Dan Erickson considers the question: If he were severed and had to work in the depths of Lumon Industries, which department would he choose?
Not Choreography and Merriment. “I’ve already done the marching band in high school. And I wasn’t very good at it, if I’m being honest.”
Not Mammalians Nurturable. “It’s great to just hang out with goats, although what we learn at the end about the fate of the goats would make it hard for me. You have to accept that they’re going to be taken away and killed, and I couldn’t deal with that. Same reason I couldn’t work in an animal shelter. I would like to. I wish I were a good enough person. But I would be like, ‘No, don’t take them away.’”
“So I think I’m an O&D guy. Optics and Design. I would like to be there taking care of the paintings and then printing things in the back. It’s kind of harmless. They seem happy. You have a lot of space to run. Yeah, I think I’m O&D.”
The Severance mastermind, who turned an ill-fated gig at a door factory and string of other mind-numbing jobs into the year’s biggest Emmy contender, is trying to wrap his head around his success and enjoy the ride. “It’s so humbling and cool and exciting,” he tells Gold Derby as prelude to a wide-ranging interview that includes how he dreamed up the key moments of the stunning Season 2 finale, “Cold Harbor” (a script that earned him one of his two Emmy nods this year), his greatest pop-culture influences, and the warped opening scene that Ben Stiller nixed.
Gold Derby: Twenty-seven Emmy nominations for Severance, including two for you personally for writing and producing. How does it feel that this thing that you created, the whole Lumon-verse, has been so widely embraced by fans and critics, and now your peers?
Dan Erickson: It’s extremely gratifying. I know it’s a cliché — but it’s something that I never used to do — but every now and then I’ll see something, or somebody I admire talking about the show, or just seeing the way that people are responding to it, and I have to check to make sure that this isn’t some elaborate fantasy being made up in my head. It’s so humbling and cool and exciting.
Is there a Severance text chain where you all got on and celebrated?
There are a couple of permutations of it. There’s a big one with everybody, and then there are a couple of smaller ones with different groups of people. A lot of us who were sort of newer to this, who hadn’t done as much beforehand, we have a text chain called “the freshman class,” and we haven’t renamed it since Season 1. I guess it should be “sophomore class” now, but, yes, there’s a couple of those, and it’s always good to check in with those guys because it’s a reminder that this is real.
Last time we talked it was right after the finale “Cold Harbor” came out, and you had a screening at the Dolby Theater. It was the first time the cast and crew watched the show with fans, and Adam Scott told me he came out of there thinking, “Holy sh-t, this is like Star Wars”…
It’s so wild and that event was incredible. I have been an attendee at that theater at other things. But getting to stand backstage — I was behind the screen looking out at the reverse image of the of the show, and then I could see the audience beyond it — that’s a moment I’m going to remember until the last day of my life. As I’m wheezing my way into the hereafter, that’s something that I’m going to think about, and it’s going to give me joy.
That was five months ago. What’s changed since then?
It’s weird, because the process of making the third season, which we’re very much in right now, is very unsexy. You wake up and you have so much work you need to do that day, and you get it all done. And so juxtaposing that with seeing people discover the show — and there are people who are still finding it for the first time — and seeing the reaction and the awards nominations … it’s hard to see something like that and then go back to work for four more hours of the day, because it’s just doesn’t feel like reality.
Since you brought it up, what exactly does it mean that you’re in the process of making Season 3? Are you just creating the bones of what you expect the season to be? Do you have a timeline of when you’d like to start production? What will Apple let you tell us about the new season?
They have a chip in my head, so I can’t say anything. [laughs] No, I don’t think we have a specific timeline yet, but we’ve got what I think are some real good bones, and we are in the process of writing it and creating scripts. It’s really fun. Every part of it is fun, but the part where we once we start to feel like we know the shape of it, and then we are actually getting into scenes and stuff like, that’s when it starts to really, really sing for me. So it’s a good time.
Dan, we can’t take another years-long wait. How does it work when you’re plotting a season? Do you have an overarching idea for multiple seasons and then break it down from there? How much comes from the writers’ room?
