If you know you'll be directing them, do you write scripts that are less complex to make things easier for yourself?
That’s interesting. I don’t ever really approach it on that level, I’m always just trying to make a story work.
It’s hard enough just to make it track, and make sense, and be compelling. Kelly Manners, who is a producer on our show, will probably tell you that I don’t think about how hard it is to do things. I’m always getting notes saying "This is too much, we have to tone this down."
The first episode I directed, [which had] a hundred rioting Chinese peasants at the turn-of-the-century, couldn’t have been a bigger show. But in a way it really wasn’t that big, because the scenes were generally between one or two characters with all this stuff going on in the background. It’s not like I have to direct the extras, there’s someone there doing that with me.
So actually the hardest scene I had to direct was the beginning of the second episode that I did, which was Through the Looking Glass. It was simply all five of the principals in one room standing in different places and moving around the room. Having to cover that, and making sure I had all the lookbacks meant covering four pages of dialogue was harder than a hundred Chinese peasants rioting.
I did say that day when I was shooting that scene that I will never write a scene where all the characters appear together that I have to direct. But that’s probably not true.
