S1E7: The Gap

Summary

Pluribus: The Official Podcast

Season 1, Episode 7 – “The Gap” (December 12, 2025)

Host: Chris McCaleb
Guests: Vince Gilligan (creator/executive producer), Jen Carroll (writer), Adam Bernstein (director), Carlos Manuel Vesca (“Minusos”), Nicholas Tsai (assistant editor/mixer)

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the making of “Pluribus” Episode 107, “The Gap,” focusing on the creative and production challenges faced by the team. The conversation covers story inspiration, the logistics of shooting across international locations, the intricacies of a highly visual script, and standout performances—especially in depicting isolation, physical endurance, and the passage of time. Listeners get an array of behind-the-scenes stories, as well as memorable anecdotes illustrating the dedication and artistry behind the Apple Original Series.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Inspiration for the Episode: Isolation and Singing

• The episode’s motif of characters coping with isolation, especially through singing, came from the writers’ fascination with the show Alone, where survivalists sing to stave off lonely silence (01:49).
• Jen Carroll (writer):
  “One thing that inevitably happens when these people are alone for a certain amount of time is they can't stand the silence. And they start singing to themselves.” (01:53)
• The choice of songs was carefully curated—Carol’s musical references serve both as humor and a subtle indicator of her psychological state, culminating in the deliberate cut of the line “I feel fine” from the R.E.M. song as a storytelling device (03:15).

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Visual Storytelling and Directorial Challenges

• The script was Jen Carroll’s first for television, featuring rare, almost montage-driven visual storytelling (03:54, 04:04).
• Director Adam Bernstein relished the opportunity to work on an episode with so little dialogue and so many visual set pieces: “That's the most interesting assignment I've had in television... it's a dream [for a director]. It doesn't come around that often.” (04:04)
• The episode purposely contrasts Carol’s “emotional descent in isolation” with Minusos’s grueling physical journey, both visually and tonally (04:40).

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Location Scouting & International Filming Logistics

• Filming occurred in geographically diverse locations: New Mexico and the Canary Islands (site-dressed as South America) (05:51, 09:45).
• Production spent significant effort to gain respectful, thoughtful access to sacred tribal lands (Jemez Pueblo) for authenticity. The cast recounts the ceremonial prayers and community support they received (06:45–08:15).
• Jen Carroll:
  “They were so supportive... It really is the sacred land for them... We were just trying to be as respectful as possible.” (07:19)
• The production’s adaptability is highlighted by using locations like the Gilman Tunnels (featured in 310 to Yuma) and recreating “mountain villages" closer to home when possible (08:54–09:06).

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The Iconic Car and Production Adventures

• Minusos’ journey features an old MG car, sourced and modified in both America and Europe for authenticity and matching details; a total of four cars were used to accommodate different shooting locations (13:23–13:55).
• Burning the car was a particular challenge, both logistically and emotionally for Carlos Manuel Vesca, who became attached to the vehicle (11:30–12:15).
• Vesca:
  “It was hard burning that car... it was painful.” (11:30)

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Staging Montages (“French for Overtime/Over-budget”)

• Extended montages required exhaustive storyboarding, careful scheduling, and creative shot variation to keep the sequences fresh (09:45, 14:09, 15:42, 15:15).
• Adam Bernstein:
  “You have to storyboard it, especially to maintain what you’re talking about [diversity], because there was so much driving with Veska…” (15:42)
• The Canary Islands proved ideal for simulating diverse South American environments due to their unique microclimates (16:25).

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Acting and Keeping Track of Emotional Progression

• Carlos Manuel Vesca discusses maintaining the character’s emotional and physical trajectory across a non-linear shooting schedule:
  “Fortunately, I had a lot of people reminding me where in the journey he was, because we shot everything chronologically except for this... next scene, no, you have to go back and be less tired.” (20:05–21:37)

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Editing and Mapping Minusos’s Journey

• Chris McCaleb (host/editor) highlights the intricate work of editing journey sequences—including the “Indiana Jones-style” journey maps, crafted by artist Oliver Scott to look photo-realistic and match the episode’s pace.
  “It’s tricky because it’s not just like, isn’t this cool? Let’s put some music on. It’s an epic journey and it’s an emotional journey, but it’s also fun to watch…” (22:24).

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The Chunga Palm Ordeal: Production, Performance, and Cultural Layers

• The Chunga Palm (“monster tree”) sequence, a harrowing moment for Minusos, is recounted with humor and reflections on how different cultures perceive the plant—threatening for outsiders, a resource for locals (26:38–27:47).
• Creativity and movie magic: Styrofoam rocks and manufactured trees ensured safety and environmental compliance, while practical effects blended seamlessly with visual effects (29:07–30:39).

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Portraying Isolation and Time Jumps

• Carol’s storyline skips over weeks, jumping from her “best day ever” to total silent withdrawal—a narrative choice to showcase the psychological toll of isolation by highlighting only the most impactful moments (31:06–32:44).
• Golf ball and glass destruction scenes cleverly combined real action with digital effects (32:58–34:02).

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Contrasting Characters and Thematic Resonance

• Carlos Manuel Vesca draws a poignant thematic comparison: “She seems to have everything material at her hand. She has everything she wants, and yet she looks empty. And this other guy... doesn’t have anything and yet he has a purpose.” (34:55)
• A meditation on happiness and fulfillment—Carol’s abundance versus Minusos’s purposeful deprivation (35:29).

