01x00 - Making The Leftovers

[bunniefuu]

The Bermuda Triangle covers approximately 500,000 square miles in the Atlantic Ocean, and many believe that over the past hundred years the triangle is responsible for a high number of unexplained disappearances reportedly claiming dozens of planes, ships and over 1,000 lives. Among which were a sortie of Navy Corsair fighters.

They took off... and they disappeared. No radio contact. No wreckage. No explanation.

(Baby crying)

Can you... I don't know.

Can you squeeze me in at 5:00?

sh*t. That's my... Hold on.

It's okay, baby. Shh.

Can you make the formula? I'm going to be home in...

Sam? Sam?

Daddy!

(Car horn honking)

Sam?

(Tires screeching)

Daddy! (Car alarm blarring)

Sam!

Sam!

Where are you?

He was right in the car seat. Sam, where are you?!

Sam!

Sam! Where is he?

(Mumbling in panic) I don't understand.

Sam! Sam!

Sam!

Woman: Iran, 1.47 million. Turkey, 1.55 million. Germany, 1.71 million.

The Leftovers is the story of an amazing event that occurs and changes the world.

There is something called the sudden departure where 2% of the world's population very randomly evaporates.

Man: That doesn't sound like a lot, but on a global scale that's, you know, in the hundreds of millions of people.

There's nothing connecting the people that disappeared.

They were all different ages, races, economic backgrounds.

Nothing unified.

We pick up three years later, and the world has just gotten weird.

The thing about the three year gap and picking up the story later is people have absorbed this blow and are really trying to figure out how do we go on from here.

Man, on tv: And now, for those who want to, let us pray for mercy and forgiveness, and return of those who have left us.

The story concentrates on a small New York suburb of Mapleton, New York where we have lost 100 people.

Not bad people.

Children, families... uh, babies.

Gone.

Our story focuses not on the people who have gone, but the people who remain.

We are watching the story of one family and that family is led by a guy name Kevin Garvey.

He's the chief of police in this town.

One of the things that I actually loved about the character is that he basically is getting pulled from several different sides.

From his family, from his job.

His son, who is a college age son, is wandering the country and completely and totally out of touch with Kevin.

He's trying to find himself in the sense of, what is it all about?

What is this? Why are we even here?

And does it matter?

Woman: Jill is Kevin Garvey's daughter. She is 17 and in high school. Not only is she like a high schooler that has to deal with all sorts of problems, but she's dealing with a dad who's not 100% focused on her because he is chief of police and he has a lot of chaotic things to deal with.

Lindelof: Kevin is basically just trying to put one foot in front of the other.

Do his job in a world that may be crumbling.

Where were you?

The departure. When it happened where were you?

Cleaning out a gutter.

Where were you?

At the laundry mat.

What could've happened?

I mean, some people conjecture that it's the biblical rapture, but we don't know that for sure and I think one of the things that's most intriguing about this show is that it's so ambiguous.

Scientists are trying to find a scientific explanation.

Everyone's trying to understand what this event was.

In my early meetings with Damon, of course that was my first question after reading the script was, what happened to everybody?

And he rightly or wrongly basically just said, "I'm interested in watching people in the show "not know the answer to that question because the reaction is more important than the event."

People say you talk about what it wasn't because you don't know what it was.

I know what it was.

The reverend is saying that this was not the rapture, which means that he regards it to be some kind of a natural... phenomenon.

Belief in the rapture is a particular twist on Christian belief about the end of the world.

Essentially it boils down to the belief that when Christ returns he's going to actually come back twice.

The next time he comes back, he's going to take from the earth all of the Christian believers to meet him in the clouds, and then he's going to go away again with them.

He will then leave the earth running for another seven years of terrible tribulation.

There will then be a great battle called Armageddon, and then he'll reign for a thousand years, and then he'll come again later.

Whereas the more traditional picture, I would argue the more biblical picture, is that when Christ comes back, that's it.

All of the end things happen at once.

When he comes there will be a trumpet blast that everyone will hear, and everyone will know it.

Man, on TV: We convene the council of clerics, representatives of post world religions, who were somewhat conflicted about October 14th, and were thus unable to reach any kind of consensus, which in turn lead us to the scientific community for answers.

