By Iain Blair

Jennifer Phang, who directed episodes of the most recent season of HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, made her mark as an indie filmmaker back in 2008 with her debut feature Half-Life. Next was the Sundance Dramatic Jury Prize-winning Advantageous, a sci-fi drama she wrote, directed and edited.

Jennifer Phang

Phang has also made a name for herself in television, directing episodes of Riverdale, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Boys, Stargirl and Resident Alien. In fact, her most recent directing role was for the Emmy-nominated The Flight Attendant, which follows reckless flight attendant Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) as she battles with her sobriety and gets tied up in yet another mystery while working for the CIA as a human asset.

I spoke with Phang — who next directs and EPs Disney+’s upcoming Descendants sequel, The Pocketwatch — about shooting the show, her love of VFX and the post workflow.

Your episodes take place in Iceland and LA. What did that take to prep and plan?
The logistics were quite challenging, and the plan was to cross-board the production. This meant I would shoot all of my LA episode first on the lot at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, and then we’d take a mini-break before flying to Iceland where we’d prep and shoot all that material. We also had a lot of heavy VFX work to do — all in LA — that included a lot of motion control and split screens.

The show looks great. What cameras and lenses did you use, and what were the main challenges of the shoot in Iceland?
We shot large format with the Sony Venice imager mode 6K FF 3:2 (6048×4032), 16 bit X-OCN ST with anamorphic lenses. Occasionally, we used full-frame spherical lenses. The framing was 2:1 with four different lens combinations — 1.8x anamorphic (4480×4032), 2x anamorphic (4032×4032) and 2x anamorphic scaled 90% (3629×3629) or spherical FF (6048×3024). The lenses were chosen by  DPs Cort Fey (ASC) and Anthony Hardwick. The primary package was Caldwell Chameleon XC 1.8x anamorphic primes. They were supplemented by Cooke anamorphic primes in case we didn’t have the right lens length.

We scouted Iceland in the summer, when you have 18 hours of light, and we knew we’d be shooting in the winter, when you get just four hours of light, so the shoot had a lot of scheduling and logistical challenges. We shot in Reykjavik and on the coast. We had scenes with helicopters that could only fly in daylight, and then we had the weather to deal with and snowstorms. There weren’t a lot of VFX challenges other than scenes with the bus. Our big goal was to get as much material as possible in the short time we had there.

You focused a lot on the bit where Cassie goes into her own mind and talks to other versions of herself. Tell us about how you did that?
We had to create all the scenes that involved Kaley Cuoco inside “the mind palace,” as it’s called. It’s a representation of Cassie’s inner world, with Kaley playing multiple versions of her character; they’re all fighting and arguing with one another.

We had to shoot Cassie in a black sweater, Cassie in a gold dress, Cassie from the future — what we called the future perfect Cassie or the perfect version of Cassie. So it was very complicated as sometimes we’d have four Cassies in the same scene, and we had to figure out how to shoot all that and make it seamless and convincing and also work with the schedule.

Tell us about post. Where did you do it?
We did it all here in LA, but because of COVID, a lot was done remotely. The editors worked from home but also sometimes at the Burbank offices using Avid Media Composers. I worked from home, and we all used Zoom to interface.

I had a really great post team that included producer Stephanie Johnson, who oversaw all the post. She’s very experienced and had a great handle on the whole process since she was on the first season. Our VFX producer was Elizabeth Rojas, and Daniel Jeannette was our on-set VFX supervisor, who oversaw all the plans for motion control and the multiple Cassies inside the “mind palace.” He made sure we were covered physically in terms of all the continuity and staging the shots. It was very complicated because we had to make sure all the eyelines were correct when we had the multiple Cassies and all the doubles talking to each other.

As for the grading, I did some passes, but the final grade was done by the DPs with the colorist (Laura Jans Fazio), and it was basically respecting the look they got with the DIT on-set.

You’ve edited some of your projects. How hands-on were you on this one?
I had two editors — I worked with Carol Stutz on Episode 203 and Tony Miller on Episode 204, and I’m fairly hands-on. We made great use of the split screens, an aesthetic that was established in Season 1, and it really added a distinctive style to the show. It’s basically an homage to all the fun spy thrillers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, so Carol and Tony and I were always looking for unusual and fun ways to interpret that. Split screens also helped keep the pace up.

What were the main editing challenges?
The show’s special in that it has all these different tones that complement each other and work together well. It’s a spy thriller, a comedy and a drama, and it has this internal monologue happening at the same time. It’s also a bit surreal, but it all works because of the fearlessness in editing and performance.

There are quite a lot of VFX. Who did them and what was entailed?
We worked with quite a few vendors, including Crafty Apes, Wolverine, Ingenuity, FuseFX and Encore. One of the most important VFX sequences was conceiving and executing the church inside the mind palace in both episodes. Young Cassie is building a small model of the Hallgrímskirkja church in Reykjavik, and it’s supposed to be a metaphor for her precarious state of mind — a sort of house of cards but in a church form that also keeps growing.

So we needed to make sure the church made sense and looked right, both as a physical model she’s actually making and as an enlarged version later in the mind palace. Crafty Apes made the CG giant replica of the church that Cassie knocks down. It was a very close collaboration with the VFX team and concept artists to get it just right.

Jennifer Phang onset (left) with Kaley Cuoco

You also have a background in visual effects, so I assume you love executing complex VFX concepts?
I do. My first two indie features were very VFX-heavy, and I oversaw at least 100 shots for each film. I really like working with VFX and all the tools we now have. I feel I really understand the whole concept and the pipeline. And on this show, they’re such a vital part of telling the story, and you can do so much with them.

You’re the director and co-executive producer of Disney+’s upcoming Descendants sequel, The Pocketwatch. How far along are you?
We’ve begun casting and scouting locations, and we’re working on concept art and storyboarding. It’s a very large project, and it’s also a musical, and musicals really inspired me as a kid. So it’s very exciting for me to be able to bring everything I’ve learned about directing episodic television to it.

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.