[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] "On Story" is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

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[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

[Narrator] This week on "On Story," creator and first time showrunner, Dan Erickson delves into the creative process behind "Severance," the cerebral character driven sci-fi mystery that captivated audiences and critics alike.

Erickson delves into the inspiration for his dystopian premise and deconstructs the creative process behind this smash hit.

- The show has to be funny, and the comedy has to come from these characters who we love, not despite their eccentricities, but for their eccentricities and there's a truth to that, because it's like, what do you do when you're trapped in a dark hell forever with three other people, well, you try to make each other laugh, you know?

And you try to make light of things and you try to make a life and humor is such a huge part of that for me, and I think for everybody.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [typewriter dings] - This is a pretty crazy successful show to be your first thing outta the box.

Somebody overheard a conversation that you had in one of our vehicles, and it was the, I guess, origin story of "Severance" and so, can you talk about that?

- The whole thing started, I had moved to LA to, you know, try my hand at this whole industry and found, I, you know, the only job I could get was working at a door factory, and it was in Pacoima, California, and they, it was like a little windowless office in their basement where I would just like catalog door parts, hinges and knobs and I guess that's it.

[laughing] I hated the job and I was walking in one day and just caught myself having this thought that I had had a million times before, which is like, God, I wish I could just jump ahead to the end of the day.

I wish there was some way to not experience the next eight hours of my life, which is a really kind of messed up thing to wish for, you know?

Like, I want less precious time on this earth, but it was what I was feeling and you know, it occurred to me as I was walking in, I'm like, well, that could be a thing, like that could be a, like what if there was a way to sort of disassociate and not have to experience your work life?

And then, you know, the show was more or less fully conceived within the next five minutes.

It was like, the whole thing kind of was like, oh, yeah, that would work and then, you know, I got in trouble because I was writing down ideas for the rest of the day and not tending the hinges.

- But so that door factory kind of did you a favor, right?

- In a huge way.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

You have to be grateful for the little miseries in life.

- From that idea and that really, probably quite boring job, you shift into totally different gear, but how long did that take?

How did this happen to get to Apple?

- I wrote it over the course of the next six months or so.

I wrote the first version of the pilot.

During that time, I left the door factory.

I went to work as a registrar at, which I still don't really know what that is, but at a trade school, it was a global company that had, you know, campuses all over the world, so that's where I encountered a lot of this sort of corporate speak that eventually made its way into "Severance," but I worked there for a while, I briefly had a development job, but really very little, you know, industry success at trying to break in and then the script ended up, it was briefly at like, I was talking to the Syfy channel about it, they ultimately passed, at which point I was like, okay, that's it, that's the end of that.

My manager was like, "No, let's keep sending it out.

You know, we have nothing to lose."

And so, I believe it was somebody there at Syfy who nominated it for the Blood List.

So it got on that and then I was driving for Postmates at the time and got a call saying that Ben Stiller had read the script and wanted to sit down and talk, which was absolutely, I was sweating more than I am now even, but it was, yeah, the rest is history.

- The pilot you actually used with Apple, was that pretty much the same, or did you go through a process with Ben Stiller and his company that changed it up somewhat?

- There's a lot of differences.

The biggest being, I think that it was much more heightened.

The original script read more like a Terry Gilliam thing.

First of all, it was Mark waking up on the table and not Helly, and he was birthed out of a giant, can I say anus, in the ceiling onto the table.

It was a much more, I think probably because I was, you know, an unexperienced writer who was trying to sort of get attention, you know, there were a lot of very big swings in there, which then through, and actually first through working with Syfy, and then later through working with Ben, we sort of figured out where the strengths were and what we should hone in on.

- Well, obviously you just told us about the [bleep] job is the driving force, right?

But there's a lot more depth to what's going on in there, I think, but you know, would like to know more about, like how you were going to kind of take the show into a deeper sort of richer concept?

- Well, I knew pretty quickly that it couldn't just be about how work sucks, like it, and it couldn't just be about how we're different people at work, you know, because that's like a very nice episode of the Twilight Zone, but that's not going to sustain itself for multiple seasons and so, you know, the more we talked about it, the more it became clear, like it has to be about a greater sense of like disassociation and how we hide from elements of ourselves, elements of our lives that we don't like, whether we are ashamed or grieving, you know, there are that we have that are real to sort of shut off certain parts of ourselves.

