Throughout the first season of the Apple TV+ series “The Studio,” directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Goldberg have risen to a number of elaborate challenges, from shooting every scene as one unbroken take (and, in the case of Episode 2, shooting an entire episode to give the appearance that it’s one unbroken take) and restaging The Golden Globes to using the production design as a sort of ongoing Hollywood history lesson. On the season finale, they faced one of their trickiest filmmaking problems yet: filming Bryan Cranston as a studio executive high on mushrooms as he ran wild through a working casino.
“It was insane,” Goldberg told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast of the effort to shoot Cranston and celebrity co-stars including Rogen, Catherine O’Hara, and Dave Franco (playing himself) while just five feet off camera patrons of the Venetian casino were watching the filming in between spins at the slot machines. “Usually there were three to four famous people per shot. So the odds of someone bothering us were pretty high the whole time. And every single spot that we shot had a restriction timing-wise.”
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To make matters worse, those restrictions would change arbitrarily from day to day. “They’d change it all the time,” Rogen said of the casino. “We’d get there thinking we had two hours and they’d be like, ‘You’ve got to be gone in 45 minutes.’” The pressure would have been stressful for any production, but the long take strategy that Goldberg and Rogen had established made shooting in the casino especially nerve-wracking. “For a shooting style that requires an incredible amount of control over the timing and the environment, we had very little control over the timing and environment in Vegas.”
Just getting the Venetian, which Goldberg and Rogen wanted because its gondolas, statues, and other features would provide ample comic opportunities for Cranston’s rampage, was no easy task. “Historically the Venetian has been the hardest casino to get,” location manager Stacey B. Brashear told IndieWire, adding that the script was risky — not only because it depicted Cranston’s character running wild through the casino on mushrooms, but because it involved him climbing statues, jumping into fountains, and committing various offensive acts that the casino would not want viewers to emulate.
“We got them the script pages and it took months,” Brashear said of the approval process. “We had already started to buy airline tickets for the crew, and we had set up rooms. In addition, Hewlett Packard had one of their largest conventions there, so they ate up a lot of space. So it was not just a matter of script approval, but also of getting approval to coexist with them when they had a majority of the hotel booked.” The production also had to coordinate with a last-minute party being thrown by Britney Spears, but at the last minute everything came together.
“I screamed so loud and unprofessionally in the production office,” Brashear said. “But everybody was happy because they knew what it meant.” Once the location was locked, Brashear and the filmmakers had to deal with the numerous restrictions placed upon them, like keeping their equipment as out of sight as possible. While they could shoot scenes set in individual rooms during normal working hours, the shots in the casino itself had to be done in the middle of the night to avoid disrupting normal casino business.
Luckily, the hotel was more than willing to accommodate the production when it came to shooting in multiple areas, because they wanted the location to be prominently featured on screen. “It was part of the contract, we had to promote them,” Brashear said, noting that the hotel didn’t charge the production location fees in exchange for the free publicity being on the series would provide. That said, one moment in the final episode did make Brashear nervous.
“I was concerned that they would think of it as a liability issue,” Brashear said of a scene where Cranston jumps into a fountain. “And I was hoping they weren’t going to come back to me and be like, ‘Well, we don’t want fans of the show to think they can hop in that fountain’ — that their legal team wouldn’t be like, ‘We don’t want people to get the idea to come take a selfie imitating Bryan Cranston in the fountain.’ But they were willing to take that risk.”
Goldberg and Rogen were glad that shooting scenes like the one with Cranston in the fountain came late in the show’s production schedule. “We were pretty dialed into the process,” Rogen said. “It was logistically insane and we couldn’t plan it all — we had no access to any part of it before we got there.” Once the cast and crew did arrive at the Venetian, however, they were immersed in it — they stayed in the rooms at the hotel, so everyone would typically roll out of bed and be on set after just a quick walk to the elevator.
“It turned into a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode,” Goldberg said. “We never left except for one shot in 120-degree weather with Seth in a car.” “I ate nothing but Grand Lux Cafe for two weeks straight, which isn’t healthy,” Rogen added, but in the end he feels that the surreal experience of living at the hotel while shooting there seeped into the final product. “You really had to hand yourself over to the insanity of it…which was good for the [last two] episodes.”
“The Studio” is streaming on Apple TV+. To hear Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s episode of Filmmaker Toolkit and other great filmmaker conversations, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
