[This story contains spoilers for “Fun and Games,” the July 18 episode of Better Call Saul.]
As AMC’s Better Call Saul nears the end of its series on August 15, the Breaking Bad prequel has left the reins of management to a team of star franchise directors, including writers , veteran producers and directors such as Thomas Schnauz, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. , as well as Breaking Bad favorite Michelle MacLaren.
This week’s episode was directed by Michael Morris, who was behind the camera for the sixth season premiere, as well as key episodes like “Wexler v. Goodman” and “The Guy for This”. Without a doubt, “Fun and Games,” like “The Guy for This,” written by Ann Cherkis, is key.
How fundamental? Well, we’ll have to see. After two consecutive episodes with the disappearance of regular characters, “Fun and Games” was without casualties, but includes key scenes that may or may not be series closings about Rhea Seehorn’s Kim, Giancarlo Esposito’s Gus and Jonathan Banks’ Mike.
Overcoming a record heat wave in London, Morris got on the phone with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about the possible separation of Jimmy and Kim, Gus’s romantic conversation with a mysterious man played by Reed Diamond and what it means to direct scenes that are clearly important without relying too much on its importance.
You directed the premiere of the sixth season, but at the time, had you always known or hoped you could make one last crack on the show?
As it happened, I knew I was going to another one, right at the beginning, when we were all preparing the list of directors for the final season. It was a real honor, though, because it’s really a family affair this past season, with Vince Gilligan doing a few and Michelle MacLaren coming back for one and then Rhea and Giancarlo, so I was thrilled to get the second one.
And you got the script for “Fun and Games,” there was some part of you that read everything that happened in the episode and said, “Hey, they gave me the end of the series by chance!”
So I’ll be careful with my answers, because I really don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, including yourself. But I will agree 100 percent with you, and I actually kept saying, that this makes sense for an end to all of this. It has the feeling of an ending for almost all the main characters, it seems like their stories are over. Now I say this not to say it’s true, because there are extraordinary episodes left and there will be things that will surprise people for sure, but for me this episode was an elegy for certain things. I think it’s very sad with Mike’s story and Gus ’story and certainly obviously with Jimmy and Kim. There is a lot of sadness you get with goodbyes and endings.
When you have this inevitable feeling of imminent purpose, from your perspective, what are the challenges of honoring these last potential moments, these elegiac rhythms, without exaggerating this purpose, this climatic importance at every moment? You want him to embrace the moments of the end, without announcing himself as a great farewell.
It’s a big part of what I was thinking about preparing myself to do this one in particular. How do you do it? I think you have this script that Ann Cherkis wrote, and it does have that elegiac sense, as we said, but it’s incredibly vivid. What I love about Ann as a writer, and I’ve been lucky enough to direct almost all of her episodes, is that she gets to all of these things from side positions. I don’t know anyone else who would write that Gus scene in the restaurant after what seems to be the end of their story, after that. This is a scene where you don’t play the trumpets or waving flags to say goodbye to Gus Fring. This is just a scene. You have no choice but to be present and in the moment with this, and I think that is also true for the Jimmy and Kim scene.
I directed a scene very similar to a previous season, a scene written by Thomas Schnauz, where they have a great discussion in that same room and ended with her asking him to marry her. So for me, without a doubt, the only way to address this is to be very present and not try to make it too important, as you say. The other thing I would say is that one thing on my mind, as we get closer to the end of the series, was also to try to honor part of the story of the series. The episode gave us some opportunities to look back and think back, and I think that helped us, or at least me, to feel like we were honoring the ending. We were deliberately quoting some shots of the pilot, including the shot in the elevator lobby with the trash, a shot at Vince’s pilot, and there were a few things along which we consciously said we were trying to call back as we approached. in the end.
But the quick answer to your excellent question is: don’t do it. Make the scenes in front of you in the order in which they are written.
So let’s go in order from above. The interrelationship of the initial montage on the cover of Harry Nilsson is so poignant and also so much fun. Individual shots and edits were in the script, and how much space did you have to play?
The answer, and you’ll get it from anyone you talk to, I’m sure, but the answer is, “Yes.” The answer is “both.” The script is very well developed the moment we have it, and it’s full of wit and it’s full of ideas, but it always gives us a kind of, “This is the thought and please, if there’s anything more, something more., do it. ” So they are very, very wonderfully, not territorial in terms of what they write, but they also write very good things. So in that montage, which was a really ambitious montage, the tone was something obvious. Talking at length with Ann and Peter, what we all decided we wanted to do was link these three stories, the impossible recovery of what happened yesterday, we wanted to show all the elements that were erased. It’s the nature of the show that there’s also a bit of comedy, because that’s part of the recipe for what makes this interesting.
There were wonderful things written in the script. Not all of them were exactly on screen as the script had been done, but many of them were and many of them were discoveries through preparation. It was a very fun task. For example, moving from wiping blood to ketchup, that was written. I liked it so much that it would never change that.
From your perspective and your conversations with Rhea, how you determined when Kim made the big decisions she made in this episode, and how much you wanted us to be able to track those rhythms through what we actually see on screen and in it? performance?
What I like to think is that she doesn’t make any climatic choices until the parking lot, or at least until just after the scene with [Howard’s wife] Cheryl. It was then that I imagined it, that that kiss means that something has happened and that then, in a very Kim Wexler way, everything unfolds very quickly. He is a person of action. He is not an agonizing person. I wanted the kiss to be ambiguous at the time and something you would look at later and say, “Oh, sure. That’s what it was.”
But being Rhea, you always want him to play on Rhea’s face. It will never give you a chance where nothing happens. May. It is not possible. We talked at length about what was going on and how we imagine Kim’s psyche is developing throughout the episode. There are ways of talking that I think are really productive, but there’s no way I could say to Rhea, “I want to see this in your face right now,” because it’s all there.
I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but I’ve seen several people arguing about how it was the first time we heard these two characters say “I love you” out loud. To what extent are you aware of how unprecedented this rhythm is?
Yes, we were. It will be a good question for Peter and Ann and I don’t remember if I asked them that, but did they know this would be the first time these words were uttered? I’m not sure. I honestly don’t know. We knew it, though, and Bob, Rhea, and I rehearsed that scene long before we shot it. We rehearsed it as a play, on set. The rehearsal of this reported a lot on the shooting style. Initially I was going to shoot it in a different way and after the rehearsal, I realized I would cover it in a way that I think I had never covered a scene before.
It was a scary idea. You don’t necessarily see it in the movie. It’s not like doing everything from an elaborate crane jack, but we essentially covered every side of the whole conversation by moving from room to room in a single jack and didn’t use a handheld camera, which just means we had to build. a very, very accurate dolly track and a sound plan to cover it and the whole thing wasn’t really built for that sort of thing. It was a big effort on everyone’s part to cover the scene that way, but I wanted to do it, because after rehearsing it with them, I knew it wasn’t a scene you wanted to break. You don’t want to say, “Okay. We got you into the room and we just stopped while we put it back together,” because they were very up to date and we would have lost a lot. The rehearsal was huge for us.
With this scene, I want to get back to the question about the honor of the big moments without necessarily exaggerating their importance, because I think you could argue that this conversation is the most important in the whole series so far. And obviously you can’t touch it that way, but to what extent did you rehearse the emotions exposed?
My career began in …