StationEleven's Patrick Somerville and Jessica Rhoades discuss making the HBO Max series, the biggest challenges of adapting Emily St. John Mandel's book, and whether there's more story to tell after the finale.
The HBO Max miniseries Station Eleven, adapted from the book by Emily St. John Mandel, follows the lives of those who have survived a devastating event: a flu epidemic that directly contributes to the collapse of civilization as they know it.
When you do adaptation, you don't get to bring that with you unless you're trying to do something that's inherently a mistake, which is just math one to one, texts, prompts to screen, because then you're losing the tonal changes that are affecting the storytelling. I knew there were many great ideas baked into the novel in terms of visual storytelling, the scale, and the wagons, and the city and the airport.
Patrick, you've spoken before about being in production on the show up to a certain point and how a lot of the "before" was shot before COVID. How much of the series had you filmed by that point, and what was it like having to come back and continue production given the reality of the new situation? And I think that the first thing we realized as we all reckoned with it [was] what risk are we willing to take to go back, to make the thing we love to do? As producers with the studio... now obviously we were making sure we followed every safety protocol. We were very careful. We made a lot of smart choices, but still as every single human had to do, you made a decision. How am I going to do this? And the show saved a lot of us.
But in those, Ruth Ammon, our production designer, designed those. That's the dead of winter in Chicago, dressed as a different season. But you can see already the visual palette of Year 20 beginning to emerge there with a lot of azaleas and strange greens. There's a lot of kind of brick reds and what we call lobster bisque red. There's advertisements that are degraded, but still there as the commercial. So all the ideas for the show were kind of put in those pops.
SOMERVILLE: Same space. The same apartment that we trucked from one country to another and rebuilt. It was a year later in a different country, but they walked into the same room. We grow up, we get strong enough to finally take a look at the ways that we were traumatized or unfair things got put on our shoulders that we didn't understand at the time. So that's all to say, what Jessica said was profoundly important about how it was the first one we did. Because for Mackenzie, finding her character, she got to acquire the memories that Kirsten had. She literally was standing watching Matilda talking to Himesh and Frank.
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