If people are disappearing, that's something that's happening right here in our physical universe, so there must be a physics explanation for it.

As to the instantaneous disappearance of 2% of the world population, your conclusion as to what happened to them is, I don't know?

When we think about humans disappearing, immediately certain questions come to mind.

For example, why just humans?

What is it that's selecting only for humans?

Humans are made up of matter, and matter, we were taught in school, can neither be created nor destroyed.

Now that's not exactly true.

Matter can be converted into energy.

That's how stars produce their energy in fact, by converting matter into energy.

That's how atomic bombs produce their energy, and that's exactly what E=MC2 means.

That's how a little bit of matter can be converted into a lot of energy.

So if I have a chunk of matter, like a human, that were to suddenly disappear, if it were converted into energy, that would be the equivalent of a nuclear expl*si*n.

So that can't be what's occurring.

Lindelof: When you hear the premise of the show, I think the only question that there is to ask is the one that you're asking, what was the sudden departure, and why these people?

But as the show goes on, my hope is that you become less invested in that question and more invested in the people that you're watching.

So many of our loved ones were lost three years ago.

We so wonder where they went and why.

If 2% of the world's population did disappear, that would have a very disorientating and destructive effect on the world and society because it would be something that people couldn't understand or accept.

I think if you experience that kind of grief and loss, which is what the town goes through, and no explanation, for some people life changes completely.

In my view you'd have something like a breakdown of society because the moral glue that holds society together is suddenly disrupted.

Everyone's sort of standing back and taking a breath and asking themselves what they believe in now.

I think it's tempting to think that after some kind of catastrophic event people become more religious, or they become more interested in religion.

I'm not sure that's always the case.

The human capacity for unbelief and indifference to God is actually very, very deep-seated.

A lot of characters find that there's no belief system that they can rely on to explain this, and they find themselves gravitating toward these different cults.

The Guilty Remnant is one.

The Guilty Remnant is a new cult that is starting, certainly in Mapleton, but all over the world.

You're not crazy.

You're all businessmen and some of you are parents, and you've just made this choice.

What happened three years ago was a catastrophe from which you never recover.

There is no meaning in the way you used to live.

None whatsoever.

The Guilty Remnant offers relief from that in acknowledging, yes, life is over as we knew it.

That is our premise. We know this.

We're not trying to distract you and say, you know, you'll feel better.

It's this we get it.

We really serve to remind people that that happened, so we're going to stand as living memorials to that.

Where did they come from? What do they want?

You don't even know who they are.

We know who they were.

People are attracted to cults if they're vulnerable, and if they are looking for extraordinary degrees of certainty and guidance in their lives.

Patti runs the Guilty Remnant, and is one of those people who can take a strong stance, and lead others to that stance.

She just never lets go.

They follow people around, and it's very strange, and we don't really know what they want or what they're up to.

It's okay.

Just ignore 'em. C'mon.

They're eating food that's just kind of slop, that keeps 'em alive but doesn't particularly taste good.

They're not having hot showers.

You know, all the luxuries of life go away completely.

People take a vow of silence, and they dress in white, and they smoke cigarettes.

Most of us don't smoke, because we believe that we're going to live a long time, and we don't want to get sick, and they're just saying, "We don't care".

You'd say why would you want to be part of that?

You have communal beds, basically, all on the floor.

There's just peace in the truth, and from the Remnant's perspective, the truth is we only have right now.

There's nothing to say that's going to fix it, so stop with the nonsense.

It's really not about what they stand for inasmuch as what they're pulling away against.

It's time. Everybody's ready to feel better.

Not the Remnant.

I think he hates them. I think it's a deep deep A-distrust, but loathing, of this community that's sprung up.

They've become a real nuisance.

All units on foot. North side of the park, now.

They provoke aggression and hatred.

Go, go, go!

Fight, now, fight! Fight, fight!

Just our presence and kind of what we trigger in people, but we don't fight back, we just stand to bear witness.

The grief that the town feels, and the judgment that we are placing upon them for trying to return to their lives, that's enraging to people, I would imagine.

This Wayne, he's the real deal?

