Westworld's Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy Break Down Season 2, Episode 4

Hey, I'm Lisa Joy,

co-creator of Westworld and director of this episode.

And I'm Jonathan Nolan,

the co-creator or vice co-creator, as the case may be.

And I co-wrote the episode with Gina Atwater.

And this is notes on a scene from Westworld.

(door whooshing)

William, my boy.

Where the hell have you been?

How long has it been?

Longer than we thought.

So then let's get me the fuck out of here.

No, I don't think so.

(dramatic music)

This episode is very special to us,

because you wrote it with Gina--

Gina Atwater.

Who is amazing and brilliant.

Alas, not here today.

And I directed it, so...

Yes you did.

(Lisa laughing)

This is the fourth episode from the second season.

It's called Riddle of the Sphinx.

[Lisa] In many ways, this episode

almost didn't happen for me.

I had wanted to direct for a long time,

but the circumstances felt insane

because I was writing the season with Jonah

while I was pregnant.

Then in order to start prepping with this,

I had our lovely baby, but...

Four minutes before shot.

Yeah.

Like, I had two weeks before I knew

we would be prepping this episode

while also writing all the other episodes

and, you know, doing a lot of stuff.

And it just seemed kinda crazy and masochistic.

You know, I told Jonah, I don't think

this is my year to do it.

I think it's gonna be too much for our family.

And he basically refused to let me back out.

And he said he just wanted to make sure

that I had this chance.

And so he took care of the kids for me

while I was doing this.

You definitely changed more diapers than I have.

I'm good at it.

Very sweet.

And he helped take care of the room

and helped produce the episodes.

And it was really, he was unwavering in his support,

which was very cool of you,

even though I might have had doubts.

It was.

It was very cool of me.

(laughs) Gonna dine out on that.

It was also very tactical.

I was very tired after the birth.

♪ Well you've got your diamonds and ♪

[Lisa] So this is the opening shot from the episode.

It was one of those things where I took some liberties.

It wasn't actually scripted.

But I wanted to start in a way

that would be immediately very intriguing and mysterious.

It's a space we've never seen before.

We're used to the kind of warmth

of the outdoors and the old west,

or the world of the technicians underground.

But this is a sort of private domicile

in a very strangely circular-shaped room.

So I designed the shot.

I wanted everybody to take a moment

and reorient themselves and wonder where they were

as the camera traveled around this room,

exploring the space as our hosts

were forced to explore the space of the park for a season,

without knowing where we were going.

Which is why I liked pulling backwards,

so that we as the audience felt

our vantage point constricted in the same way as the host,

and you're not allowed to roam freely with your gaze.

You are forced to experience the room with the camera,

seeing only what the camera allows you to see,

until you find the subject of the room.

So the shot is basically a somewhat complicated oner.

So without cutting, we basically started

on the record player in this extreme closeup of it.

And it's such a strange record.

It's white.

And the markings on it are unfamiliar.

So we started from there, not really knowing

exactly what we were looking at

until we pulled up all the way and saw that it was a record.

Then what I loved was as the record turns,

we ourselves kind of follow

a similar rotation around the room.

So the camera, which was on an arm,

the base was here, and the arm kind of rigged out to here,

and first it pulled up,

and then we just kind of traveled slowly around the room,

lingering for moments more on certain objects

that I wanted to really establish as symbolic

and kind of essential for the scene.

By the way, the entire time

we were actually playing the song,

which was nice because it gave a sense of

musicality to the flow of the camera

and the ways in which it would linger in certain moments,

almost like we were dancing with the set.

So we stopped first at the hourglass,

which gave us a sense of time

and the ways which it was running out.

Then we circled around to here, to this goldfish,

a very special goldfish that I requested.

Also not scripted.

Is that the goldfish or is that the carrot?

Okay, that one's the goldfish.

Very expensive goldfish.

I came in at budget, so don't get mad at me.

I was fine.

Under budget.

Under budget.

So as it turns out, my desire to have this fish

as a kind of symbolic element of

Mr. Delos and his confinement in this chamber

was a lovely little poetic flourish I thought I'd add.

