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We thought a therapy scene might be good for something like that.
All the scenes had to be driven by interpersonal dynamics and character dynamics.
He really saw it as an old-fashioned, Hitchcockian yarn.
It was really weird.
Anything that youre writing, people will go,That will make a great TV show!
You should develop that for TV.And you send it to your agent and theyll say,Thats fine.
Maybe they even set up a meeting and you go to the meeting and nothing ever comes of it.
But pretty quickly, it seemed a bit different.
The people they were talking about attaching were really big, and their urgency was pretty intense.
How did you go about it?Bloomberg: The TV stuff just totally took over.
Talking to you today, its a little bit like,Thats sad.
Season two of the podcast becomes like a caper comedy.
The tone really shifts and moves away from the thriller into more of an office comedy.
These people are just going after each other.
We ended up pulling an element from season two of the podcast into season one of the show.
Did Sams vision for the show help you look at the story more visually?
He gave notes and thoughts at the table reads.
That might be true in other cases, but Sam liked this story in the way it was told.
It was about giving him scenes in a way that he could shoot them.
He wanted to know exactly how it works because he didnt want us to look stupid.
You also ran a writers room for the first time.Horowitz:It was interesting.
In a podcast format, you’re free to be really focused on a scene.
If its not in the scene, it doesnt exist.
But TV raises those questions.
Like, what was Carrascos childhood like?
Do you want to go that deep?
Or who was that lady that died in the diner?Horowitz:Exactly, yeah.
Bloomberg:Its amazing to have these people with experience who are just tireless.
And then some days, it was like a rodeo.
And then other days, youre like,Oh, I understand exactly why these people are here.
Theyre questioning us in this perfect way.
Theyre seeing stuff from the outside, which is really useful.
When it came to the TV show, we really were like,Who is this guy?
What is he doing?
Why is he investigating this?
What does he think at the beginning of the story?
Horowitz:We debated a lot the specific level of rules and secrecy within the facility.
Is it a secret facility?
Is the address secret?
Are you able to leave?
How much do these guys know?
But we were trying for something a little more mundane.
Hopefully, interestingly mundane.
Bloomberg:People fill in the blanks how they want it to be a little bit.
The tricky part is it comes to these weird pinch points like, the doors of the facility.
Do those lock or not?
Can you walk up to that door and just walk out of it?
Is there somebody at a desk?
I remember at one time I really wanted there to be stanchions.
And thats a worldview thats important to the series in general.
Right, like, is Colin as smart as he thinks he is?Horowitz:Not even close.
Its not like someone thought through everything about the facility.
Colin blundered into it and maybe it became more secret than he intended.
Or the person who decided the door policy didnt know about the medications.
That, to me, is an idea thats important toHomecomingthroughout.
For me, it was far more about the physical things they constructed.
The actors was crazy, too, just as a fact.
We just made up a sentence on a page and then it sprang into being.
The facility was a building.
On this set, I could wander.
I could be like,Which room did I leave my bag in?
How did Julia Roberts get involved?
And then that faded away.
And then when Sam bought them, she expressed interest.
Shes a real podcast person.
There were fairly random ones she was asking me about.
I think theres a weird Hollywood podcast subculture.
Shes an executive producer, too.
Just having this magnitude of a personality was going to slow us down.
Is she gonna have issues?
But she was super friendly, super nice, super jokey, always ready to go.
You could not ask for a better captain for the actors cause they all look to her.
I honestly was blown away.
Oftentimes, it was taking her lines away.There were things that she didnt want to say.
She wanted to be left alone more in that scene.
She wanted to let the physicality and the story do the work and not have them be delivering exposition.
She really kept up after us about that.
We did multiple drafts of that scene and were showing it to her up until the day.
It was rigorous, but the scene ended up much better for it.
In that last scene, the camera focuses on Heidis fork after Walter left the diner.
Its at an angle.
Heidi looks down at it and reacts as if shes realizing something.
This is why I ask.
Is he indicating to her that he does remember something?
Is he gonna think thats funny and venture to mess with her?
Or is he trying to tell Heidi something?