It's as real as it gets.

People call him Holy Wayne.

Now, he doesn't call himself that, but I think he quite likes it.

Can you help me?

There's a great scene in the first episode where a senator comes to Holy Wayne, and we know that the senator's in a lot of pain, he's a very angry man, and the guy says nothing.

And the senator begs him to do something, can he help him.

And the guy still says nothing.

And then the next thing we know, this guy's walking out all smiling.

I am no longer burdened.

All gone?

All gone.

Holy Wayne, in a sense, is a cult leader, and a prophet, and he has this inexplicable power to take people's pain away.

By the point to which we reach the beginning of this series, he is at the height of his powers, but also a fugitive.

He kind of exploits people using his power for his own financial benefit, and also surrounding himself with like a harem of young girls that are kind of his groupies, but Christine has a distinguished position among them.

I love you.

I love you too.

She was just so young when The Departure happened, she was, like, 13, and then after it, she ran away from home, and she found Holy Wayne, and she becomes his spiritual wife, and he takes care of her.

This girl is everything. Yes?

Yes.

In 1587, 117 English settlers arrived just off the coast of what is now North Carolina, and formed the colony of Roanoke.

John White, a newly elected governor, sailed back to England for fresh supplies.

When he returned, the houses and other shelters were nowhere in sight.

The village was abandoned, and its inhabitants had vanished without a trace.

How could people really disappear?

Is it a situation where people have been teleported?

Is it a situation where we have multiple dimensions as are predicted by string theory, and somehow these people slip into another dimension?

Whatever it is, it's something that takes place via some mechanism, and it can't be uncovered.

When we study physics, there's two things that we as humans know are true.

Number one, we don't understand everything, and number two, we will understand more in the future.

And those two things will forever be true.

Matt Jamison is an Episcopalian Reverend, post-Rapture.

The world's attitude to God is ambiguous, to say the least, so he's lost a lot of his business, really.

And indeed, from a personal point of view, his own relationship to God has become very complex.

He feels that he should have been taken, because he was a true believer, and that was the promise, as far as he was concerned, of the biblical Rapture, that Jesus' true followers would be reunited.

It wasn't the Rapture!

They were no better than us! I have proof!

We see him in the pilot claiming that it wasn't the Rapture, certainly not the Rapture as predicted by the Bible.

He becomes a kind of investigative reporter, digging up dirt on the people who disappeared, to show that they were not good people, that it could not have been the Rapture because bad people were taken.

He starts to publish a pamphlet about various people who were taken, and the skeletons in their closets.

This becomes a kind of almost terroristic act within the community, to go after people who are gone.

In that very human way, he justifies it by telling himself that God shows him to remain, to do the dirty work.

What do you believe in, Matt?

Do you know where my family went?

Do you know what it was!?

He articulates to his sister, Nora, that the sudden departure was a test.

It was a test for what comes now.

He sees it in the way that Job saw the various trials which were visited on him.

The loss of his children, the loss of his wealth, the loss of everything.

He sees himself as the shepherd.

Do you know who that is?

Nope.

Her name's Nora something. She was at Hero's Day. Her husband and her kids all disappeared.

Nora, she occupies a very elevated position in this town because she is the most grief-stricken person in this tragedy of tragedies. She has lost the most people in this small town. Their names were... Are... Doug, Jeremy, and Erin. When you have a tragedy occur, the way that what has happened to Nora has happened, it becomes your identity.

I'm so sorry.

Oh. Uh, no worries. Let me get you another one.

No, No, it's fine, I've got to be somewhere anyway.

Sorry.

If she chooses to try and let go of that grief and pain, then who is she?

And I think that's the question about her that I think is really compelling, and something that everyone could relate to.

Kids okay?

Yeah. Jill, she's fine. Tommy's still out west, I think.

Just because he doesn't check in as often as he should, doesn't mean he doesn't love you.

Scott Glenn plays Kevin Garvey Senior, Kevin's father, who is the former Chief of Police.

I was the Chief of Police of this town when this big disappearance happened.

His father went insane, you know, and the big question is, is his father the most sane person in the town?

Or, is he the most insane?

