A part of what makes “Agatha All Alongside” an attention-grabbing character examine is choosing up with Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) when she’s misplaced her energy and seeing simply what she’ll do to get it again, particularly when she wants others. Particularly, she wants a bunch of different witches — and one acquainted teen (Joe Locke) — to stroll together with her down the Witches’ Highway, a magical, constructed path, of a kind, that gives lethal trials to those that summon it but additionally energy and the success of want to those who survive to its finish.
Assembling a inventive coven for the Disney+ miniseries wasn’t practically so troublesome for showrunner, author, and director Jac Schaeffer as it’s for her principal character. “ We’re doing TV, we’re doing music, we’re doing movie. We’re doing totally different eras. We’re doing totally different tones. And my true north grew to become witches,” Schaeffer advised IndieWire. “That was how I formed all of it. ‘What’s a witch? Who’s a witch? What are the sensibilities which might be aligned with witches? It’s ‘Suspiria’ and Fleetwood Mac. However [it’s] additionally ‘Massive Little Lies.’ These are witches.”
A witch, in any case, is only a lady with energy. As an alternative of charting the evolution of tv by Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen) tortured, controlling showrunner, Agatha’s quest to regain her magic pulls her and her coven towards environments of potent magic as various as a seashore home, recording studio, and slumber get together, amongst others. The present required an enormous quantity of visible selection, not a small quantity of which was offered by costume designer Daniel Selon.
However there additionally needed to be tonal and emotional paths to run by every of the sequence’ twists and turns. These got here from, amongst different issues, the way in which that the digicam retains making an attempt to poke by Agatha’s armor and present how she improvises by the challenges set by The Highway. There may be additionally the magical ballad that summons the highway, which, like Agatha, retains altering even whereas it stays the identical.
“ It’s a depth of character evaluation that I’ve been lusting for my entire profession as a result of it’s so sophisticated. Her needs and desires are simply continuously in battle,” Schaeffer mentioned. “‘WandaVision’ was very prescribed. Wanda’s want for management dictated how particular that present was. With Agatha, it’s messier. She is definitely deeply chaotic in a real manner.”
It took loads of visible and musical trickery to set the viewers on that chaotic journey with Agatha, and to make us wish to observe her all the way in which down the Witches’ Highway. Within the movies under, watch how Schaeffer, costume designer Daniel Selon, and songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez made every step of that winding journey magical.
The Route of ‘Agatha All Alongside’
Jac Schaeffer was not the one director on “Agatha All Alongside,” however her work runs the gamut of the miniseries. She will get to drag off one final “WandaVision” fashion TV parody, totally taking us into the antihero-led, gritty crime drama (primarily based on a Scandinavian sequence, in fact) of the 2010s in Episode 1. Then, in Episode 2, she units the true pilot for the sequence, introducing everybody who will develop into a part of Agatha’s coven and stroll the Witches’ highway together with her. Lastly, in Episode 7, she creates the visible connective tissue for essentially the most disorienting, formally bold, and but concurrently essentially the most Disneyified, cease alongside the highway.
A witchy sensibility is what bridges all of the totally different genres and costumes and challenges that wind alongside the highway. However Schaeffer’s personal method as a director attracts on some decidedly human magic, particularly when monitoring our oh-so-tricky protagonist, Agatha Harkness.
“ Agatha is a liar, however she does have a coronary heart. That, to me, is the central thesis of the present. She’s not reduce off. That’s really the issue for her. She feels issues so intensely and that she nonetheless grieves and she or he nonetheless cares, and she or he hates that about herself. I actually worth the moments when she’s another person and she or he’s emotionally reacting to that individual, as a result of she offers a lot,” Schaeffer advised IndieWire. “She offers these moments of vulnerability — who she’s , what she’s clocking.”
Within the video above, watch how Schaeffer caught Agatha’s most hidden glances and set the template for the wild, winding highway that she (and the entire different witches) must stroll in “Agatha All Alongside.”
The Costume Design of ‘Agatha All Alongside’
For costume designer Daniel Selon, the highway required each distinctive “hero” appears to be like for every of the characters and specialty costumes that match every of the witchy genres that seem throughout the trials. He needed to be fairly deliberate about discovering a thesis for everybody from the implacable Rio (Aubrey Plaza) to the mysterious Teen (Joe Locke) that will give us a direct sense of persona whereas additionally stitching in layers that will make much more sense as we get additional into the sequence.
Nowhere is that this extra evident than Selon’s work on Lilia (Patti Lupone), which options intricately woven particulars that solely develop into obvious as we expertise what it’s like for her to be a witch unstuck in time. “Our objective was to create a garment that felt prefer it was an historical merchandise that was handed down by generations of her Sicilian line of witches, and in addition inform loads of story that wasn’t essentially gonna be advised on digicam,” Selon mentioned. “We distilled these photographs down into embroidered little vignettes that we might place throughout the costume.”
However every of the costumes that Selon and his staff created for “Agatha All Alongside” is its personal little vignette on the character who wears it. “ To get to point out a journey by totally different genres, to inform the story of all these totally different textures, of various sorts of magic, is actually a fancy dress designer’s dream,” Selon advised IndieWire. “ I feel this present made lots of people really feel very seen and gave folks a spot and a footing within the Marvel cinematic universe who perhaps favored to be on the get together, however perhaps really feel like they hadn’t seen themselves on display but.”
Within the video above, watch how Selon used costume design to make it straightforward to see who every of the characters in “Agatha All Alongside” actually have been, and make every cease alongside the highway an open invitation to a brand new form of get together.
The Songwriting of ‘Agatha All Alongside’
In comparison with the totally different theme songs that Kristen Lopez-Anderson and Robert Lopez created for “WandaVision,” you may assume that one observe can be a neater elevate. However Schaeffer gave Lopez-Anderson and Lopez one other puzzle-box for “Agatha All Alongside,” a music that would span centuries and totally different variations in wildly totally different types — you may hearken to “The Ballad of the Witches’ Highway” in its choral chant model, a ’70s pop cowl, a bluesy True Crime cowl, a 1700s people music model, a time-traveling montage model, or perhaps a fashionable cowl by Japanese Breakfast, in the event you’re so inclined.
However what’s perhaps actually troublesome, and permits the music to help so many variations, is that Lopez and Lopez-Anderson designed the music in order that it might anchor key sections of the narrative, and, finally, mirror who Agatha is, too. “ The tune crosses forwards and backwards from main and minor modes, and I feel that mirrors Agatha,” Lopez advised IndieWire. “You simply by no means actually know whether or not she means nicely or not. And that’s a part of what’s attention-grabbing about her. , there’s ache there, you recognize, there’s loss and perhaps a bit malice, so we wished it to really feel like a music that you might get behind, but additionally probably not certain the place it’s coming from.”
There’s one thing mysterious and presumably sinister lurking in every model of the music, however Lopez-Anderson and Lopez didn’t work chronologically from its origins or from the model that Agatha’s coven within the present all sing collectively to summon the highway. “ The massive query was which one to jot down first,” Anderson-Lopez advised IndieWire. “So Bobby and I selected the ’70s ballad, the Stevie Nicks form of ballad, as a result of that one needed to [work as] a pop music. As soon as we discovered that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Younger ‘Down, Down,’ within the layered harmonies, I used to be in. I used to be like, ‘Oh, I wanna sing this music endlessly.”
Within the video above, watch how Anderson-Lopez and Lopez went about creating a number of variations of “The Ballad of the Witches’ Highway” to face the check of time.