Not unlike a certain alien virus, Pluribus hooks you and doesn’t let go. Created by Vince Gilligan, who famously got his start on The X-Files before becoming the Emmy-winning mastermind of Breaking Bad and its companion pieces, Better Call Saul and El Camino, the Apple TV sci-fi series was one of the buzziest breakouts of the past season. Television Academy voters responded in kind, bestowing 18 Emmy nominations on the show, from Best Drama Series all the way through the craft categories.
Gilligan approached the series with a mandate: “Create something wholly new.” That pervaded the entire production and required the various departments to collaborate to build two worlds: One before the arrival of the extraterrestrial hive-mind virus and one after the collective takes over. Members of the show’s Emmy-nominated post-production team — editor Joey Liew, composer Dave Porter, music supervisor Thomas Golubić, production sound mixer Phillip Palmer, and re-recording mixers Larry Benjamin and Tim Hoogenakker — joined Gold Derby to explain how they executed Gilligan’s vision and made the “roller-coaster ride” that is Season 1.
Watch the full discussion above and read on for highlights from our Q&A with the Emmy-nominated team that brought the series to chilling life.
Gold Derby: Let’s start at the beginning. The pilot episode, “We Is Us,” has to establish this world and then set the stakes with this story that is very high-concept. How did each of you contribute to that goal?
Phillip Palmer (production sound mixer): We got to start at the beginning of the story. Our first day of production was literally the beginning of the show, with those dishes. It was fantastic that this science-fiction story began in this amazing location, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, with these satellite dishes. So we got to begin the whole journey at the start of the show. We were able to shoot almost linearly for the pilot, starting from the beginning, and that enabled us to really get into the flow of the show. Because if you’ve seen the pilot, once it starts going, it’s a roller-coaster ride.
Watch the opening scene:
Larry Benjamin (re-recording sound mixer): To echo what Phillip was saying, we divided it into two portions. The first was the world that existed before everybody was infected with the virus. We wanted to sell the real world as being busy — a lot of life, busyness at the airport, wildlife, backgrounds, ambiences, things like that, elevated. Then, once the hive mind took over and the others communicated telepathically, we had much more space between the notes, if you will — silence, quiet. We were really selling the contrast. And Tim did a beautiful job with the sound effects and the backgrounds — he can speak to selling those ambiances, those little hyper-realistic moments that we poked through.
Carol at the hospital in the beginning of Episode 1 Apple TV
Tim Hoogenakker (re-recording sound mixer): Similar to what Larry was saying, especially in the opening of the show, you have the distant truck driving in from far away — you just hear this little quiet truck and ambience. It starts very soft, very chill, very quiet, and then slowly things start brewing and the truck gets closer. We get closer shots and angles of the dishes outside, the hums of the satellite dishes, the ambience of just how alone they all were outside — going to the contrast of them inside the shack, all yelling at each other. That started off the flow of it.
Dave Porter (composer, sound mixer): For all of us, the mandate from Vince Gilligan and our producers, all the way down, was that we needed to create something wholly new — a wholly new environment that you haven’t seen before from us. From the original-music standpoint, that meant a whole new sound, something we hadn’t done before: full orchestra, choir. And following an arc, which these guys have already mentioned, that really propels our pilot — which is so crucial in setting the tone and our whole understanding of this world we’re creating. We start with, honestly, a sense that humanity is naive and a little behind the times, but so excited about this revelation that they probably wish they weren’t going to discover. Then we move into some really fun opportunities with music that’s very tense and horror-filled, all the way through to the crazy realizations that Carol has to make at the end. And then, of course, teasing our main title at the end of the first episode.
Thomas Golubić (music supervisor): As Dave put it really well, we’re doing world-building, and we have two worlds that we’re building — one pre and one post. Part of the fun for us was figuring out how we could each contribute to that. The fun part of working with Dave in particular is that we never know what’s going to be the right solution. A lot of times we may both tackle it in different ways, and it’s really delightful where it lands and how it lands. Especially for the pilot, which is a very score-driven episode, my job was to be very low-key and to make sure I’m adding a sense of reality to the world prior to it — and then essentially letting the echo of the silence thereafter, the synth, carry through. The trick was trying to sell the world as much as possible as what the world is normally like, and then allow the later world to feel very, very different. But don’t let him undersell his importance.
Vince Gilligan really trusts the audience to come along for a ride without explicitly telling us exactly what’s going on all the time. So much of Pluribus takes place without dialogue. The show relies on the interplay of the music —the sourced music, the original music — and the sound — the ambient sound and the sound effects. How did you approach filling that emptiness?
