Interview: Morten Tyldum Discusses Creating a Society with Lost History on ‘Silo’

Morten Tyldum is an Academy Award-nominated director, making his mark on cinema with his English feature debut, The Imitation Game. Since then, he’s worked on exciting projects, including Passengers, Defending Jacob, and Jack Ryan. One of his most recent projects is the Apple TV+ series Silo, where he helped adapt the Hugh Howey novella into the show that stars Rebecca Ferguson and Common, among others. The director and executive producer sat down with us to talk about everything Silo, and it was quite an interesting chat.

During our Zoom conversation, Tyldum shared a lot of insight into the relevance of the mystery of Silo, including how he originally suggested Tim Robbins for Bernard. He talked about directing the first three episodes and helping to create the show’s visual language. Tyldum revealed that there were at least 75 different sets that made up the Silo itself and how filming during COVID impacted their world. He even talked about how they kept the audience guessing and how that was one of their goals from the start. Read on for the full interview, or listen to the audio below.

Ayla Ruby: All right. Hi, again.

Morten Tyldum: Hi, again. How you doing?

Ayla Ruby: Good. So I’d love if you could talk about your journey to this project. What made you sign on and what drew you to Wool? What spoke to you about it?

Morten Tyldum: Many things. Apple called me and said they had this amazing project and they needed a filmmaker to come in and help with the world-building for this one. And first of all, I think Graham Yost wrote a really exceptional script. I think connecting into this dystopian future sci-fi movie with a couple who wants to get pregnant felt very relatable. So there were so many, and it’s so fascinating about creating a society that has lost history, that has no knowledge about what’s happened to them, what’s outside, who caused this, who we are, identity, which I feel is something that’s very important now where we are less and less learning from history perhaps, as society.

As I always say, you can never learn from the future. You can only learn from the past. And then creating this show that has this society that cannot do that, it was very interesting. And also, it’s a mystery show. I always love that. You always second-guessing what’s happened, what’s the reason why they’re here, who’s the actual bad guy? Who’s the good guys? So there were so many things that drew me on the character level, world-building level, and it was massive, but it was so hard to do.

Ayla Ruby: It works on so many levels. It’s interesting on so many levels. From what I’ve read and from what you just said, you were really instrumental in a lot of the world-building and giving us the Silo. Can you talk about what that was like from early on through that first-

Morten Tyldum: It was. We wanted to both be respectful to the books, but at the same time, this is one of the first thing Apple said, we wanted this to be a big show. We don’t want it to feel small, dark, and claustrophobic. Or at least not claustrophobic in the wrong way. So it was all fun, and then we had to… So Gavin Bocquet was the production designer, and we sat down and we just spent about 10 months actually and just literally trying out designs, discussing architecture, looking at everything from the old city, Barcelona, how the small alleys and how things have been built and developed over time.

Brutalist architecture, art deco, and then we liked to really go into the present. But why? What’s the thought behind it? So we wanted everything to be based on when they made this, why, what was the thought behind that? If you’re going to build so many silos, we all know there’s more than one now, they will have building blocks. These are giant structures. So we said, “And it’s based out of the round silos. Everything has to be rounded, so let’s make everything rounded.” There’s no straight corners at all in the show. Doesn’t exist. Everything is round walls, round corners, round windows, round doors. So it was fun coming up with this, but it was based out of how it probably would be if you’re going to mass-produce all these elements. You would build something that you could easily slot into and create all of this. And we also wanted it that people wanted to… There should be different parts. There’s should be parks. There should be farm levels.

There are industrial areas, there are living, there are upper-class areas. There are the down deeps, and what makes them different and what makes them the same? It was so fun and it’s how people are dressing, and also how this spirit of humanity, how does it come across when it sounds all about, it’s a society that … That’s the thought behind it. That’s why the silos are being built, and it starts to see how individualism is popping itself up. People use it to choose changing small things. They’re very limited what they can do, but how we will always express how we are as an individual no matter what is being forced down on us. So it was an incredibly fun and a very rewarding process of creating something. And also, we wanted to make a sci-fi show that this is several hundred years into the future, that should at the same time be looking back. How was the Great Depression? How was that? How did people direct ourselves? So we used both from the future and from the past when it comes to the design of it.

Ayla Ruby: So in addition to all the world-building, you directed the first episode, Freedom Day, and you’ve done a couple of other pilots or first episodes. You’ve done Jack Ryan, some other things. How does it work setting up a first episode? Because that’s obviously different than another episode in a series. You’re introducing everything.

Morten Tyldum: Yeah, it is. And in Silo, I did the first three.

Ayla Ruby: Yes.