I've been committed to a high security mental institution, because I've started hearing voices, and the voices are from a very profound and high place.

In the normal world, we would just assume that this guy was nuts, but in this world, we have to allow ourselves for the possibility that the voices that he's hearing are real.

They said they sent, or are sending, somebody to help you.

Help me with what?

I don't know.

But whatever it is, you might want to keep it to yourself.

So if we do it in Hawaii, half the guest list won't even show up, which is getting to the point, right?

When we find Meg in the first episode, she's feeling very, uh, suffocated.

And angry, and frustrated, in her life and in her world.

Listen, I know that this is all a little overwhelmin'.

Planning a wedding is a big deal.

It's not, actually.

What?

It's just a party, right?

We're exchanging vows.

That's not the wedding.

She's got a lot of turmoil going on inside her, and a lot of angst, and then the G.R. show up, and they're following me.

Why are you following, everywhere!? Go! Away!

In the pilot, Meg was written as a 20-something-year-old redhead, and there was only like one scene.

For some reason, I fell in love with her, and I was completely drawn to her.

Then I knew that I had to be her.

Yo, ladies. Wanna get stoned and play some ping pong?

We're already stoned.

Oh, okay. Then we can skip right to the ping pong.

The overall effect of in an instant, if 2% of the world's population disappeared, is that it could happen again any time without warning.

Everyone's having a different reaction.

Everyone's trying to come to terms with it in their own kind of way.

The teenagers in particular are getting pretty hedonistic and disconnected and reckless, more so than teenagers usually are.

They're pushing the limits but I think teenagers are always doing that.

It's just, it's amped up with the unknown.

Tragedy can lead people to nihilistic ways of living.

Brenneman: The young people are, like, all bets are off.

Nobody's going to college so we might as well just drink and get stoned.

The kids are certainly less inclined to sit around and mope and wonder why this thing happened.

But there is this magnification that occurs in a world that feels like it's spinning a little bit out of control.

If something terrible happens and somebody can find no hope in the face of it, it's not really surprising.

But if they stare that fact in the eye, so to speak, perhaps they turn to a hedonistic way of living just seeking pleasure because everything's meaningless and pointless.

It was 1878 in Quincy, Illinois when 16-year-old Charles Ashmore went to the well to fetch a bucket of water.

When he didn't return his father and sister set out to look for him.

All they found were clear footprints in the snow that stopped abruptly.

There was no sign of a struggle.

Just footprints that ended on the way to the well.

He was simply gone.

I love Tom Perrotta's book not only because I think the premise is so fresh but the way that he writes characters and suburban life I think is very unique and incredibly relatable.

One of my favorite things about Tom's writing is that he goes so deeply into each character and with such detail where you think "I know exactly what he's talking about."

I've never worked in TV before and Damon is a real veteran of TV and so is Pete.

So, in that sense, though I originated the material I'm very much handing it over to them.

And can you go long on her?

Yeah.

Kind of pick her up and make it kind of dirty if you want.

What is very different from the book and what is immediately apparent is Tom has a little bit more of a satirical quality.

The menace isn't quite as high.

Perrotta: Any translation of the book into a film requires that a new thing is created and I'm totally fine with that.

You'll see that with, say, the character Matt Jameson.

A very minor character in the book and he's become a kind of a major force within the show.

Then there are characters like Dean played by Michael Gaston who aren't in the book.

Lucy Warburton is not in Tom Perrotta's novel.

This is a character that is, um, that was developed for the adaptation.

The most fundamental change on a character level was we took Kevin who is actually the town Mayor in Tom's book and we made him the chief of police because it just felt like that was a much more dynamic job.

And more importantly if you're living in a world that is teetering on the brink of insanity a cop is going to be dealing with insane people on a regular basis in a way that the town mayor probably isn't.

The book is more of a meditation on grief and loss, I think, than... well, just you've got to action it up for TV.

(Laughs) So they do.

An unmanned merchant ship, The Mary Celeste was found adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872.

The ship's cargo was intact and there were no signs of bad weather or a mutiny.

But the crew was gone along with the captain and his entire family.

They were never to be found.

One of most well known mysterious disappearances, is the whole crew of the ship The Mary Celeste.

