What It's Like Filming 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' In Quarantine

From ELLE

Keeping Up With the Kardashians might be appointment viewing for many people, but it’s not an essential business. So when the state of California mandated strict stay-at-home orders on March 19, the show's future—like many other productions around the globe—fell into limbo. Longtime executive producer Farnaz Farjam called up Kardashian mother-leader Kris Jenner and ping-ponged ideas back and forth: Should they hire a pandemic-specific producer? Assign each family member a cameraperson to live with them? Postpone filming altogether?

Then Jenner suggested the obvious: “What if we just shoot everything ourselves?”

Duh.

If anyone could pull off self-filming a series, it's Jenner and her daughters Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé Kardashian; and Kendall and Kylie Jenner.

The last two months have been an experiment, of sorts. The doyennes of reality television have been shooting confessionals on tripods and recording their family Zoom dinners. At least two full episodes this season (airing September on E!) will consist entirely of spliced footage taken in quarantine.

Farjam, who oversees all production from her home in Los Angeles, told me via phone that the process has been “a big to-do," but that cast and crew are learning to “make it work” in this new housebound normal.

“If Kris gets annoyed and walks out of the camera angle, it's not like we can follow her and continue shooting. She has to come back onto the screen and explain [why she walked away]," she said. “It’s less fly-on-the-wall, because we have to give them direction and they have to be more informative with us… But because this is the Kardashians and they’re entertaining regardless, it will be a fun watch for people.”

Her original plan was to have the Kardashian-Jenner clan capture footage on their personal cell phones and upload it to a shared album. “But as we [saw it come in], I was like, ‘Oh, people are going to get sick of seeing this [poor quality] footage like this,’” Farjam said. “We needed to get them proper interview spaces [for confessionals].”

She hired a director of photography and a technician, who put on a precautionary hazmat suit and configured brightly-lit rooms in Kim’s self-described “minimalist monastery” mansion and in Khloé’s Calabasas home. There they set up phone-friendly tripods, which were carefully cleaned with sanitary wipes to combat the transfer of any germs. The family waited 24 hours before entering the rooms to further avoid any potential COVID-19 contamination.

Like so many of us adjusting to life in the age of quarantine, the Kardashian-Jenners are still working out the technical kinks of working from home. “Sometimes you’ll hear them mumbling under their breath, ‘Who knew a camera person’s job would be so hard?!’” Farjam said. “But, like, that’s funny. That’s gold. That’s stuff we want to include in the show.”

Every Monday, a safely-masked showrunner drops off brand new iPhones to their security teams, and picks up the ones they’ve used to film themselves that week. There's usually around 16 hours of total footage, which is just enough for the show's editorial department to string together story lines. Some family members, Farjam said, are better at remembering to capture footage than others.

“Kourtney is very proud when her screen time is down," Farjam explained. "She’s trying to take a detox a little bit from her phone."

Kim, on the other hand, has been very candid about her time in quarantine, including how she's homeschooling North and Saint, her two oldest kids with husband Kanye West. "I'm really excited for people to see Kim having to juggle everything on her own, especially early on, when it was so, so scary," Farjam said. "Now people have been quarantining for a long time and have trusted people in their lives to help them out, but in the beginning they didn't have that. Watching Kim juggle four kids will be really relatable. No matter how big her house is, four kids is four kids. It's a lot."

The self-shot episodes will also address l'affaire Tristan. Last year, Khloé’s boyfriend and the father of her child, NBA star Tristan Thompson, allegedly cheated on her with Kylie’s former best friend, Jordyn Woods. They broke up, but Farjam said they've been social distancing together.

“Tristan definitely stepped up and helped Khloé a lot with True [their daughter],” Farjam said. “He’s totally showing a way more mature side of himself. I think so much more [highly] of him now. Now that I didn’t like him before, I just like him so, so much more.”

The cast might be using more Purell this season, but Farjam said the drama isn't at all sanitized. “Right before quarantine we had a couple family members that weren’t seeing eye to eye on something” she said. "I can't give away who, but they end up coming together during quarantine, and it's really sweet."

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