Nathan Fielder: "I had never had a desire to be a pilot, ever"

[TMC]

https://www.vulture.com/article/nath...interview.html

"It’s totally scary to me," Fielder told Vulture last week in discussing The Rehearsal's Season 2 finale. "You also realize when you do start flying that a lot of people who get into this are people who love cars, and they ride motorcycles, and they know all about engines. I didn’t know any of that stuff. I didn’t even know what an engine was, really. I knew it produced power, but I didn’t even understand what the ‘power’ is. I put oil in my car, but I didn’t know why I needed that, really. I’m, like, so dumb with all of this stuff, but I realized I had to learn all of that. So when I had this idea of this recurring issue of the communication between the two pilots and how it leads to a lot of crashes, I was like, I only know about aviation from what I’ve read, but I really want to understand what it actually feels like to be a pilot." Fielder added that he 'was immediately insecure that I’d be able to do this because my fear would be that pilots would think this is only a joke or that they’re being made fun of in some way. Not only did I want to understand the experience of being a pilot, but I thought that being a pilot would disarm some of them in a conversation; I could be like, 'I’m a pilot too, and here’s my experience, and I do understand some of these things.' I actually talked throughout the season to most of the pilots, and we’d talk as pilots more as it went on. But in the edit, we ended up deciding that delaying that idea until the end was a better storytelling device. So in the last episode, we say ‘Two Years Earlier’ because I actually did start that at the very beginning of the process. Basically, around January 2023, I had this idea, and before I even talked to HBO about the concept, I started doing some flight training. Then a couple months in I was like, 'Here’s the idea.' I was filming it, so I showed them some footage of me doing it. It’s interesting, because I am trying my best; I’m truly, truly just trying my best to do this in as quick of a time as possible, and I was struggling! It’s crazy what pilots have to go through. It’s really hard. And the knowledge stuff you have to complete — which we don’t even get into in the show — is so immense to get these licenses...I set a goal in my head of getting private pilot, instrument, and commercial. I liked the sound of that — 'commercial.' It sounds impressive, even though a lot of people don’t know that 'commercial pilot' doesn’t mean you can fly a big plane; it just means you can be paid to fly."

ALSO:

• The Rehearsal returned to its core principal with the Season 2 finale: "The brilliant finale of The Rehearsal works like the prestige of a magic trick, when all the smoke and mirrors fall away and we return to the core principle of the show itself, which is that anything is possible with diligence and practice," says Scott Tobias. "Throughout the series’ run, when Fielder says lines like 'I’ve always believed that if you rehearse long enough and hard enough, nothing will be left to chance,' it’s been easy to understand them as ironic. After all, the environments he’s creating for these rehearsed scenarios are hardly scientific: No matter how much work goes into re-creating, say, a cramped San Jose apartment circa 2011 on a soundstage, there’s nothing remotely authentic about the actors, cameras, and production crew that’s bringing this place to life. The elevated, reality-TV-level artifice of Fielder’s shows has often been the funniest thing about them, but it’s also a natural obstacle for believing anything serious he wants to say." Tobias adds: "The Rehearsal may not seem a likely candidate for uplifting, inspirational television, but that has been Fielder’s hidden agenda all season. The thing that seems to bother him most about the cockpit-communication issue is that it’s unforgiving of human vulnerability, which can be as figuratively destructive in everyday life as it is literally destructive on airline flights."
  
• What this season argued, in its strange, hilarious way, was that the human desire to avoid discomfort is narcotically powerful, even dangerous: "This focus on avoidance is where the personal story line — and boy, we need to get into this — connects, I think," says James Poniewozik in a conversatiuon with The New York Times colleague Alyssa Wilkinson. "The final episodes take a turn, as Fielder (all together: or at least his character!) faces the suggestion that he might be neurodivergent. (He notes that The Rehearsal has resonated with people on the spectrum, and he has said he’s researched Asperger’s syndrome as part of his work.) In the end, he chooses not to pursue an answer, continues flying and concludes that if you’re in the cockpit, 'you must be fine.' It’s an old move of Fielder’s going back to Nathan for You, to portray his character as having blind spots as much as his subjects do. But I don’t think he’s ever done it quite so poignantly. After undertaking a yearslong project on the lure of denial, he still can’t listen to his internal co-pilot." Wilkinson adds: "From the very start of the show, I found myself thinking it was sort of a dramatization, or maybe unpacking, of two mental experiences that can be unsettling. One is dissociation, the feeling that everything around you is unreal, and you’re disconnected from it. The other is Asperger’s, which for some can manifest as the feeling of always observing the world rather than being part of it. The 'rehearsal' impulse seems like a literalist way to cope with those sensations: replaying and trying out social situations in the hopes of navigating them properly. But it has also felt like a way for Fielder — or his character, anyhow — to actually have 'normal' experiences that seem mysterious and out of reach."
  
