For decades, German fine-art photographer Thomas Demand has been creating spare interior landscapes that anticipated the look of the Lumon Industries offices in Severance. Now, Demand sits down with the show’s longtime cinematographer (and occasional director) Jessica Lee Gagné to explore their parallel visions of corporate life.
By Jason Clark
Severance cinematographer and director Jessica Lee Gagné’s eyes lit up at the chance to meet the renowned German-born conceptual artist Thomas Demand, not unlike the overhead panels at the show’s Lumon Industries that she has filmed for two seasons running. “I’ve chosen four books to be on my coffee table that are not in [my] library. And his is right at the top,” she says. There’s a definite synergy here: Gagné’s mesmeric clean lines and glorious monochrome offices on the AppleTV+ series share a symbiotic relationship with Demand’s mind-bending photographs of the everyday rigor found in control rooms, hallways, elevators and cubbyholes—all produced from three-dimensional models that he painstakingly creates before capturing them on camera.
Some of Demand’s most recognizable images—notably Control Room, Copyshop, and Staircase—bear a striking resemblance to the doldrums that the “innies” on Severance experience after undergoing a procedure that strips them of their memory of their outside-work lives. Here, Gagné and Demand discuss their work process and how creating physical spaces can also produce an underlying narrative tension.
JESSICA LEE GAGNÉ Thomas, I was a fan of your work before Severance, and I think there’s such a beautiful study of minimalism and making bigger things into objects that is really fascinating. And it’s weird because I work in film, and what we do is create sets and then we get rid of them. It’s like another version of what you do, on another scale.
You go down a Manhattan street at midnight, and there’s still, like, six or seven offices lit, probably for the cleaner or something, but you don’t see them. So, you always look up into the light, into the neon ceiling with whatever random pattern, but there’s always something going on. —Thomas Demand
THOMAS DEMAND The work I do, I have to activate the objects to tell a story, or at least create curiosity of how these objects come together and why they make sense together. When I saw Severance, the corridors, the indirect lighting always fascinated me. You go down a Manhattan street at midnight, and there’s still, like, six or seven offices lit, probably for the cleaner or something, but you don’t see them. So, you always look up into the light, into the neon ceiling with whatever random pattern, but there’s always something going on. It’s never just a ceiling or a box, like in [Jacques Tati’s film] Playtime. The whole plot, as I understand it, is pretty depressing but [the show] doesn’t make it unattractive. It’s all trying to prove how terrible the future is, but it still has some attraction. There’s still color, like there’s always one-bleed color, like a dark green or something, and then a lot of white walls. so it actually is an enormous attraction in terms of composition.
GAGNÉ Everything that goes into the frame is chosen, which is a huge luxury in filmmaking. But I just want to speak about something that you said, Thomas, about sets and movies and how they’re made. When we work on Severance, we are literally in the severed world—that’s how it feels when we enter these sets. They’re huge, and we have hallways around all of the set. There are two circles worth of entire hallways wrapping around that set. So every day, we’re going into this weird reality, and it’s actually very difficult and very alienating. John Turturro, for example, really struggles with our set. The ceilings are low and oppressive. And for him, it affected his psyche. I’ve worked for four years on the show, and I have to ask myself the question, “Can I keep walking those hallways, like it’s mind-numbing?”
DEMAND Do you think that’s why [the storyline of] Mad Men eventually went to L.A., because they had had enough of all that?
GAGNÉ In Season 2, I don’t know if we subconsciously did something like that by saying, “OK, we’re gonna go outside,” you know? We needed to breathe. And then when we did Episode 4 [which depicts an external retreat], the entire crew came back with some color on their skin. But we kind of go through the same process as you do with your work, and I think you’d be fascinated by the amount of work that goes into just choosing a paint color. We’ll have so many samples and do so many tests, and we build miniatures of our sets to test them constantly. Thomas, your work Copyshop, with the purple carpets and the desks… I don’t know that it was a conscious thing, but that image of yours was on my original mood board [for Severance]. So I feel like the art department has their own mood boards, and [production designer] Jeremy Hindle and I were both very much looking at images and building a subconscious library. Because everything does come from reality, and then our reality is then morphed into something else in our subconscious.
DEMAND I also wanted to say about Severance that it needs to have a certain ambivalence. It’s not easily readable. And my work has to also be a bit ambivalent. If it’s an illustration, and it’s really not working on its own, then I can try to kind of swing it somehow. But it needs to have its own life and with that, it needs an ambivalence.
GAGNÉ Yeah, it is why the show stands out. You know, you cannot fold your laundry while you’re watching Severance.
