Angela Kinsey

He said he also wanted to throw people off by having it in a very ordinary location.

So he wanted to feel special, but he also wanted it to feel like Jim made the decision without a whole lot of planning.

Mm-hmm.

So Greg thought that the ideal location for this scene would be a gas station along the freeway between Scranton and New York in the rain.

And they based the rest stop on one that Greg Daniels had traveled to as a kid along the Merritt Parkway.

We did not actually fly to this location.

This is the insane part.

They built this in the parking lot of a Best Buy that I have been to many times, actually.

What they did was they used Google Street View to capture images of a real gas station along the Merritt Parkway.

And then using those images, they built it to match in this parking lot.

It took them about nine days to build it.

To create the illusion of highway traffic, they built a four-lane circular racetrack around the gas station set.

They set up cameras on the other side of this raceway, and they had cars drive around it at 55 miles an hour.

Then they added rain pouring down on us, these giant rain machines.

Our production manager, Randy Cordray, said they had about 35 precision drivers.

They were driving not just cars, but like semi-trucks.

When we were standing there on that set, you could feel the wind of these cars speeding past you.

It was so, so bonkers.

But after we shot the scene, they had to hire a special effects company to paint out the background because the background were these California mountains.

And so they had to paint out the mountains and put in some trees, like East Coast-looking trees.