You’ve seen every episode, sat through the hour long live chat, and read through the previous episodes commentary. Your Legend of Neil super-fan training is almost complete.  Satisfy your lust for all things Neil with this, the last of our commentary posts by director/creator Sandeep Parikh for LoN season 2.

“This was a really tricky episode to cast.  We had a friend in mind to play the role ever since we wrote it, my buddy Derek Mears but he became famous as Jason in the new Friday the 13th because he’s supremely talented and the timing didn’t work out.  So we really went on a hunt, we saw a bunch of talented dudes, but really the character had so many dimensions, it was really tough to find a complete package.  The guy had to be intimidatingly big, be able to play a real genuinely scary dude, have tremendous comedic timing, and be able to flip from a foppish british know-it-all to a molesty monster in a believable way.  Not an easy task for any actor.  Then 6′ 10″ Big Dave Mattey walked in the room and just nailed it with his audition.  Thank god.

The desert scene was again a pickup day that came a month after production and we drove out 2 and half hours to a joshua tree filled desert in order to grab that shot with a car full of Angie Hill, Tony Janning, Paul the camera op, Jeff our badass producer, and myself and we shot that scene.  It ended up looking really beautiful because of our color correctionist Aaron Moorhead, who did some insanely dramatic changes in the program Color to make it look really arid and brutal.”

“We shot this the in the same forest as a lot of exteriors in episode 1.  This was such a nutty day, it makes me hyperventilate a little even reliving it.  To be honest this was the only episode where I was just not sure would come out right.  There were so many variables considering we had to composite the fairy in, and it rained all over a lot of good takes, we shot a lot of Neil’s coverage without the Moblins there.  I was really nervous about the episode but then it turned out to be one of my favorites thanks to the magic of our VFX supervisor Sevan Najarian.  The dude, is truly a wizard… or wizrobe.”

“Finally a chance for Scott Chernoff and Eric Acosta (Gannon and Wizrobe) to really shine!  (And yes, I spell Gannon incorrectly on purpose bc in my version of LoZ that’s how it was spelled, look it up suckas).  This episode makes me really really regret not showing Scott sooner.  To be frank, we didn’t really have the budget to pull it off in season 1.  But now that you can finally see him, I think our audience will finally understand what a perfect villain we’ve got on our hands. Plus Jenn Rose our Makeup artist (who seriously is like someone I don’t think I can do this show without, she’s so damn talented, and so fun to work with) and our Costume Designer Jenny Green (ditto about her) really pulled out all the stops for Gannon, making him all the more menacing, vile, and hilarious.  I hope the readers are really starting to get an understanding of all the people that it takes to pull this show off.  It’s not just me and Tony and a bunch of actors.  There’s a hugely talented crew, and on top of that an amazing production team that’s making sure everyone is fed, everyone shows up on time, everyone signs the right forms.  Huge props to production (Nathalie, Gabe, Jeff), the unsung heroes of the set.”

Be sure to catch up on the other commentaries and the other episodes of Legend of Neil!

Got something we should feature on the blog? Send a link to tips@atom.com.