Ayla Ruby
Silo, on Apple TV+, just teased a first look at its econd season, but we’re still hooked on the underground drama from season one. Based on a novella by Hugh Howey, the show is a mix of mystery, dystopia, and science fiction too. Set in the future, the show stars Rebecca Ferguson as Juliette Nichols, an engineer turned sheriff in a society where you must adhere to a mysterious pact that bans technology and knowledge from the past. And oh yeah, everyone lives underground (and only leaves if they’ve done wrong) in a giant Silo. There’s death; there’s secret organizations and also whole lot of stairs.
Graham Yost is the show’s creator and also had an instrumental hand in some of the past decade’s biggest and most exciting shows, including Justified, Slow Horses, and the recent Masters of the Air. He’s got 2 Emmys and even more nominations, and it’s safe to say he knows how to create stories we can’t stop thinking about. With Silo, Yost brings to screen a mystery told within a (slightly claustrophobic!) dystopian world. So we were extremely excited to sit down with him to chat all about Silo.
Over Zoom, Yost shared with us a ton of behind-the-scenes insight on the show. He talked about how Rebecca Ferguson initially passed on the show but how she came back to the character. Yost shed light on Bernard’s arc this season, and hinted a bit of where he will go as the story progresses. He praised Common and his chops at Judicial as Robert Sims. And if you’re a huge Silo fan and have been anxiously waiting for anything from Season 2 (because those stills from a few days were not enough), Yost shared a line from Season 2 that’s full of meaning and a ton to ponder. Read on for the full interview, or listen to the audio above.
Ayla Ruby: So I’d love to know what drew you to the story, initially. What appealed to you about this world of Wool, not Silo, but, yeah?
Graham Yost: Yeah, Wool. It started, I don’t know if it was eight years ago or something, back when I was still working at Sony. And I think it might’ve been when Zack and Jamie were still there, and there was this feeding frenzy to try and get the TV rights because… It had started out they tried to make it as a movie. They had great writers working on it. But it should not be a movie. It’s just too big, too much story. And so I threw my hat in the ring on that. First go round, didn’t get it. Sony didn’t get it. And then when I was going to Apple, I first got hooked going to Apple, because Zack and Jamie were running it, and I’d worked with them for so many years. But it started with Slow Horses and then they said, “We’re also going to do Masters of the Air.” And I said, “You’ve got me.” And then they said, “And we’re also thinking of… We’re really going to make a run to try and partner up with AMC to do Wool.”
Ayla Ruby: Oh, wow.
Graham Yost: And then there was like-
Ayla Ruby: Just the trifecta there.
Graham Yost: Yeah. There you go. That’s it. And that’s been the last five years of my life, so… What got me about it, and when I first through my hat in the ring, if that’s the right term, is that it was a mystery story. I wanted to know what the hell happened. I wanted to know why are these people living in a Silo. When did it happen? What’s going on? And why is there this weird, slightly totalitarian society going on? That was really the hook for me. That… I love the story of the sheriff and his wife that started the whole thing, when he wrote that, and it just became viral, it took off, and that’s why he wrote the books. And then I love Juliette. I just love Juliette. I love someone who is a hero and has no interest in being a hero. That’s not why she does what she does. She just does it because she’s an engineer. She’s got to solve problems. And in her case, she wants to find out what happened to her boyfriend.
So, “Okay. I’m good.” And that’s a very small part in the book, the boyfriend stuff, but that’s something that we’ve latched onto in the writer’s room and said, “Let’s make that the engine and the drive.”
Ayla Ruby: Well, there are a couple of things in the book too that are expanded in just a great way. Judicial too I think is expanded from what it is in the book, and I just love what we see on screen.
Graham Yost: Yeah. We decided that we didn’t want Bernard to appear to be the bad guy right from the beginning. We wanted to know that he was an antagonist, especially for Allison, and then, an antagonist with Juliette, but then, “Oh, maybe he can be a partner. Oh, wow. He’s actually a really… Oh, no. He’s the bad guy.” And so we wanted to play that out. I said, “Well, then we have to build up Judicial as the bad guys, and we can do that with Sims. And then there was Cami Patton, our casting director, I’ve worked with since Band of Brothers said, “What about Common?” And I said, “Oh, it’s fantastic. Let’s do that.” So…
Ayla Ruby: Now you bring up Bernard, and I wanted to ask about him anyway, so maybe this is a good point. So he’s the antagonist, but he does some things that are maybe not quite evil. Even at the end, Juliette gets water from him when she’s about to go out into-
Graham Yost: That was the goal… Man, that was Fred Golan who wrote the episode. “What if she stops and she can’t get the water to her lips and he gives it to her?” It’s like, “There you go.” Everyone’s got their reasons. That’s about all I can say. And going forward in the story, we’ll find out more and more and more. But that was important, that little moment. And then also the big scene between them at the end when she’s in the holding cell and he comes in. It was Adam Bernstein, the director, who said, “I’m just going to have him open the cell and take a chair in and sit down and talk to her.” It’s like, “Well, that’s just a brilliant idea. Thank you, Adam.” We’ve known each other for a long time, but it was also the way Fred wrote the scene. And it was just… They’re not yelling at each other. They’re just having a conversation. They’re bitter enemies who oddly respect each other. And so here we are. And that became a big goal for the whole show.