And then I got the numbers in.

And it turns out this goldfish, who I named Kurt,

is incredibly expensive.

Came with like an entourage.

Oh, an entourage.

He has a wrangler.

You have to have the animal...

A trainer.

Yeah, there's a lot of people there.

But after a full day worth of shooting,

I realized I did not have the budget

to afford Kurt any longer.

So I shot him out, as you do sometimes.

I shot him out in all the wide shots and some specific--

Did you keep Ed waiting for the fish?

Yeah, Ed just waited.

How'd that conversation go?

(laughs) I was like, Ed, the fish is tired.

Sorry, Mr. Harris.

The fish needs to go home.

Yeah, we tried to shoot him out

in as many of the closeup shots as we needed.

And so what happened is our art department

held a contest about who would

carve the best Kurt.

And one of the geniuses there used a carrot

and constructed a perfect model of Kurt,

propped carrot Kurt up in the tank with a toothpick.

And so in any shot, you may be

seeing real Kurt or carrot Kurt,

but hopefully it's impossible to tell.

So we're continuing our circle.

So the circle moves all the way around.

We clock the book.

Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of both our favorites

and has made lots of little cameos

throughout the season, and seasons,

as a sort of allusion and reference in all the episodes.

And then we kind of went around a little bit more.

And we found this room.

Now, in the room, what I really wanted to do

is you hear this sound.

It's like sh-sh-sh-sh.

And it's the sound of someone pedaling.

You only see feet.

You don't see who it is yet.

You see a hand reach for some cigarettes,

but still without revealing the man,

as you see the same hand kind of

turn on the water at the faucet.

The cigarettes, by the way, are named Grillos after my DP.

So congratulations, John, you made it into the episode.

And finally you go all the way around

and you end where you started, on the record player.

And you see the music cuts off as this hand

replaces the needle, takes the needle off.

And the camera moved up.

And for the first time, you see the inhabitant

of this strange room.

And it is Delos, Peter Mullan.

Oh, one thing that I should add.

He lights his cigarette right after

we hear the last strands of

Playing with Fire by the Rolling Stones.

Which ordinarily, Jonah chooses a lot

of the music in the show.

But this one I chose, just because of

the symbolism that I knew would be occurring

and recurring within this episode.

So we shot all the stuff that was scripted.

You know, he eats a little, he brushes his teeth.

But you know, it came really as a collaboration with Peter,

because on the day, I just asked him, I said,

You know, we have all this stuff,

but really you're a man who's

going about his life with a total hubris

and self-assurance that he is

the master of his own destiny,

that he is the one calling the shots,

and that no one is watching.

So what could be more invasive than

doing all the things that we actually would do

when totally assured of our own privacy?

You know?

And those things just become more personal, right?

They become masturbation, taking a piss, dancing.

An expression of almost goofy joy,

that I thought was really humanizing,

because he's this Sion of industry, you know,

and it's easy to imagine him as being heartless

and just avaricious all the time.

But I think when you look at people for who they are,

we contain these really elemental,

beautiful and common building blocks.

And dance was the purest expression of it I could find.

We hadn't worked with Peter before.

We'd wanted to work with him on the pilot

a couple years beforehand.

We couldn't make it work.

It was your first day shooting the episode.

So it's kind of a gutsy thing to do,

to spend a day and show up and ask him to dance.

But it was fantastic.

We'd seen the character before,

ultimately the way it cut together in episode two

where he's introduced to us as this street fighter

who's built an empire underneath him.

But you don't get a sense of him as a person.

That's why it's so brilliant about what you did

was in the first two minutes of film

you've completely changed my perception

of who this character was.

And by the time we get into the scene proper,

I now feel completely differently about this character

than I did when I first met him.

(soft chiming)

[Lisa] So here Delos hears that he has a visitor, right?

And we come to know from his reaction...

About time.

[Lisa] That's unusual and also long-awaited.

He's impatient for it.

He walks over there, studies himself for a bit.

