Do you have an idea in your head of how this show will end?
I do. I have a scene in mind that’s kind of mostly been unchanged since I first brought the show to Ben [Stiller] and I told him and he was like, “Ooh, that’s pretty good.” A lot has changed about the plan. I won’t pretend that it’s been this structurally perfect thing from day one. We’ve interrogated it and we’ve updated it as we’ve gone along, but the skeleton of it and the end point, that’s sort of remained our North Star from the beginning.
How specific is your vision for the end? Do you know where each character ends up, do you just have kind of a broad idea of what will happen, or do you just have the single last moments in your mind? Because TV is such a fun medium in that it’s so fluid and there’s obviously the stories about Jesse Pinkman on “Breaking Bad,” that character popping in such a big and unexpected way, and the whole show is totally different because of that. So obviously you leave yourself room to change things on the fly, but how specific is your vision of how you want this to wrap up?
Yeah, you can definitely under-plan a show like this, but you can also over-plan it. And if you’re too rigidly stuck to your original conception of it, then you can really impede your progress. I mean, my original version of the script was very different, and before I brought it to Ben, there was a version that was much more heightened. It was closer to something like “Brazil” or almost like a Monty Python thing where it was dark, but then there was this almost magical realism. And had I been obsessively married to that, we never would’ve gotten the show that we got.
So you have to sort of take that lesson and use that moving forward and remember that there may be a better version of this that you don’t know yet and you have to be open to that. And you have to let yourself fall in love with certain characters or other elements of the story that you didn’t expect to, and be able to think on your feet and weave them into the narrative and be like, “Okay, I didn’t expect to love this guy, but now we can’t make the show without him. So what’s his role in the rest of this thing?”
So with all of that said — and this is the last question I’ll ask you about the ending — how many seasons do you think make sense for “Severance” as a whole?
We have a number in mind. I think that’s all I can say.
Okay, fair enough.
We have a pretty good number in mind that — we’re not positive. It’s like, “Maybe we’ll do more, but probably it’s going to be this number.”
Gotcha. Okay. So tell me about working with Keanu Reeves on the “Lumon is Listening” video in the season 2 premiere. I’m pretty sure it was Keanu. He’s not credited in that first episode, but it sure sounded a lot like him.
[slyly] Well, I certainly have no idea what you could be talking about. I’m not actually familiar with that actor.
I see.
Is that the guy from “The Lake House?”
[laughs] It is, in fact.
I do love “The Lake House.”
Okay, so that line of questioning is clearly going nowhere. [laughs]
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