♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYS)
PATRICK SOMERVILLE: Station Eleven
about people trying to rebuild after they lost everything.
It focuses on things that the genre
of post-apocalyptic storytelling doesn't typically get into.
Opening up auditions for one time only.
We only perform Shakespeare.
Fine.
Yes!
PATRICK:
by Emily St. John Mandel.
I thought that it was this really incredible,
gentle balance between huge ideas,
but very small, local stories.
SPEAKER:
I don't know, but I'm glad you're here.
MACKENZIE DAVIS:
it really wanted to push away from the idea
that life after civilization was lesser than life before.
HIMESH PATEL:
on that period of time, where the most suffering
is happening.
Our story takes the moment just before that--
Is this because of that thing?
And then many years after that.
HIRO MURAI:
before, during, and after this flu pandemic
that wipes out 98 percent of the human population.
People have rebuilt the world and managed to move forward.
I'd also say it's a creation story
about unionization of people through love.
Station Eleven
or how relationships occur.
PATRICK:
don't have to do with humans turning on other humans.
Maybe it wouldn't turn into a nightmare.
Maybe anything was possible.
We have to abandon the future! All that matters is the now!
DAVID WILMOT:
the words, "COVID-19." We'd done two episodes.
It's probably very rare where the audience
are gonna understand so implicitly
what the characters are going through.
PATRICK:
to find a way of surviving through
music and art.
MACKENZIE:
the Traveling Symphony, who travel from town-to-town.
PATRICK:
in a big circle, putting on Shakespeare
for the last 20 years.
MACKENZIE:
as testament to their passion and dedication to their art,
and how much it sustains and keeps them alive.
CREWMEMBER: Rolling!
PATRICK:
you just need to find all sorts of ways
to make sure your tone is saying the right thing.
HIRO:
about Patrick's take was that there's humor in it,
and there an absurdist edge to what he wants to do.
PATRICK:
don't tend to go hand-in-hand.
But I think the humor emerges out of really grounded moments.
We need protein.
-(GUNSHOT) -Good shot.
HIRO:
It was sort of subversive and wistful
and it was about the details of modern living
rather than the loss and the devastation.
RUTH AMMON:
These exteriors had to be huge,
and they had to show the massiveness of nature
with the tiny people who are just surviving.
HELEN HUANG:
is it's about art, and this renaissance.
And so that's where we wanted to approach the costumes,
make the pallet lively from the world that exists.
Because I feel like that's been very absent
in a lot of the post-apocalyptic aesthetic.
PATRICK:
It's definitely more than shelter, water, and food.
We need art. We need humor.
THE CONDUCTOR: (LAUGHING)
I mean it's not like we have lives or anything.
PATRICK:
not really a post-apocalyptic story.
It's an adaptation of a brilliant novel,
about what's good about people
that they happen to be able to see in our story
because the world gets swept away.
♪ (MUSIC INTENSIFIES) ♪