Veena Sud’s new thrillerThe Stranger, about a rideshare driver named Clare (MaikaMonroe) being stalked by her deranged passenger Carl E (DaneDeHaan) over the course of one terrifying night, spans so much of Los Angeles that it’s almost a virtual tour of the city. We’re taken through the streets of downtown, the Hollywood Hills, side-street churches, a backroom speakeasy, labyrinthine subway tunnels, a seedy hotel, and the LA river as Clare tries to evade her pursuer. It feels a bit cliché to say that the city itself is a character, but it’s actually true inThe Stranger. Los Angeles is a massive, oppressive giant completely indifferent to Clare’s horrifying ordeal, and at some points it almost feels as though it is actively assisting Carl E.
Correctly displaying the vastness of the city was extremely important to Sud to convey the depth of the world in which Clare is now trapped, locked in a seemingly endless chase. That meant filming on location as much as possible, in real areas of Los Angeles. In a recent interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Sud discussed the necessity of securing those locations to maximize the tension and helplessness that permeate nearly every moment ofThe Stranger.
“We shot a great majority of it on location,” Sud said. “There were stages that we used, that were downtown Los Angeles, for a few of the sets, but for the most part yeah, we were there. You know, because we had to feel the depth and the breadth of this world that she’s running through to deal with the depth issue on frame.”
However, even though filming is a pretty regular occurrence in Los Angeles, Sud explains that nearly every single location was difficult to lock. And some locations were simply not feasible, such as the L.A. River. “The L.A. River, you’re not allowed to shoot there anymore,” she explained. “So we shot at a dam up in Van Nuys.” Luckily, the dam is such a close visual match that even L.A. natives might not detect the substitution.
The production ran into some practical challenges as well in the creation of one of the series’ standout sequences – a desperate escape through an abandoned section of subway tunnels that unexpectedly leads into a speakeasy full of completely oblivious bystanders.
“We had to recreate the speakeasy because real speakeasies are tiny,” Sud said. “And I needed a lot of depth from the two characters as they’re escaping from Carl E, to kind of move through a crowd, and we weren’t getting that in the locations we were seeing, as gorgeous as they were.” However, she goes on to say that the most difficult location by far was the subway. “[The tunnels] have been abandoned for many years, and you feel the claustrophobia of being under hundreds of stories of cement above you when you’re down there… and to feel like the city is above you, an earthquake-ridden city, we’re the deepest you could ever possibly go in Los Angeles in the earth, was not easy. So we got in and out of there as fast as we could. We did not even break for lunch.”
You can watch the clip below. All episodes ofThe Strangerare now streaming on Quibi.
