The show’s fearless leader, Greg Daniels.
RANDALL EINHORN (DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY): I think what I loved so much about the show was that it was just so collaborative. It wasn’t always easy to find a way to do something, but we always figured it out.
Though Peter Smokler was the original DP for the pilot, Randall Einhorn was brought in for the first season and became the guy responsible for how The Office was shot. He picked the cameras, the lenses, even the filters. A DP decides how the cameras move, how each scene should be lit, and how to frame what you see at home on your TV.
RANDALL EINHORN: One of the things that Greg used to say was “Everything that makes it harder makes it better.” Which I think is kind of a metaphor for life.
Metaphor or not, Greg Daniels was entirely correct, at least on The Office: everything that made it harder really did make it better. And not in a glass-half-full kind of way. It wasn’t like if the roof of your house collapsed and you said, “It’s not the end of the world.” This wasn’t about overcoming; it was about looking at the things that made our job more difficult as tools.
RANDALL EINHORN: I think it comes from Albert Einstein. He said, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That’s brilliant.
RANDALL EINHORN: He said it in German, which sounds much more lyrical. “In der mitte . . .” I don’t know what it is.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Oh, so you’re bringing out your German now?
RANDALL EINHORN: That’s all the German I know.
Much like German, Greg’s maxim isn’t an easy lesson to learn. It’s not as if Greg said, “Everything that makes it harder makes it better,” and we were all like, “Oh yeah, I totally get it!” It took time to sink in, for us to see the method in his madness. But it eventually became our mantra, which we applied to every aspect of the show.
It was especially helpful in creating the world for The Office, both at the fictional Dunder Mifflin and at the very real, very small actual office where we shot the series.
It was early 2004 and we were all excited to start making the pilot, even though we realized our show was going to be very different from what was currently on TV. The most popular shows of 2004 were about hot people having hot problems—Desperate Housewives, Lost, ER, Grey’s Anatomy, House, and Boston Legal. Or they were gritty crime dramas with lots of violence and tough guys, shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, NYPD Blue, Deadwood, and more than a few CSI spin-offs.
We were none of those things. So how would we stand apart in that TV landscape?
RANDALL EINHORN: I used to refer to The Office as a tofu hot dog. Greg kind of latched on to that idea.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: What does it mean?
RANDALL EINHORN: It’s good food wrapped like junk food.
Greg wanted the show to reflect reality. And not the reality of reality shows like Survivor and The Real Housewives of Wherever, which pretended to reflect reality. He wanted The Office to be about real reality, with characters who seemed like they’d lived in this office long before the cameras showed up.
GREG DANIELS: When I did King of the Hill, we were in an office building and surrounded by office culture. At the time, I was regretful that we weren’t on a cool entertainment lot, just the eighth floor of some Century City office building. But I’d hear stuff on the elevators all the time. Like once, I heard this woman in the elevator say something like, “I don’t want to be a bitch, but . . .” I thought, well, that’s a good character. And that became Angela. [Laughs.]
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Oh my God.
GREG DANIELS: There was a guy who always said things like, “Got to go back to the orifice.” He was the kind of guy who calls Target “Tarjay.”
Greg’s original idea for the pilot involved the Dundies, an annual awards ceremony that Michael Scott throws for his staff as a way of boosting morale but also showing off his comedic gifts. It was also an homage to Greg’s dad.
GREG DANIELS: That was actually based on my dad giving out awards comically at his annual chili party.
Greg’s dad, Aaron Daniels, was president of ABC Radio Network in New York (before retiring in the early ’90s). He competed as a frontenis player in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, not because he was a professional athlete but because he learned that the U.S. didn’t have an official team for the little-known racquet sport. His team, which started training just weeks before the Olympics, lost every match.
GREG DANIELS: He used to do a managers’ meeting every year at his company where he’d wear a Carnac hat—you know, the turban—and his name is Aaron, so he’d be “Aaronac.”
If you didn’t grow up watching The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, one of his most popular characters was Carnac the Magnificent, in which Johnny wore a turban and cape and predicted the answers to questions that were sealed in an envelope.
