysia when it arrived for us to shoot inside it. And you were actually taxiing it through the Albuquerque Airport. That's really what's out the window is really what's out the window. You had the wonderful pilot sitting next making sure- And they're incredible pilots.

I think when you said that they flew in from Malaysia, it's an old plane.

70 years old, that very plane. What? Yes. It's 71 now. We were shooting it last year. It was built in 1954. That's crazy. Oh, yeah. Wow. He was so impressed with you that he let you... I mean, it was very safe. He was in charge. Nothing bad was going to happen. But that was really you staring it and getting it in there and applying the throttle and all that.

I think what it was is that I was very curious, and I asked a lot of questions, so he felt like I was very serious about what I was doing because I remember what been said that originally they were not sure if they will let me do it. Then we had many conversations, and they said that I could listen. So they allowed me to taxi the plane. It's wild because it's this tiny little lever that just turns. You would imagine something massive. It's actually not. It's really small.

At It's a little wheel, right?

That little wheel on your left hand. Yeah, it's like a wheel. It's tiny. And this plane is so massive. And you're like, Wait, what? How is this tiny thing operating? And that would have my feet on the pedals for breaks. And again, it's just nothing, just simple pedals. And I don't know why in my mind, I always think it's just something bigger and more grand on these planes, but it's just very small, and they just operated this massive machinery.

Yeah, you'd think it's some gigantic, like a lost where they had the huge wheel to move the island. That's how you'd have to do to move a 70,000, 90,000-pound plane.

Yeah. But by the way, we had a moment where I did, when I was taxiing, for some reason, I had my earpiece in, but it was getting distracted by... I was picking up the actual control tower. I would hear the control tower talking to all these different planes and the pilot talking to me. And he was telling me where to go, but I was like, I can't really... I can't. And the control tower. And at one point, he said, Go right, go right. I'm like, What? What is he saying to me? What is he saying? He said, Go right. I'm like, Oh, right? Okay. Because I was heading for something else. And he just said, Go right. I'm like, All right. Yeah, I'm right. Yeah, here we go.

You're stealing thunder from the story about you being really good at this.

But you don't talk about the- I was great.

I did it. I did it. I did it. You did.

You did it. But Carolina, talk a little bit about the challenges of that character. Because you're talking about a situation where you're acting, and yet somebody's yelling, Go left, go right. But as a character, they're just unflappable. We're getting to actually know one of these others.

Yes, the others. Yes. And then old schoolers.

Yeah. The old schoolers are like Carol, the folks who have not been changed. That's what we call them in the script.

Who hasn't joined us yet. Right. Yeah, who hasn't joined.

But you're a person who is hyper connected to everything and is completely confident to operate this thing. And yet you're acting that, and then you're also interacting with people. There's this fine line between how much emotion is being shown and how much... Is that a complicated thing as an actor to play somebody who's so... She's so enigmatic, but she's also so kind?

What I would love that, there was a lot of different things that we talked about, and one of them was being an indulgent mother with Carol. And also the way I would put it is someone that holds space for someone's feelings. And like you would with a kid when they're having a tantrum, you're like, okay, they're having their moments, but I know that once they join us, they're going to know the bliss and the power and the beauty of what we're experiencing. Also, having we talked about with Vince a lot is what you mentioned, being able to do all these different tasks and do it perfectly and do it really well. We had a conversation about, is it in their muscle memory? If they're great at doing something, is it in their muscle memory? That was one of the things that… When she's flying a plane, she's the best. She's like Jack Yeager. Can I talk about that? Bob Hoover. Yeah. She's the best of the best in everything that she does. That was an interesting thing to step into that of just if anything happens, you're just not affected by it. You just roll with it like nothing and learning how to ride an excavator, which is so much fun.

Well, That's highly recommended.

We're definitely going to get into that and into the cul-de-sac where Carol lives.

