By Iain Blair
It’s been 40 years since Paul Theroux’s best-selling novel “The Mosquito Coast” hit a nerve with its story of the Foxes, an American family on the run from authorities, led by radical idealist and brilliant inventor Allie Fox. That in turn led to Peter Weir’s 1986 movie starring Harrison Ford. Now Apple TV+’s drama series — created by Neil Cross and Tom Bissell and starring the author’s nephew, Justin Theroux, as Allie — has reimagined that premise and updated the family as a disillusioned, anti-capitalist, anti-government unit whose American dream has turned into a nightmare.
Rupert Wyatt
To bring their new vision of Theroux’s novel to life, the producers and showrunner Cross turned to writer/director/producer Rupert Wyatt, whose credits include the Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Captive State and The Gambler.
I talked to Wyatt, who also EPs the show, about directing the series and his workflow for VFX and sound.
As director of the pilot and second episode, you set the visual style and tone. What sort of series did you and showrunner Neil Cross set out to make?
We wanted it to look and feel as real and authentic as possible, so we knew it would have to be very ambitious in terms of shooting in real locations, not on stages. That was one of the big lures for me — making it very location-heavy. But it was an enormous undertaking, and after filming scenes in California, we moved to Mexico, just like the family. We shot in Puebla, Mexico City, Guadalajara and around Puerto Vallarta.
Luckily, we had this great logistics producer, Ed McDonnell, who did the Sicario films, and he was the glue that held it all together. Neil was very generous with my ideas, such as pointedly having the family travel south to escape over the Mexican border, like reverse immigration. Sometimes in shows the relationship between the pilot director and showrunner is a fraught one, and sometimes very harmonious, and I’ve experienced both. This was definitely the latter.
What were the challenges of pulling it together, and how much did the Covid crisis affect the production?
In terms of what it took to prep and plan, Neil lives in New Zealand and I’m based in New York, so it began in separate hubs before we convened in LA to do the rest of the prep and then the shooting. We only had about eight weeks of prep in LA, starting in September 2019, and then we began shooting in December and did a lot of the Mexican desert scenes in Mexicali. Ultimately, it took a whole year to finish it all, as we were due to wrap in May last year. But Covid hit in March and we had to shut down.
The first big challenge was creating Stockton and Northern California in the LA area. We found this perfect farmhouse location in Ventura and were able to build from that. We approached it all thematically, tonally and in terms of the palette from a cinematic perspective and in a very clear-eyed way. Here’s this family living off-grid, but always with anxiety about all the capitalism just over the horizon.
We talked about film references like The Grapes of Wrath and Paris, Texas for inspiration in the lighting scheme, and about bringing a neon sort of Americana into the beginning of the show. Then once the family sets off on their journey, the palette changes to a far more vibrant, colorful look as they head into Mexico, and we build to the climax of arriving in the lush jungle greens of the coast of Southern Mexico.
Can you talk about the visual effects?
We started on that right from the start because we had quite a lot of VFX, even though we tried to minimize them — the whole opening sequence inside the ice box uses a lot of VFX. I didn’t do much previz. I like previz in pieces, but I hate handing off sequences to be previz’d since they invariably come back with different pacing and blocking, so I like to storyboard. But the schedule was so tight that there wasn’t a huge amount of storyboarding. It was quite run-and-gun, especially scenes like the markets in Mexico City.
The show looks great. Tell us about working with DP Alex Disenhof, who has shot your films, iCaptive State, The Exorcist and Fishing Without Nets.
He’s a great DP, and I love his work. He’s got a great eye for composition, and he can pivot very quickly. We shot on the ARRI Alexa Mini with spherical lenses, and we used the Ronin rig a lot, which perfectly fit the visual plan we had of following the family rather than getting ahead of them.
Tell us about the post. Where did you do it?
I love every aspect of post, and I’ve set up a post facility in Hudson, New York, where I live. We cut there with editor Eric Spang, and we also have a hub down in the city. All the sound was done at c5 in New York with supervising sound editor Ron Bochar and mixer Paul Hsu, whom I’ve worked with a lot.
Can you talk about the editing with Eric Spang?
He wasn’t on set at all, but we sent him dailies, and he did the assembly. Then he worked with me in Hudson on the first two episodes. The other editors who cut the rest of the show also came up here to Hudson and we’d work on the cuts. Then Neil became a lot more involved in the editing and post as his focus shifted away from the writing.
What were the main editing challenges?
There weren’t too many on the first episodes because the scripts were so tight and strong, and we hardly had to cut anything we’d shot. So it was all about rhythm and pacing and keeping the energy level high. A bigger challenge was dealing with all the music and sound and evoking the world outside the farm at the start.
Using sound is always a big deal for me in telling a story, so we did a lot of work there. And because of the nature of episodic TV, traditionally you’re not working simultaneously on sound and picture like you do in movies. You do the cut, you do the temp, and then you bring the sound in once all the episodes have been cut and locked. For me, that wasn’t helpful because I love to integrate sound design and cutting. It’s changing, thankfully, with the advent of streaming and more ambitious storytelling. I find that once you start to integrate the sound, you want to open the cut up and try different things and find different cut points. We were able to do that to some degree, as we had such a great team at c5.
Rupert Wyatt
There are a lot of VFX. Who did them and what was entailed?
Atomic Arts in the UK were the main vendor, and I’ve worked with them since 1999. We also had a bunch of vendors mostly out of New York including Zoic, Fuse FX and Powerhouse. I’m pretty involved in all the VFX, especially in all the planning and conceptual stages, and I love doing all that stuff and making them seamless by blending them with in-camera coverage. For instance, for the whole opening sequence with the ice box machine — we shot the entry and exit shots practically, and used real ice cubes, but then the rest was all VFX.
What about the DI?
We did that at Company 3 in New York and my colorist was Tom Poole. I personally oversaw my episodes, and then once each episode was locked we would do the DI. There was a fair amount of work done in the DI. We stayed faithful to the LUTs that our DP Alex had established, and then we were always looking to crunch the blacks. We wanted the show to have this very alluring palette so that it emphasized a sense of adventure and anticipation, with bold colors that were welcoming and inviting — but also potentially dangerous and threatening. So we went for this very rich look rather than the desaturated look.
What was the appeal of this for you?
I loved the novel and the movie, and Neil had written such great, visually interesting scripts for the first few episodes that, while I’m usually fairly hesitant about revisiting or reworking original projects, I really had a clear understanding of how we could make this and give it a fresh take.
Originally, I was going to direct more of the nine episodes, but then the pandemic changed a lot of things, and the nine episodes became seven, and the schedule and workload became so much that it was just impossible to do the post and all the prep and shooting in blocks at the same time. So I decided to do the pilot, which sets up the whole series, and then Episode 2, which is this great mix of social commentary and a political thriller, and the idea was to treat each episode as its own movie.
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.
