[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Task,” especially Season 1, Episode 7.]
In the final scene of “Task,” Tom (Mark Ruffalo) hears the sound of birds outside his window, sending him into a moment of quiet contemplation before a cut to the end credits, which also footage of birds. That the emotional finale’s end credits forgo a big musical moment, in favor of the quiet ambient sound of birds in nature, underscores just how ingrained the animal had become with the themes, characters, and filmmaking of “Task.”
When series creator Brad Ingelsby was a guest on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, IndieWire asked what had inspired the birds. The simple answer: Ingelsby was surrounded by birders while creating the HBO miniseries. Ingelsby’s uncle, a former Augustinian priest who inspired the character of Tom, is a birder. That the actor who portrayed him turned out to also be an amateur birder — Ruffalo whipping out his Merlin app to identify a tanager on set – might have been written off as a mere coincidence, if it wasn’t for executive producer and bird-loving director Jeremiah Zagar, who became the biggest driver behind the animal’s incorporation into “Task.”
“And so, then it just kept expanding,” Ingelsby explained on the podcast. “When we got to the fifth episode in the car, I thought, ‘Well, let’s pay it off.’ I had read about these vagrant birds that left their normal area and often times don’t know how to get home.”
That Episode 5 car ride is arguably the series’ most crucial scene, and the dialogue about the vagrant bird its most poignant. After Tom shares the analogy of the bird that can’t find its way home with Robbie (Tom Pelphrey), the on-the-run thief confesses to seeing himself in the bird.
Zagar told IndieWire that, once he read Ingelsby’s early pages for Episode 5, aptly named “Vagrant,” it opened the bird floodgates, something Ingelsby encouraged. One of the reasons Ingelsby initially reached for the Philly native and “We the Animals” director was to help get his “Mare of Easttown” follow-up out of the realm of domestic drama and into the natural world, and the birds felt like an extension of what the director had already been doing with the scenes at the quarry and in the forest.
In turn, Zagar saw the birds as being a visual expression of the ideas Ingelsby was exploring in his scripts, specifically Tom’s struggle with faith, and the free-spirited nature of Robbie. “The thing about birds is they’re ethereal,” said Zagar. “They fly, and that is a thing that we associate with a very spiritual quality. When you see birds, and you feel birds, you imagine some kind of higher power.”
One of the first images of “Task” comes from Zagar putting a camera in a bird feeder, which would grow into the creation of a bird unit.
“[Cinematographer] Alex [Disenhof] and I conceived of this bird unit day,” said Zagar. “ We set up bird feeders everywhere and cultivated this garden so that we could capture as many birds as possible within a day. There’s no green screen in the show, and we had this plethora of bird footage by the end. You see how alive the world is just outside of Philadelphia, where Tom’s house was.”
As IndieWire previously covered, Ingelsby did not want to end the series with the homecoming of Tom’s son Ethan (Andrew Russel), but felt he did need a moment with Tom that captured his acceptance that his son’s return was “going to be challenging, but there is a spirit in him that is ready to face what’s coming.” It was thought that the simple last scene of Tom readying Ethan’s bedroom and giving the always subtlyexpressive Ruffalo a moment of quiet introspection would do the trick.
“[Executive producer] Mark Roybal and I were on set, talking about the ending and [how] something was missing about the end. We weren’t feeling Robbie, who wasn’t in the last episode,” said Zagar.
“Task” had been structured around the parallel stories of Tom and Robbie, and up until Tom holding Robbie as he died in Episode 6, Pelphrey had been just as much the series’ lead and protagonist as Ruffalo.
“‘How could we have Robbie in it without having Robbie in it?,’” was the question Roybal posed to Zagar. “And it became clear to me that day when he asked that question, I was like, ‘It’s birds.’ The whole thing is that Tom is changed by the end of the series, and he has to feel the spiritual presence of Robbie without Robbie being there. And so the birds are that, they’re not prescriptive, they don’t have a specific metaphor, they are simply Robbie, they hold his soul.”
To hear Brad Ingelsby‘s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.