Greg Daniels
Appearances
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Well, we didn't have a normal audition process. We did have a normal audition process. But afterwards, we did screen tests. And we actually took three days and combined all the different finalist actors in different combinations. And we filmed them improv-ing scenes together. And that was definitely one of the great things that distinguished us.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
For example, Jenna Fisher, the pained looks that she would give to camera.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Yeah, she plays Pam. And she's really the most put-upon of all of them.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Yeah, it's kind of saying, does anyone else see how crazy this is? So you have to be kind of a reasonable character to get away with it. Although, when Michael Scott does it, it has a different flavor. It's usually, uh-oh, I just blew it again, didn't I? Oh, yes, I did, when he looks to the camera.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
That's a good question. I think Michael has changed a little bit. And a lot of it has to do with growing away from the British show a little bit. And also Steve's movie career. Because when Steve Carell did 40-Year-Old Virgin, I think that was eye-opening for me and for some of the writers to see him
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
play a romantic lead in that way and how likable he was and helped us include some of those characteristics in his character of Michael Scott.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
I'm glad you picked up on that. We really discussed that a lot. And that's what we think, too. We think that she complained about her divorce for hours and then fell asleep on him.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Yeah, he has such little self-knowledge. And that's what makes a great comedy character, I think, is someone without any self-knowledge. And he really lacks it in every aspect of his life.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I love your show. You guys are so good together. It's so entertaining to hear you and it's so fun for me to hear your voices and your points of view and everything.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Do you know how Jim says he'll bet a paycheck that Michael in this episode is going to do the Titanic thing? Yeah. I would have said Angela was going to tear up, but I –
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Likewise. Yeah, you. It was a great time for all of us. And if your friendship was the only thing that came out of it, that would be cool.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I will go back a little ways because I was kind of already with a career at the time that the show started.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Please, go ahead. People don't know it enough.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
So yeah. So I was in a good position. You know how they say you need 10,000 hours to be good at something?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
So I had sort of 10,000 hours on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. And then I had another 15,000 hours on King of the Hill. So I was... like prepared. And what happened was my agent sent me the tape of the office and it was pretty unknown over here and it had a pretty boring title and I didn't watch it.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
The BBC version, yes. And so he called me, it was over Christmas, like two years before our show came out. And he said, all right, I'm going to send this to somebody else if you don't watch it. And I was like, oh, okay, hang on, hang on. I'll watch it tonight. And I put it in around 11 and I stayed up till like three in the morning watching it. I thought it was just brilliant.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
So I called and I said, I really wanna meet these guys. And I had...
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
kind of like a good little student you know always in my career and I always wanted to interact with people who I respected and you know I sold the episode to Seinfeld so I could work with Larry David and that was like a career important move for me and I kind of identified that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant had done something that put them in the top ranks of
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
people working in this profession. So I really wanted to meet them. And I didn't really think it could be adapted. So I was kind of scamming them. I was like, I'm going to go meet you and take this interesting meeting.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
It's not going to be this. And anyway, so we met over at Ben Silverman's office because he had the rights. And we got along very well because it turned out that They loved American TV and specifically The Simpsons and specifically their favorite episode or Ricky's favorite episode was Homer Badman, which I had written. And so we kind of hit it off. That's amazing. Yeah.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And I was telling them, you know, all the kind of theories that I had about making a TV show. that I put into place in King of the Hill, which was, you know, a slower pace and allowing for awkwardness and realism and all this stuff. And it was, they really responded to that. So we decided, well, maybe I would be the person to adapt it into America. And then there was a couple of
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
you know, months where we were kind of hammering it out. But it was always, the thought was always to bring it to someplace cool and cable-y because the show was not like what was on TV. You know, I think the biggest show at the time was Will and Grace, which was very...