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Licensing Art and Museum Partnerships

• The team tells the story of securing rights and recreating Georgia O’Keeffe’s Belladonna for a key plot point, detailing the extensive partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the painstaking effort to match the artist’s “exact shade of white” (36:07–38:49).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Attribution | |-----------|--------|-------------| | 03:15 | “It was always planned that we would do that hard cut out before ‘fine’ so that the audience would be thinking, is she fine? Is she okay? Has she gone crazy?” | Jen Carroll | | 04:04 | “To do an episode that's so visual... for a director, it's a dream.” | Adam Bernstein | | 07:19 | “They were so supportive. And it really is the sacred land for them.” | Jen Carroll | | 11:30 | "It was hard burning that car... it was painful.” | Carlos Manuel Vesca | | 14:25 | "Was it Stu Lyons… who said montage is French for ‘overtime’?” | Chris McCaleb | | 15:42 | “There was so much driving with Veska, so you didn’t always want to be repeating the same type of shot.” | Adam Bernstein | | 16:28 | “They call it a microcontinent... it has all these different climatic zones.” | Vince Gilligan | | 20:48 | “You talk about looking for different ways of addressing the same thing with different emotional states.” | Carlos Manuel Vesca | | 22:24 | "It’s tricky because it’s not just like, isn’t this cool? Let’s put some music on. It’s an epic journey and it’s an emotional journey, but it’s also fun to watch.” | Chris McCaleb | | 27:10 | “For someone who doesn’t belong to that place, that thing is terrifying... for [locals], it’s like a friend.” | Carlos Manuel Vesca | | 32:44 | “Often when things break in your brain… sometimes things break all at once and you’re fine just right up until the point that you’re not.” | Jen Carroll | | 34:55 | "She has everything and yet she looks empty... this other guy… doesn’t have anything and yet he has a purpose.” | Carlos Manuel Vesca | | 35:29 | “Happiness... [is not] in things that we get outside yourself. Like happiness is exogenous, where I think it’s endogenous, it’s in yourself.” | Carlos Manuel Vesca | | 38:49 | “The trickiest part about the painting... was getting Georgia O’Keeffe’s white.” | Jen Carroll |

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Carol’s Singing and Silence: 01:35–03:37
• Visual Storytelling Approach: 03:45–04:40
• Shooting on Sacred Land & Location Details: 05:42–08:54
• Vehicle Logistics and Burning the Car: 11:30–13:55
• Montages, Editing, and Music Choices: 14:25–22:24
• Minusos’s Ordeal and Chunga Palms: 26:34–30:39
• Time Jump and Character Descent: 31:06–32:44
• Thematic Resonance – Fulfillment vs. Emptiness: 34:55–36:06
• Licensing and Recreating Art: 36:07–38:49

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Tone and Takeaways

The episode flows with a warm, collaborative, and sometimes humorous tone, marked by respect for craft and location, awe at the demands of visual storytelling, and a philosophical undercurrent about isolation, purpose, and happiness. The roundtable, led by Chris McCaleb, openly celebrates the unique creative risks and production feats of "The Gap", expressing deep gratitude for the cast, crew, and global partners who brought the challenging episode to life.

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For more behind-the-scenes stories, follow and listen to Pluribus: The Official Podcast on Apple Podcasts—and watch Pluribus exclusively on Apple TV.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Pluribus, the official podcast, an intimate insider conversation about the making of the Apple TV series with the cast and creators behind the show. My name is Chris McCaleb. I'm one of the editors of Pluribus and the host of this podcast. This isn't a recap show. This is more of a wide ranging roundtable discussion about the making of each episode. So I strongly recommend watching before you listen because we'll be talking openly about everything, spoiling things, etc. This podcast is about episode 107, entitled the Gap, written by Jen Carroll and directed by Adam Bernstein. In this episode, Carol is determined to have a good time after she leaves Vegas, while Minusos makes an epic journey north across South America. There's so much to get into. So without further ado, please welcome our guests, executive producer and creator of the show, Vince Gilligan.

[B]

Hello, everybody.

[A]

Writer of the episode, Jen Carroll.

[C]

Hi, Chris.

[A]

Director of this episode in person and live, Adam Bernstein.

[D]

Thanks, Chris.

[A]

And Minuzos himself, Carlos Manuel Vesca, the Cat is Gray.

[E]

Hi, everyone.

[A]

That is right. So much of that. Just the mumbling of those things.

[E]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And also with us today on the ones and Twos, assistant editor on the show and for the podcast, our editor and mixer, Nicholas Tsai.

[D]

Hello.

[A]

Hello, Nicholas.

[B]

Hey, Nicholas.

[A]

Also, a lot of singing in this episode, Jen. Who's responsible for that? Like, at what point were the songs chosen? Was that decision made? I assume things had to get cleared way in advance. Talk about that process.

[C]

I think one thing that we talked about a lot when we were breaking this episode, Vince and I and the rest of the team, was, what does it do to you to be in isolation for 40 days? And a lot of members of the writers room are big fans, myself included, of the History Channel show alone, in which 10 survivalists are dropped out in the wilderness, you know, Vancouver island or, you know, wherever. One thing that inevitably happens when these people are alone for a certain amount of time is they can't stand the silence. And they start singing to themselves.

[B]

I didn't realize that. Yeah, and the producers are pulling their hair out saying, we gotta pay for all this now.

