About halfway through the pilot of Legion, David dreams that he, some other patients, and Syd do a strange Bollywood dance number set to a French song in the middle of their facility's common room. Bizarrely entertaining as it was, I'm curious about the reason Hawley chose a Bollywood style dance with a French song for David's dream.
Are there any interviews of Hawley explaining his reasons behind it? Why not a more traditional western musical, and why a song-and-dance number at all?
Legion is supposed to be a glimpse of David's mind and thus the unreliable narrative of the episode works since we as a viewer do not know which is real and which isn't...
Coming to the sequence, the song itself was supposed to showcase the love blooming between David and Syd and the director felt like a Bollywood style song is worth it since Bollywood relishes in musicals when it comes to love songs...
“The show is based around the idea that we’re going to give you this objective feeling of what it’s like to be David, and what else does falling in love feel like other than a Bollywood dance routine, really?,” says Hawley, who both wrote and directed the episode. “It started out as something small and then it turned into an entire day of production.”
“We choreographed the whole thing to a real Bollywood song and I ended up using a Serge Gainsbourg song, which added to the surreal-ness of it,” Hawley says, adding that the final music “has a Bollywood feel, but is not what you would expect.”
This reinforces the unreliable-narrative concept of Legion and thus adds to the weirdness...
