It’s one thing for an actor to replace a superstar in the second season of a TV series. For Amazon Prime’s “Homecoming” that meant Janelle Monae effectively needing to fill the shoes of one of the few real movie stars left in the world, Julia Roberts. It’s another thing for a filmmaker to replace the original director who brought a very distinctive style to the first season. That was the task for Kyle Patrick Alvarez. An indie film and episodic veteran who replaced Sam Esmail of “Mr. Robot” fame.
Patrick Alvarez has ventured from the work of David Sedaris (“C.O.G.”) to the real-life horror of “The Stanford Prison Experiment” to helming and consulting on the teen phenomenon “13 Reasons Why.” He’s almost seen it all. But tackling a mystery in 30-min episodes with a brand new lead? That’s a challenge.
Alvarez, who it should be noted is a friend, jumped on the phone to talk about what made him tackle creators Micah Bloomberg and Eli Horowitz’s unique thriller.
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The Playlist: How did you find yourself directing the entire second season of “Homecoming”?
Kyle Patrick Alvarez: I was a really, really big fan of the first season. It was probably my favorite thing on TV that year, whatever year that was now, I can’t keep track. But I just loved it so much. I loved it. I mean, there’s a lot I could go off, but it was mostly the way the director was a really essential part of that show and the way it was told. That’s a little bit rare in TV. And so for me, it was part loving the show, part wanting that responsibility of doing all the episodes and in part getting to just be a lot more creative than your traditional TV job.
When you pitched on it, was there already a breakdown for the second season? Had it already gone through a writer’s room or were you coming in fresh at the start?
No, I got a lot more scripts than usual, right? I mean, I think partly because it’s doing every episode, so it was less talking about the show broadly. I was given, I think, five of the scripts, maybe even six. It was good. It helped me be able to pitch more specifically, as opposed to most TV shows, you go in and you give a sense of what it is, whether it existed before, what you liked about it, or if you haven’t been able to see any of it, you try to extrapolate and project onto what you’ve learned from the scripts. But here I got to go in and pitch, “This scene, I’m going to shoot this way, with these angles.” There was a specificity to it because most of the season had been written.
The season Sam directed it in a very distinct way and he had one timeline, in one ratio and he had the other timeline in another. What made you decide to go in, for lack of a better word, “conventional way” of shooting it? Even though I don’t know if it’s as aesthetically conventional as people might think.
Yeah. I think it is a more conventional season, but I think only if you’re really looking in the details like you said. I was nervous about that actually because I pitched it at my very first meeting with Micah and Eli. “We’re going to use original score this year. We’re not going to do aspect ratio changes.” The idea was that I loved those things, right? I don’t think the show is better without them. It was more, it felt like the story dictated those choices. And my fear was that if I were to recreate them – there was a way to do an aspect ratio change if we wanted to – but it would have felt tacked on as opposed to inspired. And then I was worried that it would have retroactively taken away from what made it work so well in season one. It just would’ve been like, “Oh, ‘Homecoming’s’ that show where the bars are up on the screen.” As opposed to, “Oh, that story asked for that.” For me, it was, “You don’t need the sets to tell the story as much, because you’re constantly in new places or whatever, you don’t need the dialogue scenes to play in a certain way because there aren’t as many as there were in season one, right?” You kept on going back to Heidi’s office.
One aesthetic choice you did make was a number of really long complicated one-shot takes. Was that part of your pitch and in hindsight, which one was the toughest to shoot?
Definitely the long one in episode two was a part of my initial pitch. Granted, I didn’t think we were going to have to go from shooting two parts of the shot and a relocation. Three parts of the shot [are] on different sets. It got infinitely more complicated. But I was really clear, “I don’t want to do a long take just to try to match or one-up the one take from last season.” As soon as you start asking the audience to look for that stuff, it becomes a little uninspired. And for me, I was reading the scripts and just genuinely felt like this moment of this character, circling this house, that’s the most exciting way [to shoot it]. The motivation of the long take in season one was to establish the space you were going to spend a whole season in. The motivation of the long shot in this one was we’re going to sustain the tension by not cutting. And so that was probably the hard one, the one that tracks around the house, I think it’s about six and a half or eight minutes. And it’s got a crane, a steady cam in it, three different locations, I think probably 48 visual effects in it in total, including, for example, when you’re running a camera flat against the wall, there was no windows in place. So all the reflections are fake and there’s a cat on top of it and cats are particularly difficult to turn on camera. So it couldn’t have gotten more diverse elements, but I also wanted to consciously make it organic. If not, I think it would have stood out. Every day had some kind of new challenge. The last shot of episode one was particularly difficult too, following Chris in from the fields, we extended the arm of the crane, literally through the house that we built in the middle of this semi-empty field and had to pull the crane back through the house with him. And it was just tough and it was sand storms and all that stuff. It was trying to pull off the ambition of season one, but in real spaces, which is never easy.
One of the interesting things about this season, is that not only are you coming in directing all the episodes new to the show, but Janelle, your lead is also new to the production as well. Did you feel like that bonded you guys at all?
I mean, for me it was a totally different kind, when you have Julia Roberts, there is no higher bar in terms of fame and talent and you don’t get better than that. And so what was great for me with Janelle, is that it was just a different type of lead actress. And by that I’m not referring to anything other than just, she’s a different type of performer, right? She carries herself differently, she lives on screen differently than Julia does. And especially when you look at the first two episodes where it’s not dialogue-driven at all, Janelle really has an awareness of herself. I think she’s very aware of how she is on camera. And that helped a lot for me with this technical approach, because it’s a much more technical show than what I’ve worked on [previously]. Sometimes the dream is always to prioritize the actors and let them do what feels right for them. But on a show like this, you sometimes have to say, “Hey, you’re going to walk to this side of the room and land right here, because the walls are going to move and the cameras and they come into play.” It’s such a more technical experience than getting to work with an actress, who’s also an accomplished performer. Someone who can dance and know what choreography is. All of that contributed to these long takes going smoothly. I don’t know if we would’ve been able to do that without her ability to do that so effortlessly.