[C]

Well, they don't. They end up making up their own songs. And so there's probably a whole lot more singing that they do that they didn't license, but they always end up sort of writing their own songs and singing to themselves because the silence would drive you nuts. And so that's one thing we talked about with Carol between the teaser, when she's humming to herself and then starts singing and just the different ways that she goes about not just entertaining herself, but filling the silence that starts to get to her more and more as the episode continues. So we did pitch most of these songs in. The writers are, you know, for golf. We thought, oh, it'd be so funny if she did. You know, Kenny Loggins, you know, classic Caddyshack reference. The REM end of the world is, you know, it just felt perfect for a show that's a post apocalyptic in a certain way. But what I love about the way that we wrote and that Adam shot and that you cut the first scenes, Chris, the teaser is that it was important to us because we didn't necessarily want to know what Carol was thinking. That we cut out before the final line of the chorus, that I feel fine. It was always planned that we would do that hard cut out before fine so that the audience would be thinking, is she fine? Is she okay? Has she gone crazy?

[A]

She's definitely not okay. Nobody would be. Yeah, that's the surest sign of madness. That you're just singing songs constantly.

[B]

Hey, and Chris, can I say. Cause Jen won't brag on herself. This is Jen's first. It's your first script, right?

[C]

It's the first script I've written for television.

[B]

Yes.

[D]

Right. Yes.

[C]

It's all downhill from here. And what a weird one. It's endless montages.

[D]

It's incredible. I think that's the most interesting assignment I've had in television, which is to do an episode that's so visual, which is kind of like very rare for tv. Right. I mean, I know that Vince's shows, they make an effort to think of scenes that don't have to rely on dialogue.

[B]

Absolutely.

[D]

You guys will talk about that in the writers room and say, oh, can we just do this without the words? Which is amazing for tv. And then this is a whole episode, which is basically that for a director, it's a dream. It doesn't come around that often.

[C]

I think it was important to us, as we were breaking this episode, to show a contrast between what Carol was going through and what minusos is going through. That we would have Carol's emotional descent in isolation versus minusos in his rigidity as he's taking this long trip up to try and get to Carol in New Mexico. It was important to show the struggles he was going through that are completely different than the ones Carol is. You know, Carol's seen at a gas station where she just calls, has them fill up the tank versus Minutsos siphoning gas off of these cars he finds on the side of the road. Hopefully the audience will see the way these two are contrasting how they're spending this 40 days of their isolation. Speaking of that gas station, do you want to talk about how lovely the people were there? So they were supposed to be, you know, we were looking for. When we were scouting a gas station that was going to be Arizona. She's coming back from Vegas, sort of halfway back. It needed to feel sort of like Red Rock, Arizona. And we wound up on the Jemez Pueblo right outside the Wallatoa Visitor Center.

[D]

Those people are so kind. That was great location. And then we shot. We had a scene that was supposed to be a mountain village in Argentina.

[C]

Yes.

[D]

And the really fun challenge of the episode is that some of it was done in New Mexico and some of it was done in the Canary Islands. And Jen had just written a whole bunch of different scenes in different villages and coastal areas and mountainous areas. And we had to kind of figure out, like, what's going to be in New Mexico and what's going to be in Spain. And there was a scene where Veska's character is driving through an Argentinian mountain village. And when we were scouting the gas station, we saw the Jemez pueblo, and it was like, oh, that actually looks pretty similar. And it's not easy to get permission to shoot on that pueblo, but our great location manager Christian finagled it. And one of the most interesting aspects of the shoot is that when we went to do the tech scout, location manager Christian went in to the headquarters of the tribe, and he said, adam, they just need you to come in for a second. Jen, were you at the table, too?

[B]

Did you go?

[C]

No, no, no, Bellamy. Our first idiot. I stayed outside because we didn't want to overwhelm them with people, but we just wanted to be respectful. Krishna came out and said, adam needs to come in and say hello to the elders.

[D]

Right. And there was like a meeting of, like, the administrators of the tribe and the tribal elders where they did a series of prayers. It was amazing. And it was like a 20, 30 minute meeting where they were. I mean, some practical things were discussed. But then they did a series of prayers. It was like, you know, just one of those experiences.

[A]

That's really beautiful.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

They were so supportive. And it really is the sacred land for them. And so you're not even allowed to take photographs. We had to get permission to scout. We were just trying to be as respectful as possible. There were certain areas that we were allowed to photograph, and then certain Ones that were off limits to us. Reasonably so. And we had incredible partners, not just in our location scene, but the representatives from the tribe that worked with us. That got us extras also, so background players, so we could get these beautiful faces in. And then gave us access to hang our laundry lines and bring all of our set deck in. And they were so welcoming. And if you want to go out and visit, you absolutely should, because they can take you on guided tours and of some of the beautiful red rocks across from the gas station. But if you go to the Jemez Pueblo and you go to this visitor center, you gotta get the coffee. The coffee, which is. They have a special coffee. It's their Jemez red rock mocha. Adam's tried it. I've tried it. It was delicious. You could only get it there.

[E]

But wait, they grow the coffee there? No. Which is roasted.

[C]

No, no. They roast it there and then they add. They have their special.

[B]

The crushed red rock that they add to it.

[C]

No, no.

[A]

It just gives it that distinctive desert flavor. It is very earthy.

[B]

The terrain.

[C]

The terrain is very important because it's New Mexico. It's red chile. So that is the. Mixed with the mocha. It's so good. Yes, it's great. And we also shot up there what we. We called Chile, the sea with the map, the Vezka and the mg and the map right across the way from the gas station. And a little further north, the Gilman.

