How The Studio Pulled Off That Single-Shot Episode

“Unbelievably stressful,” is how Seth Rogen describes shooting the final sequence of “The Oner,” the ambitious second episode of his new Apple TV+ series The Studio. Rogen stars in the series as the newly-appointed, very well-meaning, very hapless studio president Matt Remick. His visit to the set of the prestige lesbian drama the studio is producing—directed by Sarah Polley and starring Greta Lee, both playing themselves—has gone disastrously. The crew is attempting to shoot a oner—a long, unbroken take—to close the film, but Matt’s earnest attempts to contribute creatively have caused them to blow every shot so far, until finally Polley, in a full rage, explodes and kicks him off the set. All this as the sun is setting and on the last day of shooting, magic hour dwindling. And of course, like Polley’s movie-within-a-show, it’s all a oner.

In fact, every individual scene in The Studio is a oner, but “The Oner,” as its title suggests, stretches a oner for a full episode. It’s an age-old technique, often deployed by filmmakers flexing their acrobatic skills, and all the rage once again between Rogen’s new show and Netflix’s series Adolescence, the buzzed-about UK miniseries whose four episodes each unfold in one hour-long take. Unlike Adolescence, which did its long-take episodes for real, “The Oner” uses visual effects to stitch together several smaller, but still quite long and elaborate shots. According to Rogen, the episode was split into about four large chunks, though the original intention was to break it up even more. Rogen, who co-directed the series with Evan Goldberg, quickly discovered that splitting the shot up too much was more hassle than it was worth, with things looking janky cut together.

“We found pretty early on that whenever we could shoot in order, it made it so much better,” Rogen says. “And whenever we were kind of compartmentalizing parts of these long shots, it made it so much worse.” Light was also a problem. The episode was set during magic hour, and they found that attempts to shoot smaller chunks during the day wouldn’t match up with the quality of light in the evening. The team decided to keep things simple: rehearse during the day, and then shoot, over the course of four days, during the 90-odd minutes when the light looked right.

“It's very counterintuitive on a set to be like, okay, everyone's here at 8:00 in the morning and we're not even rolling cameras till 5:30 pm basically,” Rogen says. “It allowed us a lot of time to really work it out and dial it in on the day, and then we would film it very fast. It really felt like the episode, because we were actually fighting against the sun going down.” In that final sequence, the sun is very literally meant to be going down. Matt, having ruined the shot by parking his car on the set, is rushing alongside underling Sal Saperstein, played by Ike Barinholtz, to find his keys somewhere in the production’s rented Hollywood Hills mansion before finally driving off into the night.

“The last day, we edged into actual nighttime,” Rogen recalls. In the scene, Matt is meant to scramble out of the house, bumping into a production assistant and spilling iced coffee all over himself before getting into the car, at which point the camera attaches to a rig on the hood of the car so they can drive away. Only, the Wi-Fi was on the fritz, causing the rig not to work. “It really was like the show,” Rogen says. “Because of this gag with the cup, I was all wet and covered in coffee, and I had to change every single time it didn't work.”

Polley remembers it not working upwards of twenty times over two nights. “I would say it's my favorite moment I've ever seen on a set of a filmmaker dealing with stress,” the Women Talking director says. “I remember, around the fifth take, watching him. He got the iced coffee in his face, he got to the door handle, the camera didn't land right, and I saw him take a deep breath. And I thought, ‘Oh, he's gonna lose it now.’ And I literally saw him make the decision to laugh. Like he revved himself with that Seth Rogen laugh, and then he got hysterical, and he started laughing hysterically.” Amazed and baffled, Polley asked him how he could be so good humored about it. “He was like, ‘Who am I gonna be mad at? This was my idea!’ He was like, ‘I fought very hard to get that coffee thrown in my face, who the fuck am I gonna be mad at? Like, It's only funny,’” Polley recalls. “He never, ever got frustrated. He only found it funny, which is, of course, the appropriate, Buddha-like response we'd all like to have. But he actually has it.”

It’s been many years since Polley last acted on screen, but it didn’t take any convincing to come out of semi-retirement. “I think the idea of working with Seth was really exciting to me,” she says. “I had not really considered acting in seventeen years, and every time something came along that I wasn't interested in doing, I assumed that was because I just didn't want to act anymore. As soon as Seth described to me the episode they were thinking of writing—which I don't think they had written yet—I just said yes. I just found that a really uncomplicated decision suddenly.”