You know, the idea for me was,

it's like he's studying himself,

which at first just seems okay,

maybe he's studying himself to see if there's,

you know, anything on his shirt,

or just glancing at his reflection.

But there's a little something deeper to it.

And you see it too when he's dancing,

and he kind of dances up to the mirror

and stares for a beat too long

before shrugging something off and walking on.

And I wanted to play with that notion,

that there might be somebody hiding within ourselves

that we're not totally familiar with yet.

And then in walks...

(door swooshing)

Jimmy Simpson.

William, my boy.

It allows the entry of Jimmy

to really come as a kind of surprise.

You know, as he's studying himself,

this person walks in, and it takes him a moment,

and it takes us a moment to register

who it could possibly be.

It's good to see you again, Jim.

Thank fuck for that.

Most potent thing these cretins

will give me is grapefruit juice.

[Lisa] The choreography of this scene

and a lot of the scenes within this room

between Jimmy and Ed was really

planned out beforehand.

You know, within the script,

they talk about how the experiment

is basically repeated again and again and again

without variation, because they're trying to

test the subject.

So I thought it would be ideal

if the camera in each of these iterations

followed a very, very similar path,

same as the actors would follow a similar path,

and only deviate when that deviation was meaningful,

when it was a break with the experiment itself

or some form of aberration.

We also did a fun thing in post-production,

which I don't think anyone has actually caught us on yet.

(laughs) Yeah. I'm gonna spill the secret.

You're gonna spill the secret?

Why not?

Yeah, go for it.

So we did a number of things.

Jimmy did some amazing things to bring

his performance in line with Ed,

but what we ultimately did in post-production

with this scene is we got Ed

to do all three of the scenes in a vocal performance.

And we took his vocal performance

and our incredible sound team

was able to take Jimmy's captured on-set vocal performance

and begin to maneuver it into the same space,

one scene at a time, very slowly into Ed's vocal range.

And then we went one step further

and started taking syllables from Ed's performance

and actually just cutting them into Jimmy's performance.

So if you watch Jimmy's performance on here,

some of the words are his,

and some of them are actually Ed's vocal performance

for the whole scene.

It's good to see you again, Jim.

Been a long time, Jim.

Good to see you again.

It's so performance-based.

The scene that I wanted to be able to

spend my time working with the actors

and allowing the actors to just do their thing

to kind of slip fluidly into the scene itself

and their characters.

And I tried to also make it so that

we had a three-camera setup

where there was always a camera pointed at each actor

in addition to a two shot.

So there's one camera that is over here.

One camera that's over here.

And one camera that was over here.

So I have an over-the-shoulder for each of them,

and then I had one two shot.

There were a couple things that I did

in terms of camera work that I thought

would be interesting in the evolution of this scene.

Peter Mullan I shot from a slightly lower angle,

so that he looked more imposing and bigger in frame.

Jimmy, I shot him more from more of a kind of,

a tiny bit higher up, or level,

so that he just looked sort of standard in the screen

or a little bit lower.

So that is sort of reflected the power dynamic

between the two men.

You're looking up to Mr. Delos.

And you're just kind of looking at Jimmy.

You haven't really realized fully

what's going on within this chamber.

And so I stayed on one side of the line,

really just focusing on performance,

and not doing too much tricky camera work.

Just wanting to get to know the characters

and sit and sink into their performances.

I think I went tighter on the actors

than is sometimes chosen by other directors

because there was so much happening

that in those spaces between the words,

between the dialog, where a little flicker here

or a little darting up of the eyes there

would say so much about their views

of the world and each other.

And I just wanted to make sure I captured that.

It's about capturing your frame of mind.

Your mood.

Your sense of humor.

I own a biotechnology company,

and I'm dying of a disease whose research

I defunded 15 years ago.

I think my sense of humor is fucking intact.

Part of how Jimmy's character, William,

would convince his father-in-law to do this

would be to Delos' own fear of death.

Because it's the one thing that comes for everybody.

Doesn't matter how much money you have,

doesn't matter what technologies you've built,

everybody dies.

