Every situation, every episode is different. For the second unit people, I made a style bible where I made a huge document full of GIFs of stuff that I shot and told them: “This is how I like to compose things. This is the kind of humor I like. This is what I think is beautiful. Try to shoot stuff with really rich colors. Try to shoot with almost a gag within them. If you’re filming something funny, then you can then supercharge that whole shot by panning to something else funny.”
One thing was these two guys walking down the street and they’re dressed like Vikings in Midtown. Then I pan to this dude on a recumbent bicycle. And there’s no obvious relation to those two things as raw footage, but it becomes really exciting when you’re watching it, to see that joke land. You can make it seem intentional in retrospect.
I feel a thrill when I watch the show because it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. I don’t personally have any reference points that I would compare it to. It feels unique.
Well, that was something that Nathan said during the pitch, which I thought was really smart. He was like, [since] Nathan For You came out, when people see a business trying to do something funny or desperate, they say, “Oh, that’s a Nathan For You thing. But with John’s stuff, I now look at the city in a completely different way and every single time I see something interesting or unexplainable on the street, I think about John’s work.” I think it could have the same kind of effect culturally like Nathan For You did, just in a different way.
Is Nathan involved in the production process much?
Oh yeah, totally. Absolutely. So much so that it was suffocating at points. But with love, in the best way.
How so?
During the pilot, we were just at it every single day together. He was there in the van following me a lot of the time. Both Michael [Koman, executive producer] and Nathan, they were my compass for when I didn’t really know what to do with production stuff. They [are] really good storytellers and Nathan is concerned with reality in the best possible way.
For most of the season, Nathan would come back and forth between LA and New York to work. But during the edit, we were editing together every single day for hours every day, once COVID started, on Zoom. Like weeks and weeks and weeks together. That’s some of the most fun that both he and I had, is in the edit. I get excited because I like making jokes over all this funny footage that I finally got time to sit with. He loves to zoom out and look at the larger picture of the emotional beats of the episode and make sure that the logic is airtight.
Part of what makes the show so fixating to watch is the uncanniness of it. It’s impossible to judge how much of what we’re seeing has been guided by your hand versus how much is genuine coincidence. Is that ambiguity deliberate?
Absolutely. I don’t want there to be any doubt in anyone’s mind that what they’re seeing is real. I really enjoy being very selective about where we drop into conversations and how much we reveal about each subject or each shot. It may seem like it’s just a random mix of stuff at points, but the timing of all the shots is down to the frame. We make sure that you only see what you need to see to get the joke. Because if we stayed on it for an extra second longer, the joke would be spoiled. But, that’s just editing anything, I guess.