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
kind of multi-camera fast far more broad yeah very different feel you know yeah i didn't have a network feel of like television yeah yeah it felt weird and um so we were talking about well maybe we'll go to hbo and uh and apparently kevin reilly at fx really likes it and um so we had a couple of thoughts and anyway so i signed on to do it and then kevin reilly left fx and went to nbc and um
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
HBO didn't want to do it because they didn't want to do a remake. And Ben was like, you got to sell this to NBC. And then I got very worried because I was like, this is not going to work on NBC, you know?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Cool cable show. Yeah, exactly. And – And I also had these stress dreams where I would be put on trial by all the comedy nerds in the world for doing this lousy NBC version of The Office. Yeah. Yeah. But eventually we were like, well, maybe the value of it will be to move network comedy into a new direction, maybe open it up just a little bit and make it more like what I liked about –
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
animation, which was single camera and didn't have a laugh track and stuff like that. So I was like, okay, I kind of convinced myself it was worth doing just for that.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
You know, one of the things we were doing was we were looking for classic office situations and trying to test them for was there comic potential. And The idea of going on a booze cruise sounded funny. And this was like our biggest episode yet. You know, this was where we were kind of feeling some oats as a show. And if you remember, they bought a whole bunch of hotel rooms for everybody.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And this was sort of going to be like the new thing. We were maybe going to have more location shooting. And it was very exciting.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Did we roll with that right away from that? No.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I love that work that you guys did, because part of the thing that I wanted to do with the show was... Like the experiences that I'd had that I didn't like in show business were mostly like factory made TV where they keep the writers over here and the actors are over here and nobody talks to each other and they got to get the scripts out fast and everything.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Um, and it didn't feel very creative and I, I really wanted to mix it all and have a more handmade feel to it. And, um, so I had, you know, I had a lot of the writers act and I would ask the, some of the actors to write, and I always loved to get access to the kind of actor prepares work that you guys did and, you know, and, uh, and I would hop on any great, um, ad lib.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Like that whole thing with Rain being Amish just came out of an ad lib, if you remember, where he was talking about his grandfather's name. And he said, Dwight Shrewd, Amish. And then we were like, ooh.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah, that sounded fun. I also remember in the casting process, like I... You know, we initially wanted Steve, and then he took that other show, Come to Papa, before Allison Jones came on board. I don't know if you know that. No. Yeah. So we had heard, Ben had specifically heard about how great Steve was in Bruce Almighty.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And he really had that amazing sort of scene-stealing moment where he's speaking in tongues as the newscaster.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And everybody knew he was, you know, really great and would be a good choice for this.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
and i'm very methodical as you know and i was like okay that sounds great um first i want to get the casting director on board and i you know really wanted to use allison jones uh from her works on freaks and geeks which i loved uh and it took two weeks to get her on board and in those two weeks steve took this other show and wow you know it might have been yeah it was awful so then we went on this incredibly long
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
process of looking at every single person in town who could possibly be in the age range for Michael Scott and including various writer friends that I had who I threw into the mix and, you know, just normal people like I'd be walking down the street and go, oh, you look good.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah. But anyway, it came full circle. And then after three months of intense casting, we got a little tip off from Kevin Reilly that maybe Come to Papa wasn't going to go the distance and we could get Steve in second position to that other show and we'd be safe. And so...
