Seth and Evan codirected this episode. As someone who’s directed Seth, what was it like being directed by him, particularly within the one-take conceit?
They didn’t have many days to do it, and we were often just rehearsing all day, and then you start shooting when the sun starts to go down, and then you’ve got a couple of hours. That’s a pretty terrifying proposition as a director, and I just felt like he was amazing at never letting the stress get to him.
My favorite thing I’ve actually ever seen on a set was that last part, where the camera is chasing us down the hall, and then it goes down the driveway and it chases Seth —and then he gets an iced coffee in his face. And the camera goes and has to land on the windshield exactly straight and then carry them in a driving shot. I was like, How the hell are they ever going to do this? It took about 22 takes and over two days to get the camera to not be slightly tilted when it landed on the windshield. I watched Seth at magic hour as we were losing the light. You couldn’t see anything at a certain point; a giant coffee thrown in his face and soaking him. It started to get cold out. He’d yell “cut” and know that it was a useless take, 22 times.
The third time it happened, I saw a moment where he had his hand on the car door handle, and I saw him on the verge of getting frustrated. Then I saw him take a breath and start laughing uncontrollably, and then he just kept laughing. I remember going, “How are you being so good-natured about this?” And he said, “I wrote this fucking thing. I fought very hard to have this fucking thing happen to me. Who am I going to be mad at? Who am I supposed to be mad at?” It’s amazing how many directors don’t ask themselves that question. Who are you going to be mad at? You literally invited this chaos. To have that perspective in the moment and to only find it funny, but to pivot toward having a normal human response, I felt like I learned a ton from watching him.
I’m sure being on the other side of it was wild, because in the time since you’ve acted on camera, you’ve become such a force of a director.
I kept sitting down behind the monitor. It was like a Pavlov’s dog thing. We’d cut and I’d go sit behind the monitor, and then I go, “Oh, so sorry!” And I’d get back on my mark. It was so habitual and strange. I was like, Why do I keep going by the monitor? It was so embarrassing.
I don’t think you’ve made films that face this kind of studio interference, but was it familiar at all to you?
As a director, I’ve only had unusually good experiences. As a kid on sets, I saw how demonic and problematic studio execs can be. [Laughs] I was on Baron Munchausen. It was famously terrible in terms of the studio. My introduction to Hollywood was not a good one. But all of my films have been independent except for Women Talking—and there I had Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, who couldn’t understand film and filmmakers more. I couldn’t muster a single complaint about that experience if I tried. But it was easy for me to imagine how upsetting and how destabilizing it would be to have a studio executive come on your set and wreck it, because I have seen it as an actor for sure.