GREG DANIELS: My first joke-writing experience was writing jokes for Aaronac. As I became a comedy writer, some very good people like Conan O’Brien and [Simpsons writer] Mike Reiss wrote for him. A lot of good comedy writers wrote for Aaronac. We used that in the Dundies. Michael has a Carnac turban and he does the exact same joke that was the first joke I wrote for my dad. The answer was something like, “The PLO, the IRA, and a hot dog stand,” and he takes out the envelope and the question is “Name three businesses with better health care plans than Capital Cities Communications.” Anyway, I used to do an actual awards show for the King of the Hill staff called the Swampies, named after Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, who was one of our designers who went on to create [the 2007–2015 Disney Channel animated series] Phineas and Ferb. He had a big personality, so we called it the Swampies and I got those little plastic salesman trophies that are not too hard to find.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: And that inspired the Dundies?
GREG DANIELS: Yeah. ’Cause I thought with the Dundies, by giving awards to everybody, you could introduce all these different characters.
But then Greg decided to do something untraditional, maybe even a little crazy. Instead of writing an original script, creating his own version of The Office, he decided that the pilot would stay intentionally close to the British script.
The show’s fearless leader, Greg Daniels.
GREG DANIELS: I realized that I would be getting notes from mid-level NBC executives if I did a brand-new script, but if I rewrote the original script we could go into production sooner with almost no notes. I decided to rewrite the original. I remember saying to myself, “Kevin Reilly says he likes the original show, let’s see if he really does.” Because, at that point, my biggest worry was changing it too much. Later, we realized we needed to change it more, but I stand by the decision that the strategic thing to do was start with the original.
RAINN WILSON: Networks are notorious for stepping in and being like, “I don’t like that person’s haircut,” and “Why don’t you say something different here?” and “That’s not funny,” and “Why don’t we reshoot this?” Greg said to NBC, “You guys love the British pilot, right? It’s pretty brilliant, right? Well, here’s the script.”
That didn’t mean Greg was just piggybacking on the success of the British Office. He had a vision for our show beyond just the pilot. And to get there, it meant creating a unique sitcom world unlike anything else on television at the time.
GREG DANIELS: One of my theories was that the show had to be handmade. It couldn’t be a factory product. What I didn’t like about network television was how much of a factory it was. The writers wrote jokes and the jokes got passed down to the actors and they didn’t overlap much.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So you wanted to focus on making the world of The Office.
GREG DANIELS: That’s right, exactly.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Finding the rhythms and realities of that office world without necessarily making it a joke factory?
GREG DANIELS: Right, yeah. I really felt like the challenge of the pilot was: Can we do something that feels like The Office and not like Will & Grace and not blow it?
To create that world, Greg brought in Ken Kwapis as the director. Ken was also super focused on heightening the realism.
KEN KWAPIS: I have a very, very specific memory of our meeting, because it went very well. And at a certain point I felt so comfortable with Greg—we were talking about the British show—and I said, “One of the things that confuses me about the British show is that I can’t quite understand visually the layout of the office.” I was taking a chance, because as a director you want to demonstrate that you’re a person who can think visually. And here I was basically saying, “I can’t figure it out at all!” And happily, Greg said, “Neither can I!” So we sat on the floor next to a coffee table with pieces of paper and pens and tried to draw the layout of Wernham Hogg.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Did that help you make sense of Dunder Mifflin?
KEN KWAPIS: We talked a lot about where people were, how the desks faced each other. That was actually a big part of my work in prepping the pilot. I had to figure out where different characters lived.
They wanted to make sure their version felt true to life. So they decided to film it in an actual office instead of on a set, which is way harder.
KEN KWAPIS: But that was definitely something Greg and I spoke about. How do you create an atmosphere of—what’s the right way to put it?—an atmosphere that’s not a show? How do we create a real workplace, where people feel a little bit trapped?
How did we create a real workplace? Well, obviously, we did it by making everything harder.
John Krasinski, upon learning he was cast in The Office, immediately drove to Scranton, Pennsylvania.
MATT SOHN (DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY): It was one of my favorite things. John did a road trip and went through Scranton and took his Handycam and shot stuff in Scranton because he was so excited that he was a part of it. And it ended up making the show. How funny is that?
That’s all true. John Krasinski was living in New York City, and the trip to Scranton was just a two-hour road trip. There was no reason for him to visit Scranton, other than just—
JOHN KRASINSKI: Pure nerd-dom. It was just me being super nerdy. When Greg contacted me to say, “Congrats, you have the part,” I was so excited. I was twenty-three, and at that time in my life, my only experiences were being in college and just sorta letting life happen. So I was excitable like a puppy. I said to Greg, “I’m going to Scranton to do research. There’s actually a paper company there.” And he was like, “Okay, cool.” I went with my friend Kevin Connors.