Rogen was what made it uncomplicated, Polley explains. “I so admire him,” she says, “and also find him to be one of the more arrestingly decent people I've met in the film industry.” Polley, who has been public about her experiences working with indecent people in the film industry as a former child actor, directed Rogen in her 2011 coming-of-adulthood masterpiece Take This Waltz, in which he played the good-natured but unfulfilling husband to a restless Michelle Williams. “I just think he has such a deep authenticity about him as a human being that comes through on screen no matter what he's playing,” Polley says of her choice to cast the comedian in the low-key romantic drama. She had written the character with Rogen in mind, and visited him on the set of The Green Hornet to pitch him on the film, where his parents told him he had to do it. “I really am grateful to his mom,” Polley says.

The Studio features a seemingly endless list of celebrity and industry guest stars playing themselves, from big names like Martin Scorsese and Charlize Theron to insiders like Matt Belloni and Ted Sarandos. But according to Rogen, Polley was among the very first he reached out to. “I just thought she was so funny. Like, she's such a funny person,” he says, adding that she also fit the concept of the episode perfectly. “If you know movies, you know how amazing she is,” Rogen explains. “And you also fully believe that a studio executive who fancies themselves kind of artsy would be really excited about working with her, and, off of an Academy Award, would be really thrilled about making her next movie, and would feel really cool about it, and would want her to like him, and would want to be close to that movie, and would want to be able to tell stories about the filming of it.”

They came to Polley with the idea even before it had been written, and then got to work shaping her “character.” Rogen credits Polley with inspiring them to have her quietly loathe Matt while trying to act nice so he’ll agree to pay $800,000 to license the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” for the shot. She also pushed for her character to get angrier and angrier with Matt as the episode went on, despite indulging his creative input and generally bothersome presence. “I wanted to give him something more to work with,” Polley says. “I think Seth was like, protecting my feelings or something, but I was like, ‘No, I have so much frustration inside me that I've never let out on set. Just let me do it.’” Having worked with her share of temperamental directors, Polley says she’s made it her project as a filmmaker to be the opposite. “The Oner” gave her a much-needed opportunity. “I felt like it was really good therapy,” she says. “I was surprised at how much frustration I had to let out.”

Rogen has had plenty of experiences with studio executives meddling or getting in the way on set—including ruining shots—and while they might not generally be as oblivious as Matt Remick, he still has some sympathy for them. “It's not malicious,” he says. “Often it's out of a genuine excitement, and a wish that they can artistically contribute to the process.” Rogen does still chuckle a bit at their expense, though. “Throughout the show, Matt, my character, views himself as an artist, which is, in my opinion, silly,” Rogen laughs. “We interviewed a lot of people who worked at a lot of studios leading up to the writing of the show, and we asked them that. ‘Do you consider yourself an artist?’ And a lot of them were like, maybe not ‘I’m an artist,’ but like, ‘The movies would not be what they are were it not for my contributions.’”

Talking about being on set for “The Oner,” Polley lights up. “It was astonishing to watch. It was like watching magic tricks every day,” she says, recalling with amazement the way the camera operator weaved all the way through the set while everyone hit their marks for a roughly 10-minute take, the crew applauding every time he did it. “What's weird was it also felt really loose. I felt like we were also improvising stuff, and new things were happening on every take, and no one was really rigid about it,” Polley muses. “That's what I don't quite understand, is it never felt like you were locked into something to make a shot work. But the shot was so elaborate. I actually, to this day, cannot figure out how they did it. It was really amazing to watch.”

Pulling off an episode like “The Oner” is a tall order for anyone, let alone someone doing double duty as co-director and star, like Rogen. “You know, things happen on sets. They're very intense environments, and they're pressure cookers, and there's never enough time and money, there's huge personalities,” Polley says. What impressed her was Rogen’s ability to hold it all together in both roles. That, Rogen, says, is a result of a lot of planning, and many years of experience.

“I think one of the things I've gotten better at, honestly, over the years, is blocking,” Rogen says, referring to the art of arranging performers in the space and in the frame. “Early on in our careers, our movies were generally shot with two or three cameras pointing at us, and generally actors were standing there and not moving in any way, shape, or form.” Since then, Rogen has picked up some moves from directors he’s worked with, like Danny Boyle and Steven Spielberg, “one of the masters of blocking,” and gained practice with small action scenes in his own projects.

With just an early draft of the script, Rogen and his team set out to find their location, landing on the modern mansion featured in the episode. They did a walkthrough with the draft in hand to figure out where each moment would take place, and how long it would take to get from one spot to another, and how the blocking would work. Continuing the writing process, they relied on floor plans and blueprints to get things timed out as best they could before figuring out the rest during the rehearsals each day during the shoot. “It was about thinking of enough ideas and jokes that manifested in movement,” Rogen says, explaining that the idea was to “really break it up into little kind of chunks that took place in different parts of the house, and understanding that getting from one place to another had to be very highly motivated.” The beats all down, getting the comedic timing right was the next challenge. “That was the thing that was, by far, the hardest. Keeping it funny,” Rogen says. “And, even though what we're doing is very specific, to not have it feel rigid. To have it feel natural and loose, and a little reckless and unpredictable, even though it's so dialled in.”

