Among its hidden camera peers, Jury Duty’s premise is certainly unique. Under the guise of a documentary, the series follows a jury trial through the perspective of solar contractor Ronald Gladden. The catch is that everyone else in the trial is an actor, and the case itself is entirely fake. Gladden is selected to become the foreperson, and he has to manage the increasingly peculiar trial. Deadline sat down with cinematographer Chris Darnell and Jake Szymanski.
“What I love about these projects is they’re all very different and challenging, and they all feel like there’s not been a lot like it before it, which is kind of rare when you’re making stuff,” said Darnell. “If it seems like an impossible problem, I’m super down.”
According to Szymanski, one of the challenges was creating a controlled world. “For Jury Duty we were full, in a Truman Show-esque way, creating a world around this guy for three full weeks,” he said. “So we controlled all the people, as actors he would interact with, but we also had to plan to be able to capture anything he might do in that world for three weeks. And the more you follow the line of what that means, it seemed very overwhelming very quickly.”
The crew found Gladden via a Craigslist ad, and they had to disguise the show so as to not ruin the illusion. “For our hero who didn’t quite know he was going to be the star of a TV show, we were trying to put him on this hero’s journey,” says Szymanski. “He knew that there was a documentary crew there filming the court process, and he knew he was taking part in that, but we tried to make it seem like a really small kind of educational or independent documentary crew, so he really never saw more than three or four guys…and never more than three cameras, I think. But in reality, we had 80 people behind the scenes and we had a lot more cameras hidden away everywhere.”
Find the full interview here. Jury Duty is available to stream on Prime Video.