‘Hacks’ Season 4 Cinematography Interview — Shooting in Singapore

It’s no secret that “Hacks” is well-liked around here at IndieWire. We’ve put it on our list of best TV shows, best shot TV shows, and dug into how their production design, costume, hair and makeup, and writing teams have all crafted a great comedy series. But the work that cinematographer Adam Bricker and his camera team pulled off while shooting on location in Singapore for the Season 4 finale, “Heaven,” includes a sequence that might be the most beautiful thing “Hacks” has ever shot — or any other TV comedy, for that matter. 

There are actually two bravura montages in “Heaven.” Both of them catch Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) in a fraught place as a result of walking away from her Late Night series before seeing Ava (Hannah Einbinder) fired from it. The first, following a dejected Deborah around a bargain store one listless, late night in Vegas, glows with a disconnect between bright lights and loneliness that would make anyone with depression do the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme. 

But the second occurs once Deborah’s figured out a scheme to get out of her no-compete clause by performing standup via a translator in a Singapore casino. Set to a Faye Wong cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams,” it charts how Deborah falls into an easy (if very luxurious!) routine while Ava watches their vacation stretch on far too long. 

The 3 minute, 44 second sequence may run from Deborah giving Ava a thumbs-up from the stage, pleasantly surprised at how well the jokes are landing, to Deborah falling asleep on stage, forcing the onstage translator (Ai Ling Ho) to improvise, but it emotionally peaks just before that, with a vision of Deborah dancing at a rooftop club with the Singapore skyline behind her — but alone, a little too drunk, on top of the world but also completely lost. 

That kind of poignant, piercing glamor has been in the “Hacks” visual vocabulary since Season 1, but rarely has it been put to the kind of spectacular effect as cinematographer Adam Bricker does here. It’s all the more impressive given how run-and-gun so much of the show’s work in Singapore was — the moment of Deborah dancing was an audible, called by Bricker and “Hacks” showrunners Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky as they worked through the montage locations and realized they still needed a beat somewhere that felt visually epic. 

“That rooftop, I think it’s called One Singapore or something like that, was just one of the most remarkable things that we had seen,” Bricker told IndieWire. “Immediately [production designer Rob Tokarz] and I were like, [Deborah] could be the queen of the world up here. We really fell in love with that space and the scope of it.” 

The “Hacks” crew still only had about 48 hours to put the shoot together, once they decided to go back to that space, and then only had from a 2 A.M. load-in to sunrise to transform the club’s kind of overflow/storage area, off to the side, to something loungy and start shooting. Finding a triangle point in the roof allowed Bricker to not only create an interesting composition for the establishing shot of Deborah against the skyline, but to add a slight sense of danger that ensures we’re having much less fun than Deborah is trying to. 

Bricker and his Singaporean gaffer also lined the sides of the roof with glowing stereo tubes and a concert mover of red light that — and this is a technical term — just does something when put against Jean Smart’s face. 

“I think you’re not used to seeing Deborah Vance lit from below. There’s something kind of magical, and it feels naturalistic because you’re in a club, but it’s just not typically what you’d see in ‘Hacks,’” Bricker said. “Occasionally splashing some red moving light onto Deborah as she’s dancing, [with] freestyle steadicam floating around her, Jean had full freedom of movement. Our steadicam operator [Watcharawit Ya-Inta] just did a wonderful job.” 

The show’s focus puller also does the Lord’s work in the last shot of the beat, just after Deborah’s face turns and looks toward the camera, flashing red for one desperate second before going fuzzy and indistinct, like a drunken exhale. 

The stylization in that moment, and throughout the episode, was born both out of the necessity of moving the production to a new place and a desire to acknowledge that the characters aren’t in Kansas (well, Los Angeles) anymore. “We can’t do what we have necessarily been doing, but also maybe we shouldn’t be, and maybe we should look at it from a different perspective and try to find a new visual approach, while maintaining the identity of the show,” Bricker said. “That whole Singaporean crew really, really stepped up the challenge.” 

But for as fun and visually striking as “Hacks’” sojourn in Singapore was, Bricker is incredibly proud of the work the show’s LA-based crew did on Season 4, and the entire series, which set them up for success. 

“There’s a ‘Made In LA’ movement and a real desire for people to do the right thing and shoot in LA, and something I think is missed in a lot of that is — I think it’s great and the noble thing to do and the right thing to do, but I also think productions should be thinking a little selfishly and LA has the best crews in the world,” Bricker said. “Our work on ‘Hacks,’ every season we’re recognized for the cinematography, and that’s no small feat for a half-hour comedy, and that’s not typical. That is indicative of what this LA crew brings to this show, and it wouldn’t be what it is without them.” 

All episodes of “Hacks” are streaming on Max.