[D]

Tunnels, which were beautiful, gorgeous, gorgeous places.

[A]

Such a cool. How did you find those? Were you just aware of them or. I think Christian.

[D]

I guess they're famous. I mean, they shot. Was it 310 to Yuma, that Western remake? The remake.

[B]

Okay, cool.

[D]

With Val Kilmer was shot there.

[C]

Yeah. It used to be a rail line. Now it's for cars to go through. But it quite skinny because before it was just a train, I believe. And Christian did an amazing job scouting. But I feel like Adam's also not giving himself enough credit because there was a lot of driving work, a lot of beauty shots that we needed, some of which weren't necessarily even scripted, but you had such a vision for how you wanted to shoot it that you felt like, oh, we need a couple more beats before the gas station. And you would go out on the weekends and go scouting, looking for exactly the shots that you wanted. So I so appreciated that you were so all in finding the most beautiful spots in the areas we knew we were gonna do the bigger scenes in.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, one of the great challenges of the episode is that we were splitting locations between New Mexico and Spain to create all these different parts, parts of South America where this character is on this epic journey. And we actually have one scene where Vesica's character is exhausted, walking in the woods, and he collapses in Spain and then wakes up in New Mexico.

[B]

The magic of the movies.

[E]

And we did the collapsing before, right?

[D]

Exactly. We shot the aftermath of the collapse.

[E]

Yeah.

[D]

With the helicopter in Albuquerque where a helicopter comes to rescue him. But we shot the part where he loses steam and falls down in Spain.

[C]

And even crazier than that, we shot the helicopter arriving in Albuquerque. We shot the car burning in Pecos, a different part of New Mexico, weeks later. And then, of course, yes, we did the other jungle work on La Palma in the Canary Islands, which kicked off our Spain work, which was wonderful. It was a. We had sort of a skeleton crew as we were getting people overseas. And Adam, Paul and our then Ad Rich and I were running around the jungle with Vezka to kick off that work.

[A]

You know, that car is a whole story unto itself. I know, and we'll talk about it. Part of the thing that I find fascinating about that car is normally in a movie or a TV show, when you see an actor driving the car, they're not really driving the car. They're on a. Usually they're on a trailer, and there's a whole crew of people on that trailer, and they're just, you know, pretending. I'm miming, you know, steering wheel driving. But for almost all the stuff for this montage. Veska, you're really driving that car? Because we see it, we have wide shots, we have other shots, shots in the car. If you spend an inordinate amount of time driving that car. What was that like?

[E]

It was hard burning that car.

[A]

It was beautiful.

[E]

It was painful.

[A]

We really burned that car, by the way. That's not.

[D]

You were good at driving that car.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Is it hard to drive?

[E]

I guess it's. Well, no. I mean, I grew up driving. How do you call it? Stick.

[B]

Stink stick.

[E]

So it was beautiful. It was just driving that car. And I remember on the coast, the Canary Islands, I couldn't believe it. I was there. Beautiful car. It's like a toy car, really.

[D]

It is a midget.

[E]

Barely fit in the car.

[B]

I sat in it once. I don't know, because we're like the same height. I don't know how you fit in that thing. I could not. I couldn't get in that thing.

[E]

He does look kind of cute driving my car.

[B]

But what did we have?

[D]

We had three of them, right?

[E]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It still was really hard to burn that car.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And wasn't the one that burned. It was a private owner. Right. And they just said, yeah, go ahead and burn that car.

[D]

We had a. I think it was a purchase.

[C]

Yeah. It wasn't a rental. No, no, no. There were two that we could drive in America because we rigged one, the.

[E]

One in the Canary Islands. There's another shot that I'm driving past some people and the stick kept like jumping off because you were going up a hill.

[D]

It was like.

[E]

So I had to have my hand on the stick. I was driving as I was. So the frowning that I was doing to those people was actually me with the damn car. This thing.

[A]

This thing doesn't really work.

[B]

And I.

[E]

So it's. It's real. It's real frustration.

[B]

You made it look great.

[D]

And.

[B]

And again, that was because we looked into shipping the car we shot in. In New Mexico. We looked into shipping it Canary Islands. And that was just.

[C]

It was outrageously expensive and would take too long to clear customs. So we had.

[E]

Oh, wow.

[C]

We found two MGs in Europe, not on the Canary Islands. It's not a car that is that common these days. What year was it? It's like 70s.

[D]

70S.

[C]

Yeah, early 70s, early 70s. And the model that was made in Europe was different than the model that you could get in America. So we ended up finding two and then spent about a month modifying them not to match, just the paint color. Cause we had a blue one and a green one. We painted that beautiful mustard color. The team in Spain, the transportation team, was so detail oriented and they made a bunch of adjustments to the car so that the dashboard would be the same. So the stick shift would be the same, the badging would be the same. So they would all match. So all told, I believe we had four cars.

[B]

Well, now that I'm thinking of it, it's like the ones in Europe. Most of them were made in Britain. Must have been right hand drive.

[C]

Indeed.

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

Correct. Yeah.

[B]

That was amazing. Or made Cruise amazing. Finding all this, Stu. Making it happen. All our producers.

[A]

Adam, as a director, when you're handed a script like this like we've been talking about, there's a series of montages, and I remember it. Was it Stu Lyons on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, who said montage is French for overtime.

[C]

I believe he said over budget.