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
An early one. I believe Kevin is packing a Speedo.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Rain had brought in, I remember, a family photo album of sort of country cousins of his that lived in Oregon, I think. And that was part of what he was drawing from for Dwight.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yes, well, that's something that you shouldn't really go to me for. I'll tell you that right now. There was, I mean, Phil Shea, who was a brilliant prop master on our show for the whole time of the show, used to go to Scranton and return with truckloads of tchotchkes from the different businesses and giveaway pens and local sports figure bobbleheads and stuff.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And I think that was on the Penguins, maybe?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, that was also like an early season running joke was him changing people's names. He did it to Pam constantly.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
It seems like we kind of dropped that after a few years.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, that boat, the real boat that we filmed on was a boat from Long Beach Harbor and was big metal boat. I can't picture how it would have gotten to Lake Wallenpaupack, which is, you know. Yes.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I went and looked at the first draft of the episode. And there is a scene that was in the first draft where Brenda, the person from corporate, tells Michael that she hears he's planning this booze cruise. And she tells him that corporate won't pay for it unless it has a certain amount of educational content. And he panics because he hadn't prepared anything.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And then we go into the conference room scene, and he's trying to make up stuff off the top of his head.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Mindy was an easy breaker, that's for sure.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, this is a long campaign that Mindy waged behind the scenes, taking, you know, and I know she plotted it, and every step was a victory. And a lot of it would be we'd kind of do a double take and go, hey, wait, what are you wearing? She's sly. She would have slipped something in. Yeah, and she kind of hijacked that character and made it into her character.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, Brenda also, I don't know, this is maybe, is this a fast fact? Fast fact?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, Brenda was Mindy's writing and performance partner in the play that is how I cast Mindy because Mindy wrote this off-Broadway play called Matt and Ben about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck writing Good Will Hunting. And Mindy played Ben Affleck. And Brenda, who's in Booze Cruise, played Matt Damon. And it was a hilarious play.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
No, I was actually – I was a guest of my wife, Suzanne Daniels, who was network executive possibly at the WB at that time. I'm not exactly sure where she was working. And she went to see it to do talent scouting. And I –
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I thought it was super funny, yeah. And it was great. And then by coincidence, Mindy's spec script came in like the next day for me to read for staffing for writers. I was like, hey, wait, that's the one I just saw.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
She's at the bar. I mean, he only sees her when she's at the bar pretty much.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
So there's a lot of authenticity to Captain Jack's military bearing there. Yes.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Rob was, you know, in the Allison Jones orbit. Yeah. And we certainly knew about him. And I don't know whether he came in for one of the other parts. Like he might have come in for Dwight or something. I'm not 100% sure.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think Allison released some of the audition tapes as part of a DVD extra, but there were a lot of cool people that came in. It would have been very interesting to see Seth Rogen as Dwight, for instance.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah. Well, Bob was really the number two. If we didn't have Steve, it would have been Bob. He did a great job. And then in season nine, we brought him back as a sort of echo.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
So Lorne Michaels has a thing that he says sometimes where he will get in-character underwear for the actors.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah, I think this is it. And people will say, well, why? Who cares? It's not going to be on camera. And he goes, yes, but the actors know.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And so we certainly believed in that and went out on this real boat in Long Beach Harbor. And it was this huge thing. And to me, the key of it was that romantic scene on the top deck between Pam and Jim. Yeah. You know, I just thought it'd be so pretty up there with the twinkling lights of the harbor and the background and everything. So we do that scene.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And later in the editing room, somebody was like, what'd you do? Did you just put a row of Christmas lights against a black piece of duvetyne there and do it in a studio? And we're like, no. We're on a boat. We're on an actual boat. But it didn't really look that impressive when it came down. It was just this one little twinkle thing of lights on the horizon.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah, we could have been nice and toasty and comfortable.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I don't, but that would be something I would have done.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Oh, right, right, right. The fake vomiting.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Didn't you pass out boning too and stuff?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Here's where we turn this whole thing into an essential oils pitch podcast.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