[sobbing] [sniffling] And so, you know, we knew pretty quickly that the main character had to be grieving, had to be going through something, because he's hiding on both sides.

Like he's hiding at work and he's hiding on the outside and the funny thing is like, there are so many people I know who say that they would do this for various reasons.

Most of them say that they would do it so they wouldn't have to experience work, but then there are those who say like, yeah, I have a lot going on out here that I would love to be able to escape from and if I could go to work and just not have to think about my life, I would do that and, you know, when I had the idea, or I had recently gone through a breakup of a five-year relationship, and so I was, you know, not in a great spot and I did find that there was comfort in work.

There was comfort in going to a place where I was there for the benefit of somebody else and everything I did, I did because I was told to do, so I didn't have to make decisions, and I didn't have to think about the greater reasons for the things I was doing, I just did them and there was a weird comfort in that.

[typewriter dings] - One of the things I've really loved and connected with in the show is, the mystery that underlies everything, because you're always trying to figure out what's going on, you know?

I mean, you have sort of a true crime element to it in a way, you know?

In season one, just obviously the way you drop us in, right?

Like the very first moment, and you're not really familiar with anything, it is like being birthed, right?

- Yeah, it's hard.

We've been able to do it so far, hopefully we can keep that tightrope walk going.

One thing that was Ben's idea was we still shouldn't understand the work they're doing, even on the inside, like it should be something that's nonsense or looks like nonsense to us, but the characters, because they don't have a greater context, you know, for the wider world, they accept it.

They say like, "Okay, yeah, this is the job and this is probably what everybody does at their job."

You know, what was born out of that was that, you know, you get to then keep that mystery going and it becomes how do all of our characters, but especially Mark, how does he end up sort of solving this mystery or figuring out what's really going on when he only has half the picture at any given time?

So we see, you know, we are figuring out twice as much as he is at any given time and we're sort of ahead of him in that way.

So there's a lot of fun, dramatic irony to be mined from that, but it was, yeah, it was Ben's idea to say like, let's keep things really amorphous, even on the inside.

When you're designing a company like Lumen and you're putting all this weird stuff in there, you were saying something about the psychology of the ultimate villains of the show, which is the Lumen, you know, management, why does Helly wake up on a table?

Why not just wake up in a chair or walk through a door?

Why does Mark speak to her through this weird disembodied, you know, intercom thing?

And those were things that Ben was extremely meticulous about.

Like everything had to have an answer.

It's like, well, why would Lumen do it that way?

But what's great about that is that, it's like every small question you have to answer, you end up answering a bigger question.

You're like, well, okay, they would do it that way, that like, I said this this morning, but it's like there's a sense of when Helly wakes up and hears Mark's voice coming from somewhere, it's as though the company itself is talking to her, it's as though she's woken up inside of an organism and she's now a cell in this big greater creature and we're like, okay, so that's, so now we know something about Lumen, like now we know something about what they're trying to instill in their characters to sort of get them to a place of ultimate subservience.

So those things, it all sort of, you know, some of it, was weird for the sake of weird, like early in the process, but then the good, the great thing about Ben is he would be like, okay, we have to, we have to examine everything and so those two things ended up really going hand-in-hand.

- Why did you change it to Helly from Mark?

- There were a couple reasons.

One is that she sort of developed into the rabble-rouser character.

Like it became clear in writing it that this was the character who was there to disrupt everything and sort of, and throw a bomb, but also sort of be a bomb that lands in the middle of this space and so, you know, we thought that it made more sense for her to be the one showing up and we're experiencing the world along with her, but the other thing is, you know, Mark, Mark, who is in many ways our protagonist, although I would say Helly is a co-protagonist, we wanted Mark to have a history at the company.

We wanted him to have some sort of pre-established relationships with Dylan, with Irving, with Petey who goes missing, you know, with Milchik and Cobel.

We wanted to be able to sort of feel like we're being plopped into the middle of a pre-existing life that these characters have.

- And she's just a fascinating character you guys are using in there to me, just because you are so cruel to her and well, it's true.

- No, it's true.

- And yet she's so persistent.

She's sort of a biblical character almost, you know, so it's like Job, and she makes you feel things, which I think is brilliant, so like she really makes you feel hatred for whoever these people are.

That part of it is, I think an interesting choice to do that because at the same time, Mark's very lovable, you know?

