It is difficult to talk about “Paradise,” Hulu’s Emmy-nominated hit series created by Dan Fogelman, which premiered in the spring, without diving into spoiler territory, but the best way to describe the feeling its premiere episode provokes is “uncanny.”
During IndieWire’s Pass the Remote virtual panel, presented in partnership with Disney, one of the episode’s directors John Requa said that their first idea to shoot the thriller series at real life locations came with too many difficulties. “It crushes you because all realism goes flying out the window and you’re really struggling with your team, your production designer and your cinematographer to get a sense of reality and ‘don’t shoot that and don’t shoot this,’” he said. Finally, he and directing partner Glen Ficarra arrived at shooting the series on several studio lots in Los Angeles.
“We’re like, ‘You know what? Let’s embrace it. Let’s make the audience go, “Wow, that’s a little weird. What’s going on? It feels a little artificial.”’ To the point where in post-production, we smoothed out the concrete. There were cracks in the concrete, so we smoothed out the concrete, to make it look more new and manufactured,” said Requa. “We felt like we could hide behind conventions of storytelling and filmmaking and Hollywood that people are used to seeing.”
Ficarra added, “It distracts you from thinking too hard about what’s going on in the world. There’s a lot of little flaws in the sky and all that stuff that I don’t think a lot of people pick up on, because you’re busy, you’re in the story, which is nice.” Editor Julia Grove explained that the first 10 minutes of the series, where that tone is established, was something they all spent a lot of time on, trying to get it right. “At one point, we had a very minimal atmospheric score that really leaned into that feeling of almost dread or someone’s watch surveillance, which is another kind of theme or feeling we try to evoke,” she said. “But ultimately we thought that sequence was a great way to introduce our musical theme, our score.”
Said music came from Emmy-winning composer Siddhartha Khosla, who said “The fun part about working with Glenn and John and Julia and Dan is that it’s such a collaboration even before they start shooting too. So I started writing thematic material for months before we ever shot a frame of anything, and it would go through Glenn and John and Dan.” The directors, who he first worked with on “This Is Us,” said to him for this series, “‘We want to feel like we are perpetually trapped also in this world, and what does that feel like?’ They would just be like ‘Give Me a tonal bed that literally does not move for 30 seconds, and then it moves again at 30 seconds and then moves again later on,’” said the composer.
“What I love about Sid’s score in general, working on ‘This is Us,’ is we always go back to this word ‘nostalgia’ or ‘memory’ and it automatically makes you feel like it’s speaking to a past experience,” said Grove. “Whether you’re aware of it or not, it’s feeling like it’s commenting on something that has happened and that we will reveal down the line.” Khosla said, “You’re scoring to the subtext of why these characters are here, not to like what’s happening on the scene, right in that exact moment.”
The full context of “Paradise” really comes with its standout flashback episode “The Day,” directed by Ficarra and Requa. While much of the show is investigatory, with Sterling K. Brown’s Secret Service character Xavier trying to figure out what exactly happened to his boss, President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), the penultimate episode of Season 1 shows exactly why all the characters ended up in “Paradise,” in full 90s action movie fashion.
“Because of the human nature of the story, the idea was to stay with the characters and just never leave them and never go into the big ‘Independence Day’ shots. You’re not cutting to Paris and seeing what’s happening. Everything is as it comes to the characters, which I think makes it more immediate, more visceral,” said Ficarra of he and Requa’s strategy for making such an epic episode on a TV budget. Requa explained that much of the episode, and series itself, was informed by the COVID-19 pandemic, “living your life and getting these little glimmers of what’s happening in the world and the fear and the suspicion and just the lack of information,” said the director.
“We pick our moments to go big, but practicalities on a television budget to go shoot world destruction after you’re already doing an Armageddon show is challenging. And so you’re almost by going smaller, you’re making it bigger because I think Spielberg’s ‘War of the Worlds’ is a really good one. It’s this big story and all this shit is going on, but it’s all told from eye level,” said Ficarra. Requa more concisely describes it as less Roland Emmerich, more Paul Greengrass. “You’re getting pieces of stuff and the camera’s missing stuff. It feels very immediate. And by doing that, you’ve kind of got blinders on so you don’t have, not every shot has to be a big CG canvas,” said Ficarra.
Even though much of the episode is set at the White House, Grove said “It’s not many rooms, but it conveys the bigger picture. And I think a lot of the news footage we had on there that we incorporated pretty early on helps back to the whole, ‘Oh, it feels like COVID or it feels like all those social unrest movements that really popped up during that time because everyone’s just watching through a screen.’”
Khosla said, “If you watch that episode without any music and you just watched it dry, it worked. It was already there. It had the pacing and the tension,” so his job was “to provide enough sort of minimal low grade tension that wouldn’t tip it too much.” However, when disaster strikes, music swells, and “that was the emotional release of the episode. . . I was like, ‘There’s enough emotionality here, I just have to open the tear ducts just a little bit with the score.’ It’s like my goal not to hit you over the head with it.”
The composer finished his thoughts by complimenting his colleagues, who he has worked with from “This Is Us” to “Paradise” Season 1: “When you have a good picture and good writing and good editing, it’s the best.”
The IndieWire Pass the Remote Winter Edition, presented in partnership with Disney, will celebrate the art and craft of TV through a series of panels rolling out through early December 2025. Check back here for more.
