Best of 2022 (Behind the Scenes): How The Staircase creators carefully staged each death theory
When it comes to understanding the goals of HBO Max's true crime series The Staircase, look no further than its name.
"I think initially what was interesting was that the staircase was a pivotal point in the story. And the decision was made very early on that, of all the things in the TV show, this is the one that we want to be objectively truthful — just the literal staircase," co-showrunner Maggie Cohn tells EW.
Like the docuseries of the same name upon which it's based, HBO Max's Staircase tells the controversial story of writer Michael Peterson (Colin Firth), who was convicted of murdering his wife Kathleen (Toni Collette) after she was found dead at the bottom of the staircase in their home. In addition to following the Petersons and their kids before, during, and after her death and the wild subsequent legal battles, the series also depicts each of the three main theories about how Kathleen died. Depiction 1 posits that it was an accident, and she fell down the stairs. Depiction 2 is the scenario laid out by the prosecution, namely, that Peterson killed her after she confronted him. And depiction 3 is perhaps the one most heatedly debated among internet sleuths: An owl attacked her.
Each scenario is presented in painstaking detail and in such a way that it doesn't feel sensationalized. It's both hard to watch and impossible to look away from. Here, Cohn and creator and co-showrunner Antonio Campos take EW through exactly how they pulled this feat off.
HBO MAX Toni Collette and Colin Firth in 'The Staircase'
The script
From the outset, Campos says it was clear that each of the three scenarios needed to factor into the show in full, but the magnitude of that decision didn't hit him until he really sat down with it. "Until we got in a room, and we were all kind of talking it through and started to write it, it started to feel very real and very alive in a way that before it felt very abstract to me. But from the beginning, these three theories were the ones we knew we were gonna try and recreate," he says.
The staircase
From there, the brief was to perfectly recreate four replicas of the actual staircase — one to be used by the lab techs investigating the crime, two for inside the house itself (with one being clean and the other used for blood splatter), and a green one (more on that in a bit). Luckily for Cohn and Campos, the Peterson family home was actually for sale during pre-production, and the production design team was able to take measurements of the actual stairs. "We took all the measurements, and the marching orders were, 'Make us four identical staircases.' Not one of them was constructed to specification," Cohn says with a laugh. "And I don't say that because people were irresponsible. I say that because I think it's impossible to emulate or replicate anything truthfully. There's always going to be a degree of subjectivity incorporated into it."
She continued, "And I think that's what the representations and the depictions were about. It was about taking key pieces of evidence that don't really change through time — we know that Kathleen Peterson was found at the bottom of the stairs, we don't know how she got there — and it's about what other people bring to The Staircase that defines how the story gets told about what happened that night. And so having the three depictions is a way of showing, just in our way, the slight deviations and major deviations that could have happened in each of those scenarios."
Once the staircases were built, Cohn and Campos staged each of the scenes themselves, with Cohn standing in for Kathleen and Campos for Michael. "Maggie spent a lot of time slipping and falling and getting up and making videos of her sort of in that mode. And then we, the two of us, played Michael and Kathleen and filmed that version of it, and did a side-by-side, like a dual-screen version that we could share with people," explains Campos. "And that was the best way to communicate to the stunt people, who then had to communicate to Colin and Toni, how we were going to do it."
The stunts
Naturally, there was only so much of the action that could physically involve Firth and Collette. "Basically, we had to get the stunt doubles exactly where the actors left off, get them to do the stunt, then freeze there, and get the actors back in to start the action from that point. And that was really hard because they have to start from like zero to 60 right away," says Campos. This is where the aforementioned green staircase comes into play, which Campos likens to a blank canvas. "Because, one, we knew that we had to have blood land in very specific places, and the only way to do that was to have more control in post-production, which was the green screen of it all. And the other thing was, to make it safe, we had to create a staircase that was cushioned from top to bottom," he says, adding, "So the green staircase, it wasn't soft by any means, but it was softer than wood instead, and it allowed them to pull off the stunt more safely."
The owl
No, a real owl was not used in any way during the actual shoot itself. However, in order to create the CGI bird used during the attack, the VFX team did have a "meet and greet" with an owl. "A humane society brought in owls that had been injured and had been rehabilitated, but not to the point where they could be released into the wild. And our VFX team came in and used cameras to photograph them doing their thing, so they could replicate it and use that footage to then create the algorithm that creates the special effects," Cohn says, adding that the experience was a "highlight" of the show's shoot.
courtesy of Antonio Campos Toni Collette contemplates her next scene on 'The Staircase'
The star
Campos shared the picture above with EW, which he took himself. "That picture, when I saw that picture again for the first time, it brought me back to just watching her on the monitor in between takes, and being really in awe of how serious and solemn it was for her in those moments," he says. Campos points out that, aside from scenario 2 in which Michael is depicted as responsible for her death, Collette had to shoot these really taxing moments alone, and he has nothing but praise for his star because of it. "She would go into a very quiet headspace, very quiet, sort of contemplative space. And she would sit in the staircase, because she took those scenes very seriously. She did each one of these scenes multiple times, and it was a very draining process, but she was so committed, and she just wanted to find the truthful version of it. She wanted to just give everything to it."
The shots and the takes
For all their differences, each of the depictions have two very key things in common: long takes and wide shots. Close-ups were avoided on purpose, say Campos and Cohn. "When we were talking about how to approach it, it was like, 'Well, what feels correct here is that we are a fly on the wall, that we take an objective approach, that we don't interfere or comment with editing,' which is what you're doing when you decide to put a camera someplace and decide to cut from one angle to another," Campos explains. "And so as hard as that was to execute in a certain way, because we were trying to pull off some very elaborate choreography, and stunts, eventually, we just knew that that's kind of how we had to do it. And thematically it was the only way to do it."
Cohn says the goal for these three depictions, more so maybe than the rest of the series, was for it to feel like a documentary, and in so doing hopefully be less sensational and more respectful. "The style was like to shoot in the way that one would shoot a documentary, that the camera wasn't influencing perspective, and it was maintaining that kind of distance. And I think, in documentary filmmaking, you keep the camera rolling through the good and through the bad. And so I think it was a bit of an homage to that," she says.
But, at the end of the day, it was still a bit of an experiment for the duo. Says Cohn, "We didn't know how it would turn out. And I think that's what we were trying to do with the entire series, is to respectfully investigate the nature of true crime, and what we're looking at every day and listening to on our way to work. And just dig a little bit deeper into what that inclination is and explore why it looks a certain way, and challenge that."
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