We have the overall shape in mind, and for the most part that has not changed. We have a pretty good sense of where we want to land. The question has always been [that] for most of this [process] we haven’t been sure how many seasons we want to go. We have a pretty good idea of that now, although we’re keeping it secret, just in case we change our minds. But it’s always been going into each season there’s usually a pretty solid starting point and end point. And then we interrogate that; we always ask ourselves, “Are we sure that’s where we want to get to?” If the answer is yes, then it becomes what is the 10-chapter version of that story. We build the show from the outside in. We start with the overall shape, and then we zoom in and zoom in until eventually we’re writing scenes.
That’s how it worked for Season 2?
Yes. I wanted people to understand, at least to some extent, what the numbers were, because that was one of those smaller mysteries inside the bigger mystery. I thought if we could satisfy people’s curiosity about that, they might stay with us for the next thing, as we zoom out. And then I really wanted to get Gemma out, because I thought of myself as a viewer and how I would feel if two seasons in, she was still stuck down there. I could just see myself getting antsy or getting annoyed. So I wanted to get us to that point, but I’m surprised that I think people are madder at us about this season finale than the last one. I’ve had more people like come up to me and be like, “How dare you do that to Gemma!” People are ride-or-die for Gemma, which I respect.
When we talked a few months ago, you said it was about 50-50 in terms of people’s reactions, but now it seems to have swung more toward the negative?
Actually, no. I think it swung back the other way. Because now a lot of people are like, “I was mad at you at first, but then I thought about it and it made sense. Like Mark choosing his own existence makes sense.” But it’s begrudging, you know.
For your writing nomination you submitted “Cold Harbor.” In March you joked with us that if viewers listen hard enough, they can hear you typing rewrites in the background of the Mark-versus-Mark scene. How much rewriting do you do on set? Was it unique to that episode and that specific scene, or are you constantly tinkering?
It’s pretty common. We show up on the day, in the morning, and there’s a rehearsal for the scene, and oftentimes that’s the first time that we’ve heard the actors say it. That’s always very informative. You hear it out loud, and one of the actors will be like, “Hey, is it OK if we try something else here?” or I will want to try something else because it didn’t sound the way I thought it was going to on the page. But that scene it was more so than normal because there were so many dynamics at play, complicated emotional dynamics between the two versions of Mark. And then just trying to get all our facts straight. OK, what does Outie Mark know? What does Innie Mark know? What are both of them willing to share? What does Cobel know? What does Devon know? It was a lot to keep track of, and my head was exploding the whole time. But it was great because every version was better. You can feel it getting better in real time, and that’s really exciting.
“Cold Harbor” also included the instantly iconic Choreography and Merriment moment. What was the evolution of that scene like?
We had conceived the scene back in the writers’ room with the full staff. But for the the last stretch, it was myself and [writer] Mark Friedman and [producer] Beau Willimon who were working on it at that point, and we knew that there needed to be some kind of celebration for Mark, and that that was going to be the thing that allowed him the opportunity to slip away and escape. We talked about any kind of party that can be thrown. I believe it was Beau who finally said, “Well, what if it was a marching band?” And we brought up a scene from Citizen Kane, where this marching band comes in.
It’s shot with this low ceiling and this low angle that is very similar to the look of [Severance]. It’s such a surreal thing to have this big marching band coming into such a confined space. And as soon as we saw that we were like, “Well, that’s got to be it.”
I did marching band in high school and have a lot of fond memories, but there’s something slightly weird about the uniformity of it, and that all these people moving in motion, in straight lines, in rows and stuff. And then it just happened that Ben is a big fan of marching bands, which I didn’t know, but sometimes these things, they line up.
When we were talking to Theodore Shapiro, the composer, he said that he had no idea Ben was a huge fan of Drumline, the Nick Cannon film, and he took some inspiration from the movie when he was writing the music for Choreography and Merriment.
The similarities between Severance and Drumline are there. The Drumline, Citizen Kane, and Severance shared universe.
As you mentioned, Ben is very open about about being a film nerd and bringing in all these influences and transforming them and making them something new. What are some of your specific inspirations? What films or shows help inform Severance for you?
Whatever this world is that we’re in [on the show], I came into it from the comedy side, because as a kid, I wanted nothing more than to write comedy film. I was really into old ’80s comedies, and I was a big Calvin and Hobbes fan — if you look at Calvin and Hobbes, it’s much darker than some of us remember — and The Far Side. That transitioned me into Monty Python, something like Holy Grail or the original show, even like the early John Cleese film How to Irritate People. That stuff was so impactful to me, and then there was a step up into the Terry Gilliam world.
