Dan Fogelman and team on the making of ‘Paradise': ‘It only works if you have talented people who you trust'

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a day ago

Coming up with a unique idea for a show is hard enough — bringing it to life is another challenge entirely.
So when it came to making Hulu's Paradise a reality (or is it?), showrunner Dan Fogelman turned to his trusted team, many of whom he had worked with on This Is Us. Having that shorthand among his lieutenants — including executive producer John Hoberg, directors John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, composer Siddhartha Khosla, costume designer Sarah Bram, and make-up department head Zoe Hay — "it's everything," said Fogelman. "For me, speaking selfishly and personally, it allows me to focus on the more important part of my job, the part I'm good at, which is writing and editing and not worrying about how the show gets made. Because I know I have great people making it. As I've gotten further along in my career, I like giving my stuff to smart people to interpret it and see what they do with it."
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Here, those smart people reveal the inside secrets of the making of Paradise, from the biggest fights in the writers room to hiding the murderer in plain sight.
Gold Derby: Dan, what was the mission you gave to the team to create the world of Paradise?
Dan Fogelman: Almost everybody here worked with us on This Is Us, and John and Glenn and I have done multiple projects together. And so my thing is my job is done when I write the script, and then I turn it over to smarter people and say, 'Figure out how to make this thing.' We had a lot of conversations about how we were going to bury the secret at the end of the pilot. That was where a lot of attention went, and that involves every department here. The challenge was obviously obfuscating the world that you thought you were in versus the world you were [actually] in for 58 minutes of the pilot. And that was the biggest challenge, I think, of the entire undertaking.
John Hoberg, how did you approach that with the scripts?
John Hoberg: We have a great room of writers, and so there was so much discussion about it. How do you make this show post-apocalyptic, but also have this humanity in there? That was always in there, the flashing back and finding the heart and the origin where these people come from. There was always that goal of how do we dig deeper into these characters and find what motivates them. There was a lot of math, too — I can't tell you how much! You should see the writers room with the cards up [on the wall] trying to track a murder mystery, but also the emotional journey of all these characters. It was a lot of very passionate discussions with writers who really, really care about what fits into what pieces.
Dan and John, what were some of the most passionate discussions?
Fogelman: My God, we had so many debates! I always try and hire writers who don't just sit on their hands when they take issue with something. But they could also just send you in circles for days arguing and debating stuff. [We debated] any number of things, like the really technical stuff that lives underneath the show that we're really exploring in the second season right now, which is how the bunker is powered. There are conversations about geothermal and nuclear energy that boggle my brain — and I really kind of check out.
Hoberg: If I hear the word 'systems level' one more time, I'm walking.
Fogelman: And then it's just big picture questions like, 'Can we kill Billy Pace that quickly in the show?' which are more conceptual. There's the sci-fi conversations, and then there's the theoretical conversations about character. We only have eight episodes, and where are you going to choose to tell your story, who's getting back stories, which are worth it. I like to take our big ideas and move them all the way up to like a third, fourth, fifth episode and then where does that leave us.
Hoberg: The killing of Billy, was something that caused, I think, the biggest fights in the room. I feel like Stephen Markley was about to walk out on that one.
Fogelman: Yeah, that was a big one.
John and Glenn, as directors, what tone did you want to set in the pilot that would then play off throughout the season that you could then revisit in the finale?
John Requa: Well, they may have had a lot of discussions in the writer's room about this world, but they didn't have enough. So we said, let's have a hundred more. We had to design the world, we had 100 meetings about cars and that's not an exaggeration. I had a screaming match in our office with Steve Beers, the line producer, about what color the cars would be.
Fogelman: There were lots of conversations with John about cars.
Requa: It's the hardest part, but it was the best part. Building a world — what a thrill. Early on, we'd been hearing about the show for a while in different forms. The first time, I think, Dan, you were talking about it as like a movie about a Secret Service guy and a retired president. And then it evolved. So when we read the script, it was wow, this is a really big swing. That just was thrilling — terrifying but thrilling.
Sarah, how did you approach building the world from a costume perspective, knowing that you were going to be dressing people for two different lives, the pre and post-apocalyptic world?
Sarah Bram: If there's a word for how we went about that, it has to do with restraint. We thought through what clothing might be in the dome and how people might wear that clothing without making it too much of a story about like, my God, crazy apocalypse. It was about keeping humanity to it, so it doesn't just become a visual story about the insanity of this idea that people may live underneath the earth in a dome. So it was about keeping it something that people could really relate to. That meant being very true, but maybe with really good tailoring.
Zoe, did people bring lipstick with them to the dome?
Zoe Hay: We wanted to make sure that people had their creature comforts with them, that there would be things down there to make people feel better, to feel calm. Women and men would have those products available to them in a limited amount. We equated it to a CVS in 1984.
Glenn Ficarra: Everybody brought something there, brought stuff there in bulk. It's stuff that you'll notice if you look hard enough, but the cars, they were just bought in bulk. It's only the billionaires who probably got all the good stuff stacked up in the basement.
So you didn't have as many fights about lipstick as you did about cars?
Fogelman: One of the things that's very cool about this show is that there was more big-picture thought than necessarily you're seeing at every moment on screen. Our department heads and our directors had rules of our world. We have Bibles and papers that were written on the kind of infrastructure politically of the world. You don't see all of it in every frame, but hopefully it has a subcutaneous effect on the entire thing because the people who were making it had a lot of thought behind everything.