Kevin Connors, the son of Jack Connors, the founder of Boston ad agency Hill Holliday (which did the Dunkin’ Donuts ad “America Runs on Dunkin”), was Krasinski’s dorm roommate at Brown University and executive produced John’s 2009 directorial debut Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
JOHN KRASINSKI: I had a tiny little camera, like one of those early digital HD things. Not even HD. It was just like a digital camera. And I shot the Scranton sign out of the sunroof of Kevin’s Jeep, with us driving at the full speed limit. I should’ve stopped but I didn’t. I just popped out of the sunroof and was like, “Wait, wait, wait!” I was filming as we drove by.
And that blurry footage, taken from a Jeep sunroof in very unsafe conditions, was used in the opening credits of The Office.
JOHN KRASINSKI: And then Greg goes, “Can I have that footage?” And I said sure. And then he said, “I might use it for the opening of their show.” And I went, “What?” And he was like, “So I have to buy it from you. Can I buy your footage?” And I was like, “Oh no, no, no. You can just have it.” Again, super young. He was like, “No, we’ve got to buy it.” I think he bought it for a thousand dollars.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Dumb decision.
JOHN KRASINSKI: So dumb, so dumb. That could have been the greatest investment of my life.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That sign doesn’t exist anymore. Did you know that?
MATT SOHN: No!
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Well, it exists. It’s now in the mall [the Marketplace at Steamtown in downtown Scranton].
MATT SOHN: Oh gosh. Why’d they move it? Was it causing accidents?
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Probably. So why’d you go to Scranton at all? Was it for research?
JOHN KRASINSKI: I just wanted to immerse myself in Scranton. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t a trained actor. I was like, “This is probably what people do, right? This must be what actors do to really get into a role.” And then I went to a local paper company and interviewed the boss.
The Pennsylvania Paper and Supply Company, founded in 1922, is a third-generation business in downtown Scranton.
JOHN KRASINSKI: I interviewed people. I don’t know if this footage has ever been seen, but I did real interviews. Greg loved it and I think he got a couple ideas from some of it. The boss [of Pennsylvania Paper and Supply] found out [that our TV show] was based on the English one and realized that the boss is the boob. He reached out and was like, “I don’t want [your interviews with us] to ever air! Don’t make me look bad!” It was not great.
This real-life paper company boss wasn’t the only one apprehensive about being the subject of a TV comedy. The city of Scranton was still licking its wounds from a 1974 Harry Chapin song called “30,000 Pounds of Bananas,” about an infamous banana truck accident in Scranton during the mid-’60s. It wasn’t exactly fodder for tourism.
STEVE CARELL: Scranton didn’t want to be the butt of a joke. I remember initially they balked at the idea. Greg assured them that this wasn’t what that was. It was about an honest, hardworking small town. It wasn’t a joke.
RAINN WILSON: I remember Greg saying that he wanted it to be on the East Coast, so there could be other branches. It’s close to New York or Philly if you need to go there, but it’s just one of those cities that time has forgotten.
KATE FLANNERY: It goes along with Slough, England [where the British Office is based], which is a forgettable town long past its glory days. Growing up in Philadelphia, Scranton was always the butt of many jokes. I went there to underage drink as a teenager.
GREG DANIELS: When I picked it, I talked to people in Scranton, like journalists, and there’s this guy, Josh McAuliffe, who worked at the Scranton newspaper. [McAuliffe has been a staff writer at the Scranton Times-Tribune since 1999.] He was really skeptical that we were going to be nice to Scranton. I had to say to him, “Look, King of the Hill was set in Texas and I didn’t make fun of them. I understood them. I did the work to figure out what life was like for people in Texas.” The point is not to do cheap jokes, making fun of the environment. Be specific and find a world and you’ll be okay.
There was beauty in the mundane. Scranton might not have a reputation as a place where people come to chase after their dreams, but Greg found something to love in this former coal-mining town.
GREG DANIELS: The city is so much more beautiful than our corner of Van Nuys [in Los Angeles] that we were shooting in, next to the granite cutter, you know? I feel like we did a little bit of an injustice to how pretty Scranton is.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It’s very green and has that wonderful lake.
GREG DANIELS: It’s got a lot of natural beauty, which is very hard to re-create in Van Nuys.