Ayla Ruby:Can you talk about finding your Jules or Juliette? Can you talk about finding Rebecca Ferguson and how that all came about?
Graham Yost: Listen, names came and went. We thought of ideas, this, that, and the other thing, and it was… I can’t remember if it was Apple or whoever who said, “What about Rebecca Ferguson?” And I think maybe her name had come up pretty early on, because I was… And this isn’t the usual business stuff of, “Oh, I’ve always been a big fan,” but I will say this, when I saw her first appearance in Mission: Impossible, my first thought was, “Where the hell did she come from?” Because she is so good. She’s so entrancing. She’s so believable. She’s so emotionally engaging. And she can kick ass. So it’s like that dream action star thing of she can do all of that. And then I found out she was Swedish. And it was like, “Oh, that’s why I’ve never seen her before.” And I frankly thought that the casting people on Mission did just a brilliant job. And I guess they saw her in The White Queen, which was her first show. And I hadn’t seen that. And she said, “Don’t watch it.” And so I’m not going to. But that was just great.
And then this is our little origin story, which is Morton and I Zoomed with her, and we thought we’d really hit it off, and this was great. We got a real good shot. And then she passed.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, wow.
Graham Yost: Yeah. “What? Oh, no.” And then we heard that her agent, Carter Cohn, and we later found out it was Rebecca kept on asking. She was saying, “Have they cast that yet? Is that part still available?” And so we had another Zoom. And I convinced her that, “You don’t like that script. We’ll make it better. That’s my job, Rebecca. That’s what I do.”
So then we got her because she loved the character, she loved when I told her where it was going. She loved that. And so then we had a partner. And then as it turns out, she is just a fantastic number one on the call sheet. She sets the tone on the set, which is incredibly friendly, cooperative, collaborative. She takes her job very seriously, but has a good time doing it. The other actors love working with her. She loves working with them. And it’s a little bit of a love fest. And the only downside to the whole thing is we know the show’s not going to go forever. There is an end to the story. And so we’re just looking forward to any time that we all get to spend together. So…
Ayla Ruby: I can understand that. So-
Graham Yost: And she makes me laugh. She makes me laugh. Yeah. So it’s a good time. And my wife and Rebecca and Rory, her husband and their child, we all just… It’s fun. We have fun together, so…
Ayla Ruby: Oh, that’s cool. So outside of the writing, outside of the casting, there’s this very physical bit to Silo, because it’s a silo. And I think I read that there were… The studio was built in refrigeration warehouses. Can you talk about that and what that was like maybe going there and building this world that doesn’t exist?
Graham Yost: Well, the production designer, Gavin Bocquet and Morton and me, I contributed, but really came up with a great design for it, which is… Someone said it’s sort of brutalist architecture, but it also has this humanist side, which is that the neighborhoods, the residential levels, things pop out from the wall. It’s not just all of smooth surface. So there’s a sense of almost a European town of several hundred years ago, just in terms of the closeness. So that it designed so that people wouldn’t go freaking insane. And that’s part of the reason for the central shaft is at least you get a sense of being outside, a sense of relief, a sense of space. Although there’s a line, and Emma won’t kill me for saying one line from season two, which is, “No one here has walked in a straight line for more than 100 feet at any point in their lives.” And so there is that sort of burden as well that’s going on. But the design of it was great.
And then with Mark Patton, our first DP, just how it’s going to look on camera and figuring that out, and all the DPs that have followed that really get this thing. And so that’s part of the whole world building, is the look of the place. And then what Daniel, our VFX guru, has contributed in terms of the design of… It’s a little bit of production design, but it’s also Daniel and his team when they do things like the digger void, which was not in the books, but Hugh loved that idea, and it made a lot of sense for big drilling projects. You just leave the boring machine where it is and then cap it. And so coming up with stuff like that, that’s all been part of the fun.
Ayla Ruby: The openness of that void gets rid of some of the claustrophobia in the Silo. It makes it so, just as an audience member, so you feel like there’s possibilities and you’re not stuck.
