We had the delight of talking with Director of Photography Craig Wrobleski on shooting the sensational series Legion and Fargo, his favorite and most challenging moments from both, and making the drastic switch between the two!

Legion and the Emmy nominated Fargo were both among my favorite series of the year each distinctive in their own way. To work on not one but both would be a dream, so it was such an honor to talk to someone so involved!

Hypable (H): Legion is a visually stunning feat unlike any I’ve ever seen before. What was it like to work on such an otherworldly series?

Craig Wrobleski (CW): Well “otherworldly” is certainly the word for it. It was unlike anything I had ever done. I knew it would be, having worked with Noah [on Fargo], I understood that he was going to take the show in a very different direction than what we’d been accustomed to for a Marvel show and the genre. So it wasn’t a surprise to me that it was a different world but what was surprising was what a complex and layered world it was and how challenging it was to find our way through it visually. To have it all gel together and make sense to the audience but still keep them on their back foot, and make sure they always had a question in their mind about what was real and what wasn’t.

H: Especially in the superhero world doing something so unconventional is really fresh so it made it even more enjoyable. On the complete other end of the spectrum you have Fargo which is far more grounded in reality, so what was it like to make the switch between the two?

CW: [laughs] I think it was a tough transition for everyone. Legion was such an, as you put it “otherworldly” show, with such a different way of thinking, that you really had to switch your mindset and shift your storytelling skills into a different gear to do a show like Legion whereas Fargo is a complex story to tell but it is grounded in reality and that takes one layer of complexity out of it.

It’s a very firmly established world since Fargo already existed so that part of it was an easy transition to make but shifting our heads out of the Legion mindset and into the Fargo mindset does take a bit of a decompression phase to be able to comeback to the world of Fargo. I think Noah [Hawley – creator of both series] put it best when he said “Fargo’s not the crazy shot show. You have to remember the world you’re living in.” and I felt like that was a good way to bring us back to what Fargo was about.

H: What are some of the more challenging moments you shot for Legion? I know you all really strived to shoot things using practical effects particularly the kitchen scene [above] in the pilot.

CW: There was a definite push on Legion to do things practically as much as possible. A lot of the visual effects in the show are very seamlessly integrated. The reality of a show like Legion, which is a very fantastic and a very incredible show but it also had to exist in some form of a reality that the audience understood to make it believable and relatable and bring a sense of reality to it. We took that approach with the visual effects by doing things practically on camera to keep that grounded and in the physical world. Then the visual effects team could take it to another level with the good foundation of practicality. The kitchen scene is a great example of that.

H: What were your favorite moments to shoot for Legion?

CW: There were so many favorite moments in Legion, I think every episode had its own unique challenge. The montage near the end of episode four with Kerry fighting the D3 soldiers and Cary feeling the blows and the impact back in Summerland intercut with Oliver dancing in the ice cube and The Eye and Syd squaring off. The choreography was so much fun to do to tie all those elements together and it was so emotional for Kerry/Cary and so visually dynamic that was a lot of fun to figure out.

In episode six, working with Hiro Murai (the director) he loved to do things practically as much as possible on camera. We had a lot of really fun elements when Cary sees the ice cube and gets separated from his bed and ends up in the Astral Plane. We did that practically by creating a bed on wheels and stood the actor (Bill Irwin) and bed vertically then pulled the bed away. It’s amazing how the crew gets so into it when you start doing things practically. The reality is, you do stuff against green screen and have the discussion of how great it will be when it’s finished whereas when you do things practically you get to see how great it will be right away and can really get a feel for it.

In episode eight, we tied up a lot of the loose ends of the story to bring it all together. When David is strapped in the chair in the MRI room and all this craziness is going on, the amount lighting work we did in that sequence between the interactive lighting and the light fuse became a real interdepartmental collaboration to get all the lighting, choreography, and stunt work together was a true collaboration. To see it all come together seamlessly knowing how much work went into it was really fulfilling.

H: Especially when you have a team you’re so comfortable with since, like you mentioned, a lot of you work on both Legion and Fargo so it makes that collaboration easier and stronger which is definitely evident in the finished product.

CW: Right, a show like Fargo or Legion wouldn’t get done without the incredible dedication of the crew because it requires 110% effort all day, everyday in order to pull it off because it’s not conventional television. It’s very ambitious and it requires a great deal of thought and consideration in all the elements. So everybody on the crew top to bottom has to really step up and lean in on it and that’s why it gets done the way it does.

Episode eight of Fargo this year [season 3] was a great example of that. All the night work – I remember, when I read the script, I was like “wow, this is not television, this is like feature film!” I was really excited about it because this is a massive opportunity – but then the other side of that comes in when you’re like how are we going to do that on a TV schedule and budget? But everybody top to bottom accepts that this is going to be difficult but we’re going to do it and we’re going to do it well. Mary [Elizabeth Winstead] was such a trooper shooting all night and trudging through. There’s no room for any other kind of thinking on Fargo or Legion.

