Netflix brought in Zero Point Zero, the production company behind Bourdain's No Reservations and Parts Unknown, to help My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman film compelling stories for Season 2. “It’s an art, and they are really the finest in field story production," said Jonathan Mussman, Netflix’s director of production, who approached ZPZ boss Lydia Tenaglia. The result is a second season that shows Letterman on a go-cart track with Formula One racing champion Lewis Hamilton and a unique moment of Dave helping Tiffany Haddish weed her garden. Tenaglia and her team were also helpful when Kanye West refused to have his first meeting with Letterman filmed with expensive cameras. So they improvised and filmed with iPhones. "I think the way you deal with it is when someone emphatically tells you you can’t use your big broadcast camera, you have to heed that," said Tenaglia. "The alternative is you’re not going to shoot it. Having been in the field on so many different things where you have to be improvisational, you have to think on the fly, and figure out how you work with those parameters. So the team quickly powwowed, they stationed people with their iPhones and everybody had their angle and they let it roll. We were plugged into the audio board. It’s worth noting, too, that was Dave and Kanye’s first real meeting with each other." Letterman said of the iPhone footage: "I knew that that was what was going on. It’s not my problem. It becomes the problem for the people recording it. I knew whatever was going to happen there, we would have to live with TV cellphone video."
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TOPICS: My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman, Netflix, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, David Letterman, Jonathan Mussman, Kanye West, Lydia Tenaglia, Marc Maron, Tiffany Haddish, WTF with Marc Maron Podcast