Atlanta's Director Hiro Murai Breaks Down "Teddy Perkins"

My name's Hiro Murai, I'm one of the directors of Atlanta

and this is Notes On a Scene.

(gentle piano music)

Posture.

Posture.

Keep your poise.

(sobbing)

Don't you cry.

(gentle piano music)

Again!

I love this song! Oh, shit!

So we are watching a scene from the episode, Teddy Perkins

and it's episode six of season two.

This is a weird one, you know, it's a bottle episode,

we're kind of stepping out of our usual Atlanta world.

We follow Darius on his adventures

of trying to get a piano from an old man,

Teddy Perkins, that he found online.

It exists entirely in the house,

it becomes sort of a horror episode,

it's very different from the language of our usual show,

but it's one of my favorites of the season.

Hey, Teddy?

Your car's blocking mine.

This is towards the end, so spoiler alert.

This entire episode, you're kind of seeing

Darius trying to figure out Teddy's MO,

Teddy is just a weird eccentric, reckless old man,

but you get the sense that he has some malicious intent

or some ulterior motives.

Teddy?

Darius is usually dressed pretty wild,

the thing about Lakeith is that he can really wear anything

and make it look cool,

so we constantly try to kind of push that

and see what he can pull off.

In this episode, we went a little more conservative,

I like his look, 'cause he reminds me

of James Caan in Misery, you know,

he's got the little '70's jacket on and then the flannel.

This episode is mostly covered either with Darius

or kind of shot from a voyeuristic angle, you know,

a lot of times, you're either completely with him,

but then that gets cut directly to a shot

of him in a different room or from a TV screen,

giving you the sense that somebody's watching at all times.

So in this case, you're finding him in a location,

that we were in before,

we've seen this part of the room before,

but we've never seen this part of the room before,

so we're revisiting an old room,

but giving it kind of new context

and revealing that there's actually another passageway,

that leads to a seperate room.

I think the space was really important to us,

so the house is definitely a big character in this episode,

most of it is sort of untouched,

obviously all the merch stuff is new,

but you know, this house had this terrifying wallpaper

and a lot of the old sort of like Colonial designs

in the house is just exactly the way it came.

It was really important to us

to kind of let him wander through the large frame

and then see how kind of small and insignificant he is

in the context of the house.

(gentle piano music)

[Tutor] Posture.

Posture.

So you can see in this sequence,

that we're with Darius the whole time

and we're kind of in his subjective view of the projector

and you know, him taking in the information

about who Teddy is.

The film that you're watching on screen,

that's actually shot on eight millimeters,

Super eight camera, we shot it in the basement

of this church, that we were kind of

basing our production out of.

In this shot, it's a real working projector,

but it made so much noise,

that we just couldn't use any of the sound,

so for these close-ups,

we just had to figure something out on the day

and that just happened to be someone

on a crash pad on her back,

kind of spooling the wheels by hand

and then we cut to behind Darius, all of a sudden,

I love this show. Oh, shit!

We're looking at him from Teddy's perspective.

We do this a lot on the show,

but especially in this episode, we like to frame things,

usually you would kind of frame it this way,

leaving negative space in the direction

of where the other character is speaking,

but we short the frame and kind of cutting him off here

and then leaving a lot of negative space on this side,

'cause it kind of creates this tension,

it makes it feel like they're kind of holding something back

or they're not connecting with the other character in a way.

As the scene goes along, you'll notice

that the negative space is on the opposite side.

(gentle piano music)

Something wrong?

When we were designing Teddy's look,

we always knew that we wanted to put him in dark spaces

and kind of frame him with the dark hair

and the dark clothes, so even from a far shot,

you're always kind of seeing a floating face

anytime you're looking at him

and his face is just so impactful

and just, it's very off putting to look at,

so we really tried to conserve on close-ups,

a lot of times, he'll just sit in the wide frame

and then you'll just see this pale face

kind of floating in the dark.

Yeah, you parked your car right in front of mine.

Oh.

I'll move it.

Our editor, Kyle, that's his favorite line

and he just constantly goes,

Oh, I'll move it.

That's his favorite fucking thing.

[Teddy] Anything else?

Where's your bathroom?

It's up the stairs.

So you can see, there's the first time

we cut to a close-up of Teddy,

again we're kind of framing him short

and then leaving a lot of negative space on this side

and even on the close-up, you know,

I think performance-wise, we really wanted

to keep his emotion sort of ambiguous,

so we're constantly having to kind of lean in

and read what Teddy's trying to do.

Right next to the attic.

I was just up there myself.

Do you know what I found?

[Darius] Whoa, whoa, whoa.