[A]

That's better. How do you go about preparing something like this? What's your approach to taking a script like this? And figuring out, how am I going to shoot this?

[D]

I guess it starts with Jen and all the other writers on this show are super visual writers, so you have that blueprint to go off of to begin with. And also there is all the scouting. Jen and Vince went in advance and they scouted. It was more like just an embarrassment of riches of places that we saw. And then it was really just narrowing things down more than anything because there was too much good stuff. And we only had six days over there. So it was sort of a fun kind of puzzle to figure out how many areas we could go to on the island. What were the best things in those areas?

[A]

Visually, especially, it's so diverse. And by necessity, it has to be diverse. So you feel every time you're in a new place, it's not the same shot. It's not the same selection of shots, the same type of angles. Everything feels unique to the place. Is that something that you, as a director, are you thinking about those things? How can I make this particular scene feel different from the other ones?

[D]

Yeah, there's a lot of storyboarding. I think whenever you do something that's an action scene or a montage that's not dialogue based, you end up kind of having to storyboard it, especially to maintain what you're talking about, which is diversity. Because there was so much driving with Veska, so you didn't always want to be repeating the same type of shot. Sometimes we mounted the camera to the car, sometimes we were going car to car, pulling the car. But, yeah, I think that was one of the challenges was to mix it up and also to try to get the most diversity in landscape that we possibly could. One of the funny things was that we started seeing pictures from certain areas in the Canary Islands. And we're like, that looks like New Mexico to me.

[C]

No problem.

[E]

Over there.

[B]

You have everything.

[E]

It's amazing. You have everything in a Canary Island.

[B]

They call it a microcontinent.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

Because it has all these different climatic zones.

[E]

It's amazing.

[B]

Yeah, it's a really good place to visit.

[E]

If you drive through the island, you see everything, like pine trees and coconut trees, banana trees. You have everything.

[B]

A lot of banana plantations.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And I gotta brag on Veska, had you ever been to the Canary Islands?

[E]

Never.

[B]

You were the guy. I kept hearing this story over and over again. You were like a superstar. People were stopping you on the street, asking for your autograph, asking for selfies.

[E]

It was quite a surprise. It was quite a surprise. I wasn't expecting it because, well, I had never been to the Canary Islands to begin with, but I just suddenly realized if you have something on Netflix, they're gonna see it. And it's in Spanish, but still, it was a surprise that somebody would come up to me with a Spanish accent asking for a picture or something. I was so humbled. It was. It was really nice.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Nice people, nice folks. Yeah. Really, really interesting. The rest of us coming and going, nobody looking twice. But, yeah, you were just. You couldn't. You couldn't walk five paces.

[E]

Oh, no, no, no, no. It's a couple of times. It was a couple of times. The people are really, really nice. I seem to remember the driver. The scene of the driver scene.

[D]

I was like. I was very sweet.

[E]

So sweet and so smiling all the time.

[D]

And he was hota friendly driver. Oh, he's friendly.

[C]

Yeah. Hotaramo.

[B]

The fellow who pulls up and says, can we get you some water? I love that guy. And he's a stuntman.

[C]

He was a stuntman because where we wanted to shoot was a slight uphill and the truck we wanted to use was on its last legs. So we needed a stunt driver because we were gonna have him in such close proximity to Vezka. So we were auditioning stunt folks and I think we saw Hota. And he has such a wonderful bubbly smile, and his performance was so lovely. That's sort of just who he is as a person. He was perfect for being an other.

[B]

Love that guy. Bye Bye.

[C]

Yeah, that's a great moment. I love that line. That wasn't scripted or anything. He says Chaito at the end because it's the friendly way. And I remember that was so meaningful for you, Faz. I think you said, I don't know, your grandmother, family or someone used to say chaito. Do you? Felt very authentically South American, which is.

[B]

Kind of like straight away, bye bye. Kind of.

[E]

Yeah. But it's. It's almost like caressing someone by saying goodbye. Chaito. Because it's diminutive.

[C]

Yes.

[E]

So chow is like bye.

[C]

Oh, okay.

[B]

It's like little chow. Chow. Little chow.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is kind of like bye bye. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Cool.

[B]

I love it. Very cute, Chaito.

[E]

It took me by surprise.

[D]

Like, what?

[E]

Wait, what? Yeah. I was supposed to give him a hateful look, but when he said chaito, I was like, bye.

[A]

Melts even the hardest heart. Yeah, definitely.

[E]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And it's such a badass sequence. An amazing sound of the empty jerry can. That and all the shots you got Adam. I love it. I love the close up. It's just right out of the. Like an old Western machete. Yeah. Unsnapping.

[E]

I felt like in a Sergio Leone.

[B]

Yeah, now you're talking. Yeah, yeah.

[E]

You would cut at him and you would speak to me in Italian.

[D]

I was practicing. That was my approach to being in Spain.

[B]

Do you speak Italian, too?

[E]

No, but I think he understands from Spanish. I can pick up stuff.

[A]

Veska. Similar to Adam having to sort of keep things different and keep things moving throughout the montage. As a performer, Minusos goes through a real ordeal and it takes quite a long time. And there's a real progression of his physical state, his emotional state, his mental state. How do you keep track of that?

[E]

And yet his words are basically the same through the whole thing.

[A]

Quite the same.

