Finneas O'Connell: Go over the overhead shot.
♪ A visible illusion ♪
[indistinct conversations]
♪ Oh, where it starts, it ends ♪ ♪ Love like a sunset… ♪
Lee Sung Jin: That came very late.
Jake Schreier: Very late.
Lee Sung Jin: [laughs] As always, with all things, uh, Sonny.
[all laughing]
Lee Sung Jin: I mean, on the page, I had the idea of wanting to end the season on… on, you know, winter. If all the couples are different seasons, like YJ's character Chairwoman Park being sort of representative of the winter season of your life, and having her give this sort of regretful monologue, and putting her head on the grave. And you executed it really wonderfully. It's beautiful to look at.
Jake Schreier: We're sitting in this graveyard in Korea, and the sun's going down, and we still need to get a drone shot. And we're both at the monitor, like, watching it, and we're like… "Did we get it?"
[all laughing]
Jake Schreier: "You get it?" And you're like…
Lee Sung Jin: I was like, "Yeah, we got it."
Jake Schreier: And I'm like, "Yeah, we got it, right?" And we moved on, and then you're in post, and it has nothing to do with, like, anything that YJ did or didn't do, or what we did. It was just, like, you're learning in real time that that probably isn't the end of the show.
Lee Sung Jin: No.
Jake Schreier: Yeah.
Lee Sung Jin: No, it's, like, weird to end on one of the prospective characters that isn’t one of our four leads. And also, she is playing the, like, billionaire, even though a billionaire is regretful, it's not, like, necessarily someone, in our current climate that you want to root for and walk away being like, "Thanks for that lesson, evil billionaire."
[all laughing]
Lee Sung Jin: And so, we had the opportunity to reshoot some things overall for the season. You know, Jake being, like always, ever planning and ever, you know, trying to look out for everything. He was like, "You sure you don't want to, like, try to reshoot something for this?"
Jake Schreier: Well, I just know, you know, I think especially between Sonny and Grace, you know, it's like, if the prompt was, "OK, you get another crack at thinking about how would you actually like to end the season?" Like, "What is something that could truly--" 'Cause I think there had been a plan, like, there was, you know, obviously in reference to Season 1, where it pulls up at the end so beautifully, is there a way to do a nod to that? And we had a drone shot above her in Korea, but, like, I don't think we had the time to get together anything around her of the order that we wanted. So it was like, "Is there something we could pull out to that has some significance?" And then you and Grace went off and, like, got, of course, blew it far out of proportion. [laughs]
Lee Sung Jin: As part of the theme of the season, you know, with the writers and with Grace, our production designer, um, I had these samsara paintings from Buddhist and Hindu history that I just loved and I looked at often from writing the show, 'cause it's such a kind of unnerving depiction of life, you know, this Buddhist idea that we're stuck in a cycle of samsara, of, like, you know, eternal love and death and life and suffering.
Jake Schreier: You know, everyone put so much work into this season to, like, give you another chance to think about, like, “How do you actually want to end this?" It felt like-- It was funny, right? Because there were these other reshoots that were what we were supposed to be doing. And like, "While we're doing it, we'll get this shot." And then, of course, it quickly ate up the entire resources.
Lee Sung Jin: And we kept telling the network, like, "Oh, it's just like-- Remember that drone shot in the dailies?" "It's just like that. We're just gonna do a top shot and just, like, some furniture from storage."
Jake Schreier: Grace has never "just" done anything.
Lee Sung Jin: Yeah, yeah.
Finneas O'Connell: I love it, man.
Lee Sung Jin: Thank you.
Finneas O'Connell: I thought it turns it into, in the best way, like a theatrical device to me. You know what I mean? Like, it turns it into choreography.
Lee Sung Jin: Yeah.
Finneas O'Connell: And I think that it's a great button on an epilogue, which, like, I think epilogues are generally super satisfying because you're like, "Cool, it's done," right? Like, especially in a television world, right? Even though this is totally different than Season 1, you're like, "No Season 3 with these characters." Like, we've seen eight years into the future, seen how it works out for all of them.
Lee Sung Jin: Yeah.
Finneas O'Connell: And I thought that it was a kind of a cool, you know, super impressionistic button on that sequence of, like, yeah, it is a, like, in the eyes of the creative mind behind the thing. It's like, we've made this play. Here's this play. Here's their roles in this. I thought it was great.
Lee Sung Jin: I'm very happy we got it. I just felt like it was lacking hitting something a little bit deeper, and I had this song by Phoenix in my head the whole time, uh, "Love Like a Sunset." We played it on set on the day while we were doing the top shot, and just, like, we're, like, timing it perfectly. But then even still, in the mix, like, wasn't quite hitting. So then…
Finneas O'Connell: We added some synths… added some arps.
Lee Sung Jin: So Finneas came in, added some stems on top of the thing, and, um…
Finneas O'Connell: Great song.
Lee Sung Jin: Yeah.
Finneas O'Connell: He's got such a specific, cool voice. I thought that while I worked on that. I was like, this guy's voice is so great.