In the scene, we're always conservative with close-ups,

but also the way Teddy makes eye contact with Darius,

you know, he's always kind of looking off screen

and we don't really know where his attention is,

until he turns to Darius and in this scene obviously,

we don't know what his intentions are,

until he pulls out the gun at the end.

The edit in general was very unusual for us too,

'cause we realized the best parts of Teddy's performance

is the moments before and after his lines,

just 'cause there's so much ambiguity in what he's saying,

so Kyle and I just often just dragged the clip out

and then we always liked the moments after

more than the actual line.

Do you know what I found?

Like that.

Congratulations.

For what?

I choose you.

Again, shorted here

and for the first time, where kind of his eye line's

getting closer and closer to the lens,

because the moment is getting more intimate

between Teddy and Darius

and also you'll notice in this episode in particular,

our show in general is lit pretty, you know,

the lighting is pretty stylized usually,

but on this episode, we opted for a more naturalistic look,

'cause you know, we're referencing a lot of,

you know, '70's psyche horror stuff,

but also we realized that his face

is so much more effective,

when everything else looks very normal.

We kind of pulled back on our usual bag of tricks

and just let his face do all the talking.

Teddy's face is completely prosthetic,

we went back and forth on the design quite a bit,

but obviously the core inspiration is, you know,

Michael Jackson and there's a little bit of,

I don't know why, but he has a little bit

of James Brown in him too, I think,

the way the hair kind of falls around his face.

We know that Teddy's face

is kind of the centerpiece of the whole episode,

so we use his position in the frame really deliberately,

so in the course of the episode,

you'll see a lot of moments, where he's kind of blocked

very small in the frame at first and at a key moment,

to accentuate a certain minor moment,

he kind of grows in the frame.

When his face gets bigger in the frame,

you can kind of viscerally feel it, you know,

it's a very (laughs) upsetting face

to have grow in the frame.

He's supposed to be an older character,

as at first I think there was a lot more kind of wrinkles

and sort of sagging of the skin,

but we realized what made him sort of terrifying

is that he sort of looks sort of eternal and you know,

he's done everything he can to kind of fight age,

so we ended up with going with

a more sort of taut texture on his skin,

which, you know, if you're a prosthetics person

and you're trying to make a naturalistic face,

you would never do that, because no face looks like that,

but that was kind of our goal.

I can't help but just draw on his butt chin.

Nobody knew that, you know,

that Donald was underneath the prosthetic,

we just told people that we got the real Teddy Perkins.

(gentle piano music)

I choose you.

You're my sacrifice.

This shot was one of the last shots we got in the day,

you know, this is something that I just really wanted to get

just because he sort of told his entire story in one frame,

we get to see kind of his tragic background

lit up in the background

and then we see his present self silhouetted against it.

It's complicated, because at this point,

you're supposed to believe that there's no Benny Perkins

and that Teddy is pretending to be his own brother,

we kind of subliminally plant the idea,

that this guy is this guy, even though one scene later,

this is actually Benny, his brother and this is Teddy,

but this is something that, you know,

we were very conscious of,

in terms of what the audience knew

at what point in the episode and you know,

what Darius knew at this point in the episode.

Put your phone on the drum.

(gentle piano music)

No, keep that,

I want it to look real.

The real projector's actually hidden

behind this stack of books over here

and we had to digitally erase the light rays

that came out of it.

It was a very small room,

so you know, we had to kind of squeeze everything in.

The editor was telling me over cutting this,

he just kept having Teddy Perkins nightmares,

he was really living in it.

What to look real?

The home invasion.

Because we were allowed to air with no commercials,

we really got to kind of take control of how we wanted,

you know, the story to kind of evolve and kind of unfold.

It's a lot slackier than most of our episodes,

you know, I think in general, we like to take our time

and we like kind of dead air

and moments between lines on the show,

but this in particular is literally him

just staring at Teddy,

trying to figure him out for most of the episode.

So pacing-wise, it's very deliberate and very slow

and you know, we're kind of playing

with the idea of building tension,

whether that's for comedy or for horror, you know,

I've heard Jordan Peele kind of talk about this too,

but I kind of, this really felt to be true this time,

so it can either fall into some horrifying murder/suicide,

which happens at the end of the episode

or a quirky, eccentric moment for Teddy,

the ambiguity and the feeling,

not knowing what's gonna happen next

is sort of what's driving this entire episode.

You killed Benny because you were obsessed.

No, man, look, there is no fucking Benny, alright.

Exactly.

(gentle piano music)

Exactly.

The important thing for me

was that you feel some sort of empathy for Teddy,

even though he's sort of a crazy character

and sort of a ridiculous character,

you know, there's a real sense of tragedy

and even though he does end up

being sort of a psychopath at the end,

you understand how he got there.

I think empathy is kind of the key to all storytelling

and you know, in this case, it's all about Teddy.