I have my own personal private belief.
But the way that you lined it up is exactly how we talked about it.
How much its your individual memories, or a spark in you or in your bones.
Hopefully, theres not a one-to-one way of expressing it.
To make it highfalutin like that!
And then Eli and I had to execute it in the script and make it all work.
But it was something that came up from the process.
Horowitz:It became ambiguous because, from the beginning, there were different interpretations of what it meant.
But there wasnt a directive for an ambiguous ending.
That just seemed like a cool ending to different people for different reasons.
Among the writers, we all saw it differently.
It was a good test that the ambiguity worked that both versions could be satisfied.
We dont see that on the TV show at all.
We actually dont know what happened to him in the interim years.
Without much consideration of season two of the show because we knew it would be different.
Horowitz:We were excited to give him a little bit more independent reality as a character.
In the podcast, to some extent, we talk about him as like a damsel in distress.
Hes a nice helpless guy who Heidi needs to save.
Just understanding his time overseas a lot better.
This is a place where asking the questions really helped us understand the character better.
We were glad to go down those rabbit holes.
Stephan James and Julia Roberts have great chemistry.
They did self-tapes, came in and read, and he was just one of the best of those.
And then we had a chemistry test with Julia, where she read with four or five of them.
The vibe in the room totally shifted when Stephan was doing the scene with her.
You have to remember theres an age gap and its not super appropriate what Heidis doing.
Hes just got this charisma and steadiness that we thought was really, really cool.
You also expanded the relationship between Colin and Heidi.
I know that Bobby Cannavale pitched himself to play Colin to Sam when they were working onMr.
Shes a really big star.
A lot of actors are like,Im not doing that.And he was willing.
you’re able to always see the fear and the insecurity and the vulnerability of Colin.
You almost feel bad for him a little bit.
Horowitz:Especially in that final scene with Temple.
I think he does such an amazing job of trying to cling to that other version of himself.
And her job here is different.
I guess I would say we found some other uses for her.
In the show, she was essentially his assistant, a junior staffer.
Horowitz:Who somehow leapfrogs.The show is about these power structures, and about gender in certain ways.
So its a very interesting question of how she made the move.
Were being intentionally vague right now about Temple.
Do you know what I mean?
I do not.Bloomberg: [Laughs.]
Well, we love the character of Temple.
We love where Hong Chau took it.
And were excited about that.
On the TV show, Heidi gets involved with Colin while hes duping her.
Why did you go in that direction?
They didnt date in the podcast.Horowitz:Remember, they go on the Ferris wheel!
They do go on a date in the podcast.
And they take a Ferris wheel ride.
Its sound effects, the Ferris wheel.
But they dont have sex.Horowitz:Well, the Ferris wheel has a pretty small bench.
You must not watchInsecure!
Go seethe Coachella episode.Bloomberg: What?
Horowitz:There are cheaper Ferris wheels you could find.
One of our writers, Shannon, came up with that.
This was a place where TV impulses really helped us.
Instead of keeping it all buttoned-down and subtle gestures, she really encouraged us to go for it.
We thought it said something about her character.
To her credit, he seemed like a nice guy.Horowitz:Niceish.
Heidi as a character, especially at the diner, is very closed off to people.
Bloomberg: She needed a stranger to unburden herself, but she just picked the wrong stranger.
It was also interesting to see Heidi in her Homecoming job interview.
Her disposition is more like the Julia Roberts we know with the megawatt smile.
But she changes over time.
She is this iconic figure and to see that diminished is its own kind of pathos.
She knows whats gonna work onscreen.
Its just insane acting.
Bloomberg: Theres space in a podcast that TV cant afford to take.
Itd just be hard, practically.
I think we could do it.
Wed have to go through a deepexfoliation and come out naked and rediscover the whole thing.
The world would blend in and mix in a fun way.
It would be like cool to see the podcast weirdly conscious of the show.
So Julia Roberts is the fictional Heidi Bergman.
Bloomberg: And theres scenes between Catherine and Heidi.
Horowitz:It would be complicated.
Bloomberg: There you go.
