The Big Picture

The eighth episode of Season 2 of The Afterparty, titled “Feng,” pays homage to the found footage genre, using an iPhone’s native camera app for a realistic and unprofessional look. Director Eric Appel worked closely with actor Ken Jeong to showcase his more dramatic side in this episode, which breaks apart his character and explores his vulnerability. Appel also had the opportunity to work with Zach Woods, who improvised moments on set that ended up being hilarious and unexpected, such as the scene where Woods covered his nipples.

In Season 2 of the Apple TV+ comedy series The Afterparty, naturally another murder has occurred, reeling Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) back into the mix, due to her desire to team back up with Aniq (Sam Richardson) and solve the crime. As the pair make their way through questioning all the family members and guests at the wedding of Grace (Poppy Liu) and the now super dead Edgar (Zach Woods), they take what they learn about the fateful event, with each recounting being told in a different film genre to match the individual’s perspective, to find the guilty party for this whodunnit.

The eighth episode of the season, entitled “Feng,” follows the father of the bride in a found footage style using iPhones. During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, episode director Eric Appel, who also directed the season’s first episode, “Anniq 2: The Sequel,” talked about how he approached incorporating the genre into the episode, leaning more into the social media aspect of it all, getting to explore a more dramatic side of Ken Jeong, and whether he was clued in on who murdered Edgar. He also talked about how his career has changed since Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, the type of comedy Stepdude is, which he hopes to shoot after the writers’ and actors’ strikes end, and what it was like to work with Paul Reubens on the Pee-Wee Gets an iPad short.

Collider: I have so much fun with this show because the different genres with every episode keeps things more unexpected.

ERIC APPEL: I know. I was a big fan of it before I came on board to direct in Season 2, so I was very excited for the opportunity to direct a show that I was already a fan of.

Image via Apple TV+

This episode that you directed, “Feng,” is considered to be a tribute to the found footage genre. That’s a genre that got really big, it was frequently used for a period of time, and then it faded away. How did you want to approach it for this? What did you want to make sure to include? What did you want to draw from?

APPEL: The found footage genre really predated the everything-being-filmed-on-iPhones era. It was a new approach to that found footage look, shooting everything vertically. We actually shot it with the iPhone’s native camera app. There were a lot of discussions about how realistic we wanted to make it look. As much as all the other episodes really leaned hard into the film genres they were portraying and tried to play up all the tropes of those genres and mimic the exact look, I really wanted this to look unprofessional, in a way. I wanted it to truly look like it was shot by a 17-year-old kid, vertically and shaky. I wanted the little imperfections to happen, like on an iPhone when you zoom in past a certain point and it switches lenses. I wanted the imperfection of those lens changes. I treated it as seriously as I would have with film noir or Alfred Hitchcock, but it was shot from an iPhone.

Obviously, you did your homework for this episode, but was this a genre you had thought about at all, before this? Had you spent any time thinking about how you’d approach this genre, if you ever did something in it?

APPEL: Not really. Obviously, I film a lot of stuff on my phone, and that’s the approach I took. This is reality. It’s not someone’s memories that we’re seeing depicted in a certain way. In a way, it mirrors Feng’s story and who he is. With Feng, he’s grappling with, “This is what my life is. What you see is what you get. Am I good enough?” That’s why his footage is reality. You’re not seeing it through the lens in his mind. You’re seeing it exactly how it played out and exactly how it was shot. I took from that. I thought about, how do I capture my own life? What do my own home videos look like? What would it look like, if I was actually at a wedding, or in one of these situations, just pointing my camera at what’s happening? That’s really what the approach was.

How did you approach weaving the footage in and figuring out how often to use it? Were there conversations about how frequently to put it into the episode?

APPEL: That was all in there, in the script, when I got it. A few of the choices that were made when I came on board were to lean into the more social media aspects of it. I remember, in my early meeting, saying that it would be fun to see a little bit more. This is a 17-year-old, so I’m sure he’s using Snapchat and TikTok. If we’re downloading his camera roll, we’re gonna see raw footage, but interspersed is also gonna see the stuff that he’s been posting. That was definitely one of the discussions that we had.