It's really the last frontier, the last stop.

So much of this season is a bit of a commentary,

not just on what's happening in artificial intelligence,

but what's happening right now in technology.

The fact that the park has an ostensible model

which is that it's a place to go have your kicks

with robot cowboys, but an actual business model,

which is that they're watching you,

they're watching everything you do,

in an effort to learn as much

about human behavior as they can,

but ultimately with the end goal of reproducing you.

So it kinda felt beautiful, delicious to us,

that we could take the character of the tech mogul

and trap him in both his own ambitions

and his own fear of death,

inverting the structure of the first season

where the audience is kind of watching the hosts,

hopefully with some empathy,

but also with a slight attitude of,

oh, they're not in on the joke, they don't get it,

and then turn that around on the audience

in the second season.

We don't get it, and we don't get the devil's bargain

that we've forged with technology.

[Lisa] So by the third iteration of this cycle

with Mr. Delos, you've kind of become used to

the little loop that he's on.

He makes his coffee.

But this time, interestingly,

he doesn't spill the milk.

He's actually progressing.

The fidelity of his copy is getting more and more accurate.

There are less glitches.

Now that the audience is aware of him circumstances,

I was allowed to play a little bit with camera moves.

So this swoop around as he walks to the mirror

from the other side was just a wonderful way

to kind of break the pattern and say,

now you're in on the joke, guys.

This is him.

And as he watches himself,

thinking he's having this private moment,

we're watching him from the other side of it,

watch himself.

We cut back in so that the same syntax is occurring,

but this time when the door opens,

Delos doesn't even recognize his visitor.

Who the fuck are you? It's been a long time.

[Lisa] It takes Ed reintroducing himself

to understand and start to really fathom

what's been happening.

William?

[Lisa] Ed could sell me booze any day

with his posturing and holding.

He would be a good booze salesman.

This bottle, I mean look at him, my gosh.

It's ridiculous.

Excellent bourbon spokesperson.

I know.

The interesting thing about this bottle

that he's holding here is we actually

we went through and designed three separate labels.

The idea was that over time,

that vintage would be getting older,

so we showed the number of years it was aged

in the label each year.

And speaking of things that age well...

Well thank fuck for that.

Most potent thing these cretins will give me

is grapefruit juice.

On these days, I popped out in selective quadrants.

We would lay down some track here.

Later on there's a shot over there.

I think the mirror is somewhere right here.

And that's where we see Delos examining himself

and the camera kinda moved there.

We also head right past this wall.

Outside we laid down track

and did a little bit of a move from outside the glass there.

That's the shot that picks up Delos

as he stands and starts to freak out

and call for Logan.

So there were three major places in this scene

where we popped out.

And our camera man loved it,

because they were on a dolly

that went fully circular around the whole thing,

and they were just pushing themselves around,

having the time of their lives.

It was great, great ride.

Now, I started this scene again

with a similar three-camera setup.

Again, you know, a couple over-the-shoulder shots here,

and I did have a two shot.

The difference being, you know,

we're looking subtly...

(laughs)

I'm trying to learn some shit.

I don't know what the fuck to do with three cameras.

I hate shooting with three cameras.

I love, he hates shooting with three cameras. I love it.

I never know what to do with the third camera.

[Lisa] So, you know, the camera from this side

is angled up a little bit so that you're seeing up at Ed.

And this one is angled a little bit down.

I also incorporated profile shots

for a couple of these things,

where you're looking square on at the profiles of the actors

as they kind of lurch back and forth

in these subtle movements in their chairs.

It gave a feel of kind of two matadors

coming and clashing, and when you kind of cut it together

I thought it was a nice escalation of tension.

There were two things that I relished about the scene.

One was the ability to pop out of the room occasionally

and get that air into the scene.

I thought that even though there was repetition

in these loops, there was still a freshness, visually,

that you could keep unfolding new angles

and new elements of coverage.

Well what's great about it is you also feel

in the first scene that it's very personal.

You feel very connected to Delos.

