Inside the Episode That Earned ‘The Rehearsal’ Emmy Nominations

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“The Rehearsal” may not have achieved liftoff among the Emmy nominees for Best Comedy Series, but Nathan Fielder’s Season 2 exploration of cockpit communication and airplane safety — via the best-produced, often highest concept scenarios that HBO’s money can buy — did break through in the Writing, Directing, and Picture Editing categories.

Editor Adam Locke-Norton was justly recognized for managing the two-year flashback to Fielder’s pilot training and making his 737 flight in “My Controls” one of the most involving season finales of recent memory. But Fielder’s own Writing and Directing nominations, and editor Stacy Moon’s nod, were all for “Pilot’s Code,” aka, the one where Nathan Fielder lives as Sully Sullenberger, down to recreating the airline pilot’s earliest life with giant puppet parents.

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That episode was a huge lift for the entire crew on “The Rehearsal,” some of whom have been empowering (enabling?) Fielder’s concepts since “Nathan For You.” IndieWire was able to reach out to cinematographer Marco Codero, costume designer Briana Jorgenson, and makeup department head Katie Machaiek about the invisible army (air force?) of artists who all helped — at the risk of making an Evanescence pun — bring “Pilot’s Code” to life.

The “personality transfer” sections of Episode 3, as Fielder lays out his intentions to live Sully’s life up to his “Miracle on the Hudson” emergency landing, required a very fine balance in terms of how the show would visually treat them and treat Fielder himself. Prosthetics are now in a place where an actor can vanish into them completely, so much of a transformation would the show’s protagonist actually undergo? What would be funniest?

“One of the biggest choices was keeping Nathan’s eyebrows natural throughout, even as Baby Sully,” Machaiek told IndieWire. “As he reminds the audience in voiceover, his reasoning forbecoming Sully is personal, not to make a cinematic biopic. It’s a play within a play — hiseyebrows remind the audience we’re watching Nathan as Sully and keep them in on the joke.”

Likewise, Cordero didn’t want to make any changes to the way the camera team shoots the HBO series in order to create a more immersive view of Nathan-As-Sully living the beats of Sullenberger’s life.

‘Peacemaker’

“There’s something funny about photographing these sequences in a straightforward way, as though they’re no different to the documentary crew than any other moment they’ve captured on Nathan’s behalf,” Cordero told IndieWire. “Still, there were a few details we toyed with. In the nursery, we used the beam of a 20K to act as an exaggerated sun beam, accenting tiny Sully versus the giant furniture and parents, and the camera operators were wheeled around on scaffolds to get good eye lines from the giant parents down to Sully.”

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Clothing is always one of the most immediate ways we can get a sense of a different time or place, and Jorgenson started with exactly what designers on period shows from “The Gilded Age” to “Forever” always do: meticulous research. “[The costume team] worked off actual photos of Sully Sullenberger through various stages of his life as a point of reference and anchor for the different time periods,” Jorgenson told IndieWire. “For the 1950s-era Baby Sully, custom pieces were created from era-accurate cloth diapers to a vintage-inspired nightgown worn during the nursery scene.”

The costume team also worked with production designer Rosie Sanders and the team from Viva La Puppet to create the look for the puppet mother [Pauline Sullenberger] as well as for Taylor Krasne, the actress who plays Fake Pauline, since their dresses needed to be designed in a way that makes sense for the puppet to breastfeed Baby Sully. “To maintain visual continuity, Pauline’s look featured recurring elements — a string of pearls and the color red, both of which became identifiers as her character across different scenes and time periods,” Jorgenson said.

The breastfeeding sequence might seem one of the more intense ones for the makeup team — you don’t generally want your work getting wet, whatever the liquid — but Machaiek said that the real challenge of the Sullenberger flashbacks was the thing that always impacts makeup the most: the environment. “Some of the Sully exterior scenes were shot in 99+ degree heat. Keeping the bald cap and mustache secure in that kind of weather is the first concern,” Machaiek said.

It was a group effort among the makeup team — Machaiek singled out key makeup artist Mara Rouse, who was there for every Sully transformation, and Erin Walters whose first day on set was the Sully Nursery sequence, as well as Rocky Calderon and Laura Peyer — and among all the departments to pull off the Sullenberger sequences so that they landed at the exact intersection of comedy, reality, and documentary where “The Rehearsal” lives. But it’s a challenge that many of the department heads have had a lot of their own rehearsal in doing.

‘The Rehearsal’

“I’ve been fortunate to have worked with Katie Machaiek, Makeup Department Head, and Becca Weber, Hair Department Head, on previous projects, and so it was great to collaborate with them again,” Jorgenson said. “We shared fitting photos throughout the process, and anytime we had specific costume elements in mind, they were always open to running with the idea or building on it creatively. This season offered a wide variety of looks to explore together — from the ‘Wings of Voice’ contestants, to Sully and Lorrie’s ‘80s wedding, to the ‘60s church congregation. It allowed us to stretch creatively and have fun with the range of styles and time periods.”

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“Pilot’s Code” comes together in Fielder’s recreation of Sully’s “Miracle on the Hudson” landing, with his own (hilariously not implausible) explanation for what Sullenberger did just prior to the emergency water landing. In order to create that mingled sense of comedy stunt, drama immersion, and Fielder’s own character arc in the moment, Cordero had to finesse shooting the sequence on a cockpit set against an LED wall.

The visuals there were partially generated by flight simulator software, in order to be as accurate to real flights as possible, especially the ones the show created in its Season 2 premiere, “Gotta Have Fun,” where crashes occurred. But there were visual limitations with that approach that the show had to overcome.

‘The Rehearsal’

“As the software’s intended purpose is flight simulation, not visual effects rendering, its output is limited to 8-bit SDR. To an Alexa’s sensor, that would lack the contrastthat a real environment would have. Realizing this, when we performed our tests with the flight simulator visuals, I drove in an aggressive color correction with Lux Machina’s assistance at their console (Ames O’Connor and their team from Lux Machina provided the LED tech and support),” Cordero said.

The camera team also put a hard light into the cockpit, so as not to rely solely on the LED wall. The wall itself works great as a stand-in for a sky wrapping around a cockpit, and creates a massive soft source for light, but for a sunny flight, the LED wall alone won’t quite cut it. “We used an LED par on a jib that could play as the sun, which was moved around the ‘sky’ by grip Brody Culbertson, who would mimic the sun’s position as it moved in the flight simulator visuals,” Cordero said. Techniques with lighting both in the studio and with color correction in post allow “The Rehearsal,” in “Pilot’s Code” and elsewhere, to toggle between the real stakes of what the show is talking about and the artifice of how they’re approaching it, with Nathan lurking in front of the wall or obviously stepping out of a set.

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In whatever mode “The Rehearsal” is operating, and however on edge it might feel, Jorgenson would remind viewers that every choice is intentional. “Nathan uses clothing as a tool to prepare himself for the psychological spaces he’s about to enter. Whether it’s mimicking someone’s outfit to inhabit their world more closely or choosing looks that submit him to be a wallflower in a situation, the costumes are part of the process,” Jorgenson said. “I really appreciated the opportunity this season gave us to stretch creatively. Even though ‘The Rehearsal’ is a contemporary comedy, we approached the costume design with the same level of thought and intention as any other genre.”

“The Rehearsal” is streaming on Max.

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