Though it has its calmer moments, The Studio is a speedy show, working at screwball comedy pace, with the metronomic intensity of Whiplash. “I said to the actors, ‘Normally, what would happen is we would shoot this scene, we'd all take your pauses and your beats, and the first thing we would do is go in the editing room and remove all of them,’” Rogen recalls. “And we were like, ‘We can't do that. So obviously, be funny and use your timing and take beats where beats are needed, and don't let it hinder your performance in any way, but just be aware that we are locked into this timing, and we can't speed it up.”

Rogen also used his role as an actor in the episode to his advantage as a director. “I would try to keep the rhythm of the scene kind of like—it is, like, a lame analogy—but it is sort of like they’re a jazz band, and I was the drummer,” he says, noting that he specifically means a jazz drummer, not an orchestra conductor. “They're not an orchestra. I would have been mad if nobody strayed from what they were supposed to do to the letter,” Rogen says. “The reason it feels funny, and kinetic, and alive is, essentially, no one in the cast is capable of doing the same thing twice.”

Polley is nonetheless amazed, remarking, “I don't know how he's able to juggle being outside and having perspective, and being inside it, but he really does. He’s really able to do both at the same time.” Rogen is a little more self-effacing, explaining that when it comes to acting while directing, “As long as it's working, I'm able to stay in it. As soon as it stops working is when I drop out of it instantaneously.”

It helps, then, to have so many pros around. Behind the camera, and in front of it. Lee and Polley, but also co-star Barinholtz and the legendary Catherine O’Hara. “Catherine, she's kind of a mathematician with comic timing, like she's literally just down to the breath and the second,” says Polley, for whom the show was also her first real attempt at comedic acting. She took all the pointers she could get, including during one scene in which she comes out from the video village on the set screaming Fuuuuuuck at Matt after another blown take. “Catherine was laughing really hard at it,” Polley shares, “and then she said, ‘You know what'd be really funny, is if you start the scream from around the corner and we don't see you at first, and then we see you appear halfway through the scream.’”

“Between me and Catherine O'Hara and Sarah Polley. It was a Canadian-heavy set in general,” Rogen laughs. “I feel like Canadians are not necessarily people who run around waving their flag, although in this moment that may be different,” says Polley, adding, “There is a certain kind of camaraderie.” She shares her theory about why Canadians like Rogen and O’Hara excel in the American comedy scene. “There's a certain feeling of always being a little outside and able to look in,” she says. “There's something in the connection between Canadians and comedy that has to do with never being completely part of the mainstream, and having some perspective on it.” As for the experience of finally getting to do comedy herself? “I loved it. I loved every second of it,” Polley confesses. “I liked this so much. I'm, like, mortified by how much fun I had. Like, it was embarrassing. I was literally like, ‘I'm having the best time of my life.’ And I remember at the very end, on the last day, it came out of my mouth without thinking about it. I just heard myself go, ‘I don't want to go home to sad movies,’ and Seth was like, ‘You know you don't have to.’”

“I’d cast Seth in anything and everything. I always want to work with Seth,” Polley says. Working away at whatever her next project will be, the director is taking some special pleasure in what her episode of The Studio might do for her career. “As I was watching the shot that they were setting up that I was supposed to have directed, I was like, ‘You know, nothing I make is this stylish. I really appreciate you leveling up my game,’” Polley jokes. “I'm so happy because more people will see the show of a film I have made in fiction than anyone has actually seen anything I've made. People will think I'm a really stylish filmmaker. This is awesome!”

Two nights and twenty-plus takes later, the light actually beginning to dwindle, Rogen and company made one more go of getting that final sequence right, coffee spills and all. “I remember seeing it, being like, ‘Oh no. if this doesn't work, like, it's actually gonna be fucking nighttime soon, and it was our last day of shooting. We couldn't go back,” Rogen says. “The joke I kept making was that the joke in the episode is real, where I was like, ‘If this doesn't work, we're gonna have to go to that weird soundstage they shoot The Mandalorian on.’ It really started to reflect the episode itself in many, many, many, many ways.”

It was so down to the wire, Rogen says. “I thought it was going to be too dark. The take we used, I think, was the very last time we did it. And it actually ended up working perfectly.” Rogen and Barinholtz drive off in his classic red convertible, as the sunlight dies and the streetlights flicker on, and then Rogen gets a text message. Polley didn’t get her shot. (Fuck!) And then “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” plays—a song that, Rogen clarifies, did not actually cost them $800,000.