The Most Challenging Scene to Film in Pitt Season 2 Isn’t What You Think [Exclusive]

This article contains spoilers for “The Pitt” Season 2 Finale, “9:00 P.M.”

The staff at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, the fictional hospital where HBO Max’s “The Pitt” takes place, don’t usually have easy days. The same can be said for the people who make the show. Whether building an immersive set for the emergency department, creating elaborate prosthetics for on-camera operations or trying to maintain documentary quality during complicated surgical procedures, “The Pitt” team has its hands full. This behind-the-scenes video offers just a small glimpse into the complex orchestration required to achieve the program’s goals:

Season 2 introduces a number of complications, including a baby who was abandoned in the hospital, introducing AI into the workplacethe deteriorating mental health of Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), and the revelation about what has really been happening with Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi). But when I recently spoke with Johanna Coelho, who has been “The Pitt’s” cinematographer on every episode of the series so far, she revealed that the most difficult moment to film in Season 2 wasn’t one of the surgeries where someone’s chest was cut open, as I assumed. In fact, the toughest moment of the season didn’t even occur within the walls of Pitt.

I asked “The Pitt” director of photography Johanna Coelho if there were any scenes in Season 2 that required an unexpected solution or some additional creativity to pull off. After mentioning that the post-credits karaoke scene was fun because it was very different from what they normally do, he highlighted the hardest scene of the season:

“A challenging scene, we also had one in Episode 15 where Digby is walking through the park with the mannequin. Funnily enough, it was a little bit difficult to light this one, because the mannequin is so clean and pure, it requires a lot of light, and then Digby has a little bit dirtier, darker skin at the time and everything. So it was very difficult to light in a natural way that we could follow this movement like this. I didn’t expect this to be so challenging, and it ended up being challenging.

I thought the rooftop scene where they’re watching the fireworks was going to be more challenging, and it turned out to be a little easier to film. [laughs] That’s why sometimes you never know what happens. It may be a specific situation and you have not been in that specific situation. For me, that was the mannequin that required so much light, while the character didn’t and I felt like we were distracted from the mannequin to just look at Digby as well.”

There were probably more emotionally draining scenes to film (Dana (Katherine LaNasa) talking to the sexual assault survivor, for example), but it’s ironic that the most difficult moment to film wasn’t an amputation or even the arrival of a helicopter, but simply a guy walking down a sidewalk.

“The Pitt” Season 2 is now streaming in its entirety on HBO Max.