Kathmandu:november11/28/2017/ tuesday Birbal Tamang.
The “elegant chaos” of the scene
Frank:
That’s what the landscape is — elegant chaos. The shootout is full of
dust and fire, and you wanted to have those kind of big western moments:
the guys facing each other, the guys in silhouette. But at the same
time, you wanted it to feel real and urgent and unpredictable.
The cutting room
Frank:
We actually shot a lot that we didn’t use, that we didn’t need, that we
storyboarded. [The scene] is already a 20-minute bit of business, and
it was almost longer — almost a half-hour. There was so much happening.
Every gang member you knew had their moment of death. There was a little
more business down in the mine.
I
liked all of it, but it just felt shapeless and long. So we discovered
some new ideas as we went, but we also realized we didn’t need as much
as we had.
The lighter moments
Frank:
Watching horses go to the bathroom inside the hotel, stuck up on the
second floor waiting while we put the ramp in to take them down and …
whoops! In the middle of the fancy parlor, there they go. It was a very
strange sight to see a horse inside this beautiful hotel.
Wever: This
won’t sound funny to anyone who wasn’t there, but I think I laughed the
hardest I laughed in 2016 on that roof. I’m playing this tough
character and I’m trying not to embarrass myself, and then Michelle
looked around and saw me — I think for lunch I had steamed asparagus,
and the wind up there was so strong, it all started rolling off my
plate. She turned around and caught me holding my hat in one hand and
then running after a really limp, flaccid piece of asparagus, so it
didn’t roll off the roof onto one of the Griffin gang actors. I laughed
about it for days.
Every western has a big shootout as its climax, and Netflix’s new limited series Godless is no different.
What
is different, though, is the breathtaking scope of the shootout. Frank
Griffin (Jeff Daniels) and his gang of outlaws ride into the town of La
Belle hunting their former associate Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell).
But
the women of La Belle, led by Mary Agnes (Merritt Wever) and Alice
(Michelle Dockery), are armed, ready, and hunkered down in the hotel.
What
follows is what can best be described as “elegant chaos,” as bullets go
flying, horses ride up the stairs of the hotel, Alice and Mary Agnes
pick off outlaws from the roof, and fires rage across town. Toward the
end, Roy and sheriff Bill McNue (Scoot McNairy) show up to help finish
off the outlaws.
Yahoo Entertainment talked with creator-writer-director Scott Frank and Emmy winner Wever to find out how it came together.
Scott Frank:
The scene was pretty detailed in the script. I read so many western
stories that I’m certain I borrowed from each and every one of them. As I
began to write and I began to tell the story of the hotel, I realized
everything was going to be centered around that hotel.
Merritt Wever:
I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a sequence like that. I didn’t
have any understanding of how it would be done. I also saw quickly that
it wouldn’t be shot until the end of the shoot, because they burn down
the town.
Frank:
When you come to the shootout, I didn’t want it to be a lot of people
you didn’t know. I tried hard in the course of the series for you to get
to know as many people’s faces from the town as possible, so when you
saw them hiding in that hotel and fighting for their lives, they were
real characters and not just background players. I wanted you to feel
all through the story that anything could happen to anyone at any time.
Preproduction
Frank:
We literally taped out the first floor of the hotel on the giant
soundstage and began working it out with [stunt coordinator] Jeff
Dashnow and Rusty Hendrickson, the [horse] wrangler. We began to work
out how everything was going to play out inside that hotel, beat for
beat. And, of course, it expanded as we did. We just kept running it,
rehearsing it. We had the first floor taped out, we had the second floor
taped out, and we had the roof taped out.
And
then we began a very long process of storyboarding and going through
all the storyboards carefully thinking about every single shot we needed
to get. We had to plan it because horses were involved — horses were
riding up the stairs — so they had to be trained well before we started
shooting.
Once
we had a very complete list of storyboards and knew how we were going
to shoot it, we began to organize those storyboards and think about in
what order we were going to film it. That was really difficult, figuring
out how we can capture all of that on film.
Wever:
I had it so easy comparatively. It was probably really challenging for
the technical people on their end. It was easier than a lot of the
scenes, for me anyway.
