‘Our Flag Means Death’ Creator on the Season Finale: “They Get to Have a Little Happiness”

It was jaw-dropping. In New Zealand, you go out the west side of Auckland, and it’s like the most beautiful beach you’ve ever seen. You go to Bethells Beach, and you can turn the camera here; you can shoot the entire thing. You’d shoot it a little bit this way, you’ve got, like, a Bergman movie. You go to the ocean, you’ve got From Here to Eternity. The freedom that you have and the beauty, I’ve never experienced anything like that before.

The battle scenes seemed to be far more elaborate and really felt like the show was leveling up. What went into filming those?

Jacob Tomuri, our stunt coordinator, is exceptional. He did Mad Max; he’s Tom Hardy’s stunt double, and he’s just so capable and good. And so a lot of it this season was that we have a short time frame, we move very quickly, and, again, we have a half-hour budget. We don’t have a one-hour budget, and we don’t have a one-hour shooting schedule. So a lot of it was just picking our shots and saying, Okay, we’re going to do a battle sequence. Let’s storyboard it. Let’s make sure that we know what the stunts are going to be, and let’s make sure that the location is spectacular. So we shoot it on that sandbar behind Bethells Beach, and it was like a dune which went on forever…. A lot of it is just seeing what New Zealand has to offer geographically. And then deciding, yes, let’s do that, and then building it around that, and then making sure that we’ve planned enough, that we can pull it off in a way that’s safe but also has enough size.

What was the idea behind having Stede as a merman in episode 3?

The idea was to make something that was just beautiful, and to get beauty and have beauty around them seeing each other again and their need for each other. To do that and to do it in a way that it’s a comedy, but to do it in a way that’s earnest and genuinely doing it and singing a Kate Bush song. We hit on the idea of a mermaid early on in the season two room, and [we said], Oh yeah, well, we have to put that in. There can’t really be mermaids on the show, but there can be in limbo, kind of purgatory, brain-damaged land as Blackbeard’s dying.