Brad Simpson: We didn’t actually have that conversation. I realized that we haven’t had as much cigarette acting in a show since Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark in The People vs O.J. But John and Carolyn were smokers. It was the ’90s. We decided to be accurate, and we’re on FX. Kids still shouldn’t smoke, but we wanted it to be real to the time.
Nina Jacobson: It is such a nostalgic piece for that time, and it’s so familiar to those of us who lived through it. Compared to today, it’s sort of shocking the amount of casual smoking with no judgment…
Brad: At bars, restaurants.
Nina: Indoors.
Let’s talk about the 20-minute scene at the end of tonight’s episode. It’s one of the most intense and heartbreaking conversations we’ve seen between them. What was it like bringing that “fight” to life?
Brad: It’s interesting because we kept calling it the fight episode, and then at some point somebody said we shouldn’t call it the fight episode because it’s misnaming it. It is a long conversation about the relationship; from the beginning, we thought of it as doing a play.
Jesse Peretz, the director of that episode, rehearsed with Sarah and Paul on weekends. While we were shooting episode seven on the weekends, the actors would come into the loft and would rehearse. Juli Weiner, who was writing it, would have new pages and they would read them and do notes, and then they would scribble them out and redo them. We did that for two weekends in a row, where we were workshopping it with Connor Hines, the creator of the show, and then we continued to do that throughout production.
Wow.
Brad: We were rewriting every day the way you might with a play and rehearsal, and it was just the two of them. We shot it in four days in that loft. We knew their marriage had problems during this time, and we knew some of the basics. We knew a lot had to do with her feeling that he wasn’t attuned enough to her growing agoraphobia and the fact that she couldn’t handle the press. We also knew he had this feeling like something had died out in the woman he loved and that she was hiding from the world.
At one point we called [the episode] “The Prisoner of Tribeca” because that’s how she felt. She was up in this loft looking down. The press was camped out every day. And so we came up with these tableaus of her sitting around waiting for him to come home smoking and just staring off into the distance. Jesse Peretz pitched John saying he needed to go for a run, and that’s how we came up with this great stuff where Radiohead’s playing and he’s running. We knew that the death of Princess Diana had a huge impact on them. They had a huge fight about it, and it stirred so much.
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