What was easier to re-create was the Scranton office itself. All you needed were the right props, things that most casual viewers wouldn’t have noticed. The vending machine, for example, is filled with locally produced snacks like Herr’s potato chips, Crystal soda, and Gertrude Hawk chocolates. The bumper sticker on Dwight’s filing cabinet advertises Froggy 101, a local country music radio station. The break-room fridge has magnets featuring local businesses like Sheetz, a chain of gas station convenience stores, and the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins hockey team.
Scranton Office decor.
ANGELA KINSEY: Every menu on the refrigerator [in The Office set] is from a local Scranton restaurant. They reached out to the Scranton city council and said, “Send us all of your businesses! Send us your maps and just anything happening in Scranton!” That was on the walls all around us. All of those places were real places.
GREG DANIELS: [Our prop master] Phil Shea used to go to Scranton, and he had all these deals with different businesses and radio stations, and he’d come back with props for the set. They were all super authentic.
MATT SOHN: Anybody who knows Scranton recognizes something from our set.
GREG DANIELS: It was something I took from King of the Hill. The Simpsons was supposed to be set in generic America, and I really didn’t want to imitate The Simpsons at all with King of the Hill. So we got really specific. There’s an artistic theory, I forget who said it, but it’s something like “The more specific you get, the more universal it becomes.”
The quest for authenticity didn’t end with props. We were trying to re-create a mundane reality, and both Greg and director Ken Kwapis wanted us to look like people who actually lived in that world.
GREG DANIELS: Ken said to all the department heads, “We’re not going to be making everything perfect. No one will be yelled at if a hair is out of place or a boom mic gets in the shot. We’re going to flip that.” Ken wanted everybody to believe they worked at a paper company by taking the Hollywood out of it so that it would feel realistic.
KEN KWAPIS: The wardrobe choices, the makeup and hair choices, it was all designed to make it feel like these are people who don’t belong on television, let alone on a prime-time half-hour comedy.
JENNA FISCHER: Ken Kwapis insisted that we clear the set of all crew members. That’s very rare. Usually there are all kinds of people standing around, watching you act and they’re being quiet, particularly hair and makeup. Ken wouldn’t let [them] come in and touch us up.
KEN KWAPIS: As I recall, we kind of gave everyone a little compact mirror.
JENNA FISCHER: I would powder myself at my desk [between takes].
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: My compact mirror got lost in the mail, by the way.
JENNA FISCHER: [Ken] just thought, if my hair moved or there was something wonky about the collar on my shirt, that’s reality. We’re making a documentary here. Nothing should be too polished.
LAVERNE CARACUZZI-MILAZZO (MAKEUP ARTIST): They’re supposed to look natural.
That’s Laverne Caracuzzi-Milazzo, the head of our makeup department. She’d worked on shows as diverse as Malcolm in the Middle, Monk, and The West Wing. But this was the first time she’d been tasked with making actors look . . . unremarkable.
LAVERNE CARACUZZI-MILAZZO: There’s a very different everyday look in Scranton as there would be to an everyday look in L.A. or New York or Dallas or wherever. Ken kind of left it up to us. We never got any notes saying, “Oh, it’s too much.”
Another of Ken’s ideas was for the cast to bring in objects to personalize our desks and make them our own. Phyllis had a photo from her burlesque days in the ’70s. Brian brought in a football, because he’s a sports nut so why shouldn’t Kevin share that passion? Angela chose a picture with her grandma . . .
ANGELA KINSEY: It was me and my grandmother Lena Mae Kinsey. It’s a black-and-white picture and my eyes are closed. I just thought it was really funny that she would frame it.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So she’s got a sentimental side?
ANGELA KINSEY: Yeah. I saw her as this sort of stuffy gal, but she wasn’t malicious. She just took work very seriously. She wasn’t there for shenanigans, you know. And that’s sort of how I approached her. The one line Greg told me is she probably doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say about everyone.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Was her grandma her best friend?
ANGELA KINSEY: I don’t know. I also had a prop on my desk from Phil Shea, a paper clip holder that’s shaped like a big cat, a big chubby cat, lying on its side, and one of its ears was chipped. I still have that to this day. That’s one of the things I took with me. So I have this cat paper clip holder and a photo of me and my grandmother, and that kinda informed the character.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: They didn’t pay me enough for that. I was just an extra when I first got there. You want me to bring something from my own life? Make me a regular, then we’ll talk.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You must have brought something.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: You know what I brought? I brought in a picture of me and my dog, a mini schnauzer named Lila.