It sounds like they just threw everything in the kitchen sink into this.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Maybe we should take – There's a lot of excuses for why Toby wouldn't be on things so that he could help out as a writer and producer.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I thought I was so clever in season one making them – actors so that they would have this experience of being actors. And then at some point in season two, I'm looking around and 50% of the writers are gone because they're on set. And I'm like, oh, what have I done?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I remember like trying to build the reactions because everybody's supposed to be like unimpressed and just, you know, straight faced. And it was almost impossible because everybody was breaking down. I made him do that over and over and over again.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I don't think so. I really think he improvised that. I don't remember it being in the script. I think he just kind of went for it.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And the worm. I mean, they were different. I feel like there were different versions of the dance, and then we kind of made the highlight reel.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
That was exhausting. Yeah, he completely did. That was amazing.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I mean, I feel like what we often did was we would do one take with the music and then somebody would have a little earwig You know, and they would say, do you want to do it with an earwig? And a lot of effort had gone into making a tiny invisible thing that could play the soundtrack. And then the actor would go, no, I don't need it. And then they would do the next five takes just for memory.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
That's how I feel like it probably went down. I do remember some fun facts about the band on Booze Cruise.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yes, exactly. Because my friend Bob Thiel, Jr., as you're pointing out on your card – who did our theme song was in the band and three out of the four band people were the guys who played our theme song uh hal craigan and uh dylan also dylan o'brien who's a big songwriter in la and uh
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
These guys were friends of mine, or Bob was, and the theme song for The Office was written by Jay Ferguson, but he set over a version of it on Synthesizer, which was a little... It was great. It was obviously a great song. Loved it. But it didn't sound, didn't have the energy that you'd want. And so Bob had this kind of rockin' band that he put together of his friends.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And we went and recorded the theme song with all live instruments in a session. Yeah.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And then he became, you know, then he called his band the Scrantons.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And then he came to Scranton with us and... Would play at our parties often.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, Bob also did the music for Sons of Anarchy and the Mayans. So he's quite talented.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Isn't there a shot of Phyllis dancing with Creed at one point?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah. I didn't like that. I reread the script, too, and I was like, ooh, glad we didn't use this.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
So do you remember? Because I remember when we were doing that scene and Amy started to do the cheerleader stuff, we did a couple of takes of it. And then Ken wanted to move on. And something was bothering me. And I didn't want to move on from that scene. And I realized that the balance – she kind of shifted the balance. Because Amy Adams is obviously very charismatic. Yeah.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
You know, beautiful actress. And she did that really fun, cute cheerleader thing. And then we were going to move on. And I realized, like, Pam is just basically not participating on the same level here. She's kind of denying the –
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
cheerleader thing but she isn't doing her own charismatic thing and we went back and at 909 i went back to you and i said you got to kick this up a notch do something do you remember that yeah and then you kind of mocked her cheerleader thing and you did that and and i was like yeah
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, also, Pam really gives him an opening on the top of the boat there.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
That to me, the Jim thing of it was she's engaged and he wants to be a good person and respect the fact that she's engaged. But he's also like there's all these clues coming in that there could be something and he doesn't go for it. And it's very funny. Frustrating to watch.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, I remember to me that was probably one of the most personal and sort of raw things that I would have put into a script because it did not feel like a very – the noble Jim successful social guy moment. It felt really like people are going to hate him for this or disrespect him or whatever. So I kind of felt it was risky to put it out there. I don't know. It was very...
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
hard also in the edit to keep it that long. I mean, we tried to make the same length that you guys really did in the scene. And there was a lot of urge to like trim that up. That's an awful long time to have people not talk.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
There's a lot going on in those 27 seconds. Just because people aren't talking doesn't mean nothing's going on. And I think that you look at his face and you can see him trying out different things and thinking and being urged to go forward and blocked. And then I think also on your face, there's all this kind of like,
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
disappointment that he's not going to do anything and face saving when you're like, well, I'm cold. And kind of it was kind of good that it was cold, actually. And we really did shoot it out in the harbor because I think you wouldn't have been able to like your nose was red.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, I mean, that was part of, I think... what made the show so special was that and so different from what was on tv you know was that moments of behavior were really important more so than jokes and setups and punch lines and lines and stuff and so uh and i think that came out of appreciating what's good about a documentary and documentaries just are all about finding the truth
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
In what people are doing and leaning in and no matter what they think they're doing or what they say they're doing, what are their actions show you that they're doing? And this was like a good romantic example of, you know, it all being in between the lines and it all being on the faces and not in the script.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I remember getting this panicky radio thing. The boat with Phyllis on it is gone.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I was stranded on the boat. And Brian too, right?
