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A whimper? A bang? In this scene from “The Life of Chuck,” the world ends with a TV glow.
At the center of the sequence is Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is walking through a dark neighborhood as all is falling apart. His phone has died and he is headed to see his ex-wife when he encounters a young woman (Violet McGraw) on roller skates and strikes up a conversation. Their moment is interrupted by the cool glow of screens, all mysteriously projecting images of a man named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston).
In his narration, Flanagan said, “What I found really striking about this scene when Stephen King wrote it is that it’s a very kind of casual conversation of two people who just happen across each other during this apocalyptic time.”
The sequence is shot in a neighborhood near Mobile, Ala., where, Flanagan said, “we took over the power grid and basically blacked out the entire world there.”
For the glowing screens, rather than using expensive visual effects, Flanagan said, “we accomplished this the very old-fashioned way by hanging televisions in the windows on their sides and prerecording these videos and running around hitting play on each of them in order to get the image to appear.”
Read the “Life of Chuck” review.
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Mekado Murphy is the assistant film editor. He joined The Times in 2006.
The post How the World Ends in ‘The Life of Chuck’ appeared first on New York Times.