Image via Apple TV+

This episode is focused on Feng, which means you got to work quite heavily with Ken Jeong on this. What did you most enjoy about that? What was it like to work with him and explore the character with him, especially because this is the episode that really breaks his character apart?

APPEL: Yeah. It was really exciting to get to do something like this with Ken, and he was really excited to show this more dramatic side of himself. I know that when he saw the first season, it was the Ben Schwartz performance that really grabbed him because we’re so used to seeing Ben Schwartz commit to these really big comedic performances, and we got to see a more grounded, realistic, emotional side of him. I was very excited to take this journey with Ken and get to do this. We saved the really emotional stuff for the end of the shoot. It was all built toward those final moments. I primarily direct comedy, and Ken mostly performs comedy. The two of us tackling this more dramatic material together was really exciting.

The moment that Edgar steps out of the pool covering his nipples with his hands really cracked me up. Was that something that was scripted? Was that all Zach Woods? How did that come about?

APPEL: The nipple covering moment was all Zach Woods. I’ve known Zach for a really long time. We were both improvisers together at the Upright Citizens Brigade, 20 years ago. I got to work with both The Office and Silicon Valley, and it’s incredible the amount of improvised moments with Zach Woods that end up in the shows that he works on. He’s someone that you can always rely on, to come up with something really funny and interesting that you would have never thought to put in a script. It’s really hard, on set, to not blow takes from laughing, when you’re so close to where the action is happening.

How does this series approach its shooting schedule? Did you shoot the first episode, and then have to wait until episodes two through seven were shot, before you could do episode eight, or did you shoot them back to back? How does that work?

APPEL: So, (executive producer) Chris Miller was actually the first director to shoot. He did episodes three and nine. Those were the first two episodes that were shot. I came in and I did episode one and eight, and shot them together. We would shoot out certain locations. When we were at the wedding tent, I did the wedding tent scenes from the first episode and from the eighth episode. It was all location dependent. And I think they paired those two episodes together because having to introduce everything in episode one was so gigantic. Almost every scene had every character in it. And then, I paired that with much smaller, single-take iPhone/found footage scenes. They involved a little bit more rehearsal time, but they tended to shoot a lot faster because we weren’t having to deal with changing lighting setups and getting all this the camera coverage. We would rehearse it a bunch, and then we would do about a dozen takes of it.

Image via Apple TV+

This is not only a big cast that you have to introduce, but you also have a lizard. It’s quite the ensemble.

APPEL: Yeah, that lizard was definitely a challenge. And we had a dog, as well. There was a lot of figuring out when we could use a fake lizard and when we had to bring the real lizard in. I think there were maybe four or five lizards, that were all trained, but to do very little. The trainer was like, “There’s not much you can do with this lizard. Where do you want him to sit?”

With the way that this show is set up with the different genres, do they ask what genres you’d be interested in? Do you just get a genre randomly assigned?

APPEL: They sent me four scripts. It was the Sebastian heist episode, the film noir episode, and then the two that I ended up directing. I had a Zoom call with (co-showrunners) Chris Miller and Anthony King, and we talked through all the episodes, and then I found out which ones I was getting.

Were you told how Edgar’s death happened and who was responsible for it? Is that something you know the answer to? Was that not information you were given because you didn’t necessarily have to know, in order to do the episodes that you did?

APPEL: I don’t know that I necessarily had to know, but I do know and I’m excited for the world to know. I can’t wait to talk to people about it. It’s interesting, directing this show, you have to know everything that happens in all the other episodes because of the way that they all weave in and out of one another. Especially with directing the first episode of the season, I needed to know all of those moments because that first episode is just wall-to-wall moments that you’re gonna see coming back, throughout the season, in various ways. Having to set the stage for all of this to play out, I definitely had to know where it was going. When a certain person leaves a scene, I had to know where people thought they were headed to, where they were actually headed to, and things like that. It was a lot to it was a lot to juggle, for sure, but it was a very fun challenge.

