KENDALL ROY:
I mean... is he gone?
FRANK VERNON:
I think he went. I think he's gone.
♪ (SOMBER MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
When Jesse told me that that was gonna happen,
I wasn't terribly surprised.
I thought it made sense dramaturgically.
And then when I read the script,
I found it shocking and emotionally devastating.
JESSE ARMSTRONG:
and that was obviously intentional.
We wanted to capture a feeling of death
that people experience in the modern era
of separation of communication over phone and email.
These things happen in all our lives
with our parents or anyone you love,
anybody in your life.
And something happens and they're just gone.
I think it's gonna have an extraordinary impact.
♪ (DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
We were sort of told ahead of time,
before we got the script what episode three
was gonna be about.
But the way that it starts out for Roman
with the dissapointment that Dad's probably
actually not gonna go to his son's wedding.
Are you gonna make it at all?
Hmm, we got him some, uh...
Combined with having to have that conversation with Gerri,
I feel like, professionally,
it's the worst day of his life,
and personally,
it's one of the worst days of his life too.
What's going on, Roman?
He has no idea how much worse it's about to get.
TOM WAMBSGANS:
-He's very very sick.
Being in that frame of mind for two weeks at a time
is not healthy.
To some extent this is just, you know, my job.
And I'm trying to keep the emotional stakes up
and put the character through that,
and then go home.
But the problem with that is going home, yeah,
that was Roman going through that
but physically, I actually had to go through that
so I was sort of--
It's this weird disconnect of feeling physically
like I've gone through some sort of emotional trauma
but I haven't.
I found it was better for me to pull out of it completely.
So that it could be fresh still.
'Cause like, for me, staying in
means that it dulls and it's not good.
You are trying to live with and embody
the death of a parent.
It was hard.
You know, one of the things about this show,
time and time again,
I'll be given something that I think is,
"This is the limit of what I'm capable of as an actor,
here's my wall."
And then you have no choice but to go through that.
And this episode was one of those.
-KENDALL: Con. Con. -Would you take care of that for me? Yeah?
KENDALL: It's serious. Come here.
ALAN RUCK:
the fact that your performance is gonna come
from all the other characters around you.
If you're just open to what is going on.
They think he's dead.
And when Sarah came in to tell me, and Sarah was a puddle,
you know, then it was just like game over.
You don't have to act.
Shooting the episode, honestly, it was quite exciting
because it felt high-risk.
It felt like the most exciting episode we'd shot
because it moves in real time.
From that phone call to the end,
things have to become an emergency.
In the planning of the shots,
it felt to me like the camera had to be almost
sadistically voyeuristic,
it had to stay really close without, kind of,
taking its eye off them.
Because every time we cut away from the siblings
it seemed to let them off the hook.
So we worked on this idea of,
"How could we keep the action as fluid as possible
so that, yeah, so it's unflinching?"
Mylod tried to credit me with this
but I think he was trying to be generous,
it was his idea.
Kieran and I had spoken about, I think actually,
it might've been Kieran's idea, and we thought,
"What if we actually ran that whole sequence
as one once we've done everything else?"
And so when we came in to shoot, I asked,
"Are we still doing that?"
And he went, "Oh, good idea. Oh, good."
To try to make it seem like it was my idea.
Very nice guy.
But that is what we ended up doing.
We shot like five or six days of the sequence bits
and then we ran the whole thing.
As it turns out, it's like a 27-minute long scene.
It was like a 28-page scene, I think.
Which is very, very, very long.
You know, on a movie you'll shoot
like a two page scene in a day.
And we shoot on film, so that meant--
We can only shoot for ten minutes
and then the camera needs to be physically reloaded
with a new roll of film.
So the camera operators worked on this idea
of basically hiding rolls of film around the set,
and hiding a third camera body
doing super fast reloads,
and one camera would always be running
so they wouldn't have to reload at the same time.
KIERAN CULKIN:
in several rooms with background actors,
with lighting everywhere, with three cameras.
And it was unlike anything I'd ever done before
and it was extremely exciting.
We just did the one.
And I think a massive percentage of that
ended up being in the final cut.
I think today's the day.
Suddenly, episode three, he's gone.
And when you've removed that one element,
you've gone, "Well, where's the conflict?"
The idea of it not happening at the end of the season
but happening in an early or mid-season episode,
you take all the places you'd expect
such a kind of humongous event,
and play the exact opposite of that,
and I thought that was just a brilliant, brilliant idea.
There's a couple of sort of factors
that play into where Logan's death falls
in our narrative trajectory.
One is a sort of base one of like,
"Ooh, maybe it will surprise people."
Oh, man.
You know, I am not immune to such thoughts
as wanting to keep the show exciting and fresh.
I think much more prominent was the feeling that,
if we're gonna do this, we don't just want to see
people crying and then have a funeral
and be done with the show.
We want to see how a death of someone significant
rebounds around a family.
The sheer heft of that character and his presence,
one can't help but associate that with Brian
and his presence on set.
And has such a huge gravitational force
around which our creative work of the past few years has spun.
BRIAN COX:
yeah, it has an effect on you.
You feel, "Hang on, this is one of the
greatest pieces of work I've ever been involved in."
And suddenly it's no more, but it's also--
it reflects what our existence is about
because we're here for a time and then we're gone.
ARMSTRONG:
you know, 'cause there's lots of anxieties about
whether it's the right creative decision,
and there's anxieties
that someone who I love working with,
and who's been at the center of the show, will feel...
rejected on a human level for not being in it anymore
when he's been so central to the whole thing.
-Here's to us. -ALL: To us.
When you work with the genius of somebody like Jesse,
it's always sad when that comes to an end,
there's no question about it,
because you've had such great respect.
We're out of here.
He took it like a total pro and he was professional
and decent and kind enough
to make it, yeah, a pretty good meeting,
but a sad and significant one.
It's gonna be hard when the public see
that he's gone in episode three.
I think they're gonna--
I feel they're gonna find it tough,
'cause they've lived with Logan for so long
so they're gonna miss him.
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