Jun
22
- AVC: You wrote and directed the finale. In the scene where Leslie goes into the polling booth to vote for herself, what was your direction to Amy Poehler in that scene?
- Mike Schur: I gave her almost none. It was a very hard scene, and I gave her almost no direction in part because the entire scene was written in stage directions. There’s no dialogue. So I had written what I wanted to write, and I didn’t see any point to giving her a lot of direction. I think the only direction I gave for that entire scene, as many takes as we did, was about camera placement. It was for the operators and not for the actors. There was no need. I figured when I was writing it that, ordinarily, without anything going on in her personal life, this would be the most significant moment of Leslie’s life: walking into a voting booth and punching her own name on a ballot. That would be incredibly meaningful and emotional and complex and everything else. Add to it that right before she goes in, her boyfriend with whom she’s completely in love, tells her that he might be leaving her for six months to go work with this shark in Washington. I didn’t for one second think that Amy wouldn’t know how to do that. It’s the culmination of a lot of years of playing this character. It was that scene and the one where she finds out the results of the election from Ann—that’s the whole year! That’s the whole year, and that’s the whole character from the very beginning all the way to this point.
