In the finale of “The Curse,” Whitney (Emma Stone) wakes up to find her husband, Asher (Nathan Fielder), experiencing an unexplained form of reverse gravity on the ceiling above their bed. Panicked, the couple assumes it is due to an air pocket in their passive, airtight, eco-friendly house. But panic turns to full-blown terror after Asher, with great physical effort and agility, makes his way outside, and the only thing stopping him is being launched into the skies is a large tree branch to which he clings for dear life.
While Asher spends the season worrying about being cursed by a tenant’s daughter (Hikmah Warsame), and series composer John Medeski’s music does more than hint at the cosmic, nothing explains or prepares the audience for the surreal, seemingly out of nowhere. 40 minutes which conclude the season.
During his appearance on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Benny Safdie made it clear that he and co-creator Fielder have a clear idea of what’s happening to Asher and what it means. However, this is not a hidden message, and to try to decode it is to miss what is laid bare on screen and the true purpose of the episode.
“You can tie it to religion, you can tie it to all these things, but it just comes down to, ‘Well, now let’s see how everyone I’ve come to know, if they can hold up under this microscope?’ ” said Safdie. “Feeling these deep feelings of real emotion in a completely ridiculous environment is key to the show. And I think it really tests the audience who believes these people when we see them pushed to the extreme. And I think that’s where you (ask), “Okay, who is this person?”
During the podcast, Safdie explained how he and Fielder very carefully structured the series so that the audience’s perspective on the characters (big and small) changed, wanting us to pass disapproving judgment on their actions, to ultimately leaving us train in the smallest details. of their dilemmas, and often confound our assumptions about them. With the structure in mind, before they even really began writing, Safdie and Fielder met their surreal end.
“It’s the ultimate litmus test for the characters, and it’s also the only way it could have happened,” Safdie said of the ending. “You kind of have this vision of them in a completely extreme and unrealistic environment, but now it’s as real as it could be.”
Safdie highlights Fielder’s physical and emotional performance in the episode, which he sees as a product of this design and what the creators were going for.
“Nathan, when he’s on that tree, speaks from his heart, with complete fear and abject terror, and no one believes him,” Safdie said. “This is probably the most real he’s ever been in the entire series, and yet no one believes him.”
Safdie’s character, Dougie, initially thinks Asher is in the tree out of fear of becoming a father, as Whitney gives birth during this trying event. The couple’s friend and producer of their HGTV reality show sees this as an opportunity to once again capture Asher in another humiliating situation on camera. But when Dougie becomes the only other person to realize what happened, after Asher succumbs to the massive reverse gravitational pull and gets sucked into the ozone, it culminates in one of the realistic moments of Safdie’s acting career.
“Dougie’s fucking depression is real,” Safdie said of the moment he fell to his knees. “Nathan (Fielder, who directed the episode) said to me, ‘When you’re ready,’ and he gave me the space to get there. I sat there for 25 minutes, waiting, feeling this shit, and then he (said), ‘All right, when you get there, let me know.’
According to Safdie, this emotional extreme, which penetrates to the original core of the character, is a combination of things: an unrealistic situation and dealing with that situation as realistically as possible, not only as actors but as as filmmakers.
“We knew from the beginning that we were going to take this seriously,” Safdie said. “We weren’t going to take this as a crazy, flashy stunt. We’re going to spend time making this real.
From day one, production designer Katie Bryon should build Asher and Whitney’s house with Episode 10 in mind. From the bookshelf that serves as Asher’s ladder to the ceiling beams that double as a obstacles and a way to hide Fielder’s safety harness up to the big tree in front of the house, she would have to build two sets, one upside down and one to the right. side version upwards, to reflect each other.
“I was very adamant that you shouldn’t start changing the language to suit the nature of certain things, because that’s when you start to understand that it There’s something going on,” Safdie said. “So we had it all set up from the beginning.”
The planning was meticulous, how and where Stone would throw a cover had to be planned months in advance so that it could be both reflected in the upside-down set and incorporated into Safdie and Fielder’s careful blocking. Both creators were convinced that Fielder himself would need to be in the harness and that there would be no body doubles.
Fielder and Safdie spent time early in the harness trying to figure out what was possible while mapping the scene. They determined that 10 minutes, 15 at most, was the maximum amount of time they could film before too much blood rushed to Fielder’s head and the pain from the harness was pulled on for too long. For some shots, he would be reversed, with Stone upside down, so that Field could execute a particular move. For the exteriors, the production team found a nearby tree that, miraculously, had massive, fully grown branches just 10 feet off the ground, allowing Fielder to not have to be up high for shots reversed views when the camera is pointed upwards. to the sky. Other than that, there could be no shortcuts.
“The audience had to actually see this and experience it as real, because one of the most important points for us at the end was: When you see something supernatural, are you going to believe it’s real? Do you actually think this is happening? » said Safdie.
Fielder and Safdie wanted the viewer to go through the same thought process as the characters, seeking and grasping for explanations. One way to achieve this (and one of the reasons why there were so few tricks available to fool the action) was to film the scene in long takes. The modifications that exist do not compress time.
“You see the whole process, and it does something to you. As a viewer, you start to wonder, “Well, why am I seeing this?” ” What is going on ? “Safdie said. “You start asking yourself all these questions, and you let the brain kick in and do that.”
While there are no immediate plans for a Season 2, the main three have full plates — Safdie is set to direct Dwayne Johnson in “The Smashing Machine”; and Stone is set to star in Fielder’s first feature film, “Checkmate” – Safdie said he and Fielder took into consideration how the ending, in which Asher is last seen hurtling into space, would establish an attractive scenario for the next chapter.
“Where I’ll leave it (season 2) is: who knows what? Who saw what? » said Safdie. “When the firefighters arrive, he is already high in the tree. When the residents arrive, he is already there. Who saw it go up? So you’re left with these questions: “When is the truth really the truth?” Because who can talk about what really happened? This is clear at the end of the episode because Dougie is talking about everything that happened, and the cop looks at him like, “Are you crazy?”
Safdie enjoys the townspeople who come to reject the whole setup as part of Whitney and Asher’s TV show — the meta layers of what’s real tickle Safdie, who describes his filmmaking career as striving to make the fake real .
“Those levels of questioning are, I think, related to awareness of things and where we wanted to leave the city,” Safdie said. “Almost bordering on: ‘What happened in front of this house?’ »
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News Source : www.indiewire.com
