Ben Stiller is in awe of how fast “The Bear” is shot. The “Severance” director and executive producer pointed to how “The Bear” has churned out four seasons across three years; “Severance” meanwhile took that same amount of time to make just a second season. Production on “Severance” Season 2 began way back in 2022, the same year that “The Bear” debuted. (“The Bear” is now set for Season 5, while “Severance” was announced for Season 3.)
Stiller cited how he would prefer to work as “The Bear” co-showrunner Christopher Storer does, or at least with the same speed. “Chris Storer will shoot an episode in an hour and a half or something on ‘The Bear.’ I’m like, ‘Goddamn, why can’t I do that?’” Stiller told Vanity Fair.
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As for the years between Seasons 1 and 2, Stiller added, “On a certain level, it’s just the affirmation of when you follow your instinct — knowing that you have to make sure something feels right, and that you get it to the place you need it to be. The frustration for us was that it was taking so long, honestly. Sometimes I look at the outside factors, which are beyond our control, but then also — I mean I won’t lie, I look at my own process too and go, ‘What is it?’”
He continued, “That’s the conundrum when you’re in it. You start to feel like, ‘Oh, wait a minute. It’s going to take this much longer,’ and then there’s going to be that much more pressure on it for people who will be saying, like, ‘Oh, we waited this long. I hope it’s worth the wait.’ You’re just kind of stuck with that, and you have to move forward blindly.”
Stiller did previously say during Jason and Travis Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast “Severance” Season 3 will not take three years to make. “No, the plan is not to [wait three years],” Stiller said ahead of the Season 2 finale. “Hopefully we’ll be announcing what the plan is very soon.”
Stiller added that three years between Seasons 1 and 2 allowed for the team to “regroup” about the series. Season 2 was shot for 186 days, with the editing taking even longer. “Thank goodness the audience was there when we came back,” Stiller said. “The challenge was to get people who hadn’t seen the show to watch the first season, so Apple did a really good job of getting the word out and we did as much press as we could. Also, three years later, Apple TV+ is actually a different…it’s a different situation there now because they have more viewers. When we started out, we were one of the first shows.”
And Storer isn’t the only other TV creator whom Stiller counts as an inspiration: Mike White, who directed Stiller in “Brad’s Status,” and “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy are among his favorite fellow filmmakers in the TV space.
“I think Mike is a genius,” Stiller told VF of White. “Literally no one else could do what he does; he created a genre with ‘White Lotus.’ How he does it blows my mind, because he does the writing by himself and the directing.”