[E]

So I remembered an exercise you do in acting training, and it's that they give you a scene like you're a cop and you're interrogating someone. You have two students and they can only speak, saying the lyrics to Mary Had a Little Lamb. And you have to play the scene, but you can only say, mary had a little lamb. And it was basically something like. You talk about looking for different ways of addressing the same thing with different emotional states. And I remember that exercise, which is a lot of fun, that exercise, somebody interrogating someone just by saying, mary had a little lamb. And the other one goes, she was white as snow. Yes, it's really good. And that gave me the.

[B]

That's cool.

[E]

Yeah, it's a great exercise. It's a great exercise. Fortunately, I had a lot of people reminding me where in the Journey he was, because we shot everything chronologically except for this. I mean, I was so fortunate that I had everyone reminding me, this is happening at this moment. So this. You have to be this tired for this moment and next scene. No, you have to go back and be less tired for this thing. It was the same for the car because we would shoot Ecuador car, and then the next scene would be Chile, which is before. Right, right, right. At some point you would tell me, it's too much, too tired or too stressed. He looks too much in distress. Don't cry. I remember he would come to me crying.

[B]

That's the wreckage.

[E]

Yeah. I remember once you said, you a have puddle in your eye and it doesn't work. Just get rid of it.

[C]

You're right. You captured such a different tone in the two montages. For us, it's act two and then act three of the script, the first one, where everything you're saying is learning English. So it's bizarre. It's nonsensical. It's like that the cat is gray stuff. But then in that second montage, it has a different tone. They're both arduous journeys. But the second one, you're doing your mantra over and over and over again. And because Chris, you're hosting, I feel like it's our job to ask you the question of how did you approach that as an editor, like, telling that story?

[A]

It is pertinent that I edited this episode and you did. I guess I should announce that you.

[B]

Did a magnificent job. It's amazing.

[A]

Thank you very much. I wouldn't say that made my job easy, but the footage is so good and so well planned and thought out. For me, it was finding where do we want to be, when, how do we want to tell this story, and then finding just the right pieces of performance that tied it together and then cutting it together. We had a music cue that we. Incredible cue that we ultimately couldn't use, but we did use another cue by the same artists. It has a very similar vibe, but ultimately I think works a lot better for the piece as a whole. It's tricky because it's not just like, isn't this cool? Let's put some music on. It's an epic journey and. And it's an emotional journey, but it's also fun to watch. And it's a big ask for a piece of music, a preexisting piece of music to hit a lot of these different emotional tones where it's. He's having a very hard journey, but it's a hopeful journey. He has this hope in that drive across the Pan American highway, up the entirety of South America. And I do also want to shout out one of the really cool things. I thought that was in the script and that was in the conception of the episode was charting this with these kind of like Indiana Jones style maps. And Vince, the way that you describe the maps, you wanted them to be photorealistic. And, you know, we wanted to match that kind of red grease pencil that Minutsos uses, that we see him use practically, but without, you know, a hand, without. So it's this kind of trick. You have to trick the brain. You're not inside the map, but you are inside the map and you're watching, you're tracing this path. And I think there are seven shots of those maps. And we had a digital map that was acquired. And then we were trying to figure out, how are we going to do this? Is this visual effects? Is this what kind of art Again, it's another really, like, bespoke ask for an artist. Because you have to be technically very savvy to know how to create this digitally and make it look photoreal. You have to have like a filmmaker's sensibility for storytelling, because it's not just A to B. There's a pacing to it that the artist actually has to almost be like a performer in creating these moments. And it has to match the timing that we have already locked in. And we were trying to figure it out. The very first person I thought of, one of my best friends since we were children, his name is Oliver Scott. He's just this multi talented artist and filmmaker. And we actually just started doing a movie podcast together about audio commentaries on physical media. It's called Commentarily Legal. But I thought of him immediately because he had done some similar work on Michael Morris's film to Leslie, which I edited. He had done a lot of work on the main title in taking these photographs that we made digitally and making them look like they were physical objects in physical space. And even a version. And I showed it to Diane and Andrew, and I was just like, I think this is the person to do this. Obviously, let's talk to all of our other people, our other vendors that we go to. But ultimately, he was the right guy for the job, and I just think he nailed it.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

I just wanted to shout that out. Cause I really love how that looks. And it's just kind of Big Lebowski style. Ties the room together. It's just. It really. I just. I love that stuff. And I'm really happy with how that montage and the next one turned out as well, which is stylistically totally different. And, you know, there was a version that had music, and it was different style of music. And then the Chunga palms. Every single time anybody watches that sequence, when you fall on the between your face and physical body performance, and then the sound effects, it is so convincing, it viscerally affects me. And I've seen it a million times. And every time it never stops being like, oh, no.

[B]

Full body wince every single time.

[A]

Yeah.

[E]

For me, it was clear what I was supposed to do to achieve it was another matter. But the figure of a chunga tree was so clear to me, like, this is the monster. But then I went back home to Colombia and I started talking about it. In Colombia, it has a different name. The ethnic communities in that region in Colombia, they call it guerrilla, and for them is like a holy tree that has nothing dangerous about for them is they Build everything from that tree.

[B]

They call it holy because it leaves holes in you.

[E]

Holy.

[C]

Holed.

[E]

That's how it leaves you. So I thought, that's amazing. For someone who doesn't belong to that place, that thing is terrifying, and it is terrifying for someone who lives in that place. It's like a friend. It's like, oh, I make things out of this. This is my friend. I can needle things with it. I can build stuff with it. So I actually felt bad because I thought, I'm a Colombian. I should know, and I don't. So it was a learning experience for me. The chonga tree, the werge, actually, that's really fascinating.