Yeah, so all these things, but you do it with such ease and such perfection. I think the first day is being on set, having nerves, and it's like, Well, this character doesn't have nerves. That was very challenging because you have... Normally when you do a scene and you're playing a person that's a normal person, you go, Okay, I'm nervous. Give it to the character. Just let the character be nervous. I think this is like, No, you cannot. You cannot be nervous. There was challenges with that internally for me. We had many conversations. Who are these people? How do they behave? What is it like to be blissed out and happy but not robotic? They're real people that don't feel pain. They don't feel negativity. They don't feel anger. They don't feel that anger and these negative feelings or anything that's negative. It's becoming more and more of a distant memory, obviously, as the season goes on. It was an exciting challenge. Sometimes it's trusting Vince, and sometimes Vince will be like, Go further, go further. That's your brilliance. When I watch it. It's just the humor that came from that, too. Taking it further and just trusting that you're not a caricature.

It was just trusting that and seeing like, wow, that's amazing how it came together. These moments that work. There's just so much humor.

I'm so glad there's so much humor. I, too. I love that about the show. But a lot of times you'd ask me a question, which I appreciated how collaborative you are, and I try to be the same way. But a A lot of times I don't know the answer, especially in the early going of a new project. And these others, we're still figuring it out. We're still figuring out exactly what makes them tick and what's going on in their heads. It's always a leap of faith explaining what's going on with these people. I think they're untroubled. I think they're implacable, unflappable.

All that, but also have that in your body. It was those days where Carol had big feelings and you hold space for that. Then I have two little kids who are three and four now, but they're a little younger. They're two and three, and they have big feelings. I would come home and they had their feelings, and I was holding space for them. It was just like, What about me?

What about my feelings? Yeah, really? Why do you get to have space? Exactly. That doesn't seem fair.

My poor husband.

You also had to, as far as prep goes, you also had to learn how to greet the old schoolers once we start meeting people from all over the world, and you had to learn to greet them in Hindi, and Mongolian, and Ketua, and Mandarin. I had recently had to learn something... And French. I recently had to learn something in Mandarin for my sister's wedding I officiated. Oh, nice. A third of the people there were from China. It is very difficult, I found, and just that language, just how musical it is and how the rules are so different.

Also, one sound, there's one word has four different sounds, and that means they have four different meanings. You have to hit that sweet spot of that word.

Otherwise, it's a completely different word.

Yeah. It's incredibly difficult language.

Were there multiple linguists working? How did that happen on set? Were there advisors?

I got a recording for each one. I got a written. Phonetically, I had it written, and I would ask them to do recordings very slowly, so then I could just listen to it and do it again and again and again. I don't know if we had somebody on set, did we? For French, we did.

Yeah. Even though Samba is a fluent French speaker, as were several of our actors.

I think Amra and Haluna spoke Mongolia, so they were Able to help, right? And then I think Piusch spoke Hindi, right?

Yes, Puyush and Viji.

Viji did. Yes, for sure. So we did.

But every now and then we'd have a linguist there as well on top. We did, right? Yeah. Just to make sure everything was kosher. But that's the asshole writers. Okay, so in this scene, force one lands, and then the lady says 14 different things in 27 different languages. The original version of it was this long... It was a lot longer than just, Hello, thank you for coming. It was a paragraph.

I think I might have asked you. I was like, Vince, are you sure? I think I might have asked you, Are you sure you really want me to say this? Even that many languages, you're like, Yes, I do.

Well, you did great. By all accounts, what do I know? I don't speak any of those languages, but by all accounts, you did great.

Thank you. It was so much fun.

I think it sells the authenticity of how interconnected all these people are now, as opposed to if Zosha had just had those UN earwigs and was like, Here, put those on, and then just that solves it. But I think the fact that flawlessly, she can communicate with everybody without even blinking, I think that's so cool.

It's such a cool detail. It is, and it's also so fascinating if I had access to all the languages in the world. What an incredible thing to I have friends actually that speak seven languages. I only speak two.

You only speak two. That's a humble friend.

Only two. But I have friends that speak seven languages. Apparently, once you learn, if you know Spanish, like Italian, French, come very easy. For me, I think Russian and obviously, Czech comes easier if I was going to learn those languages. But yeah, seven languages and have a friend who's fluent in seven languages. It's incredible. That's incredible.

