We're deep into the second season of Silo on Apple TV+, and the hit sci-fi show continues to deliver. This week's episode, "The Book of Quinn," sees Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) contend with a mysterious new group of survivors in Silo 17 after they seemingly killed her friend Solo (Steve Zahn). Things got intense fast, as Juliette barely made it a handful of steps chasing their trail before she succumbed to "the bends," — a danger of Scuba diving where coming up from the pressurized depths too fast can cause bubbles to form in a person's joints, leading to intense pain and even paralysis. Juliette had to limp back down into the water and submerge herself deep enough, for long enough, for the pain to subside.
Silo has been filled with highlights this season, but Ferguson's underwater scenes are among the most breathtaking. In the previous episode, "The Dive," her character descended thirty stories underwater in order to restore a broken water pump to drain the Silo before it completely flooded. A few weeks before that in "The Harmonium," she explored a series of flooded apartments.
If you've been enjoying Silo as much as I have, those underwater scenes probably blew your mind. They take place on intricate sets, which were built inside a massive water tank to allow Ferguson to actually spend ample time underwater filming. Now, the folks at Apple have released a behind-the-scenes video so that you can see what it was actually like for Ferguson to shoot Silo's underwater scenes. Watch it below:
The footage in the behind-the-scenes video was taken on June 15, 2023, when Ferguson was in the thick of filming the underwater apartment scenes in "The Harmonium." According to the video, these were some of the first scenes Ferguson filmed for the season. For those keeping track, that means Ferguson filmed these underwater scenes just before the Hollywood actor's strike paused production in mid-July.
The water tank for Silo was built specifically for the show at a studio in Hoddesdon Studios, just outside of London. The set for the apartments was roughly 15 feet underwater, and contains multiple rooms and winding corridors. "We built this tank from scratch. It's like the second-biggest underwater tank in the UK," said Director of Photography Baz Irvine.
"I am enjoying it. I dive a lot when I can," said Ferguson. Asked if she had to do anything different for underwater filming, she replied "I stretch. I do a lot of just kind of warming up joints, because you move differently in water and I easily can get neck cramps. The diving...it's mind power. Because even if you're comfortable in water, there's so much going on. So one of the most important things is sort of a quick, calming meditative state. Once you go in, you're just one with it. You kind of have to be a part of the environment."
Ferguson has already spoken about some of the difficulties of these underwater shoots, especially the archaic rebreather, which she called "a mental fuck-up" on account of how it shoots air into your lungs, rather than allowing for normal breathing like modern Scuba gear. After all, people don't swim in the Silos, so any equipment made for diving had to look like something a crafty engineer could have cobbled together out of spare parts.
That's not to say that Ferguson didn't have any modern gear underwater with her. The video reveals that she had a specialized device which allowed her to hear the voice of the director, so that scenes could be "mapped" out while she was submerged on set. It's pretty amazing to watch Ferguson respond to directions in real time to craft specific shots on the camera, all while 15 feet underwater.
Diving also has some specific safety limitations for actors. Namely, they can only stay underwater for a certain amount of time while breathing compressed air. Diving Coordinator David Green said Ferguson was only allowed to stay under for four hours over the course of the entire day. "But obviously, that's split up quite a lot throughout the day," he added. "She probably does about 15 to 20 minutes at a time whilst we're doing each scene, and then we pull her up for air breaks."
The team behind Silo did an amazing job with these underwater scenes, so it's great to get a look behind the curtain at how they were made.
Two more episodes of Silo season 2 remain. They air Fridays on Apple TV+. The latest episode, "The Book of Quinn," dropped today; you can check out our review here:
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