On June 5, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for some of the most impressive and engaging work of this TV season. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind television well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
Eight years ago — still two years before Apple TV+ launched, and five years ahead of the “Severance” premiere — Ben Stiller was “desperately seeking a cinematographer.” He was in pre-production on the Showtime (remember Showtime?) limited series “Escape at Dannemora,” a prison break thriller that would mark Stiller’s first serialized directorial effort, and he couldn’t find a director of photography fit for the long shoot ahead.
At the same time, Jessica Lee Gagné was moving to France. “I was actually intentionally not moving to the U.S.,” she said. “I think it’s kind of scary to move to the United States if you don’t have a bigger project. You can kind of get lost in this sea.” So the Canadian cinematographer sold all her things and headed to France, hoping to make more European films.
“On the day of my flight, I was coming out of the money exchange place — this is how long ago this was — and I got the email from one of Ben’s producers,” she said. “When I read the email, there was a small description of ‘Escape at Dannemora.’ I was like, ‘Whoa, I feel like I could crush that. I feel like I should do that.’ And then I cried because I felt that it was going to happen.”
Stiller had heard about Gagné from his friend Christopher Abbott, who worked on her first American film, “Sweet Virginia.” When he asked for a link to the movie, he saw “a beautiful tension and artfulness” in the camerawork and was impressed with how, despite using digital cameras, Gagné was able to make the footage “feel very filmic.” When he found out she was living in Paris — or, more accurately, on her way to Paris — he invited her to meet him in Cannes, where he was headed for the premiere of his latest acting project, Noah Baumbach’s “The Meyerowitz Stories.”
“I had to chug a glass of wine right before that meeting,” Gagné said, in a joint interview with Stiller. “Did I ever tell you? I don’t know if I told you that.”
“You were drunk when we first met?,” Stiller said.
“No, I wasn’t drunk. I just took the edge off.”
“That explains a lot,” Stiller said, laughing.
“OK, let’s not say that I was drunk. No, no, no.”
Any nerves would be more than understandable. While Stiller was looking for a new collaborator on his latest project, Gagné was trying to wrap her head around what the global superstar behind “Reality Bites,” “Zoolander,” and “Tropic Thunder” saw in her work. Each of her films utilized “completely different aesthetics.” She didn’t have a trademark style. She didn’t know Stiller had even seen “Sweet Virginia,” let alone that he was looking for a D.P. who could shoot digital for film.
“I was just trying not to mess it up because, for me, this was a beautiful opportunity. I tried to trust that there was something in me that he liked,” she said. “So before our first meeting, I made this piece of paper to remind myself of things in movies to bring up that I felt would be relevant for this project. So when we were talking, I was looking at my little cheat sheet — I wish I would’ve kept that cheat sheet. It had ‘Klute’ and ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ on it, and those are the things that we ended up bonding on.”
“It was weird that she had all these reference points that were from my generation,” Stiller said, who’s roughly 20 years Gagné’s senior. “She brought some cool photography books to our meeting, too, at whatever hotel restaurant it was in Cannes. For me, I was just trying to feel out what her aesthetic was, and I immediately saw that she had this incredible eye.”
Still, there’s only so much you can learn about someone at a lunch, and they both knew a leap of faith was needed.
“I’ve been doing this for a while,” Stiller said, “and I’ve never really gotten better at figuring out how to do interview meetings where you somehow project forward into what it’s going to be like when you’re on Day 50 of shooting. The one thing I think I have learned is that you never know really. You could have a great interview and a great meeting, but then when you get into it and you’re really in the weeds, it can be really different.”
To everyone’s delight, Stiller and Gagné’s lunch on la Croisette reflected their eventual working relationship. The initial trust they had with each other “developed pretty quickly” on set, and the success of “Escape at Dannemora” — which earned Stiller a DGA Award, along with 12 Emmy nominations — led to “Severance,” which has already won two Emmys, two WGA Awards, and a Peabody on its way to becoming Apple’s most-watched series ever.
Gagné’s brainstorming via photography books paid off in setting the series’ eerie, unique visual design, and even the “cheat sheet” she brought to Cannes became indicative of her obsessive pre-shoot preparations.
“I love prep. I’m a prep freak,” she said. “I can prep forever and ‘Severance’ has taught us that.”
“Jessica makes these incredible notebooks with cutouts and pictures and diagrams,” Stiller said.
“I sit on an office floor and I cut photos.”