I was lucky enough to be a teenager in 1999 when Office Space and The Matrix and all these other great existential fantastical movies came out. And all of that went into the soup. I try to make the show its own thing and make it an evolution of everything that inspired me, but there’s no getting around the fact that I’m drawing so much inspiration from all that stuff.
You have also drawn inspiration from your previous working experience, including your time at a door factory. This season there’s an inside joke, when Dylan attempts to get a job at a door factory. How accurate was that bit?
It was word for word. I recorded my interview, and we just wrote it down. It was exactly what happened. [laughs] No, it was very different from that. When I talk about the door factory, I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve exaggerated it a little bit. I let people believe that there were doors going by on conveyor belts like Monsters, Inc., and that wasn’t really the case. My office just looked like an office, but they talked about doors, they asked me about doors in the interview. I had just finished NYU with a master’s in TV writing and so I had to fake that I knew anything about doors. And I was able to get in.
You talked a bit about the need to change dialogue on the fly and rewrite on set. Have there been bigger changes — characters or storylines that wound up being a false start? What are some of the Severance scenes we never saw?
There are a couple that are on the record already because there was an early draft of the script that was on the BloodList [a now-defunct site that collected the best unproduced horror scripts as selected by industry professionals] before it got to Red Hour, which is Ben’s company. That version didn’t start with Helly waking up on the table. Instead it had Mark being birthed out of what I can only call a giant anus in the ceiling. I apologize, but that’s just what it was. He was birthed out of it onto the table and he was slimy and naked.
And he’s a full-grown human being?
Yes. He was a full-grown adult and he was birthed. I talked to Ben about that, and he was like, ”Well, can you explain that? What is the anus? Is it a big fake thing that they built?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” And he was like, “OK, we have to know the answers to these things, or we can’t do them.” And I was like, “OK, fair.” And we took away the anus.
There was that kind of stuff early on. That was at the time when we were still finding the tone of the show, and deciding what level of grounded [reality] versus magical realism we are in. Since we figured that out, it’s been a lot more consistent, but there’s always stuff we change. Like Miss Huang was initially much, much snarkier. In the very first version of the script, she was sarcastic, making fun of all the innies. We changed the character a bit both before and after casting the actor. We started to be like, “Well, no, she should be more professional, and the weird thing is that it’s a child who’s sort of acting like an adult.” Once we cast Sarah [Bock] it just suddenly clicked. It’s much easier to write for a character once they’re cast.
Did you have a personal favorite moment in Season 2? Something where you go, “Yes, that was perfect. I can just watch that on replay all the time”?
Multiple, multiple, and it’s better than perfect, honestly. Perfect would be if I watched it and I was like, “Oh my God, they got it exactly right. That’s exactly what I thought it would be.” More often, what I experience is I watch it and I go, “Holy sh-t, I had no idea that’s what I had written. I had no idea that that was the scene.” I get to discover it along with everybody else, which is so great.
Look, I’m a sicko. I’m partial to the bombastic moments of blood and gore. To be on set when they were shooting the scene where Drummond is killed in the elevator, and to watch how that worked with the squirting squibs or what have you. And then to see that on screen and actually to get to watch that, watch other people watching that scene and hear people’s reactions, I could have died right then and been very happy. I could have been punctured in the neck by a captive-bolt pistol and been just fine.
You are the anus guy, so of course…
Let’s make that stick. Let’s make sure that sticks.
Moving on. What are you looking forward to on Emmy night? Outside of the Severance crew, is there anyone you want to see or meet?
Well, I’m excited to see my old colleague Kathy Bates, because when she was on Lip Sync Battle a couple of years ago, I was writing for the Lip Sync Battle preshow. And there was an interview that the hosts did with her, and I wrote some of those questions. So, you know, Kathy and I, we go way back in our professional history. I’m just glad to see she’s finally getting the recognition she deserves after serving time in the trenches with me for so long, God bless her. God bless her.
You two were just coming up together.
Yes, coming up. We’re the first team, the freshman team.
Well, let’s hope that you level up to JV or sophomore or varsity at the Emmys, whatever it is.
Appreciate it. Thank you!
