JULY 2, 2006
PANIC
Hey! Shawn here for my weekly Producer's Blog.
"Panic" was directed by Kevin Speckmaier, who is one of the two rotating First Assistant Directors we have on the show. We first bumped Kevin up in the third season to direct "Total Awareness," which ended up being a pretty big episode and a pretty successful episode for us. "Panic" was the second TDZ episode he directed and he directed this season's finale, as well.
This episode is kind of a claustrophobic, home invasion episode where Johnny gets to really see a little bit more about the character that is the Smith house.
We've always been fascinated with not only this wonderful set, but -- as in one of the earliest episodes that Michael and I wrote together called "The House" -- we were always fascinated by the idea of all the people that walked on those floors. I mean, how many times did Johnny walk in the steps of his father and those of the people that came before him in this house?
So, that was sort of the beginnings of a story idea. Also, we wanted to move our father-son theme forward in terms of Johnny and JJ, and Johnny's father and his grandfather, to sort of loosely tie some of those themes into a claustrophobic, danger show where, literally, Walt and Johnny have to work together to save their son's life.
Everyone, I think, kind of underestimated this episode in terms of production. This was supposed to have been a six-day shoot ... and it turned into an 11-day shoot. It was supposed to have been a bottle show and ended up really becoming an extremely expensive show. I even ended up doing pickups for it when directing in my episode! It was a very piece-y episode.
To really make it sing, there was a lot of detail. Just in the dumbwaiter set alone (where Johnny and JJ and the neighbor kid are on the elevator), there were just so many pieces that it really leant itself more to a feature film than a television schedule or budget.
It's one of those shows where you try to write it to be self-contained on one of the existing sets towards the end of the season, when you're trying to cut back and save a bit of money by using your standing sets without a lot of location changes. It ended up being, basically, just the opposite.
We were over in pretty much every department: Construction, Wardrobe, Makeup, Stunts, Special Effects, Overtime ... and there were a lot of pickup shots that needed to be done to make it work. But, at the end of the day, I thought the episode turned out to be a solid Dead Zone episode.
Until next week,
Shawn Piller
Executive Producer
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