And then as the scenes go by,

you feel less connected to him,

and it starts to take on this kind of timeless,

confrontational feeling.

Ah.

[Lisa] What are you doing?

Oh, I was arming a camera up for you.

Oh yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And this one down.

I'm your best boy.

He is my best boy.

The thing that I was also really excited for

was at a certain point in the scene

when Delos realizes, now he's already realized

just by virtue of the fact that Jimmy has aged so much

that he's been here a lot, right?

But he thinks that it's going swimmingly,

and he's about to get out of this fish tank,

and you know, carouse and own the world again.

Right out of the gate in the first season,

again, the audience is looking at the hosts,

and kind of, not sneering at them a little bit,

but feeling a little superior,

because they don't understand they're doing

the same thing every day.

Did occur to us more than once

as we would take our kids to school

and drive in to work and get a cup of coffee

and go to the bathroom because we didn't really

know what to say to the room,

and then go in the room, and then leave after 20 minutes,

take a phone call, and then go back.

That, you know, obviously humans

live their days in loops as well.

But this was the most dramatic inversion of that idea,

where Delos thinks he's checked into

a care facility in California, and then the audience

is a little ahead of him as well as he starts to realize

that that's not at all where he is anymore.

[Lisa] And then...

I'm beginning to think that

this whole enterprise was a mistake.

And that's when the other shoe drops.

That's when we realize,

that's certainly when Peter Mullan realizes,

my God, I'm in a prison,

and I'm never going to get out.

And I have no power.

I entrusted you with my empire, my daughter,

my whole life and afterlife.

And you are going to screw me royally.

And in that moment when the tables fully turn,

that's when I cross the line, moving behind...

[Jonah] Can we talk about the line?

Can I talk about the line? Really?

Yeah.

This is amazing. He's gonna do a stage line class.

You draw an imaginary line from his eye to his eye.

That's your stage line.

That's the eye line connection

between the two actors.

And your cameras all really want to stay on

one side of that line.

One character's always facing right to left,

and the other character is facing left to right,

and the audience sutures the scene together

and understands who's talking to who.

It's fairly straightforward.

But the stage line is vitally important,

and there's an enormous power in crossing over it.

You can cross it, but crossing it means

you need to actually physically pick up the camera

and bring it across the line.

You need to bring it behind one actor

or in front of the other one.

You need to see their eyes go from left to right,

so now they're looking at the other side of it.

And if you save crossing the line

for an important moment in the scene,

you can create a nice psychological impact

in the viewer.

[Lisa] It helps to underscore

what they're feeling.

The shoe is on the other foot now.

The power dynamic has completely shifted,

and the world that you thought you understood

is totally different.

The angle with which we shoot Delos becomes really

ratcheted up there, and you feel it oppressing him.

It drifts from his hand on his knee,

which now he shake and the tremor

is much more noticeable as he gets more and more anxious.

Meanwhile, our view of the man

is still level and calm as he sits

relaxed in his chair.

One of the fun things about the way

that you constructed all of these scenes

is that you're in studio mode

through all these scenes.

Studio mode basically means

your camera's on a tripod or it's on a dolly.

It's very controlled, surgical.

And when we talked in the first season,

for the pilot, we wanted the feeling from the camera

to feel like it was empathizing

with the hosts from the beginning.

That it was more robotic, more surgical, more precise.

Even that first shot in the roundabout,

when we go from the record and we pull up,

you could've done that on steady cam.

But it wouldn't have had the same machine-like cadence.

And I thought that was really important,

because it's an experiment, right?

And it has to be kept clinical and logical

and kind of cold.

And so even though Delos is doing these kind of

free ranging and very human things,

the eye observing him is clinical and detached.

In addition to this sort of antiseptic camera moves,

we looked at a lot at, throughout the series,

we've looked a lot at 2001 and Kubrick for that sort of

cold, pristine gaze and camera move.

And that's what really influenced

the style of shooting Delos when he's

in there under observation.

[Man] We should terminate, sir.

Sir?

Leave him.

Might be useful to observe

his degradation over the next few days.