The set
Wever:
I didn’t realize until I got there that I had one of the best gigs in
the battle, because Michelle [Dockery] and I are on a roof, literally
above the fray, the whole time. So we’re looking down on the gang on
their horses for hours, in the middle of just the worst dust being blown
around and being kicked up by the horses. And we were up on this roof
against this beautiful sky, just looking down on it. I had all this nice
quality time with [Michelle]. She’s so lovely and warm. It doesn’t
occur to you when you read a script what the actual shooting conditions
are going to be.
Frank:
We spent about $4 million building the town. The hotel was designed to
accommodate all the horse work — the hallways were slightly wider, the
ceilings were slightly higher, so that the horses could fit. And then we
built a mockup of the roof against a hillside backdrop, because the
horse couldn’t ride up onto the roof; it wasn’t safe.
Wever:
Almost everything Michelle and I did was shot on the real roof in the
real building, but part of it was shot on a small roof that was built
specifically for the shot. That’s all I remember, that we had to fake
something. Probably [for] the horse, since it obviously can’t [gallop,
stop, and throw a man off] the real roof. But it was extensive and fancy
— the fanciest thing I’ve ever been around.
Frank:
The horses were the biggest challenge all the way through, not just in
the shootout. We have a lot of scenes where people are taming horses,
learning how to ride horses, and it takes a lot of patience. The horses
in the shootout: There’s a lot of gunfire going on around them, they’re
riding inside of buildings. It’s very tricky. We rehearsed it all.
The
horses could go up the stairs, but they weren’t trained to go down the
stairs — they didn’t know how to walk down. So after every take where
they would go up, we would quickly have a pit crew come in and put in
these special boards over these stairs so they could walk down these
ramps. In some cases on some levels, there was a hidden door in the
back, so when the horse went up the stairs, we could pull the wall and
they could go right out the back, right down a ramp outside again.
Wever:
There’s a shot in the beginning where I shoot one of the Devlin
brothers off his horse. I remember practicing my movement over and over.
I don’t know if it ended up in the final cut, but the shot went from me
spinning backwards to seeing the stunt person pulled off his horse. And
I was so scared s***less that I would mess up and require somebody to
get dragged backwards by a rope off a horse again. I didn’t want that
shame.
Structuring the shootout
Frank:
What I didn’t want to do — for lack of a better expression — is neuter
these women that I just spent all this time empowering. Everybody you
think is going to help them doesn’t. So for a good long time, these
women are giving it back to Frank and his men. That was very important
for me to show that, to show that they’re just as afraid as many might
be in that situation, but also that they’re just as brave in that
situation.
When
Roy and Bill show up, it’s very important to me that it’s a different
chapter. They don’t save anybody. The women have been defending
themselves. The women have been doing just fine. They enter a battle,
and they don’t turn the tide of that battle. And the Roy/Frank moment
happens separate from that. I didn’t want to muddy that whole feeling of
the fight with the two of them.
The “elegant chaos” of the scene
Frank:
That’s what the landscape is — elegant chaos. The shootout is full of
dust and fire, and you wanted to have those kind of big western moments:
the guys facing each other, the guys in silhouette. But at the same
time, you wanted it to feel real and urgent and unpredictable.
The cutting room
Frank:
We actually shot a lot that we didn’t use, that we didn’t need, that we
storyboarded. [The scene] is already a 20-minute bit of business, and
it was almost longer — almost a half-hour. There was so much happening.
Every gang member you knew had their moment of death. There was a little
more business down in the mine.
I
liked all of it, but it just felt shapeless and long. So we discovered
some new ideas as we went, but we also realized we didn’t need as much
as we had.
The lighter moments
Frank:
Watching horses go to the bathroom inside the hotel, stuck up on the
second floor waiting while we put the ramp in to take them down and …
whoops! In the middle of the fancy parlor, there they go. It was a very
strange sight to see a horse inside this beautiful hotel.
Wever: This
won’t sound funny to anyone who wasn’t there, but I think I laughed the
hardest I laughed in 2016 on that roof. I’m playing this tough
character and I’m trying not to embarrass myself, and then Michelle
looked around and saw me — I think for lunch I had steamed asparagus,
and the wind up there was so strong, it all started rolling off my
plate. She turned around and caught me holding my hat in one hand and
then running after a really limp, flaccid piece of asparagus, so it
didn’t roll off the roof onto one of the Griffin gang actors. I laughed
about it for days.
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