Note: This story contains spoilers from “Hijack” Season 2, Episode 1.
You did not see that coming, did you?
For much of its Season 2 premiere, Apple TV’s “Hijack” does not appear to have diverged much from the blueprint of its first season. The episode, titled “Signal,” follows series lead Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) as he boards a packed Berlin train that is inevitably taken off its predetermined journey by its frazzled conductor, Otto (Christian Näthe). The path has been laid for Sam to have to, once again, navigate a high-stakes hijacking as one of its hostages … right?
Not quite. After Sam makes his way into Otto’s compartment, he reveals to both viewers and his out-of-the-loop co-conspirator that, this time, he’s the one doing the hijacking. It is a twist that inverts the central premise of “Hijack” and, according to series co-creator and director Jim Field Smith, it was the only reason to do another season of the hit Apple TV thriller.
“To me, the only way we could bring him back was to make him the architect of it, rather than the passenger again,” Smith told TheWrap. “There’s nothing interesting about making Season 1 again but in a different environment. That would have been the lazy, easy answer. Maybe people would have got past the it’s-happening-again ‘Die Hard’ issue. You can do that and just wear it on your chest and say, ‘Yeah! It’s [this].’ But I was like, ‘No, we have to grab this bull by the horns and come up with a [reason why] it’s happening to him again.’”
As Smith noted, Elba’s Sam could have easily just have been a John McClane-esque figure with extraordinarily bad luck. Odds are, that is exactly what most viewers will go into the “Hijack” Season 2 premiere expecting, and that is why Smith felt the need to change things up this time. “I get a little bit contrary in these situations, and I tend to say, ‘What’s the difficult thing to do?’” the director explained. “The difficult thing to do in this case was to say, ‘He’s the bad guy.’”
In order to further set up its climactic twist, the “Hijack” Season 2 premiere opens in a manner intended to directly mirror the start of its first season. “I said very early on, ‘I want the season opening to be a direct quote of the Season 1 opening,’” Field revealed. “I knew that people would be coming into this season with their arms folded, saying, ‘Okay, let’s see how you’ve managed to do this again.’ A lot of people were worried about that, but I was like, ‘No, this is great, because this means they are going to be prejudiced about what we’re doing.’”
“We wanted to play into that expectation. We wanted people to sit back and think that they are seeing one thing and then the magic trick is that they’re not,” Field said. “My hope is that people get to the end of Episode 1 and they go back and rewatch it and see the homework that was done to make it work. There’s no cheating here. We didn’t lie. It’s all there, and if you watch it again, understanding what Sam is actually up to, it tracks.”
“It’s definitely a gamble, and I think everyone thought, ‘This is going to be really hard to pull off,’” Field acknowledged. “I agreed with them. But those are the best kinds of tricks. The ones that are hard to do.”
Below, Smith opens up more about the new look and twists of “Hijack” Season 2, including why he chose Berlin as the season’s primary setting and the difficulty of making an entire season set on a moving train rather than a plane.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: How early on did you settle on the setting for this season?
Jim Field Smith: The Berlin aspect came a little later. But the underground train idea was, I would say, almost instantaneous. The moment we started talking about doing it again, there were two headline questions that came up for all of us. One was: Why is this happening again? Once you ask that, you’ve got to start thinking, ‘Where’s this going to take place? Where are we going to do another seven, eight-hour series?’ Those questions are actually connected because, if you can find the right environment, you can answer the why and vice versa.
The train was based on wanting to move away from the plane in Season 1. I wanted [this season] to be in a darker place. I wanted a more dynamic environment. The plane is not actually that dynamic. I wanted it to still feel claustrophobic. Tube travel is great for that. I wanted Season 2 to feel visually and thematically like a sort of yin and yang puzzle piece that clicked with Season 1. What’s interesting is, two days ago we were editing a Season 1 recap and that contrast is starkly there. It’s quite stark when you see it side by side, and that’s a deliberate choice because that’s also a reflection of what’s happened to Sam.
Why Berlin?
