An American Pickle How The Scenes With Two Seth Rogens Were Shot

An American Pickle: How The Scenes With Two Seth Rogens Were Shot

Seth Rogen plays both main roles in HBO’s An American Pickle: Herschel Greenbaum and great-grandson Ben; here’s how the dual-role scenes were shot.

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An American Pickle How The Scenes With Two Seth Rogens Were Shot

An American Pickle on HBO Max features Seth Rogen giving a dual-role performance as Herschel and Ben Greenbaum. The film is based on a short story by Simon Rich titled “Sell Out.” Herschel is a Jewish immigrant who moves to America at the turn of the 20th century to seek a better life for himself and his wife Sarah; however, after an accident at a pickle factory leads to Herschel being trapped in brine for 100 years, he finds himself in a world he doesn’t recognize, with no living family apart from his great-grandson, Ben Greenbaum.

An American Pickle may seem like the perfect movie to use dual-roles, but Rogen was not always set up to play both parts. At one point, Ike Barinholtz read for Herschel’s role, but after some more deliberating and insistence by the other filmmakers, Rogen agreed to play both Herschel and Ben. Norma Shearer appeared in the first known dual-role performance in Lady of the Night, almost 100 years ago. Since then, the concept has been used in a plethora of films across genres. The one question that remains, however, is how exactly the process of dual-roles is done.

In the early days of filmmaking, the process of dual-roles was done by layering film strips. Today, the process is all done in post-production. The actor will usually perform one scene as one character and then turn around and immediately perform the same scene as the other character. Films use stand-ins to make sure the blocking is accurate; the stand-in in An American Pickle was Ian Poake.

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In An American Pickle, Seth Rogen and director Brandon Trost decided to shoot all of the scenes as Herschel then went back and did the scenes as Ben. The reason for this, according to Rogen, was simple: “I didn’t want to wear a fake beard for the movie, because I think they look bad, and as an actor, they’re very restrictive” he told Yahoo. The beard, on top of the accent, helped make the performances feel distinct from each other — as much as possible with one person playing two roles.

Despite how it all came together, the shoot was far from easy: as Rogen told CinemaBlend, “Some of the more challenging scenes were the more simple ones.” Rogen explained that the “naturalistic” scenes between Herschel and Ben in which they interact with each other on the screen were the most difficult to film because the filming was so “rigid.” Moments like the two making seltzer water together are deceptively simple; Rogen is so comfortable in both roles, it’s easy to forget that the shot is a composite made from various takes. Another complicating factor was Rogen’s style of comedy. As he said in an interview with Screen Rant:

I’ve been improvising in film for around 15 years, and this was a very difficult version of that. You have to improvise both sides at once. I would improvise as Herschel, leaving pauses for what I knew I would later improvise back to myself as Ben, and then come back, weeks or months later and improvise the other half of the conversation.

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Perhaps the use of dual-roles in An American Pickle will lead to a resurgence of the method going forward. The uncertainty around movie production right now could also be a factor in the technique becoming more popular. Having one actor take the place of two characters could be a creative way for directors to tell stories in a time when crew size will likely be limited for the foreseeable future due to COVID-19.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/american-pickle-movie-seth-rogen-double-filmed-how/

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