Golubić: You described it really aptly — there was an enormous amount of trust in the audience, which is one of the hallmarks of the work, from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul to El Camino. Those projects have always engaged the audience to have their own experience and to figure things out on their own. Vince loves to have people figuring things out as they go; it’s not spoon-fed by any means. With Pluribus, because it was such a new world for all of us, we had to avoid any of the previous clichés we’d gotten comfortable with. The Albuquerque we had in previous shows had to feel very different from this Albuquerque. On a score level, the sound had to be really different. What Larry and Tim did had to feel different, in that it didn’t draw on the same tricks we’ve used in other shows. In the same way that Vince was trying to reinvigorate and really take a chance on creating something that could fail, he was asking all of us to take that risk as well. That bravery became an incredible opportunity for all of us to test ourselves and find new ways of doing our jobs, where perhaps we hadn’t done it quite like that before.
Carol observes the Others as they sleepApple TV
Porter: In terms of the score and this new world we’re building — one of the great things, and I’m sure these guys are going to talk about it too, is that without a ton of dialogue, there’s a lot more space aurally for us to hear and room to play with. For the score, I was able to utilize a lot of vocals, which is something a composer would often avoid, because the sound of human voices is right in the same range as the important dialogue you’re going to want to hear. So it left open a lot of space to do that kind of thing and experiment in a range of sounds we don’t normally get to play with as much.
Hoogenakker: It was a little awkward at first to get used to: this is now a new world without all this dialogue going on. It was great for me as an effects mixer, because then I’m putting in backgrounds — a dog barking, a little car beep. We’re filling it in. It gave us more of a palette to fill things.
Benjamin: To bounce off what Tim was saying, I want to take the sections that do have dialogue and give them import. We want to sit them into a space. Anytime Carol is talking to Zosia, for instance — whether she’s in her kitchen, or talking to the people who are not affected, maybe they’re at Bilbao Airport — we put that into a big space. Phillip did an amazing job capturing all those elements, and I can further enhance, distort, or modify by putting reverb on something, planting it in a space or the arena. When they’re all sleeping, we can put a little subtle verb in there and make it sound like they’re not just in a place with a lot of other people — because they’re not talking. So we can feel the loneliness. Even if we’re surrounded by the Others, the others are not communicating verbally; they’re doing it telepathically. So we have to keep the dialogue, when there is a presence of dialogue, alive and spatial.
Palmer: It’s funny when this sort of thing is brought up with me, who is the person that captures the dialogue. The space in between the dialogue is as much a part of the show as the dialogue. When the dialogue happens — I mean, the script is everything, but it becomes even more so, because those are the moments we’re telling the story that the silence doesn’t give you. There’s so much in the dialogue, so it becomes super critical. And, like we said, we stripped back Albuquerque. If you were a fan of other shows that Vince and the gang have done in New Mexico, there was quite a sound we had developed for that place. This is not that — we ripped it back. Even where the house is, up on this rise, the sound of the silence is vastly different. We had to lean into that on set, and it was a challenge, because we’re in a busy world. So I have my work cut out for me.
Carol is surrounded by the Others
Joey, we’ve been talking a lot about the pilot episode. I want to talk about the one you were nominated for editing, Episode 5, “Got Milk?,” which is one of the best in the series. How did you build the tension and mystery and create a mini thriller?
Joey Liew (editor): When you mention it being a thriller — silence in general, we’re just so used to noise. Silence is uneasy; it makes you really uncomfortable. If you see something on screen for, I don’t know, 10 seconds without any dialogue or sound, alarm bells go off. Especially with that episode, it’s the first time she’s kind of left alone and had to deal with a lot more movement, and how heightened movement would affect the cut. Toward the end, in the temp sound mix — what we provided for everyone — at the end, where there’s a warehouse, we used the diegetic sounds of the refrigerator going off, being loud, really trying to get into Carol’s headspace. But at the end, we pulled it all back. And I think that’s even more scary. That makes the audience lean in, because silence is really unsettling. I think we were talking about this on another panel — Tim, all that at the end, there were just echoey footsteps.
Carol searches the warehouse in ‘Got Milk?’Apple TV
Hoogenakker: Echoey footsteps — feet on gritty footsteps. So you really feel the grit, which made it feel really alone. We actually worked on making sure it was a little extra gritty as she stepped through that.
Was it always going to end on the cliffhanger, or were we ever going to see more?
Liew: Originally — I don’t know, am I allowed to say this? — I think a bit of another episode, the next episode, was scripted. She was supposed to run out [in “Got Milk?”], but that went into Episode 6. The cliffhanger definitely works, and the audience leans in, because silence is really unsettling.
This story are video are presented by Apple TV.