“Grotesquerie” director Max Winkler was afraid he would be fired because of the 15-minute continuous shot in Episode 5

When director Max Winkler first read the script for episode 5 of Grotesquerie, he knew he wanted to film the majority of the episode in one continuous take. The problem was getting everyone else on board.

“I kept lying to everyone: ‘We can do it.’ I thought, ‘We’re going to do this 1,000,000%,'” Winkler told TheWrap. Throughout the process, Winkler was reminded of one of his heroes, Marcelo Bielsa, coach of the Uruguayan national team, who famously never had a plan B, other than to better implement plan A. It was exactly this mindset that Winkler brought to “Red Haze.”

“In my head I was like, ‘Oh my God, are you really going to get fired for this?’ Are you really going to burn yourself out of Hollywood with this idea?’ “said Winkler. “But we did it. I’m really proud of everyone involved.”

It’s not hard to understand Winkler’s panic over Red Haze. The first half of Episode 5 lasts about 14 minutes and 30 seconds and feels like a panicked, wild nightmare ripped straight from the mind of David Lynch. If the season so far has been a slow build up of insanity, now all hell is truly breaking loose. Winkler wanted to present this as one continuous take, “not to show off,” but to capture the panic that Lois (Niecy Nash-Betts) and sister Megan (Micaela Diamond) feel when they’re trapped in a motel in the middle of nowhere.

“[Continuous shots] are very overused. “A lot of times it happens, and then all of a sudden you become more aware of the recording and less aware of what people are going through, and that no longer serves any purpose,” Winkler said. “I wanted to get inside Lois and Megan’s head and I wanted people to feel suffocated by the things we keep accumulating.” He said Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” served as inspiration for the ambitious episode, as well such as Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” and Romain Gavras’ work.

“Red Haze” begins immediately after the events of Episode 4. Lois and Sister Megan are caught up in a series of forest fires and are driving down the road with a hitchhiker, a doomed woman named Andrea. After advising them to stay at a nearby hotel to wait out the fires, Andrea escapes to the bathroom to clean up. Then this terrible saga takes off.

Lois and sister Megan face a never-ending onslaught of people needing their help, from the doomed Andrea and a motel worker (also named Andrea) suffering from domestic violence to a family involved in a car accident is. As sister Megan ran from one distressed person to another, an exhausted Lois screamed at her to take a step back while making a painful call about her comatose husband. To add to the chaos, Grotesquerie – the serial killer both women had been tracking – showed up at the motel and started shooting at them. The extremely stressful sequence ended with Grotesquerie kidnapping the still bloodthirsty Andrea before shooting Sister Megan. As Lois screamed for help, the camera pauses her jerky movements and slowly pans up to focus on the desert skyline.

According to Winkler, the nearly 15-minute sequence took months to plan. He first walked through the set with his cinematographer Carolina Costa, assistant director Anna Ramey Borden and second assistant director Sarah Ford. While Winkler, Costa and Borden located the car’s locations and various platforms, Ford played the roles of both Lois and Sister Megan. After Winkler and his team created this rough sketch, they went to the set with a cameraman to find out more specifically what was possible and what wasn’t.

As the team worked out the details, they realized that the best chance of mitigating the technical risk was to film the sequence at magic hour, thereby limiting the amount of lights needed. That meant they only had four times to get this ambitious shot right.

“It was very, very tense,” said Winkler. After the actors were brought in, Winkler compared the setup to a “theater troupe.” The actors rehearsed for the first four hours of the day and then attempted to record during Magic Hour.

“We wouldn’t get it. “We would try differently, but we wouldn’t get it done,” Winkler said.

Another confusing layer was the Andreas. “Grotesquerie” hired identical twins Victoria and Madison Abbott to play bloodied hitchhiker Andrea and abused motel clerk Andrea. As the scene continued, the twins “constantly” went through hair and makeup as each played the other’s role.

“So Victoria runs out of the car. Madison is then at the reception. Then Victoria changes and manages to be the Andrea who gets thrown into the pool,” Winkler explained. “Madison then goes the other way and gets her hair wet and combed back and then gets a new black eye that comes out from behind the desk.”

To make impossible shooting more difficult, the desert heat was added. Winkler praised Neal Bryant for his Steadicam work throughout the sequence, calling him the episode’s “secret weapon.” Previously, Bryant was named TV Cinematographer of the Year by the Society of Camera Operators for his work on Episode 3 of The Last of Us. For this episode, Bryant worked closely with cinematographer Em Michelle Gonzales.

“We would say cut and he would have to throw up in the bushes and camera assistants would have to pour ice cold water on him. It was 120 degrees and he had all the different devices that he had to keep turning on and off,” Winkler said. “We couldn’t have done it without him. Without him I wouldn’t have even tried. It would have been impossible.”

The heat also posed a challenge for Grotesquerie’s character. During much of the chaotic sequence, the murderer, dressed all in black, can be seen in the background. Unlike all the other characters in the scene, the serial killer is almost always in the sun, away from the shadows.

“We had to constantly recruit new stunt people for Grotesquerie because people were getting sick. People were suffering from heat exhaustion,” Winkler said.

Finally, on the third day of filming and on the third take, everything came together perfectly. The actors hit the mark, the car crash and shootout went smoothly, and the twins’ costume change was complete. All that was left was for Grotesquerie to end the scene by shooting Sister Megan.

“Grotesquerie gets out of the car. He holds the gun and drops it. “I remember thinking at the time that I might die and have a heart attack,” said Winkler, comparing the moment to the theater farce “Noises Off.” “But there can’t be a meltdown because everyone is waiting for you to say, ‘Everything is going to be okay.’ So I took my headphones off and thought, ‘Great, let’s do it again.'”

“I would say that was probably the moment where I needed the most inner determination to keep acting like I knew what I was doing,” Winkler added.

Finally, on the very last day and their very last chance to get the scene right, Winkler and his team got their chance. “Em, our B cameraman, who operated the camera while Neal held the camera most of the time, was crying. I felt like that was very indicative of the challenges that everyone wanted to live with in order to pull this whole thing off and make it make sense so that it actually serves the story,” Winkler said.

“It was so complicated and so much fun,” Winkler said, highlighting the work of Borden and Costa as well as the stunt team, camera operators and series stars, particularly Nash-Betts and Diamond.

“Above all, it depended on all elements of the entire group working together to reach this optimal point, which we finally achieved on day four,” said Winkler. “It was a real team effort. It felt like we were performing Our Town or something in the desert, but with a lot of madness and violence.”

New episodes of “Grotesquerie” premiere Wednesdays at 10pm ET/PT on FX and stream the next day on Hulu.

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