[A]

It's something like the blowfish. You know, there's a way to prepare blowfish that's totally safe. And if you know what you're doing and you have the traditions and you understand, it's completely safe. And if you don't, it can kill you.

[E]

Right.

[A]

So I think there are probably a lot of things like that for one community, an incredibly positive thing. And for an outsider who doesn't know what they're doing and encounters them and maybe doesn't take the proper precautions.

[E]

Sure.

[A]

You know, it could be death.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

I love the way you play that, and I love the way you directed that. I love.

[E]

Amazing.

[B]

I remember listening to you guys talking about the blocking of it, and for a while there it was. My first thought was, he slides down a hill, and it's a. It's one lying.

[D]

It's rolls down the hill and.

[B]

Yeah, but your version is so much better because it's Simpler. Simpler is.999 times out of a thousand, simpler is better. And the way when you grab. When you. When that close up of your foot on the little boulder, the little rock, and it goes out from under you, and just the sound effect of that rock hitting the other rock, then Adam cuts to you, and you're flailing, and you reach up and you grab that. There's one last chance you get. Grab that vine that it breaks. And I just literally shut my eyes every time I see that thing. It's just. It's so good.

[E]

And you guys remember the rock that I exploded?

[C]

It's in the gag reel, in fact.

[D]

Oh, like a giant stuff. We had, like, giant styrofoam rocks.

[C]

Everything's Styrofoam.

[E]

But I thought they were solid. I was sure that they were solid, so that's why I just. I went to it.

[C]

Yes. You launched yourself forward off of the spikes and into the rocks in front of you. And luckily the rocks in front of you were indeed styrofoam rocks. And it just. It was hollow and it just exploded.

[D]

I was so worried.

[C]

I was so worried about you.

[E]

I was worried about them, but you were fine. I was worried about our department. I was like, oh, my God.

[C]

Luckily, that was one of the last shots of the day, or I think there would have been some tears from our beautiful painters.

[B]

Good thing we didn't fill it with chunga palms.

[C]

I know.

[E]

Just put some stuff in it.

[B]

A toy surprise inside.

[D]

Interesting that where we shot that was a protected nature preserve where they. One of the asks is that we didn't move any rocks.

[C]

That's true. It was a national park.

[D]

That is true. We had to bring our own painted styrofoam rocks so we didn't disturb the rocks that were there. And the chunk of trees are all shipped in. Denise manufactured those trees, spikes. We had five or six that we had to carefully place them and they were only so high, so we could only photograph up to a certain point.

[C]

Without visual effects extension extending them.

[A]

And the trees that you're chopping too, didn't we bring those in as well? Yeah, those are our trees. Yeah.

[D]

Because we couldn't cut any vegetation. So the scenes where Minusos is with the machete, the ferns, we had to create our own little fern tunnel.

[A]

As we sort of wrap up this conversation, I just wanted to talk about two other things quickly. This is our first in the series. Kind of our first big time jump. You know, we've been in not real time, but we've been, you know, sort of experiencing this with Carol and with Minusos. And we go through this ordeal with Minusos. We sort of leave on him in grave peril, in grave danger. And then we come back and it's been quite a few weeks later.

[C]

Weeks, yes.

[A]

And Carol is no longer singing her happy tunes and she's silent.

[C]

She's upgraded in certain ways over those 40 days. She's in isolation at first. She's entertaining herself. That Act 1 is very much like Carol's best day ever. You know, she's going to the spa, she's golfing. The only person on the gol golf course. She's living her best life in a certain way and singing to herself. And you think maybe, you know, she feels rebellious, she is doing okay. And then we have this big time jump forward to what it ends up being the end of her isolation, though, when you watch it, you don't know that at first. Now she's got a Boombox that's blaring music at max volume. You know, something we in the mix, we made. Sure. Like, take it till it breaks, as we say. Like, she's got this Judas Priest has to be so loud. And she's not golfing on a golf course anymore. She's, you know, whacking balls off a parking garage. She's taken over the city in a different way. And she herself is silent. And what we talked about in the writers room was that there were a lot of ways to show Carol's descent. You can show it incrementally over the course of many weeks. You know, check in with her day three, day seven, day 12. But often when things break in your brain in a certain way, this punishment, this psychological torture she's going through where she's alone in this city, sometimes things break all at once and, you know, and you're fine just right up until the point that you're not. And so for Carol, I think it was important for us to show the beginning of her journey and the end, because those are the two most interesting, most important moments. And the audience can decide what they think all the middle days are. But, Vince, would you say that's true? Like, as we were breaking.

[B]

I think this is one of those episodes, in part because there was so little dialogue, it was a little hard for folks to wrap their heads around in the reading of it. And then when you see it and you're like, oh, I get it. Oh, but by the way, was any glass actually broken in the making of that scene where she's.

[C]

Where she's driving golf balls off of the building at the other one? Oh, tons, tons. That is all beautiful visual effects.

[B]

We just sort of slunk out of there.

[C]

We didn't tell.

[A]

Yeah, we'd appreciate it if you not tell anybody either. If you're listening to this, don't tell.

[B]

The city of Albuquerque. That was us. It's amazing. All visual effects.

[C]

It's all, yes, it's a real golf ball she's hitting, but it was one that was tied to a string. And then in Adam's planning of the shots, he just knew we were gonna to knock out a bunch of glass. And you added one of my favorite details, Adam, was the glasses on the desk that get pulled off by special effects. Right. When the golf ball.

