To bring to life the nefarious corporation at the center of the dystopian thriller “Severance,” the director of photography Jessica Lee Gagné needed to find the right location for a fictional headquarters.
As she scoured the internet for abandoned malls, she stumbled upon a blog with photos of a decaying, hollowed-out midcentury office building called Bell Labs. There was an eerie emptiness, even as its wraparound internal walkways, triangular skylights, magnificent sunken lobby and giant planters built into a vast atrium remained.
Ms. Gagné typed “Bell Labs” into Google Maps and zoomed into Holmdel, a rural town in central New Jersey. “When I saw the overhead of it, I was like, this can’t be true,” she said. “Is this a real place?”
Within days, she and Ben Stiller, the director and an executive producer of the serial for Apple TV+, went to New Jersey — they drove up the winding access road, passing a looming, three-legged white water tower shaped like a transistor radio. The building had been renovated since the photos were taken, but the developers had not dulled the impact of its corporate frigidity.
“There was a part of me that couldn’t believe how perfect it was,” Ms. Gagné said of seeing the mirrored building that she saw in the summer of 2019. “It was this mind-blowing moment.”
