After helping shape Vince Gilligan’s television universe for years, editors Skip MacDonald and Chris McCaleb faced a very different challenge with Apple TV’s ‘Pluribus.’
“You can’t hide anywhere,” McCaleb says of editing a series where there aren’t as many audio distractions. “You’re fully in whatever is happening dramatically.”
“Normally, you fill scenes up with sounds and stuff,” MacDonald said about the soundscape of ‘Pluribus.’ “This one, we were fighting that. There were no sounds and trying to keep the scenes moving, flowing, and not relying on sounds was a challenge.”
In this conversation, MacDonald and McCaleb discussed the challenges of establishing ‘Pluribus’’s unique tone, crafting scenes that rely heavily on performance and silence, and collaborating with Gilligan after years working together on ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘Better Call Saul.’ The editors also reflected on the technical demands of the show’s ambitious one-take sequences, Rhea Seehorn’s performance as Carol, the series’ post-production process, and why the show’s quieter moments often proved more challenging than its larger set pieces.
‘Pluribus’ is a genre-bending original in which the most miserable person on Earth must save the world from happiness.
Created by Vince Gilligan, ‘Pluribus’ stars stars Rhea Seehorn, Karolina Wydra, and Carlos Manuel Vesga, and guest stars Miriam Shor and Samba Schutte.
All episodes of ‘Pluribus’ are streaming on Apple TV. A second season has already been ordered.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to meet you. How are you doing?
Chris McCaleb: Good. How are you?
AF: I’m doing well. Both of you have worked with Vince Gilligan before, dating back to either ‘Breaking Bad’ or ‘Better Call Saul.’ How has the shorthand improved in your working relationship through the years?
Skip MacDonald: That’s a good question. I guess we just, for me, it’s like taking each scene a step at a time. We kind of get to know what his styles are, how he looks at things, and how he likes to play things out. So, yeah, it’s improved quite a bit over the years. You get a little closer to what he’s looking for.
Chris McCaleb: I think so. A lot of it is just the longer we work together, the more you come to understand each other’s taste. Hitting that baseline of having the same idea of what works and what doesn’t, that kind of shorthand, I think, is so key to that any collaboration. I think it’s what makes working with Vince so special is that it really—I don’t know how Skip feels, but I really feel that sense of close collaboration and trusting each other’s instincts like that.
Skip MacDonald: Yeah, no, I agree. A lot of times, Vince has specific things in mind, but we try different things. Sometimes we hit on something differently than what Vince wants or what he’s envisioning. But it, again, with the collaboration and stuff, we kind of try things out. It might be not quite the shorthand that he’s used to, but it gives us a little something different than what he’s looking for and he does appreciate that too.
AF: ‘Pluribus’ is such a different show from the earlier Vince Gilligan series with it being a sci-fi drama. Which episode or scene has provided the biggest challenge in your respective episodes?
Skip MacDonald: Wow. There was a lot in the first episode, but when you watch it, episode one was a whole different tone than the rest of the episode. It was down there. The toughest thing, I think, was finding the tone in the first episode, but then being able to transition into the rest of the series.
Chris McCaleb: This doesn’t answer your question, but I’m imagining being in Skip’s shoes, the tonal shift that happens at the end of that first episode, which when I watched it the first time, it’s just like, whoa, what is this show? Because it really starts to tell you this is really more the vibe of the show. There’s comedy—it’s not what you’re expecting and it’s not just this straight ahead sci-fi action thriller. It hints at that heart.
I would say for me, I think one of the biggest challenges, period, of this show is how many scenes you have where it’s just one person. We’re lucky because Rhea Seehorn is just one of the greatest actors of all time. She can hold that frame. The scripts are fantastic and so that really helps.
But just constructing something out of the pieces that is as engaging as possible, while in a world where there’s not the same audio distractions that you might be used to. You can’t hide anywhere. You’re fully in whatever is happening dramatically. I think to me, that’s one of the bigger challenges of the whole series.
Skip MacDonald: Yeah, no, I agree because normally, you fill scenes up with sounds and stuff. This one, we were fighting that. There were no sounds and trying to keep the scenes moving, flowing, and not relying on sounds was a challenge.
AF: It’s my understanding that Vince had an idea to do a wonder in the first episode and that everyone laughed at him?
Skip MacDonald: In the first episode?
Chris McCaleb: Are you talking about the truck?
AF: I was reading the production notes and it mentioned a oner, but everyone laughed at him in the crew.
Skip MacDonald: No, I think that it was, yeah, it was just that the truck driving down the highway was done in the oner.
Chris McCaleb: It was extremely challenging the way that it was done. They had to figure out a whole rig to make that work, which I can imagine if the story was that production was like, oh my G-d, that sounds impossible. I think it could have been impossible. Skip, you saw all those takes.
Skip MacDonald: Yeah. I guess once they figured that rig out, they made it look easy. The toughest thing was just trying to decide how far they wanted to go with it. But it wasn’t designed for the whole show. It was just for that one section for the oner.
AF: From an editorial standpoint, how do you feel about oners?
Skip MacDonald: Sometimes it makes your life easier, but a lot of times when you get a oner, they shoot multiple takes, 10, 15, 20. You’re viewing them over and over again and finding which take is going to work the best for everything. There’s always somebody missed a cue here, somebody missed a cue there. It’s also time-consuming because you do have to watch so much footage and make sure you’ve got the right choice of the take.