Hoberg: I remember hour-long conversations about what television programs did they let people watch down there? It never made it to air, but just every detail was discussed.
Fogelman: There's a scene where the kids are listening to music in the library. And the thought behind it was if there was too much pop culture from before and not enough created down below, at a certain point it could devastate people because everything you're listening to and seeing is made by dead people ostensibly. And so the thought was that there was a certain amount of media in houses and in rooms and in programs. But if you wanted it, you sought it out at a special place in the library. You just see a kid listening to music in the library, in the listening section, and that's where Cal goes to make his final mixtape.
Speaking of music, Sid, what themes did you want to evoke with your score?
Siddhartha Khosla: I was just trying to make Glenn, John and Dan happy! The beauty of working with these guys is that they treat music like it's anything else we've just talked about, like discussing it early on before even shooting a frame of anything. Dan sent me a script and then I wrote this little melody off of that script. The guys seemed to like it, and then we spent several months trying to develop it together. John would send a text saying, 'Hey, can you write me a piece of music that feels like we are trapped and we can't escape?' I recorded violins and cellos and percussion and all sorts of other instruments and looped them and messed them up. I got to feel like I'm in a band again working with these guys. So that's always special. On most television and film, composers come in really late in the process. But getting to come in really early in the process allowed us to experiment.
Not only had you worked with the crew before, but obviously also Sterling K. Brown. What did he bring to the role?
Fogelman: Oh, he's awful. Terrible guy, terrible actor. [Laughs.] He's the best. I mean, he's such a force as an actor. I love him in this role. It's so different than what we had just done together for so long. And he's a tremendous leader on set. He leads with his infectious laughter. It's a fun place to go to work because the most famous, biggest force on the set is the world's nicest guy. And everybody follows that lead, so it's a real pleasure always coming to set when Sterling's there. There's never any tension. And he's so good at his job. It's very rare that you find somebody who's as good at their job who's also that nice and generous. So he makes it easy.
John, how did you approach writing episode 107, which was such a complicated one with its multiple timelines?
Hoberg: I was lucky that one came up for me — there's a batting order. I wanted that one so bad because it had everything that I love in it. It really was just trying to find little bits of humanity sprinkled throughout that so people aren't superheroes at all. There's a speech writer who's mad on the last day of the world that a callback in his speech is being cut. Someone's annoyed that the CIA is interrupting them in front of the president. I felt like finding those little moments of humanity help at least me ground how I felt as I was writing it. Like these are actually really people in this thing and they're all in over their head.
Zoe, is there one look you're proudest of?
Hay: I would have to say the librarian. That was such a challenge from the very beginning before we even started shooting, Dan asked us to do a test on him, and I think we came up with about maybe 20 different looks for him, different mustaches, beards, wigs, all kinds of stuff. And then we sort of settled on the few transitions that he had, but he's a tall guy and it's hard finding disguises for him where you could lose him in the crowd visually. I think we succeeded because I don't think anybody really spotted him.
Fogelman: It was such a big part of it because he's in the first episode as the assassin and then he's living in plain sight as a different character throughout the entire series. If you start going, oh, it's the librarian, it ruins it. Occasionally a person would write on Reddit, I think they're in an underground bunker; once in a blue moon somebody would hit on something. But I don't think anybody ever saw him. We had a premiere screening months ago and his own mother and agent said, we just wish we could see one that you were in — and he goes, well, I was actually in that one. And his own family didn't realize that he was the guy that played the assassin after having watched the pilot. So that was very cool. because the whole thing would have fallen on its face if it hadn't worked.
Was it always intended that it was going to be him?
Fogelman: I didn't know who it was going to be at the very beginning when I wrote the pilot. But then right when we gathered the writers room, one of our writers said, I think it would be cool if it was someone hiding in plain sight. What if it was a librarian? And then we're like, how are we going to do that? Then we were casting with an eye on who could pull off the performance and also who could be malleable to what Zoe was going to do to him.
Requa: Some faces aren't that hideable. There were so many conversations that ended with … 'and if this doesn't work, we're [screwed].'
You really do like to write yourself into corners.
Fogelman: Once in a while, I'll think to myself, God, it would be really nice to just write something linear.
Ficarra: We always say that.
What did you all learn from making the first season that you're bringing now to the second season?
Ficarra: Cut the script down early. I still haven't learned.
Hoberg: I haven't learned that.
Fogelman: One of the things is, you learn by the response to show. And so obviously we end our first season with Sterling heading out into the world. And that was always part of the plan. But you start learning that people love our bunker and they love our cast down there and they love the dynamics of those folks. So for season two, we're going to be out sometimes with Sterling, but we're also going to make sure we live with the stuff people love in the bunker as well. And finding that balance. It was an exciting thing to discover that it's not just that people are tuning out when Sterling's not on camera on his A storyline. People love Sinatra and Sarah Shahi and Jon Beavers and James Marsden. They love all the storylines in the world that was created down below.
Give me one word to describe Season 2.
Fogelman: It's very ambitious.
Hoberg: I was gonna say bigger.
Requa: Subjective.
Ficarra: Surprising.
Khosla: It's incredibly cool. I've worked on the first couple already and it's awesome.
This article and video are presented by Disney/Hulu.
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