The other performance that really stood out to me is, and I have not seen all her work, is Hong Chau’s. Can you talk about working with her, what her priorities were and what you and the rest of the team thought about her character in the context of the season?
Obviously she’s teased in season one and the most enigmatic scene in season one is the scene where she essentially fires Colin. I remember when I watched season one, I was like, “Well, I’m not sure what the scene is,” but I was like, “They know what they’re doing on the show and I know that there’s a reason for this.” I remember when I got the scripts to episode three and got to that moment where it’s called back, I was like, “Oh, O.K, good. That was right.” What I would say Hong did really well, and I mean this as a compliment, is [she’s] incredibly self-sufficient. In a lot of ways, I think she’s most comfortable coming prepared and delivering what she prepared. And I love that in an actor. And what was great was I think she had spent a lot of time thinking about how this woman is going to be very different in her private space versus this facade that we only saw in season one. I think Hong actually brought a lot of levity to who that character is and also a humanity to her that wasn’t there in season one. And that was all the scripts and Hong really. I can’t take much credit for that. She really owned the character and would often make really bold decisions that paid off. There’s a key scene at the end of episode four, that in my brain, wasn’t an emotional scene and when we ran the cameras, it just became that and she drove that really, which I appreciated.
Without spoilers, and in context of what she and Janelle have to go through, what happens to their characters, did you shoot it by location or was it more sequential?
It was all over the place. I mean, we started in a few different places and then we went to the Geist building interior and we shot half of the stuff and even half of some scenes, because we didn’t have Janelle the first time we went there. So we had now for a week or two, and then we had to shoot building stuff without Janelle, I think she had some prior obligations. And then we went out to the fields and to Arrowhead, and then we came back to the Geist building how to shoot the other, sometimes the other half of scenes. So it was really complicated that way. But generally speaking, we were able to at least keep all the stuff in Lake Arrowhead, all the forest stuff was together, most of the Geist building stuff was together. And then all the sets, which was Audrey’s home and this one’s right behind me, the whole Redwood offices, so in some ways we can at least stay in the same place, but Janelle had a couple of tricky days where she had to be playing two sides of a coin, so to say. That’s to say it without spoilers. And you try to avoid that as much as you can, but it’s tricky. Chris’s very first day on set was giving the big speech he gives at the end of two. So the very first time he walked on camera was giving six pages of dialogue to 400 extras. And sometimes you just have to brave it dive in and he certainly did.
You made a name for yourself in film and we’ve talked so much personally about what you went through on those projects. What about television do you enjoy? What about it fuels you creatively?
For me, the challenge of TV is finding out how to put yourself into it. And by that I mean, when you go and direct an episode you’re basically a guest on a show. You’re following a format, you’re trying to be creative within a smaller sandbox. As opposed to [this situation where] they were saying, “Do what you want to do with this.” And I was the one that was a little more like, “O.K., cool. Let’s bring in all this stuff from season one.” I was able to choose my own restriction so it was just a higher level of a creative experience which is frankly what I wanted to do in TV. I mean, the greatest thing TV gives a filmmaker is consistent work. And by that, I don’t mean income. I mean, if you’re an indie filmmaker, you’re lucky to make a movie every two or three years. That’s a long time before you’re on set again before you remember just the pattern and the flow. I used to be scared of being on set in a way, it was like, “Oh, I spent three or four years to get to earn these 17 days and oh God, each minute needs to go well.” And now after doing four years of TV, I’m like, and granted, some of this also just comes with larger budgets, but like, “It’s going to be okay, it’s going to work out. You will meet your day. You will get what you need. There’ll be a solution around the corner.” In fact, the thing I miss the most from filmmaking is that I’ve learned so much in TV procedurally that I want to bring to a feature set and a lot more confidence just in terms of the actual technical day to day of shooting goes. But in the TV space, what I’m most excited about and hopefully being able to get to do more, is I’m excited with how you play with format and that’s what Homecoming does. It’s a 30-minute thriller, that’s not really a thing that existed, or there’s not a lot of it, right? It’s always an hour-long or it’s always got to be this giant global spanning thing. And here, this is these seven short episodes and there’s something thrilling about that, there’s something digestible about that. You’re asking less of a commitment from an audience and because of that, you can play more and you can play with expectations more. So I hope to get to keep on doing that and keep on, really as simple as saying, I would love to just keep making 30-minute drops.
You got to work with the legendary Joan Cusack on this project. Can you just tell me one memory you’ll never forget from being on set with her?
I could probably do dozens. I think it’s really easy to take for granted funny people. That you think it just comes naturally to them. But the thing I learned the most about Joan and admired so much was that every line delivery had a reasoning. Every page of the script had notes to herself, had reasonings, had ways to figure it out. And you realize what makes her so good at what she does and her career lasting is because she isn’t eccentric. It’s not strange for strange sake, she’s playing a person she’s built and she earns it. So she earns those strange moments. The odd line deliveries that we love her for [hit] because she works hard at that. For me, it was looking past that veil and seeing how the machinery works in a way for her. How her artistry works. Was what was the coolest. Anytime she and Chris Cooper were on stage together extra crew would come around just to watch those scenes.
“Homecoming” Season 2 is now available on Amazon Prime Video.