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah. It was crazy. Well, for some reason, it fixated on me that it was Phyllis. That Phyllis was, that we had lost Phyllis.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, she says the first memory, she said it was about 2.30 in the morning, and she was waiting to leave the ship. And her first memory was seeing Steve Carell on a tiny little boat holding onto some kind of a pole with no life jacket disappearing into the night.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And she remembers thinking that if NBC knew that their star didn't have a life jacket and was being pulled off back to the harbor, they would be upset. And then she got on the boat – And she thought it was Oscar, Brian, and somebody from the wardrobe department.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Oh, she said, I'm not sure if Angela was there or not. And then she talks, everything was fine, pulling away. We were enjoying the smell of the ocean, the lights in the distance. And then all of a sudden, nothing. The engine died. So you were there.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
It was very unstable. Phyllis said that at one point she had to switch boats. She was terrified of falling in.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
That is Kent Zbornak. So Kent was our line producer, and he was also in the DGA. And he managed to launch us on the budget that we had, which was tiny, into Long Beach Harbor on a boat for days and get hotel rooms for everybody. And he realized that we really needed a shot like that. And he shot that himself with his own equipment. while we were shooting the rest of it.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Cause he just had an instinct that there was no way the production could get that and stop everything. So that was kind of a gorilla move and super valuable. And Kent was fantastic at doing those kinds of things. Like he was always stitching together amazing stuff on our little budget.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
He's on one of those dinghies. He's on one of those Zodiac dinghies.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
That was, go ahead. People, I think, have the wrong idea about how we did the show in a way. Because like most filmmaking is super intentional. And you would say to the camera operator, okay, at this signal, you need to zoom in. And then you'd try and get the actor to do it at exactly the right time. And our show was more like the theory of natural selection kind of.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Like there would be a situation and I would give notes or the directors would give notes to the camera operators that were not about what they did specifically but more about their intentions. So we would say, okay, you're really interested in what he sees down at the end of the hall. So just go find it. And we had all these people who had come from reality shows
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
who were used to finding the story on their own. And that turned out great. And I can't really speak for Ken. As the director, he directed it, and he might have known exactly what he was going for and kept doing it until he got it. But a lot of the times, there were just lots of happy accidents.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And then you'd tell the story through all the happy accidents, and you had enough flexibility that you could have gone a bunch of different ways with it.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Totally. The editors are amazing. We had fantastic editors. This one was Dean. Dave Rogers, as you know, I'm still working with, work with him all the time. Brilliant. Claire Scanlon.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Also brilliant. And... there was enormous amounts of leeway for the editors and in post because like a documentary, we shot way more stuff than we could ever possibly use. And so our rough cuts were always about 38 minutes long, but the show's only 21 minutes long. six seconds or something like that. So tons of good material was discarded. And that was a large part of my job. I loved being on set
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And I also loved being with the writers. But this whole other area of my job was sitting with the editors. And they're fun people too with great creative ideas. And you could tell so many different versions of the show by what you left in and what you took out. And there was always a thing where you'd go – everybody kind of agreed on the first six or eight minutes to get rid of.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And probably we all agreed like having – Oscar makes snarky mean comments is not great or whatever it is. But then you get to like about 26 minutes and there was a lot of really good stuff. And I used to have all these regrets about things that were great that couldn't get in the show. One of them for this, if you remember, was
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Creed sitting in with the band and us finding out that he'd been in the grassroots.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And, um, that was like fantastic. And we had all this footage and I found footage of him from, you know, late sixties and, you know, playing guitar with the grassroots on, um, Play Boy After Dark with Hugh Hefner, like all this great footage, which was going to be the B-roll under him talking about playing with all these greats in the late 60s. And that was in for a really long time.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And that he kind of fried his brain with drug use. Yeah. And now he can barely concentrate on his job. And then there's a talking head of Angela going, he wasn't that good or something like that.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I think Ken did a really good job with that too, because that was, I believe, supposed to just be a talking head. And-
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah, and he really rightly said, well, where exactly did he say this? Because he had the thought, and then he walks over to Pam, and then she gets interrupted by Roy setting a date. So he couldn't figure out where there was going to be a time to interview him about this. And so he sort of invented this on-the-fly interview where he kind of just passed the cameraman and said it into camera then.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
I think it makes it so much worse too because he had his moment on the deck.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And she was quite receptive there and then he didn't go for anything. And then here, look how happy she is that she finally, after three years of being strung along – Yeah.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And then you could just picture like, oh, maybe I could have made that face on her if I had said something upstairs.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