Image via Roku Channel

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story definitely got some love and attention. What’s it like to have a hit movie like that in Hollywood? Did you, all of a sudden, notice that your agent was getting more calls about meeting with you?

APPEL: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. The incoming calls definitely ramped up, after the movie came out. It’s interesting, I had directed TV for a solid decade before I made Weird, but after making Weird, it’s almost like I didn’t exist before. I’ve always wanted to direct movies. The tone of the meetings that I would go to, post-Weird, was just a lot different. All of a sudden, people seemed to be interested in my opinions a little bit more than prior to that. The difference between all the TV projects that I worked on and Weird is that, as a TV director, with a show like The Afterparty, you have a little bit more freedom to bring your creativity to it because of the nature of what the show is, getting to play in these different genres, but typically, you’re there to execute the writer’s vision and oftentimes you’re coming onto a show where the machine is already working really well and you’re just coming along to execute. With a feature, especially when I co-wrote Weird, as well, I’m putting more myself up on the screen, so the response to it created a lot more pressure. It’s like, “Well, this is me. This is what I would do when I make a movie like this.” It’s definitely a different experience.

Do you know what the next thing is that you’re doing? Will it be Stepdude?

APPEL: Stepdude is something that, had we not all gone on strike, and for very good reasons, I think I would be in Hawaii making that right now, or at least prepping it. That’s still the next thing on my schedule, but I’m just not entirely sure when that’s gonna happen. I also have some other projects, in various states of development, that are percolating.

Where does Stepdude fall, in the line of comedy between Weird and The Afterparty episodes that you’ve done? How does the comedy of that feel?

APPEL: I would say it’s a little bit in that Meet the Parents world. It’s got a lot of big laughs. It exists in a world that’s a little bit more grounded than Weird was, I think. Tonally, I would say it lives somewhere around What About Bob? or Meet the Parents. Those are two comps that I use, which is fun because my first episode of The Afterparty this year was a Meet The Parents studio comedy. So, when Stepdude entered my life, I was primed to work on a project like that.

Are you someone who has a drawer of scripts or a computer file of scripts that you’re hoping to get made, at some point?

APPEL: Yeah. I have a project that I’ve been working on writing with a friend of mine that I used to write sketch comedy with in New York. During the writers’ strike, we’ve been Zooming with each other and talking about this script that we’d like to have ready to go when things get back. I have plenty of ideas. I have a lot of half ideas. I have a drawer full of log lines that are just waiting to turn into movies.

Image via Netflix

You directed and worked with Paul Rubens on Pee-Wee Gets an iPad. What do you remember about working with him? What stands out to you about that experience, however brief it might have been?

APPEL: It was incredibly brief. We shot that the day after the first iPad was announced. The idea was that Paul was about to do the Pee-Wee live show, and they approached Funny or Die and said, “We can do a video, but it has to be the right thing and it should be topical.” So, I came up with this iPad idea and shot it in about 30 minutes. I was such a huge Pee-Wee fan. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is in my all-time top five movies, and I was such a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse fan, as a kid. I really cared so much about this world. I know that Paul was a little bit skeptical because we were shooting it so fast and it came together so quick. He was a little precious about his character. So, I edited it that evening and I got a call from Paul Rubens, and he was like, “I can tell that you’re a fan of this world. You just did such a great job with this.”

When he did his show on Broadway, he invited me and my sister out to see the show live and we went backstage. We kept in touch, throughout the years. I got very close to directing the Netflix Pee-Wee movie (Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday), but ultimately didn’t end up doing it. Paul was just the greatest guy, ever. I got birthday texts from him, every year on my birthday. This past year, he sent me this three-minute long, really personal video message that I will treasure for the rest of my life. He was just like a fantastic, supportive human being. When we went backstage for the Broadway show, he told my sister how lucky he was that he got to work with me on the video. That was mind-blowing to us, thinking back to being nine years old in our pajamas, watching him every Saturday morning. He was just a really incredible guy.

The Afterparty is available to stream at Apple TV+.