The origins of 'Hijack' are rooted in transit. The Apple TV+ drama returns for its second season this month, and the question becomes not just how to escalate the stakes, but how to reinvent the space around them.
Leaving behind the open skies of Season 1, director Jim Field Smith explains why the series’ next chapter plunges Sam Nelson (Idris Elba) into an environment that is darker, tighter and far less forgiving — the underground.
That is exactly what happened [with Season 1.] Season 2 came about because I was thinking if we're going to do more of this world, we're going to explore this character in this world a bit more I, as a filmmaker, need to do something fresh. I can't just do, okay, here's more of the same. So I was trying to think of ways that we could keep the DNA of the show the same and keep our central character obviously, but then plunge him into a completely different environment.
My natural instinct is always to go to the exact opposite of something. And if you think about Season 1 being up in the sky, sunlight streaming through the windows, it's blue skies, it's 35,000 feet and it's oxygen—I was like, what's the direct opposite of that?
So my brain immediately went underground and the idea of being trapped underground in a city you don't know with lots of shadows and grime. To me, it is the exact opposite of the world of Season 1. And so that immediately was great and it inspired, well, where's this character? What's happened to Sam? Why is Sam underground? Thematically, he's underground and why? And why is Sam in a dark place, both literally and metaphorically? So that was kind of where the underground train thing came from.
As I've said previously, I can be a little bit contrary. So I immediately think, how can I push myself and my team to tell the most compelling story possible? Now, you might think that would be to open things up to the widest set of possibilities. Actually, I think better results come from containing things and setting harder rules because that's life, and life is frictional and drama is frictional. Things shouldn't be easy. If you're trying to make a show where a guy has a lot of problems to overcome, what you want to be doing is making his life as hard as possible, not making it easier and not going well, anything could happen next. Sam's out on the road, and therefore, he can go anywhere.
My instinct is to do the opposite and say, let's put him in a labyrinth and let's put him inside a metal tube in a labyrinth and let's make life as hard for him as possible. Let's have him be in a city where he doesn't speak the language. Let's surround him with people he doesn't know where he has no allies. Let's have it that he can't communicate with anybody. And so these are all very deliberate choices that we're making because we want to reduce it back to a human thing and a psychological thing of, how is Sam going to get past the next obstacle and the next obstacle and the next obstacle?
So yeah, it does make for a very challenging filmmaking environment because of course, you are choosing to restrict yourself. But then what I encourage everybody to do is to lean into every last detail. And so we build that train for real. Every millimeter of that train is an exact replica of a Berlin U-Bahn train. Every station that you see is an exact replica of the real life station that it's representing. The computer systems, the uniforms, everything is authentic. The more you lean into those details, the more authentic it feels to the audience and to the cast that are playing these characters, and the more the show connects with you on a human level. That's the most important thing.
‘Hijack’ has and will continue to be a character-driven show. For all of the fun that we have in the show, the kind of rollercoaster ride that we go on, at the end of the day, if you don't connect with those characters, then it's all meaningless. So obviously we have Sam at the pinnacle of that...you think you know Sam Nelson from Season 1, but you don't. The Sam Nelson that you will meet is being pushed into a much more extreme state and he's learned a lot in Season 1, but it's nowhere near what he needs to learn to get through the events of Season 2. And the theme of Season 2 is very much how far will Sam go? And I think if you filter that down, that's true for all the other characters as well.
There are characters that are supporting Sam on his quest and he's having to encourage them to make some pretty tricky choices and some slightly counterintuitive choices along the way. And then you've got everybody that's responding to Sam. You've got the police authorities in Berlin, you've got the passengers on the train, you've got the people back home who are also trying to second guess what Sam's doing and why.
And we've got some familiar faces there back from Season 1, which I think people hopefully will be happy to see. But yeah, the nature of plunging Sam into a new city and a new world means that we get to meet a lot of new people too. And we wanted to surround Sam with new faces so he has to forge new relationships.
The eight-episode second season of ‘Hijack’ will debut globally on Apple TV with the first two episodes on Wednesday, Jan. 14, followed by one episode weekly until Feb. 25.
