Gwyneth was not crazy about whatever song we had chosen, and “Happy” was a big hit at that time. So I didn’t shoot that “Happy” number until weeks later when we actually did it—and we brought it back into the show once we had gotten all the rights.
Dahmer: 1 nomination
- 2023: Outstanding directing for a limited series or movie for the episode “Silenced” (pending)
We’ve talked about a number of episodes in your career that have gone against the standard template of shows you worked on. “Silenced” certainly fits into that, and also served as kind of the mission statement for the whole show. How did you go into it?
One of the things that made me want to do it is you have a gay, deaf, Black protagonist who is really the hero of the story. To elevate and to portray that culture and that person to make it vivid and emotional and make you care about it, was worth every hour and every bit of sweat that it took to make it happen. We spent 20 minutes with him before we ever see Dahmer in the episode. His story was the story that rings out to a lot of people when they think of the series. I think that’s because of his uniqueness, but also his universality. People saw his humanity and related to him, and it made his death even more painful and made Dahmer even more of a monster.
Digging into Black, Deaf, gay culture, which is a subgroup that I wasn’t completely in, was a fascinating learning experience for me. To be able to bring the audience to sit at the table with these gay, Deaf, Black men, talking the way they talk, shooting the shit—also revealing their dreams and their hopes and where they want to go, it was one of the things that I’m proudest of in my oeuvre.
In those very mundane details you’re talking about, how did you think about the design of the episode? How did you come to realize those subtle moments would be so important?
Well, I really had to take some chances, because this is an episode that was not like the episodes that came before it. I created an architecture for that with the D.P. John O’Connor, where we really started a new style with the camera moving, brighter, while we hear the character’s trials and tribulations, getting a job, meeting a photographer, all those things that he went through. Then once we would introduce Dahmer, bit by bit, we would bring back the older style, and what you had seen of him being very center-punched in the frame, and then short focus and shrouded in darkness, and around yellows, and those colors that had been associated with him before. While Tony was basically blue, Dahmer was in this yellow world, this piss-colored world. As you watch the episode, you’ll see—it fights, it fights, it fights. But then it ends with Dahmer. We’re completely in his dank apartment, the yellows return, he’s center-punched as he was when he was most villainous and we fade to black. I constructed it visually in a way so that it would carry Tony through, but Tony would fight the Dahmer look throughout it all, and then eventually the Dahmer look would win.