RAINN WILSON: I brought a bunch of family photos [of] my uncles driving Trans Ams from the seventies. And a lot of my nerdiness, of me playing Dungeons and Dragons and being in marching band and on the chess team. I brought pictures of my relatives and ancestors in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who are farmers.
Character building through set design. Phyllis Smith, Angela Kinsey, and Leslie David Baker show off their personalized desk decor.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Beet farmers?
RAINN WILSON: No. But Greg Daniels always said that the beet farmer thing was his grandparents. I think they were literally beet farmers.
GREG DANIELS: My grandfather came from Russia and had a beet farm. That always struck me as really weird. It’s not very American, you know what I mean? It’s not like we would grow corn. Beets just seemed like such a weird thing.
RAINN WILSON: When people ask me about playing Dwight, I always say that I think my goal was to make Dwight very specific. I do think this is true as an actor, that the more specific you make your character, the more relatable your character is. Having Dwight stand a certain way, drive a certain way, sit in his chair a certain way, have certain attitudes about certain things that are very specific, it made him more human and therefore more relatable.
Another way Ken immersed us in the world of selling paper was by having us do real work in the office, long before we started shooting.
JENNA FISCHER: Everyone in the cast had to be hair and makeup ready and at their desks starting at 7:30 A.M., and we would “work” for thirty minutes. Ken would walk around with just a camera operator and a boom and record us, just B-roll of us at our desks.
KEN KWAPIS: We started each day shooting basically documentary footage of the whole cast, the entire ensemble, just pretending to work.
JENNA FISCHER: I remember sitting there that first day and thinking, “What am I supposed to do?”
KEN KWAPIS: What was great about it was there was no story going on. It was just everyone at their desks. You and Angela and Oscar doing accounting work, or Phyllis making an imaginary sales call.
RAINN WILSON: The copy machine worked and the phones worked. We had to call each other and just be working in the office. I mean every day. We shot it over five days. For about a half an hour every morning we were just improvising, just being in the space.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Ken and Greg had devised a little scheme. For many pilots, everything feels very new because it is new. You’re starting a new show and you’re in a new environment. Greg wanted the office to feel lived in.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: It wasn’t a pilot for us. We’re office workers. It’s a documentary. We were boring before the cameras showed up. [Laughs.]
ANGELA KINSEY: It didn’t feel like any other set I’d been on. It was almost like I was on a reality TV show, and I’d been mic’d and told to go work in an office somewhere.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We didn’t have any marks like you do on a normal television show, where they show you exactly where you’re supposed to stand so the camera can capture you perfectly in your scene.
ANGELA KINSEY: That’s right. Where the focus is on walking up to a certain spot and delivering your lines. We didn’t have that.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: They just let us wander and do whatever. Do you remember what you did when we were supposed to be doing fake work?
OSCAR NUÑEZ: Gosh, I don’t know. I would doodle. Did I bring a book in?
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The computers didn’t work yet. I don’t think we got internet until season two.
JENNA FISCHER: I’d actually been a secretary. That was how I made my living when I wasn’t acting. So I started doing some highlighting and using the Wite-Out. I heard Phyllis and Leslie make fake sales calls.
RAINN WILSON: I’m doing sales calls like, “Hello, Mr. Schwartz. I’d love to sell you some paper today.” I didn’t even know anything about the paper industry.
JENNA FISCHER: The whole room just started to feel like a real office. It was Ken’s idea to get us into a headspace and it worked.
KEN KWAPIS: I think everyone sort of just figured out what their jobs are at a paper company. It started to create a sense of what their normal day is like.
MIKE SCHUR (WRITER AND “MOSE SCHRUTE”): Ken essentially eliminated the artificial membrane between “this is reality” and “this is fiction.” Even if you’re in the deep background, you’ve got to be at your desk and it’s a pain, right? You guys could have all been in your trailers, playing video games or calling your children or whatever. It’s asking a tremendous amount of the actors to sit at your desk for as long as you did. But there is a theory behind it. From the first frame, it felt like everyone was really working in that place. Nothing about it felt fake.
KATE FLANNERY: I feel like everyone had a focus immediately. You weren’t looking for someone to throw you the ball. You were busy doing your work. I remember Jenna and I had a whole dance, we had these clearance papers that we would sign for each other. It was so bizarre, but it was fantastic. We had all that weird medical paperwork that the prop department had found. Remember that?
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That’s right! Our prop papers were essentially old expired medical documents from people’s procedures.
