Like I said, the only thing that threw us off was the FBI raid, which is just insane.

I mean, I would have kept trying if we hadn’t gotten those two. They’re hard to find, but we got very lucky that it all worked. I think their reaction was basically similar to what Thomas’ character is doing in the show.Īnd you didn’t have to cycle through multiple horses or anything? I can’t believe we’re doing this.” It was funny, you would see one person after another just. There was lots of laughing and lots of, “Oh my god, this is crazy. It wasn’t happening entirely when they were talking - that would have been very difficult to coordinate, but they were definitely at the horse place. We shot the horses getting it on, got that out of the way and then did the dialogue. We just set up those cameras and they went at it.īros, Bongs and Bay Area Satire: On Set With HBO's 'Silicon Valley'ĭid you shoot the scene with the actors in front of the action or did you work some magic in post?

We had lined up some other opportunities in case that other one didn’t work. Nope, the minute the male sees the mare in heat, no coaxing has to be done. It would not go on as long as that conversation Richard and Jack are having in the scene.ĭo the horses need any sort of … encouraging? So we had to repeat the footage some - not too much, but if you cut it all together, the horse just finishes really fast. That’s the only thing that’s fake is, well, the horses actually go very quickly. How long did it take to get the money shot? We just had to look for places where this was going to happen already and just shoot it since it’s all real. Up in one of the canyons between Westlake and Malibu.

Wow, so where did you actually end up filming? The FBI raided it and there were all these cop cars there saying, “Turn around!” So we had to reschedule it for a couple weeks later. The whole place was some kind of front for selling pot down in Temecula somewhere. Well actually the first place we went to shoot it, if our camera crew had gotten there about 15 minutes later, they would have gotten arrested. So we just looked for a place where it was actually going to happen.Īre places like that fairly easy to find? They would never do that.” But then we looked into it further and found out that most species of thoroughbreds will only inseminate naturally. We kind of had our hopes dashed at one point because someone was saying, “Oh no, it’s all done artificially. Well, we had to do a lot of horse research. That’s how it started.Īnd then what did the next steps look like? That’s where we saw these videos of them having sex and it was just making us laugh. So we started talking about racehorses and looked on YouTube. I think it was Dick Costello, the ex-Twitter CEO who was in the writers room part-time this season, who told us about a guy who had just blown a ton of money on racehorses. Originally we had them at a vintage racetrack, but we just weren’t finding anything funny about it. Given the unconventional nature of the shoot and HBO’s less-than-perfect track record with horses (see: David Milch’s short-lived drama Luck), THR caught up with Judge to discuss how YouTube videos inspired the scene, the FBI raid that delayed filming and why they had to repeat the footage in the editing room (“The horses actually go very quickly,” he says with a laugh). “There is no CG - we captured that moment.” But Richard, understandably, becomes distracted by the explicit act, which involves a very large, erect horse penis, lots of thrusting and, yes, even fluids. The graphic scene begs the question: Was it real? “Yes, they are really having sex,” Judge, who directed the episode, tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Horae penis