I I really want to talk about the cul-de-sac where Carol lives. My introduction to seeing it was in the office, we have architectural, like a drawing of the neighborhood, and then photographs as it started going up. Talk about the conception, because I know that there were certain story needs that the neighborhood needed to have. Talk about the conception of the cul-de-sac, the neighborhood, and what went into the planning of that, because it's a completely constructed neighborhood.

From scratch. I'm going to throw this over to Denise. I'm simply going to say that we needed a neighborhood that Carol lived in that we would have complete control over because we knew there's big stuff coming, many big things coming after episode 2. That a real neighborhood owned by real folks who worry about their property values and want to sleep at night, would not be happy about us. They wouldn't be happy about us shooting in a real neighborhood. So we had to construct this neighborhood from scratch. And Denise and her crew, I want to let her talk about it here, because they just crushed it. It's absolutely amazing what they did.

My favorite photo is an early photo of Vince, and he's got to post it with a little cul-de-sac growing on it. And he's pointing, he's like, This is what we need. So It's like the Stonehenge moment.

It is. It's like a little napkin.

Yeah. And then I wandered off and had a hot dog, and then the adults went to work, just like they did with the Air Force One and going to Spain and the Canary Islands and all of it.

But he's very clear, and that's what the joy of working with Ben says. He's very clear on his vision and what he wants, and he pays complete attention to detail, which Which I love because then it just- It's true.

It's the best thing.

It raises the level of everything. You'd never want to say that's good enough. When any one of my crew says, Oh, that's good enough. I'm like, No, it's not. We're going to see it. We might see it. But Christian, our location manager, found some land. There were several places because one of the things we wanted was we wanted Carroll's house to have a view. So we found the right spot out in, I think it's West Albuquerque. Is that West? Northwest.

It was a closed location in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Yes. I mean, no road went to it. It was just some land that we found that we could lease. So we found the land first, and then we started plotting out how the neighborhood would be. We designed six houses, and Carol's being at the end of the cul-de-sac, and we had to figure out which way the road went. We had to make sure that when the road curves, that you feel like it goes on to more neighborhood. It just isn't ending right there. There was a lot of logistics involved with production. We had to make sure- Drainage. Drainage. Drainage was huge, and we didn't find out. Some of those problems until monsoon season hit and a couple of houses leaked, but we were able to fix all of that. We designed each house. I wanted it to be like a custom neighborhood. It wasn't one of these cookie cutter suburbs, but it was more of a custom neighborhood. We had a lot of meetings with the city of Albuquerque.

The city was great.

Yes. They had to wrap their head around, yes, we're building these homes, and we're doing it for real, except for plumbing and electric. But we poured slabs. Everything has to be weatherproof and safe. Windproof. That's a big thing. Windproof, yeah. And then we knew, at Carroll's, it's two-story. We built the second story on stage, but you can go out on her balcony on location, and it's a perfect view. And we did a lot of grading of each house up and down to where we could get that view so the other houses weren't hiding it. But I also didn't want Carol's house to be this giant thing at the end of the cul-de-sac. It had to blend in. As we went down the street, the houses got a little smaller, a little lower.

I did not know that. Yeah. That illusion, I would say, is invisible. You definitely can't tell that.

I did not know. We went out there every day, and it's like, no, house number 4 needs to come up, house number 5 needs to go down, Carroll's needs to come up. Before we could start pouring slabs. Then we poured our slabs. And then when we went on the balcony, we realized, Oh, I think we're going to see the roofs of everything. So we had to do each roof with skylights or swamp cooler or air conditioning or electrical.

Vents and all that stuff.

Even the little breather vents or the sewer system. Yeah, all that stuff.

Wow, that's incredible.

We definitely talked about doing those with visual effects at some point, and that was on our to-do list. And then, I don't know, first day we went out there and we went up top and I said, Oh, my God, she finished the roof. I don't have to do anything.

I think it's just always better to do practical. And once we got up there, we just kept going. And I said, Okay, let's just do the roofs. And then there was also talk about not doing the backs of the houses or the backyards. They were like, Well, we'll do it per episode. But it's like, No, that's not going to work.

Episode 2, helicopter, delivering an excavator. I think we're going to see down.

