1x04 - "Semper I" Episode Discussion

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Discuss Semper I here.

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Alex Gansa: The time-jump is another source of big debate. Could we do this? And would the audience follow if we did it? And we had to do it all through dialogue: “It’s been three weeks, the warrant is about to run out.” I think that there were certain episodes in which we really swung for the fences, and this was one of them because of the time jump, because we were pulling the plug on one of our most dramatically effective narrative techniques.

Carrie watching Brody was riveting. Every time we got into those scenes, with Carrie behind her monitor, and Brody doing something, whether it was sexual, whether it was violent, or damaged, there was electricity. We just didn’t want to overplay our hand. If you remember how “Semper I” opens, it’s with Carrie watching Brody the last day of the surveillance, and she’s sort of narrating his morning: “Get dressed, put this on, smile for the cameras.” All this stuff, which we hopefully thought would convey the idea that she’d been watching for a long time and knew everything about him and was intimate with him in a way. I give credit for the staff’s willingness, and everyone’s willingness, to pull the plug on the surveillance. And it also led to their second cross in the show, and it was a cross that was really, really important. It was one we all held our breaths for when we were watching dailies, because this was a meeting outside a support group, outside a church. This was really the first time that they’d met personally, and not in a professional setting, and we just hoped there was going to be some chemistry between these two.

AVC: Had you read the actors in auditions opposite each other?

AG: No, we had not. It’s so funny. In television you’re talking about writers all the time, “the writers,” “my writers,” but you just cannot overestimate the importance of our directors, especially Michael Cuesta, who worked with Claire [Danes] and Damian [Lewis] a lot in the pilot establishing what that connection is, talking about what each character’s motivation is. We sat in [the writers’ room], overdid it, ad nauseam, talking about that stuff. And that scene outside the church in the rain was really the culmination of all those discussions, and all the cat-and-mouse that was going on between these two characters. And Michael’s idea was not to do a lot of rehearsal, just to throw them into the situation and see what happened. Michael didn’t direct that particular episode, but he was there, and we talked a lot about it with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who did direct the episode. And we all just crossed our fingers in hope that something magic would happen, and I think it did.

AVC: Carrie doesn’t learn anything through surveillance that implicates Brody, so you don’t get a lot out of it on a plot level. It does get you a long way on a character level. Where did you make that call?

AG: That’s why we decided Virgil fucked up and didn’t put any cameras in the garage, because that way, we were able to have it both ways. Yes, Carrie watches Brody. Yes, she becomes personally involved in his life. Yes, she knows things about him, but nothing definitive that says, “Yes or no, he’s a terrorist.” And it also opened the possibility that the audience wasn’t seeing what was going on in the garage as well, so we could keep that question open. And that was just a narrative strategy.

But you’re exactly right. The surveillance was designed to establish a connection without actually having to have them meet. And in the fourth episode, “Semper I,” we shut off the surveillance, which forced Carrie into her next move, which was just as radical, in our opinion, as surveilling him with cameras and microphones, and that is to insert herself into his life. And it really started the second movement of the season.

Alex Gansa talk about Semper I - Read more here: www.avclub.com/articles/alex-gansa-walks-us-through-homelands-first-season,68222/