You may not be able to tell when watching Pieces of Her, but — much like the deceptive mother at its center — the dramatic thriller isn’t being totally honest. Pieces of Her may be set in the sleepy Georgia town of Belle Isle, but the production filmed nearly 10,000 miles away, in star Toni Collette’s hometown of Sydney. 

That wasn’t the original plan. “We had just spent four months prepping, we were like four days away from... principal photography,” executive producer and director Minkie Spiro revealed in a discussion with Pieces of Her author Karin Slaughter. “And that phone call came in from Netflix to say, ‘We’re shutting down. COVID has arrived.’ And we were all shipped back to our homes.”

So the shoot underwent a total overhaul, with the team working double time to figure out if the production could move to Australia. But there were a few obvious problems, starting with the show’s very premise. “Your brain suddenly goes, ‘Oh my god, this is a road trip,’” Spiro said. “‘We’re in Australia, American cars [drive] on the other side of the road. How the hell are we gonna do this?’”

As it turns out, it took some old-fashioned problem-solving. “Trying to make it all work on the other side of the road — with the wrong road markings, with the steering wheel on the other side — was just a whole other world,” Spiro continued. “And you know, we did some funny things, like when there were cars that were stationary, we’d get the art department to build us dummy steering wheels, we’d lower the real steering wheel and we’d put somebody in the passenger seat with a dummy.”

And it didn’t stop there: When production was again just getting ready to start filming, the crew got another phone call — this time to tell them that a shipment of American cars for the show’s driving scenes was stuck in Melbourne. “So we had to completely relook at the schedule and change things around,” said Spiro. But even this reorganization caused a domino effect of difficulty: Moving up scenes that didn’t require cars meant Collette had only two weeks to learn a piano piece for a crucial scene. “It was this incredible journey that we all went on,” Spiro concluded. “And everyone got knee-deep in mud just to get this on the screen.” Sounds like Laura Oliver would be proud.

Pieces of Her is currently streaming on Netflix.

Season 1 Trailer | Pieces of Her