Morten Tyldum: So, the first three. But it is very fun. So first of all, you have to work with the showrunner who’s been involved in this and you are discussing what’s the vision behind it, what’s the thing we’re going to communicate, and what’s the long arch of this? What’s several seasons? What’s it going to… But it is like finding a tone, finding a look, and finding… An idea is like, how do we make this feel like a silo? How do we get this silo feel, this silo look? So if you’re not seeing the intro of this, you would immediately know, oh, it’s Silo. That’s all. Because it will look in a certain way, people are going to be dressed in a certain way. The lighting. The way we move the camera. You have to define the language.

This becomes a little bit technical, but it’s like we didn’t shoot with any long lenses. I wanted only to have short lenses because that makes that if the background will be sharper and not so out of focus. And the silo is such a big character, so instead of putting a long lens, if you want a close-up, move the camera closer because the background will be sharper and you’ll see that the background of the silo is always there. One of the main characters of the show is the silo. So you have to create all of these languages. How do we light this? How do you create night and day on something that doesn’t have the sun? There’s no sunlight. How do we create that feeling of rhythm, passing of time? What lighting can they have? So it’s all these rules that you have to create when you start a show, which is really fun.

Ayla Ruby: I love that you mentioned that the silo itself is like a character. That was one of my questions. It feels very much like… I want to say it almost has a personality. It’s there, it’s looming. That’s awesome.

Morten Tyldum: And it’s also the music. Atli Örvarsson who’s a good friend of mine, who’s composed this beautiful music, this amazing music to it, he talked a lot about it. He recorded in a empty concrete silo. He went in and recorded with this electric violin and this electric piano. He created all these sounds which he recorded in a big bunker silo just to create this sound of the silo.

Ayla Ruby: Wow.

Morten Tyldum: So there’s a lot of this very hidden, almost like the music sometimes when it’s barely there, which is just to create a sound and a feeling almost like the silo is whispering there all the time. It’s like it has its own life.

Ayla Ruby: That’s amazing. So obviously you’re on these big sets. What did your days look like with Silo? How long… Besides the 10-month building it, for actual filming, what was it like for an episode? Can you take us through your process?

Morten Tyldum: So the sets here was immense. It’s actually bigger than they even look like. And I thought it was very important that I didn’t want this to be a blue screen or green screen sets, which we of course had because it’s impossible to build it so big. But as much as possible, we wanted the actors to actually walk into the silo and be in the silo. So it was actually very rewarding because we spent a lot of… It was a long shoot because we shot this during COVID, during lockdown. We were all in the silo, so nobody could be out and about as normal. So we were together. Everybody was wearing a mask and we were in the silo, and nobody saw any daylight. It was a long day. We were the whole day inside in these big sets, so it was challenging. Everything that has this scope and this mass of course is a top shoot, because it’s just a lot of it. But it was also very rewarding because we were all saying that we all became part of the silo in many way.

We were all living there. We were all stuck in the silo. It was just challenging, but it was also so that we became very tight-knit, the group. Everybody became part of it, and everybody started to get the feeling. Everybody, even the people that dress the extras or the etc. Everybody felt like something was wrong, “Oh, this doesn’t fit into the silo. This doesn’t fit the silo.” Everybody started to understand the silo. But it was tough shooting that day, and also, the hard part about shooting something in the set is that you cannot just follow an actor. If they’re walking and talking and then they walk out of the door and then into a hallway, then when they walk out and then you come to the set, here it’s like… Every set here, and then they do this, and then the next part we have to shoot in a month because we have to take everything down and then we have to build another set, or maybe we have to go out somewhere else. So the logistics of the set is incredible. I think there was 75 sets.

Ayla Ruby: Wow.

Morten Tyldum: And you’ll be shooting in, we had seven or eight stages, but we can only have one set in there. And then it was time to take it down. Then another one came up, but we have to move over to somewhere else. And the logistic about it, you have to keep track of, oh, two months ago I was shooting this scene and now this is the continuation of it around the corner, but we’re in completely different time of year and completely different studio. So it was challenging both for the actors who did it really well, but everybody was directing and shooting it really like, “Okay, where are we? What was the rhythm? When they around the corner, they walk like that…” It is tough when we’re shooting something that’s supposed to have all these big sets, but they’re never connected. They’re all individual pieces.

Ayla Ruby: Now through the first three episodes and through the whole series, but there’s a lot of tension. It just feels very heavy as the mystery is unfolding, as we’re getting deeper and deeper. How do you create that sense of tension as a director? How do you build to that? How does that work from your end? Besides everything you’ve mentioned?

Morten Tyldum: Yeah. First of all, a lot of it has to come from, you have to work with the writers and the actors, so performance-wise and the writing, but also visually. When we started talking about it before the script was even written, we all agreed that the start of this has to be a lot about journeying from the top to the actual bottom. Even the digger void, the void beneath it, the secret path in it. So you are showing everything and you’re going from the top, which looks a lot like our society in many way, until this dark void with this ancient machine that you have no idea what it is. This is just big, dark. So visually also, you’re doing this journey into darkness literally where she has to go down into the dark and there’s water and there’s a secret door.