KATE FLANNERY: A ton of them. They lasted for years.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: They were covered in numbers so it looked like something you’d find in an actual paper company, but it was like, I don’t know, the red blood cell count numbers for Jason Alexander from 1976. It was all about recycling.
KATE FLANNERY: There you go. We were doing some green work. Repurposing.
MATT SOHN: You guys didn’t have the internet, right?
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: No internet. We were doing Post-it Note communication back then.
The internet definitely existed back in 2004, but it wasn’t the sublime time waster it is today. Facebook had just launched in February, but it was still solely for Harvard students. YouTube wouldn’t be around until 2005, and Twitter a year after that. Google introduced Gmail on April 1, 2004, and most people thought it was a joke. According to a New York Times story from that year, the “majority of Americans who surf the Internet still do so by dialing in on regular telephone lines.” So office employees looking to avoid doing actual work had to find other distractions.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: We used to pass notes back to each other. Angela still has some doodles that I did back in the day. It was very exciting to be there.
RAINN WILSON: We were literally doing expense reports and calling clients. It was like performance art.
JOHN KRASINSKI: It was like an acting exercise. I remember being like, “Oh, this is so nerdy.” But by the end of it, we were all kinda into it. We were dialed in.
KEN KWAPIS: One of the things that really strikes me when I look at the pilot now, it feels like they’ve been working there for years. It doesn’t feel like, “Oh, here’s a new show.” It feels like we’ve wandered into a place that’s been going about its dreary way the same way it has been for the past couple of years or more.
OSCAR NUÑEZ: It had to be a boring workplace. The camera would scan the room and some people knew they were being filmed and some just ignored it, like nothing was happening. People didn’t try to do bits. It’s funny enough just to see someone looking over and rolling their eyes. Like they’re thinking, “What do you want from me? I’m trying to work here.”
KEN KWAPIS: It gave a voice to a lot of actors who didn’t have a speaking role in the pilot. Some of the things we shot on the B-roll that were so mundane got into the credit roll at the beginning, during the title sequence. Like Rainn sticking things into the paper shredder.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Or me with the adding machine.
KEN KWAPIS: The adding machine, right. I think Steve Carell adjusting the Dundie trophy on his desk was from one of those B-rolls. I remember getting a comment from some executive who didn’t understand why we had these long, lengthy shots of like the water cooler. “Why is there a ten-minute shot of Rainn sharpening pencils? What is the purpose of this?”
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: “We’re paying you for this?”
KEN KWAPIS: [Laughs.] Right, right. You can shoot a lot of footage in a half hour. One of the things that I discovered in this process is that the cast, they knew they were being observed, they knew they were the subject of a documentary. So when we then moved into a scene, a proper scene, the actors kept that same attitude. They were still the subjects of a documentary. It wasn’t like we now shifted into “show mode.” We were still in documentary mode. So it helped set the tone for everyone in terms of the performance style.
It wasn’t just the actors who got to spend time in the office. The writers were also encouraged to explore Dunder Mifflin and make it their own.
MIKE SCHUR: When we were writing the first season, Greg would tell everyone to spend half an hour and just mill around the set. We would sit at different desks and notice things like, “Oh, from Pam’s desk, she can’t quite see Angela. That’s interesting,” or “Creed’s got his back to the door so he’s always going to be surprised when anyone comes in.” These tiny observations didn’t feel like anything, but the whole show was about these tiny little observations and tiny moments. When you’ve actually lived inside them as an actor or a writer, they become more meaningful and you understand them at a deeper level, you know?
The camera catches a moment between Krasinski (Jim Halpert) and Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesly) on set of “The Fire.”
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We shot the pilot and the first season in the production offices above the soundstage in Culver City. You didn’t make any changes to the production office, right? The walls were where they were.
KEN KWAPIS: That’s right. When we built the Dunder Mifflin set, one of the things that Greg and I discussed was not making any of the walls movable.
GREG DANIELS: On a Hollywood set, they make the walls “wildable,” which means any room you’re in, you can pull the wall off so that the camera can get back and get a great shot.
RANDALL EINHORN: We didn’t do any of that. It was a real office—it was J. J. Abrams’s office at one point, I think—with real doors and real low ceilings and real everything.
GREG DANIELS: Our aesthetic on The Office was nothing should be wildable. The obstacle of a column in the way is subconsciously interpreted by the audience as another piece of evidence that this is actually happening. This is real, which makes it much more intense, right?
