Art of the Long Take: Episode 6, Mac and the Shotgun
Quarry — Episode 6, “His Deeds Were Scattered”
Following each episode of Quarry director Greg Yaitanes breaks down elements of a key scene.
My most creative time is between 6 am and 10 am. Opening on the figurine and the shotgun shells, and then moving to Joni waking and her confusion was an idea that came to me when I stayed home from the office during prep a few weeks before shooting. Prepping your shots and blocking is something you’re rarely given time for as a television director, since your job is answering questions and helping everyone prep their work so you have what you need on the day of shooting. What the show looks like and where the actors will be in a scene is work often done on weekends and nights. That one day I worked from home is memorable because it’s where most of the look of Quarry was formed.
There is something about the way Graham Gordy and Michael D. Fuller wrote the opening to Episode 6 that felt intuitively like the viewer would see it from Joni’s point of view. It’s exciting when great writing inspires you. Staying anchored on Joni wasn’t scripted but a choice based on how the script spoke to me.
Episode 6 zeros in on Joni. We had seen the various ways that post-traumatic stress had come out in Mac, and midway through the season, we transition out of the underwater/void visual into physical manifestations and hallucinations. I thought it important to leave Mac’s point of view and touch on the fact that the wives were also victims of post-traumatic stress. The book Vietnam Wives by Aphrodite Matsakis was an influence on Graham and Michael, and I wanted to represent that inspiration in my own work. The wives of vets are forgotten victims and have an unsung heroism for what they experienced. They were charged with taking care of husbands coming home with symptoms of a mental illness that, at the time, had no name, no course of treatment, or any meaningful answers. You’ll see this concept further explored later in the season.
For this scene we could have done it from Mac’s POV and shown what he was seeing: Joni’s confusion and initial feelings of being under threat and then realizing that this is much bigger. Logan is nude in this scene. There was no other choice for this scene without watering it down, so I commend the commitment to his craft for doing what was right and what was needed. At the same time I didn’t want it to seem like we were featuring “Oh my God, he’s naked running through the streets!” I wanted to let that organically unfold through Joni and let you, the viewer, realize what you’re seeing. The escalation, and Mac not being in control of his body, is why we stay focused on Joni the whole time, and we only see Mac when he briefly comes into her focal plane.
Mac’s house, as you watch the series, is both a location and a set, and we split up the work accordingly. In this particular case we’re shooting the location just as we did in the opening. In other scenes we’re shooting Mac’s house-set, which is on a stage. We actually got this scene in just a few takes. It went very quickly and very smoothly once we choreographed it. The idea is that we, thematically and visually, tie ourselves back to his homecoming and that this is a more disturbed version of that.
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