'Barry' Cinematographer Breaks Down That Season 3 L.A. Freeway Chase

Warning: This story contains spoilers for the sixth episode of Season 3 of Barry, titled "710N." Read at your own risk!

All of Barry's proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. 

Throughout Season 3 of the HBO dark comedy Barry, the titular character (played by Bill Hader) has been haunted by the ghosts of his murderous past. The LAPD is ramping up their investigation of the mass murder at a local warehouse, and Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root) seems hell-bent on torturing his former protégé. Masquerading as a private investigator named Kenneth Goulet, Fuches hunts down the loved ones of Barry's previous victims and then tips them off with his location. 

In the cold open for the sixth episode of Season 3, entitled "710N", Fuches provokes a motocross gang into hunting Barry down as payback for killing their friend. And, at the end of the episode, the gang finds him. In a seven-minute sequence with minimal dialogue and no score, Barry finds himself under attack. He quickly commandeers one of the gang member's bikes and attempts to flee from their wrath. 

What unfolds is a mesmerizing and wild motorbike chase through the streets and freeways of Los Angeles because the motocross gang is seeking vengeance for Taylor's (Dale Pavinski) death. 

Introduced in Season 1, Taylor was an army veteran with serious anger and impulse control issues. After they were connected by their mutual friend Chris (Chris Marquette), Taylor and Barry teamed up for a raid at a stash house, where Taylor saved Barry's life. Later, Taylor recklessly headed out to another job of Barry's, only to get killed by the Bolivians. Barry is responsible for so much death but, ironically, Taylor's murder was not Barry's fault.

Carl Herse, the director of photography for the episode, totally gets it if you were unsure about what was going on with that motocross gang. The "normal language of the show" is anchored in "revealing information from a very subjective point of view, so that you are only understanding information from the perspective of the character that's experiencing it," he tells Metacritic. So, when Barry gets jumped, we're literally along for the ride with him. 

"You're really putting together the information about who these motorcycle riders are, from within the cab of the car, you're really in it with Barry," he explains.

Here, Herse speaks with Metacritic about the unique challenges of weaving through L.A. traffic, filming biker silhouettes at dusk, and Barry's uncanny ability to blend in during moments of chaos. 

Los Angeles traffic is absolutely legendary, and this chase scene takes place in the thick of it. How did you go about staging this sequence? 

A lot of what inspired that sequence is the traffic in L.A. You might be sitting in traffic going nowhere, and suddenly, two motorcycles will shoot by either side of your car going 50 miles an hour. So, I think, having experienced that, [Bill] really wanted to try and capture that feeling and create a chase sequence that unfolded in that environment, which I think people haven't really seen before. 

So, when we first got the script, it literally was written in normal script format. And then there was just a single sentence. It said, "There will be a great lane splitting sequence." And then it went back to normal script format. We worked with our VFX department and stunt coordinator and first AD to flesh out Bill's ideas. And eventually, they created a pre-viz animation sequence. We all watched it as a group. And I remember all of us staring, like, "Oh, my God, this is amazing," and then bursting into laughter at the end. After that moment, there was just a long time where we all looked around and realized, "OK, we have to figure out how to do this now."

One of the big things that became a very early question was whether we could actually shoot on a real highway. Our amazing location manager Jonathan Jansen did find sections of highway, but they were more remote areas, or like the beginnings and ends of highways where we could stop traffic. And we shot on Sundays only because that was the only time that we were allowed to use those sections of highway. Before shooting, we went to the Forum in L.A., which is a big stadium and they have a huge parking lot. And we just took a line of something like 40 cars and brought out camera picture motorcycles as well as the capture vehicle which was primarily a camera on its own motorcycle. We shot mostly motorcycle to motorcycle using a camera bike and a picture vehicle with a stunt driver. The big thing that Bill and I and everyone wanted to do was shoot this practically: We didn't want it to feel in any way like it was done in portrait on a green screen or with too much VFX.

It doesn't appear as if there's any green screen. 

We only relied on blue screen for one particularly complicated shot, when one of the motorcycle riders crashes through Barry's windshield. Bill and I sat and watched movies like The Road Warrior and classic movies that had to be done practically because of the technology that was available at the time.

It's so funny to think that sometimes it's cheaper or more convenient to do VFX instead of practical effects, but the payoff really shows in this sequence.