Yes, I read drone shot. Okay, we got to do all the backyards now. And so we had a landscape plan for each backyard. And I was talking to our Greensman, Loa, who is a genius. Loa is the best. Yes. We had an earlier greensman who, because of the strikes, we were allowed to work to a certain point. Once we decided, Okay, we're going to build these houses, but At some point, if the strike goes on and on, we're going to have to shut down. But we can't just leave everything. So we had to commit to doing certain things before we could walk away to make them safe. We had to work with the EPA a lot because of the dust and everything we were generating. I think we had 350 tons of aggregate. I know every rock and flagstone in existence.

Is it that much?

It was, and I couldn't believe it. We were calculating the other day, how much was that? We figured with the truckloads and stuff, it was that much because we had to cover all of that area. Before we went in. And then before we broke for about a month and came back. And so we buttoned everything up, laid all the rock, but we purchased all the trees ahead of time, and the Santa Fe tree farm kept them for us. And so then when we came back in January, which is not the optimal time to plant trees or December, and then we started planting in January, February. So we had like 30 trees because there were no trees out there. There's nothing out there. It was just scrubby, and a lot of it was lava rock that we had to really dig down into certain areas.

Zosha knows.

There's a lot of rock in that soil. See, they should have asked me. I would have told them. Is it Daniel Day-Lewis style? Yeah. That's right. I could have done it myself.

I heard that story, that Daniel Day-Lewis thing. You went out months earlier with the excavator. Exactly. You built a lot of the village from scratch. What an incredible amount of effort that went into what looks absolutely like a real neighborhood. I want to live in Carol's house so badly. Me too.

That's the good part and the bad part. The good part is you don't want it to look like a set. The bad part is it's thankless because it's like, Oh, you built that? People don't realize how much work and planning it took, and it was a lot. We also built a lot of Carol's interior out there as well. We have her interior on stage, and then we have a lot of her interior out, so we can look right out the windows and see what's going on in the neighborhood.

I remember as that was happening, because some of that was happening gradually as things were We did. Okay, we need this kitchen. Let's get the kitchen done. Okay, we need this hallway. Let's get the hallway. I know in some of the dailies, sometimes you could look one direction, but not the other at first.

The kitchen in this episode, Carol's on the phone. What you see in the show is what was done. That was it. We could not turn around and look into the house. Like, video village right there.

I just want to say a quick thing to folks listening. This is an amazing marvel. Do not try to go visit it. It is on private property. It is guarded by actual guards 24 hours a day. They're very nice, but they're not going to let you come visit. That's right. And do not send a drone up over it because it is within the Class Delta airspace Double Eval Airport over there on the west side of Albuquerque. And if you send a drone up, you will get busted by the FAA.

A lot of people don't know that about drones, and they just go willy-nilly with the drones. But yeah, they're very, especially, like you said, in airspace.

We would have people drive up sometimes while we're under construction, and just looking around, and then they would say, When are these houses going up for sale? They're not.

We have the same question in the office.

Yeah, absolutely. So bad. Everyone's picked the one they want to live in. Yeah.

They're so beautiful, Denise. You truly did. It's you. Just so people know, they had the most amazing sunsets. Most magnificent sunsets as well in that area. It was It was so beautiful.

Diane, on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, a lot more of your work was done here in the office. But on this show, you've spent way more time on set, on locations, which has had huge benefits. Do you want to talk at all about the experience or the difficulties, the new challenges that you have taken on with the show like this?

I've never been involved with something from the very, very beginning. That was a real a challenge and I guess a joy. I was one of the first people to read the script, thanks to Vince. That's true. I wasn't in the pitches, but we certainly were having conversations about how to plan and how to budget and how we should schedule it and all that stuff very early on before we even sold it. I just had never really had the opportunity to be involved in something that early. I think this is such a post-heavy show, and my background on that side of things absolutely helped us figure out how we were going to accomplish this. And then just being able to go to set. I mean, I spent probably six months. I would go for a few weeks at a time and then come back. I was in all the meetings and absolutely really being able to have that overhead view of everything because I was the only one that was coming back here because Vince doesn't do a ton of posts while we're shooting because he needs to be focusing on... Especially this show is new.

