Swarm Showrunner Looks Back on Start to Dres Rampage
In Janine Nabers and Donald Glover’s Prime Video thriller Swarm, Dominique Fishback’s awkward social misfit Dre is driven to murder when her foster sister Marissa (Chlöe Bailey) kills herself after discovering her boyfriend, Khalid (Damson Idris), has been cheating on her. Dre shows up at Khalid’s house in the final scene of the pilot with ambiguous intentions — but by the time the credits roll, she’s bludgeoned him to death with a salt lamp, thus setting up the murderous rampage Dre will embark on for the rest of the series. Nabers breaks down how this pivotal scene evolved from its first drafts to what stunned viewers eventually would see onscreen.
Related Stories
Nabers liked the idea of showing a softer side to Khalid’s macho exterior within his home: “We added a dog, a Rottweiler, for that particular scene, [to] set the tone. We’re setting Khalid up as this guy who is a bully, he’s cocky, he’s the type of guy that probably walks around the neighborhood with a shirt off, letting his Rottweiler bark at people. But he’s this kid that actually lives in a proper, very homey house.”
Dre’s choice of murder weapon went through many iterations before the shooting of the scene. “It was a pan, and then I think it was a billiard ball, which didn’t make sense, because we wanted something that she could bludgeon [with]. At one point, it might have been a hammer,” Nabers explains. “Then we were sitting in this production meeting, and Drew [Daniels, director of photography] was the one who very brilliantly thought of the salt rock. As soon as he said it, [I was] like, ‘Oh, that’s it. That’s absolutely it.’ “
“It was actually really easy to write this scene because it felt like a lot of callbacks to what we already had established between [Dre and Khalid],” Nabers muses. “Like cursing, or saying, ‘I don’t drink,’ and him having offered her beer before, earlier on in the episode. Just feeling like this man has never seen who this woman is.”
“This final scene is very full-circle, in terms of her relationship with Khalid, and how it leads to this moment that you think might end up being kind of a sexual awakening with her,” Nabers says. “Shooting Black people on film at night is hard. But it’s purposeful in that moment, because the only light we see is this salt rock lamp, and then the flashes of this creepy alien footage on TV. It feels like horror, it feels like something [ominous] is approaching, but it also feels like it could be sensual, a little sexy.”
The ending of the pilot that aired on Prime looks completely different from the final lines of this script, with Dre gorging on a pie after killing Khalid. “Her eating the pie was never scripted,” says Nabers. “We were looking at her relationship with food, [which] is kind of funny, but also weird. It felt a little bit like a play, especially shooting this scene, because we only had one take because there was so much blood. We did it, and we realized that there was a hair on the film. We were like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.’ Then we realized that the hair was actually so at the bottom that it was OK. We didn’t have to reshoot.”
This whole short scene was cut from the finished product: “We shot it through initially where she bludgeons him and then she leaves, and we see her drive off,” Nabers explains. “But it just ended up being so strong to go out on her eating this pie, and this dog barking at her and her making eyes with the dog at the end.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qbvLpbCwp5%2BZv6a8zqurnqpemLyue9OvZq2uXZuyosDUq5ysZ6OsrrO5jKyfqK%2BiqruvsdFmm6udo2K%2FornPmp6eZWFngHaBj3Fuam5f