H: Speaking of Legion, was there anything you watched or anything that inspired or prepared you to start shooting something so psychedelic?

CW: It was interesting because the one thing I didn’t do was read the graphic novels or steep myself in the lore of the X-Men intentionally. I didn’t want to go down that road because I knew Noah wasn’t going to go there. I knew that he wasn’t going to look at it through that same lens so I felt like it would be a disservice to myself and to the project to come at it with preconceived notions about what I thought it was going to be.

What was a bigger influence was the notion of the uncanny which became a real touchstone for what Legion is. Where you would see things you may have seen before but not quite that way and it also spoke to David’s [Dan Stevens] perception of the world where he was surrounded by a world that was so familiar but not. Directors like David Lynch [Twin Peaks] are masters of the uncanny he has a gift for taking the world around us and twisting it in a way that makes us look at it differently and is also deeply unsettling and sometimes just flat-out terrifying. That was a big influence in terms of tone.

Visually, Stanley Kubrick’s work was a big influence, films like A Clockwork Orange and The Shining – especially in episode six because The Shining is an absolutely terrifying movie but it’s so bright. It’s not a traditional horror film; what gives you that sense of unease and the horror was what’s actually happening in the content not so much the look that leads you there.

The work we did in episode six, a lot takes place in Clockworks which is a fairly bright environment but you’re still unsettled by what you’re seeing because it is so familiar but in an unfamiliar way. There’s a lot of callbacks to the first episode and it feels odd – Syd [Rachel Keller] even mentions it at some point basically talking about the uncanny element that we were pursuing visually. The sets themselves were incredibly inspiring as well just the perfect version of what you’d want. Each step of the creative process was elevated every step of the way.

H: Aubrey Plaza [Lenny] had two of my favorite scenes in Legion. The first was in episode six where she’s got this gloating, malevolent dance that was so unexpected but so visually outstanding, can you give us a behind-the-scenes glimpse at that sequence?

CW: When I read that, I just thought “Awh, this is amazing!” like what you said it’s just so unexpected. When you turn the page of the script, you don’t expect to see cue up Nina Simone and watch Lenny dancing all over the place but if you look at that sequence – and this goes back to the whole principle behind Legion – it was grounded in the notion that this is Lenny going back to all of the places where she was victorious over David’s mind. If you look at where those dance sequences were shot, they’re even lit the same as scenes where she’d been victorious.

In the kitchen where he lost it, she’s dancing in the debris and then she swings into the bedroom on the noose that David hung himself with in the fist episode and it was even scripted this way I think the exact words were “Lenny is rubbing her stink all over” and Aubrey obviously ran with that. She was like an animal in that sequence. She’s just reveling in her victories and it’s a moment of pure joy but it’s such a malevolent joy because it’s Lenny which was the grounding point of the sequence and why we shot it that way. It was a callback to the audience, whether they get it consciously or it’s subliminal, they feel that we’ve seen these places before but now it’s different and uncanny.

I’m glad you brought that up because it really embodies the idea of what Legion is which is these incredible sequences that seem unexpected but when you actually start pulling at the threads of it, it’s all grounded and driving the story forward in some way. That sequence on the surface may seem frivolous but it’s actually a major moment in Lenny’s character arc. It was also just a ton of fun to shoot. It was beautiful freestyle shooting like we had no idea what Aubrey was going to do but when she did it, it was just so much fun to watch. Everyone just had such a good time shooting that sequence because of Aubrey who’s such a free spirit to begin with and so to see her unleashed by that was just so much fun.

H: I also really loved the silent movie montage at the end of the season where she crushed The Eye in the same way that it was so horrifying but gleeful at the same time.

CW: I remember reading it and it wasn’t originally scripted as a silent movie – it was actually filmed with dialogue. Then it became the silent montage in post-production where Noah took it to that level and I thought it was just incredible. To turn it into that with that combination of whimsey and malevolence, which is such a trademark of Legion, really keeps you on your toes. It’s very smart the way Noah does it by pushing those two elements against one another because it really creates a tension unlike anything else where you’re feeling these mixed emotions. Then to put Bolero over top of it added such a sense of propulsion to it especially Jeff’s [Russo – composer for Fargo and Legion] version which was very Kubrick-ian and a lot of fun to listen to. The whole sequence was very top-notch.

H: Are you involved at all with season 2 of Legion?

CW: I’m actually not involved. The show moved down to Los Angeles which made it a little more challenging for me to be involved but I can’t wait to see what they do with it. Nobody really knows where it’s going to go after the season one finale. I know they’re prepping right now and will start shooting soon but I’ll be watching as an eager audience member just like everyone else.

Thank you so much Craig Wrobleski for taking the time to give us a behind-the-scenes look at these amazing series! Legion is set to return in 2018 on FX.