We're trying to figure out what story we were telling and how these others would need to behave and how everything needed to look. And we were building the houses as we were going, and we were making all these very important creative decisions that he had to really put his time on. So part of it was me just going back and forth and making sure that it's all adding up in post, that what we have, what we're shooting is coming together, and that it's actually making a show that is what Vincent intended to make. And so I found the time spent on set to be absolutely invaluable for just understanding Vince's vision and helping put the pieces together and make the show, because questions would be asked on set that would change other things. There's so many things. You read the script and you I think one thing, but then in the execution, it raises different questions, and you have to work that out with the DP and the production designer and the costumes. So much of the others is how they dress and how they move through the world and how good they are at everything and trying to make people understand.

It's a very difficult concept. It makes a lot of sense when you watch it. But if you're reading it and you're trying to build it, you have so many more questions than you have answers for so long. I mean, I hope I'm not opening up too much of how the sausage is made, but I think that this episode benefited greatly from how long it took to shoot it. Because we had a cut of most of it, the Albuquerque portion of it that we could look at that would help us inform the stuff that we shot in Spain. And Carolina had many more months to understand who the character was.

It's into the body more character.

And have that confidence when you have to be in Spain leading this group of old schoolers who have not... I mean, Carol has more questions than anybody, right? Most of these other old schoolers seem to be very content to just keep living their lives and pretending like nothing has changed. But Zosha is the leader of... She's our guide to the new world, and she has to have that complete confidence and understanding of what has changed and be able to explain it to everyone else, the audience and the characters. And I think that was so much improved by the fact that we had all this time to really answer those questions. It's such a team effort, all of this.

Just to add to that, I'm so glad that it went that way as well, because it's very true. I felt the character lived in my body. She lived more in my body, and I was able to have those moments more be freer and just explain it in a different way.

But and it's also how Vince plans his shots, and it's how he introduces the characters. I mean, we talked a lot about this moment when Zosha comes to the house for the first time, and Vince shot it in a way that's very unusual for him with the distance, right? It's so great. We don't see Zosha in a closeup until almost the end of the interaction when she offers the water. And you were very frustrated in the editing room because she was like, I can't believe I shot it this way. I want to be closer. Why did I do this? Why did I do this? I love it because it keeps you so firmly in Carol's point of view. And she's keeping the world at arm's length. This beautiful angelic person is standing there offering help, and she doesn't want it, and she's so distrustful. You feel all of that and how the scene is shot and blocked and edited, and being able to go to Albuquerque much more and see people and be in the room with people and have meetings and tell people it's working. I promise you it's working because everyone's like, I think it's working, but I don't know.

To be able to tell people, I swear it's coming together. Everything looks good. It's going to be great. Then we all were able to keep moving and keep pushing and pushing ourselves.

It was a huge help for us, for the art department, to have I am there. I mean, huge. The collaboration of this entire crew is just magical.

It really is. Everybody leans on everybody else, but everybody also knows they can lean on everybody else. If that makes sense. We're all here to hold each other up and whatever. Denise will come to me and be like, Yeah, I can get this far, but I need you to take it the rest of the way. And it's like, I got it. We always are talking. We're always communicating. There's a lot of trust.

A lot of trust. Coming into this creative family, it's my first time, and just watching how everybody works together, it's really magnificent. There's so much trust. When Vince would ask, I was lucky enough to just listen in on one of the scenes and listen to Vince talk to Matt, who's a camera operator, and just the dance that they do to get a certain shot, to get a certain moment. All of it is just so special.

We would have failed catastrophically at this show if we did not have this history with this crew.

I think you're right. If we just came in not knowing each other, I don't think it would have worked.

It would not have happened.

You have a lot of trust. It's just utter trust and understanding. Even you with Ray, just watching the way you guys, your relationship and the nuances that you guys have with each other and to get certain moments in her performance was so fascinating to watch. It was really-Yeah, I agree.

That was another really... That was an amazing part of being able to be on set, too, was to see that, to see how you interact with the actors and how the whole crew, how everybody just finds it and finetunes it. That was a real joy.

What I do think is one of the finest moments, and we'll close out on this, is one of the last scenes that was shot, the big lunch scene where everybody gets together and has a lunch. And another podcast we'll have to talk about Mr. Diabate, the Absolutely wonderful Samba.

