How Jake Szymanski directed the ‘mental puzzle’ that was ‘Jury Duty’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“Jury Duty” has no business working as well as it does, and Jake Szymanski, who directed all eight episodes, knows it. “It just sounded like a crazy, almost impossible idea, which is what I’m attracted to,” he tells Gold Derby (watch above). “It sounded tough. It sounded like a mental puzzle on how to pull it off.”
The Amazon Freevee comedy follows Ronald Gladden, a solar panel contractor who believes he’s participating in a documentary as he serves jury duty. In reality, he had no idea he was on a scripted TV show and that everything in his life for three weeks was fake and heavily planned — from the case and the sequestration to the 11 actors as his fellow jurors (and James Marsden as an entitled version of James Marsden) and that dinner at Margaritaville. Szymanski and the “Jury Duty” team spent four months in pre-production meticulously creating an immersive environment that maintained “a sense of reality” for Ronald. But because they didn’t know how Ronald would react to something, they also had to cover their bases and try to anticipate his responses.
“If we wanted a character to say a line or a story beat to happen, it wasn’t as simple as writing it down. We kinda had to plan the 24 hours leading up to that to make it make sense to Ronald. And so it was really viewing prep and production through that lens of creating a reality for someone, not just creating a moment that’s going to end up in the show,” Szymanski shares. “I started to refer to it as directing by flowchart. We had our Plan A, our Plan B and our Plan C. It was all about trying to move the story in the direction we wanted it to move, trying to move Ronald in the direction we wanted him to move, but not forcing it too hard if it wasn’t working in the way we thought would work. Because trying to force it might seem unnatural and tip him off.”
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They had to pull back on a bit on Day 3. As seen in the finale, which shows how the ruse was pulled off, the gag was to hold up Ronald and the jurors at security while a security guard said goodbye to another guard who had gotten fired. Ronald offhandedly remarked that the delay felt like reality TV. “We did not expect him to call it so blatantly so quickly, so we kinda immediately abandoned it and pulled back on all the bits we had planned for security,” Szymanski reveals. “We were terrified that we were three days in and it was over. … To be honest, we were worried about it every single day. It was a very high-stress, high-tension production room there.”
Though it’s easy to call “Jury Duty” a prank show, that was never the goal. “Our entire intent with the show was hopefully not do anything to Ronald but to have our characters be in situations around him and to kind of have Ronald act as a moral compass,” Szymanski says. They lucked out on that front. Ronald instantly became a fan favorite because he was just a good guy. His inherent goodness shone through in every wacky situation producers put him in. “We were looking for a good dude and we tried very hard to find a good dude, so in that way, things went as planned. But I think he exceeded our expectations beyond what we could’ve known. And not just being a good dude, but he somehow was hitting story beats for us without us trying too hard.”
Case in point: Ronald accelerated their story beats for his relationship with Todd (David Brown), a socially awkward inventor who creates things like chants (chair pants). Instead of being “a little distance-y” with Todd, Ronald immediately embraced him and showed him “A Bug’s Life” to let him know it’s OK to be different. The film was one of the movies production stored in the hotel common room as part of the jurors’ sequestration entertainment.
“I wish that I could give credit to one of our writers for planting ‘A Bug’s Life’ knowing it would play out that way, but I think we were kinda just looking to fill it with 20-year-old movies as part of the reality of what the court system might have,” Szymanski says. “And again, that was all Ronald, who saw that in the mix, picked it and realized, ‘Oh, there’s something in this I can use for Todd.'”
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