By Iain Blair
With its ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter, Apple TV+’s The Morning Show, about a network morning show and its anchors dealing with a sexual misconduct scandal, could hardly be more timely.
Mimi Leder
It stars Jennifer Aniston as Alex Levy, co-anchor of the UBA network’s hit morning show along with her on-air partner of 15 years, Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell), who is summarily fired after allegations of sexual misconduct. Alex soon finds herself in a power struggle with new co-host Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) as the show explores the cutthroat world of morning news and the lives of the people who help America wake up in the morning. It co-stars Mark Duplass as EP Chip Black and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as head talent booker Hannah Shoenfeld.
Prolific TV director and producer Mimi Leder, whose credits include the feature films The Peacemaker, Deep Impact and On the Basis of Sex, executive produced the show and directed several episodes, including the finale of the first season.
I recently talked with Leder about directing the show, the workflow and challenges, and why she loves post.
The show’s set in New York City, but most of it was shot in LA. How was that handled?
We shot nearly all our interiors in LA, and we shot a lot of skylines, exteriors and background plates in New York, so we had coverage of real places, like Broadway, to work from. The exterior of the UBA building was shot in LA, and in the finale, for instance, we see Chip go in and go upstairs and get fired, and then I had him walk out into a very crowded street full of New Yorkers. To get that shot, I put the camera on a ladder with a very long lens, so he’s lost in a sea of people. That was the image and feeling I wanted — that he’s alone in this huge crowd.
Our VFX supervisor, Marc Côté from Real By Fake [check out our interview with him here], went to all these locations and then did set extensions to add layers and layers of New York streets once we were past our first couple of blocks. That’s an old-school way of doing it, but it’s very effective when coupled with all the production design and so on. And when Jen and Reese come out of the building, we used CGI to create the right colors and version of the building, so you’re right there in New York. And we moved the camera a lot to mimic that fast-paced world.
Talk about the look of the show and how you worked with the DPs, Michael Grady and David Lanzenberg, and later the colorist in the DI.
We all collaborated very closely, and first off, I wanted the actual Morning Show to be really authentic and grounded — to show how big that world is and at the same time make it feel quite intimate. So when we’re on that stage, it feels very bright, as these shows are, and we did research The Today Show and GMA and so on.
I was also inspired by movies like Broadcast News and Network, and the frame of Michael Clayton, which was so intimate. So we used a 2:1 format — a very cinema, bigger format not usually used in TV — which let us shoot two people in a two-shot that filled the frame.
What cameras and lenses did you shoot on and why?
We shot in 8K on the Panavision Millennium DXL2 with these large-format Panavision Super Primo 70 Series lenses; they’re such great lenses. The whole package gave us a very cinematic look.
Isn’t it unusual to shoot 8K?
It is, but Apple wanted us to, so we did. And going back to your question about working with colorist Siggy Ferstl, at Company 3, he’s just a genius, and it’s super-important to have someone like that as your colorist. DP Michael Grady and I [check out our interview with Grady here] would discuss the look we wanted. He and Siggy had worked together for a long time, and I’d also worked with Siggy before on several shows. You’re really swimming backward instead of forward if you don’t have a great colorist. A great one takes the show to its final tone and look, and Siggy really understood exactly what we wanted. So the personal lives of the characters have a very different feel and look from the bright studio look, and there’s far more contrast, far more saturated color and far more shadow. It’s more complex visually, like life and their world. (Ferstl called on Blackmagic Resolve for the grade.)
The show has a ton of VFX. How did shooting in 8K affect the VFX workflow?
We’re not an effects show, but you’re right — we have a ton, from CG and 2D enhancement to 3D set extensions and replacement to LED cleanup — and you don’t want to see any of it. Like, when we’re looking out of Jen’s window at the Hudson, with all the boats and so on. We took a lot of plates of what all that looked like, with shimmering water, lights moving, helicopters and so on. It’s very layered and hard to do, but we wanted to put her character, Alex, in a glass house. So she can look out of the world, but she’s also very isolated in a sense, and I wanted that outside world to look very active.
Marc Côté’s Real By Fake did them all in full 4K HDR, and they had an army of artists using everything from Nuke, Blender, Maya and Houdini, and it took nearly half a year to do it all. They can also do everything in post, from editorial to the DI. They just did the VFX on this show because I wanted to use Company 3 for the DI, and our editorial was based at the studio where we shoot.
Do you like post?
I love post. I love the set and every aspect of filmmaking, but post is, as they say, the place where you get to write the final version of the script and tell the story all over again. I love it because you can manipulate time and space, and we had amazing editors and sound people. I really love the thrill of collaborating with all these artists who bring it all to life. It may be my vision, but it’s this whole team working with you in post. It’s really hard. Post is hard, but it’s worth it.
The show has six editors. How does that work? I assume you work with just one?
It depended, and none of them were on the set because there wasn’t enough time. I directed three episodes. Two of those episodes were edited by Carole Kravetz Aykanian, and for the finale, I had both Carole and additional editing by Aleshka Ferrero.
Dailies are sent with Pix, and after I’ve done my director’s cut, I show it to my partners — our creative showrunner Kerry Ehrin and EP Michael Ellenberg — and then as producers, we do our cut. When I’m not directing, the other director does his or her cut, and then we do our producer’s cut.
What are the big editing challenges?
It’s getting the right tone and pace, and it’s an evolution of many layers of fine-tuning, finding the right intentions, beats and shaping the story in the most impactful, honest and authentic way. Editing is such a process … to find the heart of your show in the performances and storytelling. And it’s a process I love so much.
This show has a great score by Carter Burwell and great sound design. Can you talk about the importance of sound and music to you and working with the sound team.
It’s so important, and our editors also contributed a lot to the whole process. Last year we did the sound in Canada, but this year we’re doing it all in LA at Sony. We mix in Dolby Atmos and have a great team — supervising sound editors Paul Lucien Col and Peter Lopata, sound designer Mimi Allard and re-recording mixers Elmo Ponsdomenech and Jason Gaya — and once we have a cut, we watch the show with our sound designer. We discuss in detail what
Mimi Leder and Jennifer Aniston on set
In the finale, when Bradley learns of [a character’s] death, I shot the whole sequence in 60fps, and when she walks into the broadcast stage to tell everyone, I decided to take out the sound. You just hear a few sound effects — her breathing and heartbeat — as I wanted her to feel like she’s underwater, like she’d just had a concussion, and it’s all muffled. Carter wrote a beautiful piece for that, so the whole sequence is led by sound design and music.
You’ve done both movies and TV. Are things better in TV for women now?
Definitely. There’s far more opportunity, especially now. Movies are still tough to get for women directors, but it’s slowly improving. There’s more diversity, more women, but it’s still far from equal.
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.