KEN KWAPIS: It was Greg’s choice to find this warehouse in this scrubby section of the Valley so that even if it wasn’t in actual Scranton, it was definitely not Hollywood.
GREG DANIELS: We moved to a different lot between season one and season two. I wanted to get a lot that was closer to where Steve lived, to make his commute a little easier. I drove all around the San Fernando Valley, looking for the right place. I wanted us to be off by ourselves, so I was looking for small, independent lots. And almost all of the ones I visited did a lot of porno. [Laughs.] I remember one that was like, “Oh this is nice.” It appeared to be child-friendly because it had like a storybook tree with a swing. And then I realized, oh wait, it’s a sex swing. I didn’t want to go to a lot that had porn connections.
KEN KWAPIS: It definitely felt like, where are we? Why are we coming all the way out here to shoot this show in a warehouse? Greg really wanted to give us every opportunity to not feel like we were on a show.
GREG DANIELS: The lot that we ended up in, it was a new lot that had only done commercials. When we landed there, it was very remote. It was in Panorama City. I remember going online and going to Yahoo restaurant recommendations or whatever. You type in your address, and then you’re supposed to type in what type of food you’re looking for. So I typed in the address of our lot, and then I typed in “healthy eating,” which is one of the food choices. Then it popped up “There is no healthy eating in Panorama City, California.”
KEN KWAPIS: The idea was that since this was a “documentary,” directors had to respect the physical limitations of the space. If you couldn’t get an angle, you couldn’t get an angle. It was a way to signal to directors coming down the line that, you know, you had to honor the space.
GREG DANIELS: Because subconsciously, you’re like, “Oh my God, they can’t quite see what’s happening.” So they have to lean forward. You’re going through the blinds and around the side. There was always a debate about how much to lean into that device, and the writers often would want to do it more than the rest of the crew.
KEN KWAPIS: One of the things I loved—not just in the pilot but in, you know, episodes in the second season in particular—was creating a sense that we were blocked from seeing the action properly. Whether it was a pillar or a file cabinet, something was in our way and we couldn’t quite get a good angle on things.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: And that increased the realism.
KEN KWAPIS: Yeah. So much of what Greg and I discussed in terms of the camera style was how to create a sense that we were observing people, observing characters. Obviously it’s not a secret that the staff of Dunder Mifflin knows they’re being observed. They know they’re being filmed. But most of the staff members don’t want to be filmed except for Michael Scott. So it was trying to come up with visual ideas like, if I’m shooting you and I’m this far away from you, you’d know I was there. But if we hide behind a shrub or a file cabinet and eavesdrop on the action a little bit, we could sort of observe without characters knowing we were there looking at them.
ANGELA KINSEY: They had to truly work in the space they were in, because it is a documentary. They can’t fudge it by moving a wall because it’s messing up [their] shot. You had to work around it. The camera was trying to find you and if they missed you it could get blurry. They didn’t want it to feel like a polished network television show.
RANDALL EINHORN: Everything was difficult. And every single thing that made it more difficult made it better.
There’s that mantra again.
RANDALL EINHORN: Because you had to work for it. It made it seem more real. So we were always putting stuff in the way and, you know, making it more inconvenient. The more real and crowded it felt, it allowed the comedy to go a little bit further. We tried to make the bullpen environment of the office seem like a prison, which I think we did. Then outside could be the liberation. Like when Dwight takes [Ryan] to his beet farm, and B.J. is on his knees in the field, planting the seeds, and we backed the camera way off and just let the sun play and it was gorgeous. We tried to make the outside a break from the monotony of fluorescent tubes.
Ken found other subtle ways to keep us homed in on that reality, including one memorable phrase.
GREG DANIELS: He would never say “Action.”
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That’s right. He was always, “Go ahead.”
ANGELA KINSEY: “Go ahead.” And then you do your scene.
JOHN KRASINSKI: Yeah, “go ahead.” It was my favorite thing.
STEVE CARELL: “Go ahead.” In the most calm, inviting way.
KATE FLANNERY: It was an understanding that you’re not just suddenly turning on, you’re already in. So just continue. Go ahead. It’s perfect. It’s like the perfect direction.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It’s very hard to describe. He’d act as though he was about to tell you something, and then he’d say, almost like an afterthought, “Go ahead.” Like he had a thought that he was about to tell you but then he forgot what he was going to say, so he just brushed it aside and said, “Yeah, forget it, go ahead.”