A perfectly sea worthy ship with valuable cargo is found drifting in the Atlantic Ocean with nobody on board.

The lifeboat was missing.

There was no lifeboat found.

Their fate is probably obvious.

If you think about the... just capsizing they would have drowned.

The big mystery is what caused them to get into the lifeboat.

Why get into a little boat when you have a perfectly sea worthy big boat to which nothing seems to be wrong with it.

The lost colony of Roanoac Island which is one of the earliest English settlements in the New World is a most intriguing story.

A man named White had to come back to London to arrange for further supplies to be sent.

Unfortunately it was for three years before he got back when he got back there was nobody there.

It wasn't clear what had happened to the people.

He did find the letters "CROATOAN" on the tree which was the name of both neighboring island and neighoring tribe.

Nobody really knows what happened to the colonists in those three years.

It's still a mysterious disappearance.

Louis LePrince is an interesting story.

He is now, I think it's fair to say recognized as having invented the moving picture.

He was in the process of taking his invention to America.

He got on a train with his luggage and he was never seen again.

The interesting thing there is that the luggage disappeared as well.

So, did he in fact ever get on the train?

There are all kinds of questions about that one which make it a particularly interesting disappearance.

Let's roll 'em.

A mark.

C mark.

Here we go, folks.

And action!

Bring in my fighters.

Come on down, guilty remnants.

What Pete does and what Damon does is kind of a magic trick as far as I'm concerned.

It's a high science for them.

Every time Damon comes on set it's like a radar kind of goes off in my head and I look around for him and then there he is.

And it's, like, "Hey, dude, what's this?"

And he's, like, "Do you really wanna..."

That's the famous Damon Lindelof line.

"Do you really wanna know?"

And it's so scary that usually I'm, like... usually I'm, like, "No, man. No, no.

"No. I don't want to... no."

There's a part of you that feels like he knows.

He knows everything. He knows where this is going to go and what's going to happen.

And that he's cast you for a reason and he's asking you to do certain things for a reason, but you don't know yet because something else is going to happen.

You can even lose, I'm not sure, if you...

Damon basically just crushes down on every character, every scene, he really, you know, gets into the sandbox and drills down on all those character stuff.

We've had a little bit of talk about where things were going but I have to say most of it has been a surprise to me.

Sometimes because it's a surprise to them what Nora is doing, I think.

He wants to live in the moment.

These characters are impacting on him and his writers as they're impacting on the audience and on us.

And what I love is that I don't know where I'm going.

It's how I watch television just one episode at a time.

So as an actor it's just one script at a time for me.

And I find that to be the healthiest way for me to work.

It's great when it's a sort of surprise because life is like that.

And this is a really strange slice of life.

Livvy, go sit out again. Start from the top.

Amy, will you come back in and exit again, please?

Pete Berg who is very energetic and crazy and amazing... and he loves to just throw everything as you think it's going to happen away and just put you in these situations that feel really chaotic but it creates this incredible tension, and it makes everyone very free.

But I really like something almost extreme.

Like real long lensy.

Here, profile, face.

Tight on the eye.

Looks up.

Pete has this kind of, you know, whirling dervish kind of, you know, insane, macho, whatever you want to call it, just... he's just very aggressive about his directing style in the way he just throws cameras around.

When I say approach you guys are going to slowly start moving in on them.

He knows that there's a world that he can play in and that he can control these little characters on his videogame through his monitor.

And tell them "Go this way, do that, run with them."

And the camera operators are going to know if that might happen too.

Floyd!

He's an improvising director which is very rare.

Okay, thank you all very much.

Good job...

♪

I think the story's going to resonate with so many people in a very intimate way.

Whatever the viewers' assumptions are about this rapture-like event should be a welcomed discussion.

I hope that people will just relish the mystery and some of the ambiguity because, frankly, our lives are full of it.

Let it happen to somebody else for a while.

You k*lled for great purpose? Yes, but you k*lled.

It just feels real. You feel like you're peaking in on these peoples' lives.

It's about what it is to be human.

If we work very very hard and if we're committed to our vision, it's possible that we might make something that feels different or new.

Cut!

And cutting.