Inside the Making of the Final Frame of ‘Hacks’

Nailing the final shot of Hacks proved to be a gargantuan effort across departments — particularly the transition from Ava (Hannah Einbinder) and Deborah (Jean Smart) walking the streets of Paris beneath the Eiffel Tower to the duo laughing underneath the replica on the Las Vegas Strip. The latter was “actually superimposed … in camera, so the Steadicam operator [Joel Marsh and cinematographer Adam Bricker] could see the Las Vegas Eiffel Tower in his monitor” when they shot the real one in Paris, explains director and co-creator Lucia Aniello. Working with the VFX team, the editors were then able to cut from France to Nevada in a seamless transition.

Getting the final emotional beats of the series right was equally taxing. “We almost never reshoot things,” Aniello says, “but we were a little disappointed that the sky wasn’t quite right and the light wasn’t there.” Fortunately, the locations team booked out the Bellagio and Caesars Palace for an entire week, giving the crew the opportunity to reshoot.

Production had to work with both hotels to time things so that they could have the “fountains going off at the Bellagio at the exact right moment that we wanted to have the camera move off,” Aniello explains. For the shot, they used a drone so that “we were able to have that really beautiful dive into the two of them,” Aniello adds. “It felt almost a little bit magical.”

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazinef, click here to subscribe.