“It’s like arts and crafts, but it’s amazing,” Stiller said. “It’s literally one photograph or something. We both look at the photograph and go, ‘Yes, that’s it!’ Then it’s like you’re off to the races. You’ve got this trust because you know you’re both going for the same thing and you’re speaking the same language.”
Whereas Season 1 was built from scratch — Gagné describes the process as a “massive mood board party,” where the hallways were lined with photos and ideas that could be referenced during production — Season 2 required them to shift their focus from creating a world to expanding on one audiences already loved.
“I think it was easier,” Gagné said. “But, I mean, Ben also gave me the mandate of trying to make it look better,” which prompted a giddy laugh from Stiller. “I think the word he always used [was] ‘lush’ — like, ‘more expensive.’”
“And Apple’s like, ‘More expensive?,’” Stiller said.
“I’m definitely, between the both of us, the grittier one, but we did go lusher in Season 2,” Gagné said.
“Season 2 scared me a little bit, because Season 1 was completely its own thing that had no reference points in terms of people having seen it or judging it or liking it or not — we just made it,” Stiller said. “Then, all of a sudden, it was well-received by a lot of the people, and it was now like, ‘OK, what would not screw this up and still expand it? What do people really love about this? Do they love the baby goats? Do they love the hallways? Do they love Mark and Helly’s relationship? Everybody has different things they connect with, so [the focus for Season 2] was more like trying not to lose the thing we’d created.”
A key factor on set was flexibility. While Gagné said she prefers prep to post-production (and Stiller leans the other way), they both prioritize being open to discovery as they go. That wasn’t always the case. Gagné described herself as a “very control-oriented person” who “struggled” to embrace spontaneous change. When he was directing and acting at once, Stiller said he would plan out every scene in rehearsals so he could focus solely on acting when cameras were rolling. But that proved too limiting.
“The most important thing in directing for me is that when you get there, you see what you have, you see what’s through the lens, you see what the actors are doing, and then you react to it, and that’s where it becomes real,” Stiller said. “You have to go, ‘OK, well, this doesn’t feel like I want it to feel.’ You’re dealing with the reality of what you have and trying to get it to the place you want it to be.”
“Ben, you have a very organic process, and it’s actually kind of liberating, especially for a DP,” Gagné said. “As a DP, you want to make sure you’re on the right path for the director and using references, but you never want to lean in too heavily because you don’t want it to become something that’s already been made. It’s just about creating a language with the filmmaker and with the team where we can say one word and we all know what we’re talking about. So we come in with a plan, but then we’re also able to throw it away and create on the spot, understanding that ideas come from many places.”
“I’ve also worked with filmmakers that block that out,” she said. “They’re not able to go there, and usually it’s an ego thing. I mean, I’m trying to be respectful here because I appreciate every project I’ve worked on, but I feel like I became a little allergic to these ways of approaching projects where it’s like, ‘Oh, it needs to look like this’ before we even make it.”
For a duo taking home IndieWire’s Auteur Award, it can’t be overstated how much Stiller and Gagné stressed the value of healthy collaboration — people who share and respond to ideas without an inflated ego or false modesty. Narcissists aren’t good partners, but simply deferring to whoever’s in charge doesn’t help either. Finding artists who strike the right balance can be hard.
“Consistency is helpful for any show,” Stiller said. “I remember when I met with one of our directors for the first time, he showed me all these frames he’d pulled from the show, and I could see that he understood the language of the show very clearly, but he was also inspired by it. And I think that’s the thing: When there’s one or two people on set who’ve been doing it the whole time, whatever their sort of consistency and vision is, you want that to then inspire the other people who come to work on the show. They get what the language is, but it also inspires people to bring their own creativity to it.”
From a cheat sheet on a slip of paper to mood-board parties and creating their own language, Stiller and Gagné have formed a working relationship richer and more rewarding than anyone could’ve expected after that first lunch in France.
“I think we had 186 days of shooting on Season 2,” Stiller said. “That’s a long time. Some days someone’s going to come in in a better mood than someone else. Some days you’ve got a lot of stuff going on in your real life and you’re less together [at work]. So there are going to be days where Jessica’s like, ‘Hey, let’s go, let’s do it.’ And days where I’m like, [groaning] ‘Oh God.’ But I feel like if you have a trust in your working relationship and your friendship too — a trust as people — then you can help each other out through the process.”
“Maybe that’s more like a friendship thing, you know what I mean?,” he added. “As opposed to a traditional cinematographer or director. But these creative relationships, they are based in that. The baseline is the work, but when you have that trust, then it’s really just understanding how to navigate it day by day so that you can get the best out of each other.”
“Severance” is available on Apple TV+.