It's funny, people talk about consciousness,

and that was one of the themes of the first season,

but another theme is sanity.

At one point in the finale,

Jeffrey Wright's character talks about the idea

that most states of consciousness are insane.

What humans consider sane behavior

is actually a really narrow range of behaviors.

There's a convention to it.

Sometimes you feel as a human being,

you're sort of aware of how little freedom we actually

have in our behavior before people start to think

that it's odd or off.

We were interested in the idea of

if you left consciousness alone in a box long enough,

what would happen to it?

And it felt inevitable that sanity

would be the piece that slips away.

And I think it's a bit of a cautionary tale.

I mean, one of the things that you wonder about

with this question for immortality is, well,

what becomes of a mind that's left alive forever?

And is what we define as sanity genuinely sane,

or is it just what we all agree on?

There's a lot of stuff that happens in this world

that seems sometimes quite insane,

and yet we're all quite comfortable with it.

So what happens if your mind

is left to rot in a little box long enough?

And what I thought was interesting about this sequence

was that it feels like,

we look at Delos and see the insanity,

but when you listen to what he's saying,

he might well have glimpsed something

that's actually more true than what we found.

[Lisa] So in the design of the chamber,

we worked with Howard Cummings,

our incredible production designer.

We went through all of these different schemes

for how the room could work.

It was just supposed to be one window,

and you would look in at a walled room

from a window of kind of two-way glass.

And that was like, oh, we've seen that before,

it looks like a police interrogation chamber kind of thing.

And so then we went to, well,

maybe a couple of the walls are glass, you know?

And we have this maybe like a square or rectangle somewhere,

and they're looking in from two sides.

And ultimately what it became was,

okay, well, why don't we make the entire thing glass,

so that we can really trace every single motion

of this person.

You know, we always talk about the hosts

living in loops.

It immediately just struck me

as wouldn't it be beautiful if

there was a sort of circular design to this room.

Like he's caught in the physical manifestation of a loop.

And also to me it evokes not just a clock face,

but also the panopticon.

There's this prison in England

where they designed the whole thing in a circle

so that all the cells face a central watch tower

so that the prisoners understood

that they could be watched at any given moment.

This was the 19th century, so no cameras.

And it's a kind of horrible, horrible feeling.

(dramatic music)

Elsie?

Someone's in there.

[Lisa] You know, later on,

Jeffrey Wright, playing Bernard,

has this epiphany about what his true purpose was.

He remembers these drone hosts getting murdered.

And when we shot that scene,

I had Jeffrey stand in the middle

of this giant room and pivot

in the same kind of clockwise motion

that the camera in the opening shot of the episode pivoted.

Because there he's kind of an observer

to everything that's happening around him,

and he's caught in his own loop.

It's this kind of motion, I think,

that helps to unite the common plight

of some of our otherwise seemingly at odds characters.

So we're gonna do a lightning round of

objects that we see, with Jonah ready to clear this.

I'm ready.

All right, ready?

Here we go.

Doors open.

Oh, those are the shelves. In there are all the objects,

layer after layer of the items in Delos's room.

So you get this sinking feeling that

that little fire that started the last round

happens a lot, and then they just repopulate the room.

What happened to all the cooked goldfish?

We could not afford cooked goldfish.

They wouldn't have been real goldfish.

Doors open.

Lots of flashing lights.

This lighting scheme was really fun to work with,

to bathe everything in red and have

occasional lightning flashes.

One of the things that they discover is this here.

We've established it before and

the hourglass has finally shattered.

And we see the sands of time have spilled out.

Subtle.

I know.

I was like, will people get this reference?

This was also really broken,

because we couldn't afford rubber copies of this hourglass,

so for all the times that Delos previously

knocked it off the stand,

there was somebody catching it on the floor.

And then we finally got to break it for this.

I think our art department had a real blast

going through and just tearing down everything

and destroying the sheets and really,

really going to town on this room.

Whiskey.

Nailed it.

So we got the record coming back,

playing a distorted tune,

and the blood on the record.