Graham Yost: Yes. Yes. And we had to calibrate that in our minds too. And so that becomes something going forward that’s also… You’ll see in subsequent seasons, if we, God willing, we get to do them all. We know that we’ve filmed season two. Can’t say when for sure it’s coming out, but we know it’s going to come on as fast as we can get it ready.
Ayla Ruby: So you have these amazing characters. Is there anyone that you think is maybe misunderstood this season? Or now that the show’s been out for a little bit, has anyone’s audience reaction been surprising to you or maybe not surprising?
Graham Yost: The fans of the books would be looking towards the relationship between Juliette and Lukas, who she meets as he’s looking at the stars at night and trying to figure out what those lights in the sky are. And I would say that we needed to recalibrate that because we wanted to bring forward the relationship that she had with George and make that the story of the season. So, “George was great. Maybe he wasn’t so great. Oh, maybe he was an asshole. Wait a second. What else is going on? Oh, his mother died when he was a kid,” and we learned more, and then by the end of the season, “Oh, he gave his life so that she would be left alone. Well, shit. Okay. Now we love George again.”
So that became the story of the season, which meant that the story with Lukas is something that we have just very consciously built out in our minds for how that can go. And we got Avi Nash, and he was willing to suffer through the indignities of not stepping up and helping Juliette at the end of the season, but he knows where it goes. And he’s filmed season two and he’s… That’s all I’ll say.
Ayla Ruby: So you mentioned it earlier, and I know you’ve talked about it before, the starting point of this show is Holston and Allison. Can you talk about deciding to adapt that to make us fall in love with these people essentially and then offing them?
Graham Yost: Yeah. Listen, a lot of bodies drop in the first four episodes. Let’s just be… Five episodes because Trumbull goes over the railing. It was just… There’s a little bit of fan service there in that that’s how the whole thing began was with that story of those two people. But I think that it… When Hugh then built out the books and realized, “Well, I got to come up with someone who’s going to take this story because I killed off the two people that people fell in love with,” I felt that we needed to do the same thing. I felt that the Holston and Allison story would really take us into the world and let us find things out without there being too much straight ahead exposition that because there’s a mystery to be solved, what the hell is going on, that the exposition, the world building can happen through that.
And then the other thing is that it gives you this, I think, gives us a nice foundation. It’s like, “Well, none of this would be happening if it wasn’t for Allison.” And as the story goes on, you’ll start to feel, “Oh, there’s other people in the history of this place that are also responsible,” that there is this long chain of people that allowed this story to happen and for Juliette to be where she is. So they’re a critical part. And then you get to work with David Oyelowo and Rashida Jones, and it’s like, “Man, we’re just lucky.”
Ayla Ruby: Yeah. I mean, they were phenomenal. And I was very sad when he was gone. And she was gone too, but my heart for that. So one question for you. Do you think you would clean the glass if you went outside?
Graham Yost: I’m a Canadian. Joke about Canadians is how do you get 100 Canadians out of the pool? “Everyone out of the pool, please.” It’s just they say clean, I’ll clean. But as a Canadian, I probably wouldn’t have done something that would get me sent out unless it was… We’re also Canadians who are like, “Wait a second. That doesn’t make sense. What the hell is going on here? I want to go out.” So I don’t know. That’s a really good question. Mark Gordon and I, who produced Speed, we always used to joke who would’ve stayed on the subway train with the other one. “Would you have left me?” And I used to joke with him that he would’ve stayed, but he would’ve used my body to break the fall as he hopped off.
I tell you this, I’m really glad I would not have to make that choice, because it’s such an existential choice, but I think that whoever designed that thing, and I’m not going to go into it any further, they’re pretty smart. If you show that in the helmet that it’s beautiful, people are going to want to clean to prove to everyone else inside, “It is beautiful. Come on out. It’s great. It’s safe. Oops, I’m dead.” But inside they’re wondering, “Well, wait a second. Are they dead?” And so that mystery was a lot of fun to have hanging around. It’s a depressing reality, but Juliette’s still alive. She’s still alive when the season ends. And-
Ayla Ruby: Thanks to the tape.
Graham Yost: Thanks to the tape. She got the good heat tape.
Ayla Ruby: Yeah. Thank you so much for talking. And is there anything else you want people to know about season one or the show in general?
Graham Yost: No. No. Listen, I’ll tell you my joke, and I’ve said it. Hugh and I did a bunch of stuff together when the series was launched. And I would say this and I would look right at him when I said, I said, “Hugh, everyone should buy the books and they should read the books as soon as the series is over,” because we want the fun. We want the fun of flipping the cards and revealing what’s going on and having our characters find out. So that’s the only thing. Books are great, but wait until we’re done with the series.
Ayla Ruby: Awesome. Thank you.
Graham Yost: Thank you.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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