[A]

Right.

[D]

We tried a couple things. We tried the glasses. We tried the wedding portrait. A couple things got knocked over.

[B]

But it's a real pair of glasses. They get jerked off the desktop with a fish line. But then the golf Ball hitting them is completely created digitally. And the glass breaking is completely. It's just where reality stops and computer generated images take over is. It's amazing. It's kind of scary too, but it.

[C]

Really is also in this episode, the fireworks scene, because that is a real wonderful mix of practical effects and visual effects. And I think that combination is what hides the fact that it's not all vfx. We didn't actually set off any fireworks there. However, we did have special effects fill those mortars with whatever that explosive is. I forget exactly what the mix of ingredients is. So the low level explosion, the light where the rocket would be shooting out, that's all practice. There's real smoke coming by her practical. Exactly. But then Waylon, our chief lighting technician, our gaffer, he had these giant LED lights that were timed to certain colors. You know, if AB's like, oh, I want a blue one and then a purple firework, that's all lights. Because we needed that interactive light on Carol. And then our VFX team Rodeo would put in the actual firework in the sky as needed.

[E]

Yeah, and her acting in that scene is.

[D]

She's.

[E]

It got me to think, and maybe I don't know what you guys think about it, but she seems to have everything material at her hand. She has everything she wants, and yet she looks empty. And this other guy who's struggling in the middle of a jungle, he doesn't have anything and yet he has a purpose. It got me to think how contemporary world works where you can have everything, everything you want, but you don't concern yourself too much about what you need.

[B]

Yeah, that's well put. I like the way you said so.

[E]

You were talking about the contrast between Carol's and Manusa's situations and how they are. And I just started thinking, this show has so many layers that you can read into it. Because for me, it was like a commentary on how we've been taught that happiness is and things that we get outside yourself. Like happiness is exogenous, where I think it's endogenous, it's in yourself. And this guy has something in himself, a purpose that he has and that fills his life, that pulls him through the jungle, through the changa, through the whole thing. She has everything and yet she's empty.

[B]

Yeah, you're right.

[C]

Chris, I know we have to wrap up soon, but I would love to give a shout out, if I can, to the wonderful folks at the Georgia o' Keeffe Museum, who allowed us to license the painting Belladonna, which is the one that Carol steals from the Georgia o' Keeffe Museum. And they were really wonderful partners the whole way. The team there, Renee and Liz and Jennifer and Cody. In the podcast for episode two, you guys talk about how early we started talking about Air Force One. Right alongside that was as soon as we broke this episode in the writers room, I started talking to our clearances manager, Janine about Georgia o'. Keeffe. Because to license real art takes time. And we knew we were going to need both access to the museum. Though ultimately we ended up building the museum under their supervision because it turns out to shoot in the actual museum around priceless art, we would not have been able to bring in lights. We could have a crew of seven. And we didn't want to rob Adam of any riches. So we built a portion that Adam and Denise, our production designer, figured out exactly how much of the gallery we needed to recreate based on his shot. But we recreated all of the artworks there and we used the Georgia o' Keeffe Museum's real framing company to frame the painting. The replica that we did. And we had them bless not just the set and the replica, but every single decision we made along the way was in partnership with them. But it took quite, quite a long, a long time.

[A]

So like a year of lead time, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

It was a hell of a producing job. You guys did it. And then all the very amazingly recreated works of art that are made to perfection. The recreations, I don't want to say fakes because that's not the word you would use. But then they all had to be destroyed after we're growing.

[C]

Yes. Though perhaps we have not destroyed the one that is in Carol's house set just in case we needed any pickups at any point. So at the end of the show we'll be destroyed. But we partnered with these guys on Breaking Bad and in the past they have been such great partners. The trickiest part about the painting we chose because we did say to the George Okeefe Museum, do you have a preference what painting we use? And they gave us a short list of a few, including belladonna. Then we chose that one. The trickiest part about it is getting Georgia o' Keeffe's white, the white paint, because they gave us a high res file of the painting, scanned which we printed out on canvas. And then ultimately the white was never. No matter how many times we printed it out, we could never get it to look quite right. And so finally we had our onset painter. One of our prepping painters figure out exactly what the right shade of white would be and then paint on top of the printed canvas and both to get that texture, but to get the white exactly to the Georgia o' Keeffe Museum standards. Had we known that, we perhaps wouldn't have chosen a white flower, but it makes it all the more delicious. Knowing how much work went into getting it.

[B]

I would have gone with the dogs playing poker guy myself, but I got overruled. That's a classic, too.

[A]

Well, I love this episode and this was a really fun conversation. Thank you guys, everybody, for coming on in on a Sunday, and thank you for listening.

[E]

Thank you.

[C]

Thank you, Chris.

[B]

Thank you, everybody.

[A]

All right, thank you so much to Carlos Manuel Vesca, Adam Bernstein, Jen Carroll and Vince Gilligan. And thank you for listening to Pluribus, the official podcast, an Apple TV podcast produced by Highbridge Productions and Sony Pictures Television. Be sure to follow on Apple Podcasts to get the next episode in your feed, including those bonus episodes. And watch Pluribus on Apple TV where available. Our editor and mixer is Nicholas Tsai. Theme music by Dave Porter. Associate producers are Alana Hoffman, Justin Verbeeste and Nicholas Tsai. Executive producers are Jen Carroll and me. Your host, Chris McCaleb. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.