[Editor’s Note: This piece contains Spoilers for Season 2 of ‘Paradise’]
Much like the characters in Season 2 of “Paradise,” when the nuclear reactor that’s been powering the underground bunker they call home starts to go, director Hanelle M. Culpepper started running out of time. It is the side effect of streaming series looking as polished and complex as films — they are as complicated to shoot as features with more than double the material, half the time, and a third of the budget to do so. It’s easy to get behind on making your day.
But years of working on everything from sitcoms and procedurals to “Westworld” and “Star Wars” series have taught Culpepper how to prepare and how to focus her work so that she’s always able to get what matters. On this particular day, she was responsible for shooting a huge piece of the bunker evacuation in Season 2, Episode 8, “Exodus.” There’s former billionaires throwing their stuff out in the rush of packing, terror in the streets, the (fake) sky literally falling down. And yet, what guided Culpepper through the episode that’s now earned her an a Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, are the character beats.
“ I consider myself a director who really loves and can do well with the worldbuilding of these big genre sci-fi shows without ever losing the emotional heart of what the characters are going through,” Culpepper told IndieWire. “Because ultimately, that’s the journey that grabs the audience and keeps them invested and wants them to keep watching.”
On this particular day, the “Paradise” was a little behind by lunch and still needed to shoot ex-Secret Service operative and possible AI-appointed world-savior Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) going down to the bunker controls with its billionaire architect of extremely dubious morals, Sinatra Redmond (Julianne Nicholson). There was a whole beat of navigating to get into the elevator to head down and then the trip to maybe, hopefully buy enough time down there for everyone else to escape.
Culpepper worked with the episode’s writers, John Hoberg and Seena Haddad, to buy themselves time to show what really mattered about this section of the Season 2 finale. She thought they could cut through the shoe-leather of getting to the elevator, and just shoot the awkward silence of the ride down, which not only shows how uneasy the alliance between Xavier and Sinatra is in the present, but also echoes their relationship in the past as Culpepper and DP Yasu Tanida frame it up exactly like a Season 1 moment where the two were still antagonists, but hadn’t gone through nearly as much.
“Dan Fogelman so trusts his writers. They know what he needs. They know his vision and how he thinks, and they all really creatively work together so that they have the power to say, ‘Yeah, you’re right. We don’t need that. Let’s cut it,’” Culpepper said. “Let’s get to the important stuff.”
The important stuff in “Exodus” isn’t simply the large-scale action and overlapping storylines and narrow escapes and choices to be left behind, although all of that is thrilling. Those don’t work without the pure visual storytelling beats of character emotion that Culpepper balances them with. The elevator moment is only one of the silent visual callbacks to Season 1 as a way to bid farewell to our favorite doomsday survival bunker underneath Colorado City (jury’s out on the one revealed underneath the Denver Airport).
Culpepper also echoes Xavier’s introduction in the show’s pilot — only instead of going for a jog, he’s running for his life — and includes a number of visual grace notes that link back to Sinatra’s dead (ish) son as she waits for the mountain to come down on top of her. Nothing is overly emphasized, but viewers who know the visual language of the show will recognize the repetition, like the second half of a rhyming couplet that completes this section of the story.
“I have to shout-out my first AD, Lisa Zugschwerdt, because she was truly my co-pilot in figuring this out,” Culpepper said. “You want to really give the audience that adrenaline ride, but you want to make sure you have time for those emotional beats where you want to slow the story down, so you have to really plan it right. Otherwise those big setpieces can just eat up your time, and then you find yourself rushing the actors. And I did not want to do that.”
Not necessarily being referential but being visually emotional, making sure there are moments of pause to understand the action, is something Culpepper has been working into her TV directing since her stint on “Star Trek: Discovery.” There, she had an intense setpiece where a character dies (although, this being “Star Trek,” doesn’t stay dead). Culpepper remembers assembling her cut of that episode and starting to panic, because she was sure she shot reactions to the character dying but there was so much set-piece stuff, the reaction beats were missing from the initial assembly.
“I was like, ‘I know I shot that.’ So [the editor and I] went back through and we made sure to put that all in and when Alex Kurtzman saw that episode, which had all this edge-of-your-seat stuff but [also] this moment where we stopped and had all the characters really reacting to the loss of someone they love? That’s why he asked me to do the pilot for ‘Star Trek: Picard,’” Culpepper said.
In the Season 2 finale of “Paradise,” Culpepper gets to direct a very affecting moment where everything stops. Sinatra’s final walk through the main drag of the bunker, the paradise that she built, is an almost sentimental sendoff for a character who has caused as much grief as anybody on the show. Culpepper and Tanida cover it in unhurried, consciously beautiful tracking shots that appear simple, but required a full court press to make real.
Culpepper worked with special effects, stunts, visual effects, production design, camera, rigging, almost all departments to make sure everything from the sky panels to the fake sun flares would visually signal the measure of peace Sinatra comes to and yet still connect her to her family who make it outside the bunker. With a lot of conversations, a lot of meticulous notes in Scriptation, a lot of prep and building, and then with Nicholson’s performance and an emotional out-of-focus fade to white, the “Paradise” team made it happen.
“We needed enough space for those panels to fall and to figure out what that looked like, what the design was, where visual effects would step in. We needed to figure out which pieces to shoot, and how, and where to hand it off, so there’s a lot of working together on that moment,” Culpepper said. “We all had to think outside of the box to work this whole episode out and they all came through: the crew, the cast, the background, everybody. It was so much work. And I’m really thankful to the full team because it really is all of us who get nominated when something gets a Best Directing for a Drama Series episode [nomination].”
“Paradise” is now streaming on Hulu.