This is very satisfying.

[Lisa] So they see a blood trail.

Jeffrey goes into a room and finds the technician,

who had previously been in the antechamber, is dead.

Then we hear first before we see it

that same screeching sound.

We have the pedals once again here.

You know, I think so much of horror

is about this mood of building dread.

You know something terrible's gonna happen,

but you don't know what yet.

And so, you know, we introduce Delos for the first time

as just feet and pedals.

This time, of course, Delos is pedaling backwards

and the room looks very different.

You have a sense that everything

is gonna be completely batshit, which it is.

[Delos] You like to see what I see?

Stay away.

(suspenseful music)

[Lisa] The fight in this scene was choreographed.

You know, it's a small fight.

There are bigger fight sequences in this.

But we did talk a lot about the motion of both hosts.

You know, we haven't seen Jeffrey

be violent in this way before

in any sort of protracted battle.

And Delos, too.

You realize at this point that they are

both machines in their bodies.

And so their movements are a little bit stilted

and incredibly precise in the way they fight.

It's not like a street brawl.

And then comes the sort of finale of the scene.

The way this scene was initially scripted,

their encounter was nowhere near this close.

They basically fought him, and this dialog

occurred from a distance when

once Jeffrey had helped Elsie to her feet

and gotten from the room,

and it was kind of the swansong of Delos

delivered from afar.

But one of the great joys of directing is

when you're watching a performance

to leave room for something really fresh

to emerge totally organically.

And that's what happened here.

I saw this connection between Jeffrey and Peter,

and was thinking about the ways in which

that last speech would be so much more intimate

if they were close.

[Jonah] This idea that potentially in his insane state

he's glimpsed something that might actually

ring a little more true

without reducing to these almost

sort of biblical terms that he'd be

wrestling with the infinite.

They said there were two fathers,

one above, one below.

They lied.

He's referring here and remembering a conversation,

but this idea of being under

a great volume of water and looking up at it

and seeing yourself reflected back down,

and applying that to the idea of God and the devil,

and this realization he had

that maybe they're one in the same.

That maybe this vision that we have

of a sort of shining deity who will rescue us

is really just the devil standing right next to you

or maybe you yourself being the devil.

And we like the idea of consciousness, like a well,

or an elevator shaft that you're falling down.

And this idea that sanity or the state of consciousness

that most people exist in most of the time

is potentially actually sort of

an envelope that you live in that protects you,

that kind of guards you from looking at

the actual state of the world.

And that if you push through that,

if you went further down and further down,

you'd eventually get to a place

where you saw the world for what it really is.

And that would be a truer state of consciousness,

something that most people would look at

and comfort themselves by saying is insanity,

but might actually be a vantage point

from which you see the world, life,

and consciousness for what it really is.

There was only ever the devil.

When you look up from the bottom,

it was just his reflection, laughing back down at you.

This entire season has been questioning

the idea of good and evil,

and whether people are simply heroes or villains

or whether different circumstances

can elicit different behaviors

or show different sides of a person's character.

And I loved playing with the notion

of these dionysian souls trapped in this episode

and subverting the traditional, you know,

posturing of good versus evil.

You've found this intimacy between

these two characters, you know?

Where literally Delos is talking about mirroring

and the idea of it was only the devil looking up at me,

and these two men are positioned in this way

where they're mirroring each other.

They're having a moment of actual connection.

A moment of connection that will later

kind of haunt Jeffrey's character

as he steps outside and realizes

what part of this conspiracy he was complicit in.

It's redemptive in a way, I think, for Delos,

this final confession.

He almost becomes a pathetic figure

that you feel sorry for.

You see his humanity and his tragedy at the same time,

and I think Jeffrey does too,

Bernard's character does too.

So he went from being this monster in a horror movie

to just a human laid bare

with all his weaknesses and all his doubts.

And those doubts are reflected in Jeffrey's own storyline.

It was a beautiful moment.

That's not what we scripted.

But you just--

Yeah.

You just kinda-- I improved it for him.

(laughs)