- And what I love about Helly and how we were able to make it work this season was that, you know, it is just this parade of indignities that she is subject to and the whole time she's getting more and more vitriol built up at the company, you know, at basically, you know, whoever put me here and then she has this realization at the end of the pilot that she put herself here and that, and you know, she is in fact the enemy that she's been, been coming to hate and then we have an even sort of bigger version of that same reveal at the end of the season, which is like, oh, I've been looking for the devil and the devil is me.

[intense music] We didn't come up with it right away, but once we did, it felt absolutely inevitable.

It was like, this is the logical, in a way, it's the ultimate nightmare and you know, you're not wrong that we do put Helly through Hell, you know, in the show and the final revelation feels like the ultimate kind of capper on that endless stream of nightmares.

- When she hung herself, I was like, you're not, we know what she's gonna go do, but we know she's not going to really do that, right?

And then you let it happen and so it's, that to me is a really interesting tonal choice in the show, period, right.

Because there's also a lot of comedy in it, subtle comedy, but comedy for sure, it just seems like, wow, it shouldn't really work, but clearly it does.

You know, I guess it's feeding the overall psychosis of what the situation is, right?

- Yeah, it's funny, my background was primarily in comedy.

Like what background I did have, you know, I went to NYU and I studied half-hour comedy and was intending to try to get staffed on a half-hour comedy and sort of wrote this script on a whim.

There's a sadness inherit to almost all comedy if you really scratch down below the surface and so it was always a really important part of it to me.

I was like, the show has to be funny.

It has to be, and the comedy has to come from these characters who we love, not despite their eccentricities but for their eccentricities and there's a truth to that because it's like, what do you do when you're trapped in a dark hell forever with three other people, well, you try to make each other laugh, you know, and you try to make light of things and you try to make a life and humor is such a huge part of that for me, and I think for everybody, - You also shifted that somewhat with adding this whole element of the room, this sort of hidden place that nobody even knows is there, and that you sort of open up for this moment, to these people and give them just a little bit more than what they've got, which is another interesting concept, right?

- That was one of the most fun things, was once you realize that this is their whole world, everything expands to fill a vacuum and the perpetuity wing where they have the wax figures of the Eagans, it's like a church, you know, to them it's like a church, because these are the people who created everything that they know and so, you know, they are deified in a way and, you know, when Irving meets Burt and it's this sort of like, guy from the other side of the tracks, like, we don't trust them necessarily.

You know, that's like, you know, anytime you leave home, you're gonna find and meet these interesting new people and you possibly fall in love with interesting people who are different from you and how you grew up.

- I'm Irving, macro data refinement.

Are you a department head?

- Well, optics and design.

A two person department, so, barely.

- So this is your work, hmm?

- We don't paint them, we do hang them.

- I loved that you did the Ambrose Cycle in the team building space last quarter.

- Huh.

- I never seen it.

- It's rare to meet a sophisticate.

Most people only think of O&D when new handbook totes come in.

[both chuckles] - Well, I love those too.

- It's a miniaturized version of the real world, you know, and there's a lot of comedy in that, like a lot of that is funny because it seems so absurd, but I think there's a truth to it too, because I think that is you, you know, you need a life, like you need profound things, you need a sense of purpose and you need connections and so you're gonna create it one way or another, whatever reality you're presented with.

[typewriter dings] - Essentially, you can't talk about your show without talking about the world building part of it.

- Yeah, I mean, it's so funny.

Like, these are the conversations that you have in the writer's room that last all day, where like we're talking about like the rules of "Severance" and what exactly comes through and what doesn't.

It's clearly these char-- like they can all still speak English, so something is coming through and we sort of tried to dramatize that in the opening scene.

[audible static] - Hello?

[Helly groans] [Mark] I am sorry, I got ahead of myself.

Hi there, you on the table.

I wonder if you'd mind taking a brief survey.

- Who is that?

[Mark] Five questions.

Now, I know you're sleepy, but I just bet it'll make you feel right as rain.

- Who's speaking?

[panting] Hey!

Open the door!

- Mark is asked, you know, name a U.S. state, and he says "Delaware," [attendees laughing] Then he's asked where he's from and he doesn't know.

And I'm sorry, I mean Helly of course.

It's that thing of like, okay, so you understand that there's a place called America and that there are states, but you don't know which one you're from and all of the, you know, we always had to say it's like, would they know what a car is?

Like if you asked Dylan to draw a car, could he do it?

