Ted Lasso Director Explains How Massive the Production Actually Was

Ted Lasso may be considered a comedy when it comes to awards voting, but you’d never guess it if you stumbled upon the show’s production. One of the most popular shows on the planet for the past couple of years, Ted Lasso also became a behemoth of a production for Apple, just ask its directors. Emmy-winning director Declan Lowney recently spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about his work on Ted Lasso, and revealed it was nothing like he’d ever done in the TV space before.

“I’ve never worked with so many people on a show. A British show would have about a tenth of the budget – our audience is smaller, the shows are smaller, we don’t have such huge crews or enormous casts,” Lowney said. “And we don’t have the facilities that a big budget gives you. The scale of ambition is smaller. That said, more and more British shows are now being made for streamers, and they are having the money spent on them. It didn’t take me long to adjust. It’s wonderful to have a bit of money.”

The director went on to talk about just how difficult filming Ted Lasso could be, thanks to the massive case and all of the football scenes.

“It’s a very complex show to make,” he said. “There’s the core cast of 18 characters who interact. But then you’ve got the football – the soccer, as you call it – and that’s quite a complicated thing to shoot. The football is shot by the football director. Then, if there’s drama on the pitch for the actors, the director for that episode shoots the [scenes] on the pitch, but then you get off and the football guy does all the wide shots on the action. And then it cuts to Rebecca, Keeley and those guys up in the box – that’s shot in the same place, but it’s not shot at the same time as we shoot the football. And then when you go to the dugout to see Ted, Beard, Roy and Nate, that’s in a separate, smaller field with nothing behind the camera. They’re surrounded by about 200 extras. In season two, I [organized a lot of that] because I was a supervising producer. Thankfully this year, I only directed the last two episodes, but they were also hugely involved, being 70-minute episodes.”

Is Ted Lasso Season 3 Really the End?

In that same interview, Lowney was asked about the potential future of Ted Lasso. The Season 3 finale definitely operates as a series finale, but it also plants some seeds for potential stories to continue in the future. There’s been no definitive word from Apple TV+ either way.

“Everybody knew it was the end, but it’s also the end for now,” Lowney said with a laugh. “It’s going to be two or three years before anything happens – if anything happens – so let’s try and tie up all these stories properly. I’m trying to remember how the script was delivered, because I’ve a feeling I might have gotten a big chunk of it, and then there’d be more coming – but I didn’t know how much more yet. I was like, ‘There’s a lot of tying up to do!’ And then Jason [Sudeikis] gave me the remaining pages and it was like, ‘Ah! That’s what he’s doing here.’ But it is very hard to stand back and say, ‘Shit, guys … there’s 80 pages here.’ We shot it as we went along, and it’s very hard to gauge these things until you put it all together. Six weeks later, something else appears at the other end [in the edit], but it’s also about 10 minutes shorter than it was.”

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