• Season 2's finale seemed like a response to criticism of Season 1: "Fielder began Season 2 by framing his mission as an altruistic exercise, intended to help the people who drive and use air travel. (Judging by recent headlines, it seems like they need it.)," says Alison Herman. "The finale makes clear this retooled rehearsal practice, just like the original, is first and foremost about Fielder — and not just in the sense that Fielder, like everyone, has his issues with saying what he feels. In fact, it’s one of precious few times The Rehearsal has hinted that the events of Season 1, including a disastrous experiment in simulated parenthood, have weighed on the protagonist. What if Fielder is so disturbed by his own dysfunction, and outside observers’ attempt to taxonomize it, that disproving their analysis drives him to increasingly over-the-top acts of one-upsmanship? Could an irredeemable loner doomed to a life peering from the outside in do this?"
  
• The Rehearsal began as an attempt to improve aviation safety, but slowly morphs into a meditation on the sincerity of the comedian: "Nathan Fielder is a character," says Lindsay Traves. “Yes, he’s a real person and a comedian, but like his predecessors in Rowan Atkinson, early Stephen Colbert, and Larry David, Fielder has created a character so deep into the bit that it’s nearly impossible to know who Fielder would be, say, sitting across from you having a morning coffee. It’s something he examines throughout this season, beginning on a note about how he is viewed as a clown, and later in the penultimate episode of this season remembering how even on talk shows and in interviews, he is doing a bit or playing a character." Traves adds: "In his finale, his copilot calls him an actor, and Fielder corrects him that he is an actor and a pilot, presumably acting as a pilot in the current circumstance. Most of us probably won’t see the real Nathan Fielder, at least not while he is crafting this kind of media, but for now, his latest stunt has perhaps given us the longest glimpse at the man behind the mask."
  
• The Rehearsal revels in those productive contradictions: "While Fielder insists on making perfect reproductions of various physical environments, his scenarios are in other ways designed to shake the subject out of any possible immersion," says Lili Loofbourow. "Getting waterboarded (milkboarded?) by a giant doll’s breast milk seems unlikely to help Fielder experience the close relationship heroic pilot Chesley 'Sully' Sullenberger had with his mother. But that silly sequence wasn’t a signal meant to undermine the project’s more serious aims. It was a joke version of something he was genuinely attempting: trying to understand what it’s like to be a pilot. Fielder, who facetiously leans into comparisons to Willy Wonka, offers his subjects the opposite of a chocolate factory. The fantasies he indulges are decidedly pedestrian. Instead of an escapist wonderland, he uses the magic of his production to make exact copies of people’s homes, transforming their lives into sets. The expense alone makes it outrageous. Who would spend this much money on such a thing? Why? One of Fielder’s answers is: It’s funny!"
  
• This season’s experiments have been enthralling, illuminating, even occasionally beautiful: "The pilot/co-pilot dynamic is useful to Fielder because it is, at bottom, a relationship," says Phillip Maciak. "This is the point. Sometimes in obvious ways and sometimes in surprising ways, every ‘rehearsal’ boils down to relationship problems, usually outside the cockpit. There’s the young co-pilot who has a hard time being assertive and ends up having a long-avoided confrontation with his girlfriend in a simulated cockpit. There’s the couple who’ve cloned their dog but don’t feel like they ‘recognize’ their old dog in its replicas. Fielder hires a team of actors to study the couple and try to raise the clone in a simulation of the original dog’s puppyhood, only for the scenes to all devolve into arguments about whether or not to have children. Then there’s Colin, another young co-pilot who is too painfully shy to have a functioning love life. Fielder has a crowd of actors surround Colin everywhere he goes in a ‘Pack,’ mimicking and mirroring his words and behaviors in order to give him confidence. It’s a deeply stupid stunt until, every once in a while, it becomes incredibly moving."
  