It was really just breaking it down shot by shot. We had these massive boards of storyboards with color posted notes next to them that said the time we want to do this shot, the order we want to shoot in, what the special equipment needs would be, which camera we'd be using, how we would be monitoring the shot, et cetera. And once you've got those puzzle pieces broken out, you can assemble it in a way and shift things around to make it achievable. For the most part, the highway portion was shot over three Sundays. And then the rest was shot in the normal film environment.

You said most of the highway scenes were shot on motorcycles?

We had a stabilized remote-controlled head that lives on either the nose or the tail of these two motorcycles. Then we brought out two incredible stunt motorcycle cyclists who operate the camera vehicles that our cameras are mounted to. We got Danny Wynands who did The Matrix highway chase sequence, and Regis Harrington, who does Marvel movies, and they were really able to help us to figure out some of the logistics of it. 

But what was interesting about our sequence was that Bill and I really didn't want to depart from our show's voice visually when approaching the sequence. So, a lot of working with those stunt riders involved asking them to push back against what their instincts might be, because the way they're used to shooting these sequences is not how we wanted to approach it. In a stunt sequence, oftentimes, you've got the cameras scraping right over the ground, because it creates all this movement and dynamic, high-speed feeling. But with ours, Bill really wanted this more high-angle perspective, third person perspective [as if] you're in in a video game where you're locked into the action. 

Barry is the anchor for information in the sequence. We're never cutting in to the riders to show how scary and badass they are, they're always these tiny figures in the distance. They're more mysterious, like, "What is going on? Who are these people? They seem to be following me." And I think that the high-angle perspective felt like a video game... very much like you're going with this one character. You're only seeing as much information as Barry has.

The chase definitely inspires a lot of questions: Who are these guys? Who are they related to? 

Another interesting element of this sequence is it's not a known antagonist. It's just like, Barry is good at observing when someone's out to hurt him, but he has to kind of improvise along the way. 

The highway scene leads up to the scene at the car dealership, and dusk starts to fall. Even though it's a crazy moment, there's that striking silhouette of the biker on top of the dealership. Can you talk a bit about staging and filming that scene as well? 

The big intention for the end of this sequence was for it to feel more like dusk and feel like it's all part of one continuity. So, even through the first two thirds of the sequence, we were intermittently trying to make it feel a little darker later in the day and schedule the way we shot it to evoke that. Also, we really wanted the inside of the dealership to be this glowing, alien, UFO vibe. On a normal day, it's very hard to see into the interior of a space through windows. 

Bill was really excited about this idea of the last shot looking like a Joel Sternfeld photo. Sternfeld does all this work on these big landscape formats where there's a lot of different information happening at different depths, and the relationship of the foreground object to the deeper background object is very interesting. 

From a technical standpoint, we spent most of the afternoon rehearsing that with the extras and the car dealer. Once that was really dialed in, we knew we had a tight window of time to actually execute the shot because it's really only about 20 minutes that you have from when the sun is gone below the building. 

I remember it was really getting to the point where I felt like it was starting to get a little bit too dark. And the shot was 90% of the way there and we knew that we probably didn't have enough time to do it again. But we quickly reset everything, swept up broken glass, reset the motorcycle, all these different things. And that final take is the one we used, and it really turned out perfect. There was so much excitement and a sense of accomplishment on set. It was very gratifying. I remember when we wrapped that shot, we had playback set up in the parking lot and let all of our extras and all the crew come around and watch it. And the sense of achievement was so powerful. 

There's so much going on in this scene and so much to look at, and we kind of lose Barry for a moment. Was the intention for Barry to be kind of a living version of Where's Waldo? 

The way that Barry can slip in and out of the normal population is one of his skills. And it's also just kind of a fun, comedic beat to see him appear again after disappearing into a crowd. I think that's what Bill really wanted: to lose him for a second and have this chaotic experience unfold. And then as the crowd parts, you see Barry standing there, and then he just slips away, going back in the direction he came from. As long as he can keep his cool, he can reasonably blend back into the world.

Barry airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO and also

Get to know Carl Herse:
The cinematographer has more than 15 years of credits behind him, most recently working on Apple TV+'s The Afterparty (Metascore: 72), Showtime's Black Monday (57) and Moonbase 8 (61), and Comedy Central's Robbie, in addition to Barry (88).

UPDATED: This story was updated on 5/31/22 to correct a quote about how much green screen was used in the episode.