Hacks Showrunner Paul W. Downs on
VFX, Three (Nominated) Editors, More

By Iain Blair

Hacks, the sharply written and beautifully acted dark comedy series from HBO Max, just racked up 15 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Comedy Series, Writing for a Comedy Series, Single-Camera Picture Editing and Sound Mixing.

Created by Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, all veterans of Broad City, it tells the story of Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a Las Vegas take-no-prisoners, stand-up comedy diva (think Joan Rivers) who’s struggling to remain relevant. When she’s thrown together with snarky young comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) — whose career has been “canceled” thanks to an offensive online joke — the odd couple has to learn how to get along.

I talked to Downs, the show’s EP, writer, director and actor (he plays Deborah’s agent) about making the show, VFX for the comedy, their editorial approach and more.

This is a comedy, not a big action film, but there are quite a few VFX. Can you talk about that?
We don't have tons of explosions, alien spacecrafts and so on, but it was an incredibly large and complex undertaking in terms of the VFX — I don't think most people would even realize we had so many. We had a great VFX supervisor, David Niednagel, and I'll give you an example of one really intricate sequence. One of the running storylines is that Ava is tasked with digitizing all of the old footage of this legendary stand-up, so she goes through a ton of it, and we needed footage of a young Jean Smart.

We had Jean perform the work, so we could get her delivery, cadence and her physicality, and we captured all that. Then we had an actress play the young Deborah, and she perfectly mimicked all the timing and gestures. Then we used her body, and David was able to mine hours and hours of old footage of Jean Smart and then map that in a real deep fake way onto the young actress’ body and face. Then that went through several layers of degrading and texturizing to make it look and feel like it was a late ’70s VHS tape.

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