From ComingSoon.Net
WandaVision: First Episode Was Filmed In Front of Live Studio Audience
In a recent interview with EW, WandaVision showrunner Jac Schaeffer and executive producer Kevin Feige along with lead stars Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen opened up about Disney+’s highly-anticipated MCU series, revealing that the first episode was filmed in front of a live studio audience on the iconic Blondie Street at Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank.
“The show is a love letter to the golden age of television,” Schaeffer said. “We’re paying tribute and honoring all of these incredible shows and people who came before us, [but] we’re also trying to blaze new territory.”
“I would get ready for the day and watch some old sitcom because I couldn’t take the news anymore,” Feige said on what inspired him to adopt a sitcom style format for an MCU series. “Getting ready to go to set over the last few years, I kept thinking of how influential these programs were on our society and on myself, and how certainly I was using it as an escape from reality where things could be tied up in a nice bow in 30 minutes.”
Executive producer Mary Livanos added, “It’s really incredible to be able to tell a long-form story the way the comics did. In a sense, [a TV show] is a multi-issue comic-book run, which is something that, from the Marvel development side, we totally do understand.”
On filming in front of a live studio audience, Bettany and Olsen admitted that they were very nervous about it first as they had to rehearsed their entrances and exits with a special-effects team using wires and camera techniques that were used in classic sitcoms such as Bewitched.
“It was insanity,” Olsen said. “There was something very meta for my own life because I would visit those tapings as a kid, where my sisters were working [on Full House].”
“We were all so high by the end of it, we wanted to keep on running the show,” Bettany said. “Maybe take it out on tour or something. WandaVision on ice.”