By Iain Blair
Peacock’s Mrs. Davis, created by Lost’s Damon Lindelof and Big Bang Theory’s Tara Hernandez, is no ordinary episodic. It tackles AI, faith and religion while being both mind-bending and comedic. At the helm is director Owen Harris, who won an Emmy for his work on the sci-fi series Black Mirror.
Owen Harris
The series centers around Mrs. Davis, the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence, and Sister Simone (Betty Gilpin), a nun who is devoted to destroying her. Sister Simone partners with her ex-boyfriend Wiley (Jake McDorman), leader of the anti-AI resistance, to go on a globe-spanning journey full of flashbacks and wacky side-plots to take down Mrs. Davis.
I spoke with Harris, who also executive produced Mrs. Davis, about the challenges of making the ambitious series.
You directed Episodes 1, 2, 5 and 8. Can you talk about collaborating with the creators and setting the tone for the entire series?
I think a lot of the tone is in the script, so when I read the pilot, as wacky as it is, my first thought was, “I think I know what this looks like and how to communicate the ideas visually.”
The challenge then was gathering all the elements together and figuring out what the style and energy’s going to be in the overall look, and what that world is. Betty Gilpin coined a phrase, No Country for Old Looney Tunes, and it was so true as we were literally using color palettes from old Looney Tunes cartoons and referencing the film No Country for Old Men. We also looked at Quentin Tarantino films and Romeo and Juliet, so we were pulling from lots of different tones and looks, and that’s all in the show. It does a bit of genre-surfing, but you also need a unifying overview so it all slots back together.
How was working with your DP on the look?
A big part of the process was working with my DP, Joe Anderson, and choosing the right lenses for the look. He shot all of my episodes and spent quite a lot of time in the grade before we even began shooting. He was trying to figure out how to get this sort of Coen brothers’ tonality and make it feel very cinematic, but also allow it to be light enough so we could play with the humor and the lighter elements of the show.
What camera package did you use and why?
We shot on the ARRI Alexa Mini LF, with a set of Caldwell Chameleon anamorphic lenses. They’re very beautiful, and I was very interested in using them. Brian Caldwell is like a one-man show, and they’re very special lenses. Joe looked at other anamorphics and went off and tested a bunch, but we ended up coming back to the Caldwell Chameleons.
Then, of course, you have to convince the studio to shoot anamorphic, and then the studio has to support you as you convince the streamer. There’s always a sense of trepidation when you do something like that, but when we presented the whole package of how we wanted it to look they loved it.
The show is stuffed with global locations and flashbacks. How tough was the shoot?
It was very challenging. We shot in LA and Spain to serve the breadth of the storytelling. The story itself covers California, including LA and San Francisco; Reno; Scotland; France; and a desert island — so it’s quite a wide-ranging tale, which is what you’d expect from something that’s about the quest for the Holy Grail.
We had to figure out how to pull off all of these very different looks and get the big scale. Part of that was figuring out the LA part of the shoot, which was very challenging because there were lots of set pieces. They were lots of fun to make but you had to really work out how to do it all. Then it was a matter of taking the whole show on the road to Spain and introducing a whole new crew to the madcap world of Mrs. Davis and hoping they “got it” and got onboard, which they did.
Owen Harris
I began shooting in June 2022 and finally wrapped at the end of November. The pilot took up the lion’s share of that, and the crazy thing about the show was that every episode was like a pilot and really ambitious. It was like doing a whole new show every episode. Luckily, we had great crews in LA and Spain.
Tell us about post. Did it have a traditional TV post schedule?
We began doing post while we were shooting. I had a chat with Tara and Damon right at the beginning and stressed how important it was to have a post team in terms of dealing with the production design, and that we all worked really closely together. So production designer Emma Fairley and our post production team, including post producer Terri Murphy and associate post producer Tyler Furtado, were always collaborating and sharing ideas.
Dailies, online and titling were done at Keep Me Posted. A lot of the post work was quite wacky, like the big action scene at the end of the pilot where characters jump through a giant donut on a motorcycle. There’s lots of stuff where you really have to get the spirit of the show to then pull off all the post and VFX work. Once we got the engine going, we knew we had something that was going to work.
When shooting finished, we again spent a lot of time in the grade, especially Joe, who worked closely with our colorist Tony D’Amore at Picture Shop. Then when I got back to London, I was looking at post remotely and feeding in my ideas, and Tara and Damon were very hands-on in terms of finishing the edit and finalizing all the elements of post. They were literally working on post right up until the air date.
How did you deal with all the VFX?
We storyboarded a lot, and we did a bit of previz here and there, and had VFX teams on-set. Then in the edit we’d play around with VFX to a degree. We had the usual post pipeline and mapped it all out mainly before the shoot. So even though a lot of the VFX were pretty bizarre, our approach was fairly conventional.
The overall VFX supervisor on the show was Zsolti Poczos. Zoic Studios did most of the big stuff, PowerHouse VFX a little as well. Other vendors included Alkemy X, Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies (MARZ), Mr. Wolf, Ingenuity, Assembly and Rhinestone.
What about the color grade? How involved were you?
I went in for a few of the sessions, and we also did a test grade at the beginning before we shot anything. We wanted to be sure that we could get this particular look out of the lenses in the conditions we were going to shoot in because it was all so varied. It ranged from the desert, with very hard light, to period stuff in medieval France, so we spent a lot of time playing with the look, and I think Joe and the colorist did a great job. It looks very beautiful.
How do you look back on the experience?
It’s a very ambitious show about faith and technology, and how this nun sets out to destroy this all-powerful algorithm called Mrs. Davis, and she ends up finding herself. It’s as crazy as all of that sounds and more. And it’s wonderfully fun and inventive and original — all qualities that certainly drew me to it, along with its very rich visuals.
It was also the tail-end of the pandemic, and I was looking for a project, not just to direct, but also something I’d like to watch myself, and it’s got such a joyful spirit to it. It was probably one of my most fun shoots. Every time you turned up, there was something crazy and challenging going on, and I’m super-happy with what we pulled off.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
