Grotesquerie Director Max Winkler Unpacks Episode 5 Standoff

When director Max Winkler first read the script for “Grotesquerie” Episode 5, he knew he wanted to film most of the episode using one continuous shot. The problem was getting everyone else on board.

“I just kept lying to everybody, ‘We can do this.’ I was like, ‘1,000,000% we can do this,’ ” Winkler told TheWrap. Throughout the entire process, Winkler was reminded of one of his heroes, Marcelo Bielsa, manager of the Uruguay national team, who famously never had a Plan B other than to do Plan A better. That’s exactly the mindset Winkler brought to “Red Haze.”

“In my head, I was like, ‘Oh my god, are you really going to get fired over this? Are you really going to burn your way out of Hollywood on this idea?’ ” Winkler said. “But we did it. I’m really proud of everyone involved.”

It’s not difficult to understand Winkler’s panic over “Red Haze.” Coming in at roughly 14 minutes and 30 seconds, the first half of Episode 5 feels like a panicked, wild nightmare pulled straight out of the mind of David Lynch. If the season thus far has been a slow ramp up of insanity, this is truly when all hell breaks loose. Winkler wanted to present this as one continuous shot “not to show off,” but to capture the panic Lois (Niecy Nash-Betts) and Sister Megan (Micaela Diamond) feel as they’re trapped in a motel in the middle of nowhere.

“[Continuous shots] are very overused. Oftentimes it’s happening, and then all of a sudden you become more aware of the shot and less aware of what people are going through and that doesn’t serve a purpose anymore,” Winkler said. “I wanted to get into Lois and Megan’s head, and I wanted people to feel suffocated by the things that we just keep piling on.” He said Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” served as an inspiration for the ambitious episode, as did Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” and Romain Gavras’ work.

“Red Haze” starts right after the events of Episode 4. Trapped by a series of wildfires, Lois and Sister Megan drive down the road with a hitchhiker they picked up, a bloody woman named Andrea. After Andrea advises them to stay in a nearby hotel to wait out the fires, she flees to the bathroom to clean up. That’s when this horrifying saga starts to pick up momentum.

Lois and Sister Megan are faced with a never-ending onslaught of people who need their help, from the bloody Andrea and a motel clerk (also named Andrea) suffering from domestic abuse, to a family involved in a car accident. As Sister Megan ran from desperate person to person, a frazzled Lois yelled at her to take a step back as she dealt with a painful phone call about her comatose husband. To add to the chaos, Grotesquerie — the serial killer both women have been tracking — showed up at the motel and started to shoot at them. The intensely stressful sequence ended with Grotesquerie kidnapping the still-bloody Andrea before shooting Sister Megan. As Lois screamed for help, the camera breaks from its jerky movements and slowly pans up to focus on the skyline of the desert.

According to Winkler, the nearly 15-minute sequence took months to plan. He started by walking through the set with his director of photography Carolina Costa, assistant director Anna Ramey Borden and second assistant director Sarah Ford. As Winkler, Costa and Borden figured out placements for the car rig and various platforms, Ford played both the roles of Lois and Sister Megan. After constructing this rough sketch, Winkler and his team then took a camera operator out to the set to more concretely figure out what was and wasn’t possible.

As the team ironed out the details, they realized that their best chance of mitigating technical risk would be to film the sequence at magic hour, thus limiting the amount of lights they needed to use. That meant they would only have four times to get this ambitious shot right.

“It was very, very tense,” Winkler said. Once the actors were brought in, Winkler likened the setup to a “theater troupe.” The actors would rehearse for the first four hours of the day, then they would try to get the shot during magic hour.

“We wouldn’t get it. We would try a different take, we wouldn’t get it,” Winkler said.

Another confusing layer were the Andreas. “Grotesquerie” hired identical twins Victoria and Madison Abbott to play the bloodied hitchhiker Andrea and the abused motel clerk Andrea. As the scene continued, the twins went through hair and makeup “constantly” as they each played the other’s part.

“So Victoria runs out of the car. Madison’s then at the front desk. Then Victoria is changing and getting in position to be the Andrea that gets dumped in the pool,” Winkler explained. “Madison then is going the other way and getting her hair wet and slicked back and getting a new black eye to then come from behind the desk.”

To make an impossible shoot harder, there was the matter of the desert heat. Winkler praised Neal Bryant for his steadicam work throughout the entire sequence, calling him the episode’s “secret weapon.” Previously, Bryant won Camera Operator of the Year in Television by the Society of Camera Operators for his work on “The Last of Us” Episode 3. For this episode, Bryant worked closely with camera operator Em Michelle Gonzales.

“We would say cut, and he would have to go throw up in the bushes and have camera assistants pour ice cold water on him. It was 120 degrees, and he was carrying those various rigs he has to keep switching on and off,” Winkler said. “We couldn’t have done it without him. I wouldn’t even have tried to have done it without him. It would have been impossible.”

The heat also presented a challenge when it came to the character of Grotesquerie. Throughout much of the chaotic sequence, the killer, clad all in black, can be seen lurking in the background. Unlike every other character in the scene, the serial killer is nearly always in the sun, away from shade.

“We kept having to get new stunt guys playing Grotesquerie because people were getting sick. People were getting heat exhaustion,” Winkler said.

Finally, on the third day of filming and the third take, everything lined up perfectly. The actors hit their marks, the car crash and shootout went off without a hitch and the twins’ costume changes were completed. All that was left was for Grotesquerie to finish the scene by shooting Sister Megan.

“Grotesquerie gets out of the car. He’s holding the gun and he drops the gun. I remember thinking then that I might die and have a heart attack,” Winkler said, comparing the moment to the theatrical farce “Noises Off.” “But you can’t have a meltdown because everyone’s looking you to say, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ So I took off my headphones, and I was like, ‘Great, let’s do it again.’”

“I would say that was probably the moment that I required the most inner resolve to continue pretending like I knew what I was doing,” Winkler added.

Finally, on the very last day and their very last opportunity to get the scene right, Winkler and his team got the shot. “Em, our B camera operator who was controlling while Neal was holding the camera for a majority of it, cried. I felt like that was very indicative of the stakes that everybody was living with wanting to pull this off and make it make sense so it actually serves the story,” Winkler said.

“It was so complicated and so fun,” Winkler said, highlighting the work of Borden and Costa as well as the stunt team, the camera operators and the series stars, especially Nash-Betts and Diamond.

“It very much rested on all of the elements in the entire group working together to hit this sweet spot, which we finally did on the fourth day,” Winkler said. “It was a true team effort. It felt like we were putting on ‘Our Town’ or something in the desert, but with a lot of insanity and violence.”

New episodes of “Grotesquerie” premiere Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX and stream the next day on Hulu.