SPOILER alert: This interview contains spoilers for Season 2, Episode 7 of “Our Flag Means Death,” now streaming on Max.
For the second season of “Our Flag Means Death,” Max’s comedy series starring Taika Waititi and Rhys Darby, the producers’ goal was to raise both the emotional stakes and the scale of its world building — which is exemplified in the final scene of Season 2’s penultimate episode, “Man on Fire.”
Interrupting an intense duel between Stede Bonnet (Darby) and Pirate Queen Zheng Yi Sao (Ruibo Qian), all the ships in the bay of the Republic of Pirates explode at the same time when Prince Ricky Barnes (Erroll Shand) betrays a pact with Zheng.
To pull the siege off, director of photography Mike Berlucchi, visual effects supervisor David Van Dyke and production designer Ra Vincent teamed up to devise a cable lighting system to mimic flaming cannonballs and timed the lights to practical special effects explosions on set.
Along with the episode’s director Fernando Frias, they storyboarded every shot for the sequence. Berlucchi said that was unusual for the show, but necessary for that scene: “We had it planned out to a tee, because there were a lot of things that were against us — explosions that we can’t repeat, and all these cannon balls raining down. And then we had the weather to compete with. I do remember that night us getting shut down for a lot of lightning.”
The sequence was shot over the course of two nights, and took a total of 12 hours to film. “We would sling different lights with fire effects down,” Berlucchi recalled. “There were just rows of guys up ahead, firing these things down the line, and they all had to be timed perfectly with our special effects explosion that took down a building.”
Because they did not leave all the effects to post-production, Vincent said they were able to capture genuine reactions from the cast.
“We only needed a couple of really good, convincing little moments to get the audience involved in the story. The moment the building exploded behind Madam Zheng, for instance, was a well-composed conversation between visual effects, special effects, cinematography and lighting,” Vincent said. “We came to the conclusion that as much as we could capture in camera and live as a performance, the more convincing we will be for the audience.”
The modelmaking department made miniatures of Zheng’s ship and the end of some of the other ships, which were then photographed and scanned to be placed in a visual effects environment. This allowed the effects to be created from “layers and layers of reality rather than completely fabricated out of thin air,” Vincent said.
Van Dyke and another director of photography shot generic plates, footage to be used as a background, in New Zealand’s Bay of Island for establishing shots. Van Dyke said they decided to place their practical set in one of the Bay of Island plates and then add in computer-generated ships, water and explosions.
“One of the biggest pitfalls and challenges of visual effects in general is you have to work very, very hard to not make the show or the story or the shot about the effect,” Van Dyke said. “If you have an unbelievable effect that looks weird, or it looks fake, or it is trying too hard to be the joke, then it really steps on [creator] David Jenkins’ writing.”
Giving an example from the episode’s title scene — in which Stede lights a man on fire from a cigar — Van Dyke added: “Visual effects wise, it’s really more about filling in the gaps for the practical team to make sure that we’re allowing their work to really sink.”
In addition to the minimal visual effects, details such as Vincent’s two-story, lived-in Republic of Pirates set — which stood for months and grew real plants — contribute to the realism of the series. “The town is a conglomerate of all of those characters from different parts of the world, personified in a town,” Vincent said.
By keeping the audience invested in the characters rather than merely the action, “Our Flag Means Death” is able to differentiate itself from other pirate stories.
“We’ve always leaned into this very simple style in a way to make it unlike any other pirate genre piece you’ve ever seen,” Berlucchi said. “What is the most simple way forward to tell this story that is still going to be a lot of fun to watch? And fortunately, we have an amazing cast of characters that you just can’t take your eyes off of.”