KEN KWAPIS: It’s not something I’ve always done, but I can tell you exactly when I started doing it. I directed the pilot episode of The Larry Sanders Show, Garry Shandling’s show. When Garry and I were prepping the pilot, he very much wanted a sense of verisimilitude. He came up to me and he said, “Is there any way that you can develop a shooting style so that the actors actually don’t know when the camera is on?” And I didn’t know how to do that. I mean, it was kind of a brilliant idea, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I finally came up with the idea that we would start each scene without the usual announcements, without a first AD saying, “Rolling speed.” We didn’t give anybody the signal to start. I told Garry, “I’ll just say, I don’t know, ‘go ahead’ or something like that.” Garry would take the signal and he’d chat with the cast for a while and then, at some arbitrary point, he’d just launch into the scene. So there was this sense that the line between acting and not acting got very blurry.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So it’s like tricking actors into not acting?
KEN KWAPIS: In a way. It takes some of the onus off of it. This sounds kind of pretentious to say, but there’s real life and then there’s the scene. And so if you can erase the line between real life and the scene, I think that helps.
THE ACCOUNTANTS’ CORNER
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Remember that time we were almost fired?
ANGELA KINSEY: Which time? When we made Oscar tell a story really loud under the window?
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That’s the one. It was during the first season. They were shooting in the offices upstairs, and you and me and Oscar were down in the parking lot . . .
ANGELA KINSEY: And Oscar got really animated and worked up. He’s kind of a very passionate storyteller.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: What were we even talking about?
ANGELA KINSEY: I really can’t even remember.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The show was brand-new. They hadn’t aired an episode yet.
ANGELA KINSEY: We were the supporting cast. We weren’t a big-ticket item on the show. We were easily replaceable.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So we were out in the parking lot killing time, and Oscar started telling this story very loudly.
ANGELA KINSEY: Very loudly. This is when he kind of blames me. We were standing over in the sun and I was like, “Guys, let’s go stand in the shade.” I scooted up against the wall of the building, apparently right under a window where they were filming. And then Oscar continued his story.
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: He was doing the accents and the gestures and I was roaring with laughter and Angela was like, “Stop it, stop it!” You were screaming. And then—
ANGELA KINSEY: Ken Kwapis himself leaned out the window, our director, and said, “Hey, guys, can you keep it down? We’re trying to film here.” We were like, “Oh my God!”
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: My face turned white. I was petrified.
ANGELA KINSEY: Oscar pretty much hugged the wall. I made myself so small that I turned into a shadow. I don’t think Ken saw me. I think he just saw Oscar. You went flat up against a dumpster, remember that?
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: He was so mad.
ANGELA KINSEY: Oscar still says, “Kinsey almost got me fired.”
BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It felt like we might be. We walked away going, “We’re fired, we’re done. We’re done.” Like, they have no use for us. They haven’t found a way for us to be funny yet. We are done.
THE ACCOUNTANTS WHO ALMOST GOT FIRED.
We were having a blast. But honestly, none of us really believed that this little world we were creating would last.
JENNA FISCHER: We shot the pilot in March 2004 and my thirtieth birthday was March 7, 2004, and I did not invite any of you to my thirtieth birthday party because I assumed I would never see you again. I was so sure that making the pilot was the end of our show, that it would never get picked up. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it was so good and so weird and so special that no one would give us a chance. There was just this feeling of “Have fun making your pilot. That’s all it’ll ever be.”
Even Greg Daniels, their leader, wasn’t certain the show had a future.
GREG DANIELS: I remember saying to everybody after we wrapped the pilot—I had such a great time working with all these guys, it was like a dream—I remember saying to everybody, “If this is all we get, I’m happy. It was great fun.” In the beginning it didn’t look like we were going to be on for very long. So you took what joy you had.
Everyone felt that way, except for apparently one person, according to Rainn Wilson.
RAINN WILSON: After shooting the pilot, John, Jenna, Steve, and I went out for a sandwich, down the road in Culver City from that crappy little studio we were at, to this crappy little sandwich shop. I had a tuna sandwich. Steve was like, “I think this thing could be really special and I’m betting that these are the roles that will define us for the rest of our lives. No matter what we do for the rest of our lives, this is what we’ll be known for.”
STEVE CARELL: I think we all sensed it. We all knew.
Okay fine, maybe we didn’t all know. But we wanted to believe. Like those kids in The Polar Express on the fence about Santa Claus, we wanted to believe. We knew we had something special, but would the rest of the world agree?
Or, more important for us to make even one more episode, would the network agree?