Samba.

That scene, it's one of those things. It's a scene that is effortlessly complex. And it seems you would never know how incredibly complicated that scene is. And in part because of your, not rigid, but the desire to not repeat shots, it creates this far more cinematic feeling in the scenes. A scene like that, which is a very long dialog scene with many characters, many points of view, all of it ultimately coming back to Carol's point of view.

And critical information for the audience being explained.

Yes. And then drama happening where we learn that Carol has this ability to, through her emotions, cause a reaction in the others. How do you even start? And a huge shout out to Skip, the editor of this episode. Skip killed it. I mean, you could really teach it. You could teach an advanced editing class with that sequence because of just the amount of material, the shot choices, and how you constructed it and how you conceived it. How do you even start with a scene like that when you're getting into it?

That was my least favorite scene. It wound up being one of my favorite scenes of all because of the wonderful, wonderful actors. Everyone did such a great job. My least favorite scenes are long, talky scenes with many, many, many people in them. I kept thinking, I would say to Diane and Jen, and sometimes I'd say, and Trina, Is there a way we can cut this scene out? And they're like, Are you nuts? And we shot in a beautiful place in paradise, basically on the north Coast of Spain, the north of Spain. They're right near the French border, a little bit west of San Sebastian. Beautiful, beautiful place called the Iteregi. That was a wonderful boutique Hotel is a wonderful boutique hotel. They were very, very wonderful hosts to us. And so it's paradise there. It's beautiful in the Basque country. And that building exists. But then there's this gazebo that we not the scene under that Denise and her crew had to design and build, and some local Spanish engineering firm built it because we basically needed Marshall Adams, who did a brilliant job shooting these first two episodes, needed to control the light.

Because we shot over four days.

Four straight days.

And the weather is very changeable in that part of the world.

Especially in late fall, because when we scout it, it was summer the first time, and we chose the location, and everything was in bloom, everything was beautiful. And then we're like, Oh, it's now-Yes, we're going in November. So we had to adjust a little bit.

It was a big, big scene. And I always do homework. Anyone who's listening to this who says, I want to be a director, you could do it, as I always say, same with writing and show running, do it any darn way you want. But the way I find most helpful is to go in with a really solid plan, and then you can throw the plan away. But from a directing point of view, I had, I think, 14, 15 pages of homework.

I remember I saw that on the plane. Oh, yeah. I looked at it. It was very thorough.

I make it as thorough as I can. I letter the shots, and I got up to probably double C.

That means through the alphabet multiple times, and there's 26 letters in the alphabet? Yeah, exactly. That's hundreds of, potentially, upwards of 100 if you get into the D. Well, no.

I don't think it was... It was like 30 or 40. It was a lot. It was a lot. It was a lot. I can't even remember.

But there's multiple cameras, so you got to multiply that. Yeah.

That's a lot, too. I think we had three cameras, right?

Yeah, we had three cameras. But see, the other thing, multiple cameras is great. It's a blessing and a curse, as Frank Black used to say, a millennium. A little shout out for all the millennium fans, because you have one great shot, typically. But if you try to squeeze another camera in, then you got to jockey your first camera around, and maybe it's now slightly less good a shot. It's very tough using multiple, especially three. It gets exponentially harder when you add a third one in. We had a great crew. I want to give a shout out to the crew in Spain. God, they They did a great job. Everybody did. They did.

They were great. Yeah.

Well, we're out of time, but this has been a really awesome conversation about it. I guess we're going to hop on the plane. Who knows where we're going from there? That's right. Thank you all for listening and for watching the show.

This was awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chris.

All right. Thank you so much to Carolina Vidra, Diane Mercer, Denise Pizzini, and Vince Gilligan. And thank you for listening to Pluribus. The official podcast, an Apple TV podcast, produced by Highbridge Productions and Sony Pictures Television. Be sure to follow on Apple Podcasts to get the next episode in your feed and watch Pluribus on Apple TV, where available. Our editor and mixer is Nicolas Tsai. Theme music by Dave Porter. Associate producers are Alana Hoffmann, Justin Verbeast, and Nicolas Tsai. Executive producers are Jenn Carroll, and me, your Chris McCaleb. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.