A lot of the writers said that, too, to me. And I... thought it was the most efficient breakup you could possibly have, pretty much. And we always had time issues. And I just didn't really want to see a long, drawn out scene with Katie and, you know, just wasn't about that. And it seemed to me he was motivated to be brusque and, you know.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
You went the longest being not the nicest of any character.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And which was great because then when we got into season nine and I was kind of casting about for what the arc of season nine should be, it was like, well, there's only one character left who hasn't warmed up at all. Let's put Angela through hell this year. Yeah.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yes, well, that was one of the non-Dunder Mifflin people on the boat. And as I recall, he was not supposed to jump off the boat. As I recall, I mean, I may be blowing this because it was a while ago, but I think there was a little bit of shock that one of the extras jumped off the boat in that take. And I think we were probably not supposed to let him jump off the boat.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah, I think so. I think he went – I think he may have either misinterpreted some direction or he just was super enthusiastic. I don't – I have a slight memory of that being a little too guerrilla.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Kent was in the boat that was supposed to catch him, but he went and took the shot.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, I'm just saying this was leading up to him being handcuffed on the roof.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And the kind of secret impetus for this whole episode was that, you know, we had come on the air in the first season and we were given, you know, six episodes and we didn't do a great job in the ratings. And there was a lot of question whether we'd get invited back. And So at one point in between the seasons, Kevin Reilly said, come in and pitch me a new take on the show.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Pressure. There was a lot of pressure. And so I had – initially kind of thought that The Office was such a special, unique show, which I had so much respect for, that I wouldn't change very much on it. And I realized that I needed to change something. And I had some experience with this, with King of the Hill, in making Hank likable, the lead of King of the Hill.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And he has certain qualities that were invented to keep him likable. And so I was like, oh, this isn't really that different. Because Michael has some, negative qualities and I just got to find a way to give him some stories that are going to warm him up. And so I wrote out a bunch of story ideas somewhere like in probably in norms. No, we weren't at norms yet.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
That was my go-to place in the mornings on Sherman Way and Woodman. But yeah, so I was in some coffee shop and I wrote down a bunch of moments that I thought would warm them up. And one of them was that, for instance, that even though the staff finds him irritating, they'll back him against an outsider. So that was like the end of Dundee's.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And, you know, one of them was like he should be good at his job, which happened in the client. He actually was a good salesperson.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And this one was that he should give a piece of really good advice to somebody that the audience was going to be happy that that advice was transferred. And you'd be like, yeah, good for you, Michael. And so it was sort of all about him telling Jim to never give up on the top of that thing.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
But that's what the audience wanted to see. Jim was so sad. You wanted somebody to give him some hope and keep this Jim Pam thing going. And so Michael kind of stepped in. And I took the never, ever, ever give up from actually Winston Churchill's speech, which – This is perfectly you.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah. It was great because the two plots kind of intersect there for a moment. Yeah.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
After a few of those, Michael starts to get to be a better lead.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
That's correct. I've been working on this for so long, it's kind of ridiculous. We had our strike in 2008, and this was my sort of idea to write a book, like a sci-fi book.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And then we went back to work, and so, you know, it was gestating for a long time, and It's sort of a romance, very intense, and it's set in the future. I am in.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Well, it's got a very kind of accessible, more Harry Potter-y than like on a spaceship kind of deal. Yeah. Yeah. And anyway, so I have been working on it pretty much since The Office went down, which is ridiculous. But I wrote it. I sold it to HBO. It was there for a couple of years and then it went over to Amazon and we shot it in Vancouver at the beginning of the year.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
Yeah, it's funny too. It's a comedy. It's like a lot of stuff. There's a mystery. It's basically there's this idea that in the future medical imagery will get much better and virtual reality and it'll become possible if you're in an accident and you get to the hospital in time to have your brain scanned and then
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
You can be uploaded, it's called Upload, into a virtual reality hotel that's run by all the big tech companies. So the six big tech companies that have things like Alexa and Siri, they have programmed these luxurious sort of virtual hotels along the lines of different themes. So like the Facebook one is like a casino and – The Apple one is like some sort of beachy kind of resort.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
And the one that he ends up being uploaded in is like this mountain hotel on a lake. And... Anyway, that's the premise.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
But that's the end of your head. It burns your head off when the scan happens.
Office Ladies
Second Drink: Booze Cruise with Greg Daniels
But the information exists, and it's digitally presented in a piece of software so that you think you're still alive.