Jessica Lee Gagné had not intended to return to Severance. Now she’s the first woman to be simultaneously double-Emmy-nominated for her work as cinematographer and director on the Apple TV+ series’ season two.
“Getting the opportunity to direct took a couple of days to absorb fully. The opportunity to be a producer on the show was something I was also excited about. The rest was like Christmas,” says Jessica Lee Gagné, who has been nominated for two Primetime Emmys for the second season of Apple TV+’s Severance – as director of episode seven, titled ‘Chikhai Bardo’, and cinematographer on episode one, ‘Hello, Ms Cobel’.
Gagné’s episode as director is the first time viewers get to know Dichen Lachman’s Gemma, and her relationship to Adam Scott’s Mark. They usually exist in a world where people can undergo a procedure to permanently sever their work persona (innie) from their personal-life persona (outie) in the series created by Dan Erickson, and produced and directed by Ben Stiller.
The leap to directing was something to which Gagné had to adjust. “Actors want to be directed. They want to know if they’re hitting the mark.” At first, “I would feel bad about [giving direction]. I had to move past that,” she says.
Having worked as a cinematographer on season one helped. “The fact that I could speak the Severance language from a visual standpoint made it easier, because I didn’t have to think about it. I could focus on the story and actors, which were the new things for me.”
Her talent for directing is something that took “15 years of making visuals for other directors and trying different languages and creating aesthetics and looks that were so, so different [to develop]”.
“It has made me a nuanced director,” she adds. “I have access to great experience in that technical field. If you’re talking about shots that are metaphors or using the architecture or the light in specific ways, for me it’s very natural in the sense that I understand these tools because I’ve been maneuvering them so much.”
Gagné also photographed the bulk of the ‘Chikhai Bardo’ episode, but delegated the flashback work shot on film to fellow DoP Max Goldman. These ended up being shot in Gagné’s rental house at the suggestion of the episode’s production designer Jeremy Hindle.
“If it wasn’t [filmed] in my house, that episode would not have looked like what it looked like.”
It is ironic, given the theme of the show, but was a boon for Gagné, who had immersive access to a key location.
“On these bigger projects, you don’t always have access to the locations, or the stages and the sets. Having access to my house on the weekends and at night was what allowed me to shot-list and think about things.” She did so while listening to the Severance score, created by fellow Emmy-nominated composer Teddy Shapiro.
Harnessing the technical language
As well as episode one and (most of) episode seven, Gagné was cinematographer on four other episodes in season two, including the fourth, ‘Woe’s Hollow’, which is the first time the ‘innies’ experience the outside world.
“What was important was the scale [on episode four],” she says. “How small they are, and how trapped they are in these woods. Even though they’re outside, they’re not free.”
This unsettling lens was something Gagné developed from season one. “It’s a huge key in the general aesthetic of Severance. In the early stages [of development], we looked at some spy stuff in the references, and mystery-style cinematography. In the outside world, we’re less up in their face physically with the camera.”
Though says she say’s she is “not really good with tech”, her self-deprecation belies her ability. “You have to be able to harness technical language to push the feelings,” she notes.
Learning to let go
Like many shows that are nominated in this year’s Primetime Emmys, Severance’s production – which took place in York Studios in The Bronx and on location in New York, New Jersey, and Newfoundland, Canada – began in October 2022 but was paused in May 2023 due to the WGA and later SAG strikes. This gap gave Gagné “time to make things up about what I could do [with episode seven]”.
The trick was aligning it with the writers, when they eventually returned to production in January 2024. “Where I had to adapt the most was in terms of forgetting what I loved about the episode and making sure that the whole season was supported [by it].”
As Gagné’s describes it, the episode “doesn’t move or play with the other episodes”. It’s a micro-example of the macro-theme that exists throughout the show – the ‘innie’ world vs the ‘outie’ world. Two elements in one show that have to be distinct but not jarringly so.
To blend episode seven with what viewers already knew, Gagné focused on transitions. For the show overall, the answer was “the palette. We had a restrained palette. Inside you have these white walls, outside you have all this white snow. There’s a lot of blue on the outside where there’s less green, but it’s still close to green on the spectrum.”
She sums it up: “Being able to understand technically how to use these tools to make people relate to things, to move people on a subconscious level, that’s what filmmaking is about.”
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