Smith: I wanted to put Sam in a foreign city because I didn’t want him to be somewhere that was too easy for him. I didn’t want him to have friends around. I didn’t want him to be able to speak the language. I didn’t want him to know the layout of the city, and I didn’t want him to know or be able to second guess how the authorities might react, because the way that the German authorities might react is culturally different from how they might in, let’s say, London or New York or Tokyo. There were only a few cities that have a large enough subway system, so that narrowed it down. Berlin then emerged very quickly as a frontrunner.
I have a little bit of a personal connection to the city, having lived there as a kid. I also love the yellow trains cutting through the gray city. I got very excited about setting it in the winter and it being snowing, much to everyone’s dismay. [Laughs] Personally, until I can start to feel my creative juices flowing, I’m not interested in a project. The moment we settled on Berlin, the season unlocked itself for me. Building a mood board was easy. It was like, “Oh, this is what the season looks like. I’m going to shoot it on these lenses. This is what the sound of the world is going to be like.” It doesn’t make itself, but to a certain extent, it does, you know? It tells you what it’s going to be.
The season premiere really just drops viewers right into the middle of this story. It doesn’t spend much time catching you up. What made you decide to pick back up, essentially, in medias res?
Smith: Audiences are incredibly smart, and I think people are very keyed into what they’re seeing. I also think there’s a huge amount of trust you build with the audience, and I think people forget that. When I get notes from the studio, there’s often a slight lack of trust and an underestimation of how smart audiences are. I like to trust the audience a little bit, and I like to think that they trust me a little bit as a storyteller, even if they don’t know me or know what I’ve made before.
In this case, it’s Season 2. People have watched Season 1, presumably. They are prepped, and I immediately latched onto that. I just thought, “They have expectations, and that’s perfect, because we can lean into those expectations and we can subvert them.” You sort of lose an episode, in essence, because Episode 1 does a lot of leg work to set up this world and the situation Sam has orchestrated. But I hope it feels like it pays off, as we start to unpack how he has gotten himself into this position and why. And when you learn why, you understand how.
Everything feels more cramped this season because of the train. What would you say was the biggest technical challenge of the season?
Smith: Easy is boring. For me, as a filmmaker, I’ve got to continue to push myself and find new ways of doing things and force myself to think more creatively. I like to push my team in a similar way, and they like being pushed. The train presented a huge problem. The plane in Season 1 doesn’t really do much. That’s the whole point. It’s 35,000 feet [in the air]. It’s not acting dynamically because it’s not supposed to. Nothing much really happens to the plane or the environment around it and there are just these tiny portholes, so it’s quite easy to contain what you see.
An underground train is an altogether different prospect because you’ve got big windows and you’ve got a moving environment and the train itself is moving. We had to build something we called the Jiggle Rig, which involved mounting this train that we built from scratch, which is a perfect 1-to-1 replica of a Berlin train. We mounted it on a pneumatic rig, and that helped with [the movement] because I didn’t want the actors to have to think about it. I wanted them to just be on this train and everything to be moving in a way that they had zero control over. And you can feel that. It feels real. You don’t have to think about it. It’s really hard to cheat that, so we had to do that, essentially, for real. That was tricky.
There aren’t just tiny portholes on a train, either.
Smith: Right. Anyone who has stood on a tube train will know that when you look down the length of the train, the whole thing kinks around like a snake. That’s a really strong, visceral thing you see, and it’s quite disconcerting. So we had to figure out how to achieve that as well. We had a thing called a Sway Rig, which meant that the actual two train carriages [we built] were mounted independently of each other and could be moved laterally. But that all had to exist also within our LED Volume.
We took a six-camera rig onto the Berlin underground and filmed hours’ worth of footage that could accurately portray the position of the train and what that looks like, and then we also had all these interactive lighting rigs as well. All that is quite tricky. But that illusion has got to work because the viewer has to be tuned into the emotion of what’s happening. I don’t want you sitting there thinking, “Oh, that doesn’t look real.” Making that work for nine months of shooting and being able to show up every morning and not go, “Oh, how are we going to make this work today?,” [is important]. It’s got to work the first time, every time.
That’s how we were able to shoot the way that we did and achieve the right effect. It requires a huge amount of forethought, a lot of creative brains banging their heads against the wall and trying things out. I’m really, really proud of what we achieved this season because it definitely was not easy, but the show could not have worked otherwise.
New episodes of “Hijack” Season 2 premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV.
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