• The Season 2 finale combines several of The Rehearsal’s underlying preoccupations into a single narrative arc: "If you’ve seen the now-legendary 'Dumb Starbucks' episode of Nathan for You, Fielder’s beloved Comedy Central series, you know he’s always loved gonzo stunts, and the 737 flight is one of his best. It combines several of The Rehearsal’s underlying preoccupations into a single narrative arc," says Brian Phillips. "There’s Fielder’s slightly creepy-seeming desire to be in control. There’s his equally creepy-seeming attraction to scenarios that combine care and exploitation. And then there’s his comic determination to go to extreme lengths for seemingly ludicrous motives, 3) a determination that both sets up The Rehearsal’s main plotlines and makes its tone strangely hard to describe. What I mean by that is that the tone of the series seldom seems to emerge naturally from the action on-screen; describing what happens makes the show sound zanier than it really is. In fact, the vibe is austere. The music is dour and repetitive. The lighting is clinical. Fielder’s voice-overs are deadpan to the point of sounding pained. For long stretches, the show isn’t particularly funny, and I don’t get the sense that it’s trying to be. Rather, Fielder seems to be using the paraphernalia of comedy to put his viewers in the same position of anxious uncertainty that he and his characters constantly experience. Life is unpredictable, other people are hard to understand, and rejection hurts; these are the core human crises that The Rehearsal seemingly wants to save us from, but it has a strange way of making us feel them more intensely rather than less, as if the audience itself were another diorama to be filled with Fielder’s anxieties."
  
• Season 2 was, somehow, even more berserk than Season 1, but it’s also more disciplined and coherent: "Acting, as he sees it, isn’t about convincing yourself but convincing other people," says Gideon Lewis-Kraus. "Fielder populates his own shows with actors because their remit is to convey feelings—a crucial part of his incessant rehearsals—without actually having them. He can experiment with his own performances without worrying they might take his responses personally. They are not, after all, regular people. They’re professionals. The object of Fielder’s rehearsals is not the nurturance of some elusive inner truth; it’s the hope that he might make his own performance of self in everyday life more convincing. He is not interested in authenticity or inner depth. He would just like to learn how better to be taken at face value." Lewis-Kraus adds: "The finale of this season, ‘My Controls,’ is one of the most astonishing, ridiculous, and sublime episodes of television I think I’ve ever seen."
  
• The Rehearsal twists reinvents the show into something thrilling and terrifying: "It’s almost miraculous that he was able to keep his pilot skills a secret so that he could use that reveal to flip the script on our assumptions about him, shattering the notion that the host of the last five episodes was coming at the cockpit communication problem with anything less than 100-percent commitment," says Tara Bennett. "And it suddenly provides a reason why his actors agreed to go on a rehearsal flight with him as a pilot, and why an expert like John Goglia would give him the time of day outside of an initial polite conversation. With the power of that turn, Fielder reinvents the finale of The Rehearsal into something thrilling and terrifying: a genuine opportunity to prove his theories in real time and potentially change aviation-pilot training by exploiting a flight hour loophole pertaining to 737 pilots. Fielder theorizes to Goglia that if he finds a flyable 737 and passes his 737 SIM pilot training, he could potentially pilot a plane full of actors, not paid passengers, to test his rehearsal method between actual flying pilots. It’s the ultimate rehearsal exercise that, if successful, could prove to the FAA the worthiness of this hyperspecific but reasonable remedy. Watching Fielder throw himself into preparing for the rigorous training is like bearing witness to a much nerdier, but equally gripping, version of the training montage from Rocky."
  
• Trying to suss out what’s real and what isn’t is an inevitable response to The Rehearsal, and also, by design, an impossible one: "Both as a performer and as a director, Fielder shapes his interactions with his subjects (or, if you like, targets) for maximum unease, sharpening Nathan for You’s comedy of cringe into genuine discomfort, sometimes with a splash of ethical murk," says Sam Adams. "At the end of The Rehearsal’s first season, Nathan played “pretend daddy” to a 6-year-old who seemed to develop a genuine emotional attachment to him, and Lana Love, a contestant on the second season’s airline-themed singing-competition show Wings of Voice, said she’d been duped into spending more than $5,000 traveling to and from its bogus auditions. (The show within a show’s transparently absurd name was not revealed during the early round, and Fielder kept his distance from most of the participants.) But when one episode opened with a genre-mixing medley of the top 50 contestants performing 'Amazing Grace,' several of the finalists posted videos of themselves gleefully reacting to their moment in the national spotlight, as fleeting and faintly ridiculous as it was. And Love, who sneered her way through the show’s pop-punk take on the Christian hymn’s chorus, got a glamorous headshot published in a lengthy Variety article as well."
  
• "Wings of Voice" winner denounces fellow contestant who complained she lost $10,000 over the fake singing competition
  
• Redditors express doubt over The Rehearsal finale after finding evidence of three flights of the same Boeing 737 over two days