So it was very helpful that we could do that, so we can visually do that. The show goes more and more secretive, more and more darker, more and more mysterious. So you can lend into the… The first episode is more colorful. It has the Freedom Day and flags and music, and there’s the market with the spice and all of that. And then it goes more and more darker, and it’s more dramatic in a way. And also, there’s Episode 3 where the whole silo has to go dark and the blow-up and all of that attention with the danger. So I think that was very prevalent that we wanted to really quickly establish that this is about mysteries, about danger, and do that by literally traveling from the top to the darkest deep.

Ayla Ruby: You mentioned Freedom Day and the contrast between that celebration with the lanterns as everything is falling apart for Rashida Jones’s character is really very cool and very well done, and just wonderful to see.

Morten Tyldum: Oh no, thank you. It’s all about on the core of it, which again is, what is the truth? Which is a core theme about the whole show. Who owns the truth and should you believe everything you’re being told? Which is more important now than ever. Who holds the truth about what’s going on? And this is about someone who’s just realizing that I have been lied to my whole life. This is not the truth. This is like we are celebrating something and I don’t even know what we’re celebrating.

So, that is the critical moment from the whole show. And of course, the mystery is like, did she die or did she not die? Is she there? Is she not there? All of these things are… And we really wanted the audience to guess. And I think this is brave when you’re setting up with the show that you think these are going to be the lead characters, but bang, there comes the Rebecca, and she’s the actual lead character. And so it is a very brave show in that way, and it deals with the fundamentals of, what is the truth? We wanted the audience to be unsure as much as the characters started to become unsure.

Ayla Ruby: Now speaking of that switch where you think one set is going to be the lead, but it’s actually different, can you talk about working with Rebecca Ferguson, Common, everybody, because you have amazing actors on the show?

Morten Tyldum: Yeah, great. I’m so happy with the cast. And we were so lucky to get all these wonderful actors who agreed to do this, and David Oyelowo and Rashida who knew each other and always wanted to do something together and who were so great at playing this couple. And I always felt like they… A lot of times, you’re worried about chemistry between actors, and they really talked a lot about their prior history as a couple, and I think they did such a remarkable job. And Rashida also got this… This is the one who falls apart . She cuts herself open just to find the truth and go against everything she’s learned, and I think that was interesting for her to be able to play so dark.

I don’t think she, as a character, has gone there a lot with the character she’s been given. And Rebecca is amazing because she really, really carries this character and it’s a lot on her shoulder throughout the whole season. And she’s also a very physical actor, which she’s great. She’s great at action, and she can also really… I loved… Actually, something I just really wanted to do a few times is to have the camera being almost here on her, really close to see. And I just find out that she can actually carry… A lot of the times, it’s really demanding on an actor because you really see everything in them. It’s like you really peek into the soul a little bit. And you can’t do much because you can’t move much, because the camera is so close on you, but she was able to express so much by doing so little.

So I find out, oh, this is going to be one of the signature ways of shooting her that sometimes the camera be really close, almost like we’re leaning into her, like peeking into her soul and her brain. She really brought so much physicality to it, and the insecure… She has a character that both is leaning away and because she’s so full of anxiety, she’s so alone, and at the same time so strong and has so much power in her, which is really hard to play both sides of it. So no, I think we have a phenomenal cast. And on just the smaller parts to the bigger parts of the… And Tim Robbins said yes, which is… I always wanted to work with him, so I suggested we should ask him. And-

Ayla Ruby: And it worked.

Morten Tyldum: … shots, because I always been a big fan of him and it was just great.

Ayla Ruby: I know we’re just about at time, but is there anything you want people to know about Silo or anything else you’re working on?

Morten Tyldum: Anything else I’m working on or anything about Silo? That’s too big question. But no, Silo has actually been such a gift to have been worked on because it’s weird where you get to do something that feels like it has a good heart, it has a good theme, it has something to it wants to say. And it has been so fun creating this world and work with these phenomenal actors, the crew behind it. Actually, working with Apple on it has been phenomenal because it was a tough time for everyone. It was during the pandemic, it was… Just building the sets, there wasn’t enough steel in England to build the foundations of the sets. It was so big, we actually run out of steel in the country.

Ayla Ruby: Wow.

Morten Tyldum: Yeah. That was the challenges, and it was wild. So it was actually a great adventure to be on, and it was so well-received. And everybody’s waiting now for Season Two, so no, it’s going to be great.

Ayla Ruby: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for this. This has been a wonderful chat-

Morten Tyldum: I appreciate it.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.