Chris McCaleb: I would say too, especially if you’re not stitching takes together, if you’re staying in a pure single take—which we definitely did quite often on this show in certain episodes—when you’re watching that material, I think it takes even longer than because you’re scrutinizing it in far more detail because there is nothing to cut to. You might normally in a take say, well, oh, the camera bobbled there, so I’ll just cut to something else, but you can’t do that.
The other thing I would say about the oner as Skip said, sometimes it makes it easier, but I think a lot of people would be surprised, even in a pure one-take shot, how much trickery sometimes goes on as far as speeding up the frame or slowing things down and just adjusting and massaging performance, adjusting and massaging movement.
There’s a lot of little tricks that we’re employing and we like to paint with every tool in the paint box.
AF: After working on ‘Better Call Saul,’ what’s in been like to watch the footage of Rhea Seehorn in her portrayal of Carol? These characters couldn’t be more different.
Skip MacDonald: Well, as Chris said earlier, she’s a phenomenal actress. She is amazing and she gives you subtle differences from take to take to take. We watched her grow, too, as a character throughout this whole season. We’re watching that happen, but this is a whole different character than Kim was. We’re starting from scratch, watching everything, trying to figure out which way was going to be best to portray her, just looking at the little subtle differences, and making sure we were hitting all the key notes.
Chris McCaleb: I think Rhea is also one of the rare actors—there’s not a single bad or unusable take. Of course, there’s the best take, and those are the ones that we’re using. But it actually creates a different problem as an editor where it’s like, well, I have only good choices so how do I make sure I make the best of these good choices? Which is a great problem to have, but definitely, I think that Rhea is—I can’t echo what Skip said enough. Rhea is just so dynamic and such an amazing presence on screen. It’s always a pleasure to watch her dailies and cut her footage.
Skip MacDonald: Yeah. When she’s in a scene with other characters, those characters step their game up quite a bit just because they feed off of her.
AF: I know that comedies usually have more room for improv, but what about ‘Pluribus’—was there any improv involved?
Skip MacDonald: I found very little improv would come up. The scripts when we get them are very tight, very clean, and laid out really well. Every once in a while, you might get a little something, but very rarely did I run across improvs.
Chris McCaleb: The only one I can think of, and this was one of Skip’s episodes. I wouldn’t even know if it was improv, but it was in episode six. I remember them talking about it on the podcast. Something about avocado toast or there was something that Samba had, who plays Mr. Diabaté, had worked out with Rhea. I wouldn’t call it improv. It was just an idea that he had and that they worked in, right?
Skip MacDonald: Yeah, it was more like he was mimicking what she was doing when she was making the avocado toast and eating it. It was his fascination with how she did it so he just followed along like he’d never seen this happen before this way.
Chris McCaleb: That’s right.
Skip MacDonald: So, yeah, I wouldn’t consider that quite an improv, but I guess you could say it was.
AF: Were you working on episodes simultaneously or one at a time?
Skip MacDonald: Both.
Chris McCaleb: Yeah. I guess, yeah. They shot the episodes for the most part in order and then we trade off. Joey Liew, who is also a part of our team, he edited episode five.
But yeah, normally, they’ll be shooting an episode that Skip is editing. I’ll probably be editing whatever was the last episode and then Skip’s getting that. He’ll continue editing while the next episode starts shooting and then I’m editing that.
It’s a machine to some extent, although I would say our machine works a little bit differently than the more traditional television post-production.
AF: How long does it typically take to finish a cut of an episode?
Skip MacDonald: Well, it depends. Are you looking at it from the standpoint of when we finish getting dailies to finish it or from each step? We get our cut, then the director gets their cut, then we get into a cut with Vince, and each stage is a little different than each other. But overall, it’s hard to put a time on this because of the way we do it. We get our cuts, we work with the directors, and then they sit to the side for a little while until Vince comes in. They just keep rolling through, but if you just counted the days, probably six weeks from the time we finished dailies.
Chris McCaleb: I guess that’s right. Yeah, but as editors, we usually get four or five days, something like that. Generally, from the last day of dailies. And then, yeah, like Skip was saying, the director gets their time, the producers get their time back and forth with studio, network. It’s a process, but it works. It’s been going like this pretty much since ‘Breaking Bad’ in some ways. It’s been, I would say, fairly successful process with Vince.
AF: How would you react if the world got taken over by a mysterious wave of forced happiness?
Chris McCaleb: Yeah. I want to say that I would live it up and live out my James Bond fantasies like Mr. Diabaté or travel everywhere that I’ve never been able to see. We work a lot. We work in often dark rooms so we don’t get necessarily to travel the world as much.
I’d love to say that, but I think in reality, I would probably fall into some terrible depression like Carol and probably turn to the bottle.
Skip MacDonald: Try to figure out how to change it back because, for me, as she was going through, she had some compelling points, Zosia had other points, the other people had good points. But when you look at it overall, as in 10 years, they would deplete their food supply. If you knew that going in, would you want to change or would you try to get things to change back to the way they were?
AF: It was so nice chatting with you this afternoon.
Skip MacDonald: Same here. Thank you.
Chris McCaleb: Yeah, absolutely. Nice to meet you.