And those were all the just sort of little rules that we had to establish.

- So let's discuss, it's Cobel, right?

Yeah, let's discuss her because I mean, you Easter egged her in the beginning and that was great, but then, you know, we're learning a lot more about her by the end.

- It was one of the things where the question, you know, came before the answer, I think in the, not in the original pilot, but one of the early versions of the pilot, you know, I had the reveal that she's living next to him at the end and that she's the neighbor who he's been talking to, you know, on the phone the whole time.

Then of course, the next question is why?

Like, what on earth is she doing?

Like, is she observing him for the company?

Our intention was that she's not severed and I was surprised that some people think that she is.

With her, we wanted to look at sort of the ways that, that people can sever without severance, you know?

Because I think there is a sense that as Mrs. Selvig, she is living a life that she can't as Cobel, whatever her motives are for that, like whatever her motives are for doing that, like, I've always felt that she likes Mark as Mrs. Selvig, you know, she actually enjoys the warmth of that friendship and that that's something that she can't necessarily feel in her life as Cobel.

So it's like, you know, what are the ways that we, even people who are not severed sort of segment their life and live out different versions of themselves in different scenarios.

- Mark's brother-in-law is just, he's just something special, you know?

- I love Ricken.

I love Ricken dearly and in a lot of ways that maybe I don't wanna examine, he is the character that's most like me.

When Mark ultimately reads his words outside of the context of knowing him and outside of all of the sort of personal preconceptions he has about this person, that he finds inspiration and he finds comfort and wisdom in the words.

There are people like that where it's like, you know, we've long since written them off as buffoons, but if you really, truly were able to take a fresh look at some of the things they were saying, yes, it's still silly, I mean, Ricken's book is ridiculous, but there are pearls in there that end up being the thing that helped Mark get to that place of revolution that he needs to get to.

- The set is just amazing, [chuckles] in that I think I would lose my mind if I was shooting there every day.

- And it's actually even worse than it sounds, because there's the MDR office with that horrible low ceiling and that terrible green carpet, and then the hallway maze is actually built around it, like there's a very vast network of hallways and Ben likes to show that by like showing long shots of people walking through.

Then beyond that are the hallways of the sound stage, which look eerily similar.

You step out from the fictional maze into the actual maze that we do all actually work in.

- There is this Jekyll and Hyde feeling about the innie and outie part, and it feels very much like that story.

- I mean that's, that sort of thematically comes down to what the whole thing is.

It's about kind of why do we reduce ourselves?

Like why is it, 'cause it hurts to be whole.

Like, it hurts to be a person and, you know, a lot of times we sort of, we will numb the effects of being a human being, you know, through alcohol or through people who work and do things at work that they would never do in real life, you know, in terms of ethically or whatever and they write it off.

They say like, well, I was at work, you know, that's work me, that's not me me, and so, you know, I do think that it's, we wanted to look at like reasons that people sort of divide themselves up and become lesser versions of themselves and how, in a way that's comforting, but then also how that can be taken advantage of by those in power.

- Do you consider the innies and the outies separate characters?

- It's one of the central questions of the show, and it's something that we come back to all the time and it fortunately doesn't have a clean answer because the fun is in exploring that, 'cause yeah, it does come down to issues of nature versus nurture.

I think there's a core of sameness between them, but the same traits can express themselves extremely differently, depending on a person's station, depending on how and where the, you know, they grew up.

Have they been high status their whole life or have they been sort of trodden upon?

And one thing that I think is gonna be, you know, we're having fun exploring into, is that we are gonna see a little bit more of the outie characters and get a little bit more of a sense of who they are and why they are that way.

So in the case of Helly, it's like, I think it's really interesting, it's like, what is the difference between the rebel and the dictator, you know?

Sometimes maybe it's just, you know, the situation and the same traits that can cause somebody to be like, you know, I'm gonna burn this place to the ground.

I'm gonna tear down this system.

Those can be expressed in very like painful and oppressive ways in a different situation.

There's no clean answer to that and like we talk about like, yeah, is Mark, you know, is he the same guy?

Is he a different guy?

And we ask that question almost every new scene we write.

It's like, okay, to what degree is this a is this person, is this trait, a central tenant of who Mark is versus what can be malleable depending on whether he's an innie and an outie.

[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching On Writing Severance: A Conversation With Dan Erickson on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about "On Story" and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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