Creating a pandemic show in a pandemic: Patrick Somerville and Jessica Rhoades talk about creating Station Eleven
by Jaskiran Kaur | Tue, 18 Jan 2022 18:50:00 GMT
Image Source: IMDb, TVLine, Vulture

Functioning normally amidst a pandemic is far from normal thought. Almost everything came to a standstill as COVID wreaked havoc around the globe, but fortunately enough, there was a cinema to help people fight off boredom. And once the world stepped back into some post-covid normalcy, cinema creators took their hard jobs of creating series, shows, and films to keep people entertained. 

Station Eleven is an HBO Max series that follows a world that forever changes after being struck by a flu epidemic. Based on Emily St. John Mandel's book and created by Patrick Somerville, the series juggled past flashbacks and present narratives as it deals with how the world was undertaken by the epidemic crisis, and how it emerged from it. Needless to say, there are many parallels the audience can draw with the globe's very real pandemic. The diverse cast shows a very real perception of a world devoid of technological advancement, comforted by arts and literature. 

Recently Patrick Somerville and Jessica Rhoades came together to share their experience on making a pandemic show: Station Eleven. Here is what they had to tell Collider in their interview. 

The one thing that most book lovers complain about when their favorite series turn into movies or series is that the screen version was not up to the mark. Mostly, it is because there is so much in the books that simply go unexplored because it can not be easily translated onto the screen. However, Somerville had an interesting idea. He got Emily to narrate parts of the book, and hence nothing was left out. 

He shared, "To me, the very best thing about the novel, Station Eleven, was Emily's voice as a narrator. The most interesting, artistically, but also the most emotionally attuned and totally pristine, safe, hand-holding you through the end of the world. It emerged from the voice of that novel."

He continued, "When you do adaptation, you don't get to bring that with you unless you're trying to do something that's inherently a mistake, which is just math one to one, texts, prompts to screen because then you're losing the tonal changes that are affecting the storytelling."

Station Eleven also managed to find a balance between the emotionally intense scenes that have you on the brink of your seat along with slipping in enough moments where you could find time to breathe and actually find happy moments. While the series is about a very different world, deprived of so many pleasures we know, the creators did instill a sense of relativity into it. 

Jessica Rhoades revealed, "We also were making a show about why you'd want to survive, why you'd want to be in this world," referring to managing the heavyweight story with emotional breathers. "What's the point? And the point is art and community, and laughter and joy. That's what you're fighting for. That's what you're losing if you don't get to be here anymore. And so having that be not only the audience's experience watching it but to have the characters living that life that's worth living."

Needless to say, the series suffered a great deal when the pandemic struck. Somerville told Collider, "We shot two complete episodes in January and February of 2020. And our plan was to go on to hiatus for post and prep and come back in April and May to shoot that summer."

The series began its shoots again in February last year, "And instead, we went down for almost a year. We went down, didn't know our fate, made a lot of tough choices about needing to move the show to Canada, built a new crew and got on the ground there in the fall, and started shooting again in February of 2021," said the creator. 

As the creators, writers, and actors headed back to the shoots after surviving a real-life pandemic, their perception of the story shifted in a significant way. Rhoades shared, "I mean, specifically, we had shot 1 and 3 before March. So those characters in those episodes clearly have not survived a pandemic yet. And interestingly, in many of the other episodes, the characters have. And so that impacted obviously the actors, but it, in fact, impacted every member of the crew." 

So when the actors finally went back, the series had a lot of real experiences to help it through the narration. "Every member of the team coming together brought with them now a sense of memory even beyond what Patrick and all the incredible scripts could give to guide them. Everyone now is bringing their own personal experience to the table," said Rhoades. 

Being back in the community, surrounded by people who enjoyed arts and creativity helped the producers run the show again. Interestingly enough, creativity and art are themselves what the show focuses on. While it was initially difficult for the crew to get back into rhythm, the collective expertise of everyone helped in the end. 

"As producers with the studio... Now obviously we were making sure we followed every safety protocol. We were very careful. We made a lot of smart choices, but still as every single human had to do, you made a decision. How am I going to do this?' asked the creator. "And the show saved a lot of us."

"I remember the day of our first camera test with Mackenzie and Matilda and hearts racing. And we had our masks and we had our shields and all of these people were like, "How are we going to do our job like this?" And then we just started doing our job and the muscle memory of how we did this thing," she recalled. 

But even before the pandemic, the director, Hiro Murai, had an interesting 'insight' about how he wanted to film the show. "In Episode 1, Hiro's brilliance, insight was... what we call time drifts, occurred in the episode. And I'm speaking of not just the opening, but the two other moments of sudden, without warning, 20-year jumps with no context whatsoever and then returning to our story. Just instant, hyper-objective, almost painfully true glimpses of the future."

The series has a gripping edge on viewers and leaves no one without a few thoughts in their head. If you love a series that could shake you up a bit, Station Eleven should be the latest show of choice. 

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