[This story contains spoilers for “Fun and Games,” the July 18 episode of Better Call Saul.]
As AMC’s Better Call Saul nears its series finale on August 15, the Breaking Bad prequel has turned the directing reins over to an all-star team of franchise directors, including veteran writer-producer-directors Thomas Schnauze, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, as well and Breaking Bad favorite Michelle MacLaren.
This week’s episode was directed by Michael Morris, who was behind the camera for the season six premiere as well as key episodes including “Wexler vs. Goodman” and “The Man About It.” Certainly Fun and Games like The Guy for This by Ann Cherkis is key.
How key? Well, we’ll have to see. After two straight episodes featuring regular character deaths, Fun & Games was casualty-free, but it does include key scenes that may or may not be series finales for Rhea Seahorn’s Kim, Giancarlo Esposito’s Gus, and Jonathan’s Mike Banks.
Braving a record heat wave in London, Morris got on the phone with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss Jimmy and Kim’s possible parting of ways, Gus’ romantic conversation with a mysterious man played by Reed Diamond, and what it means to direct scenes that are clearly important without placing too much emphasis on their importance.
You’re directing the season six premiere, but did you always know or hope at the time that you might get one last shot at the show?
It just so happened that I knew I was going to another one right at the beginning when we were all working out the director list for the final season. It was a real honor though because it really is a family affair this last season, with Vince Gilligan doing a few and Michelle McLaren coming back for one and then Ria and Giancarlo, so I was happy to get the second one.
And you get the script for Fun and Games, was there a part of you that read everything that happened in the episode and went, “Oops, they accidentally gave me the series finale!”
So I’ll be careful with my answers because I really don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, including myself. But I’m going to agree with you 100 percent, and I kept saying it, actually, that’s what makes sense at the end of it all. There is a sense of ending to almost every main character, it feels like their stories are coming to an end. Now I say that not to say it’s true because there are episodes left that are extraordinary and there will certainly be things that surprise people, but for me this episode was an elegy for some things. I think it’s very sad all the way through with Mike’s story and Gus’ story and certainly, obviously with Jimmy and Kim. There’s a lot of sadness you get with the goodbyes and the ending.
When you have that inevitable sense of looming finality, what are the challenges, from your perspective, of honoring those potential final moments, those elegiac rhythms, without exaggerating that finality, that climactic importance of each step? You want it to embrace the moments of the ending without announcing itself as a big goodbye.
This is a huge part of what I was thinking about as I prepared to make this particular one. How do you deal with it? I think you have this script that Ann Cherkis wrote, and yes, it has that elegiac sense, like we said, but it’s incredibly alive. What I love about Ann as a writer, and I’ve been lucky enough to direct almost all of her episodes, is that she comes at all of these things from a sideline. I don’t know anyone else who would have written that scene with Gus in the restaurant after what feels like the end of his story, after that. This is a scene where you don’t blow trumpets and wave flags to say goodbye to Gus Fring. It’s just a scene. You have no choice but to be present and in the moment with him, and I think that’s true of the Jimmy and Kim scene as well.
I directed a scene very similar to the one in the previous season, a scene written by Thomas Schnauze, where they have a huge argument in the same room and it ends with her asking him to marry her. So for me, certainly the only way to channel it is to just be very present and not try to make it too important, like you said. The other thing I would say is that one thing I’ve been thinking about as we get closer to the end of the series is to try to honor some of the history of the series as well. The episode gave us some opportunities to look back and reflect, and I think that helped us, or at least helped me, to feel like we were honoring the ending. We deliberately referenced some shots from the pilot, including the shot in the elevator lobby with the trash can, a shot in Vince’s pilot, and there were a few things throughout the way that we consciously said we were trying to call the end.
But the quick answer to your excellent question is: Don’t. Do the scenes in front of you in the order they are written.
So let’s go in order from the top. The opening montage cut to Harry Nilsson’s cover is so touching and also very funny. Were the individual shots and edits in the script and how much room did you have to play with?
The answer, and you’ll get it from everyone you talk to, I’m sure, but the answer is, “Yes.” The answer is “Both”. The script is extremely well-developed by the time we get it, and it’s full of wit and ideas, but it’s always given to us with a kind of, “That’s the thinking, and please, if there’s something else, something more, do it.” So that they’re very, in a wonderful way, not territorial about what they write, but they also write really good stuff. So in this edit, which was a really ambitious edit, the tone was something that was evident. Talking at length with Anne and Peter, what we all decided we wanted to do was tie these three stories together, the impossible recovery from what happened yesterday, we wanted to show that all the elements were wiped out. The nature of the show is that there’s and comedy, because that’s part of the recipe for what makes it interesting.
There were some wonderful things written in the script. Not all of them were exactly on screen as scripted, but a lot of them were, and a lot of them were discoveries through preparation. It was a really fun task. For example, going from wiping up blood to tomato sauce, it was scripted. I loved this so much I would never change it.
From your perspective and your conversations with Rhea, how did you determine when Kim made the big decisions that she makes in this episode, and how much did you want us to be able to follow those strokes through what we actually see on screen and in her performance?
What I like to think is that she doesn’t make any climactic choices until the parking lot, or at least until the scene with [Howard’s wife] Cheryl. At the time, I imagined that this kiss meant that something had happened, and that after that, in a very Kim Wexler way, everything moved very quickly. She is a person of action. She is not an agonizing person. I wanted the kiss to be ambiguous in the moment and something you look at later and say, “Oh, sure. That was it.”
But Rhea being Rhea, you always want that to play on Rhea’s face. She will never give you a chance where nothing happens. Never. Not possible. We talked at length about what’s going on and how we envision Kim’s psyche developing over the course of the episode. There are ways we’ve talked that I think are really productive, but there’s no way I can say to Rhea, “I want to see this on your face right now,” because it’s all there.
I hadn’t realized it at the time, but I’ve seen several people discuss how this is the first time we’ve heard these two characters say “I love you” out loud. How aware were you of how unprecedented this beat was?
Yes, we were. This will be a good question for Peter and Anne, and I can’t remember if I even asked them, but did they know that this would be the first time those words had been spoken? I’m not sure. To be honest I do not know. We knew, though, and Bob and Ria and I rehearsed this scene well before we shot it. We rehearsed it as a play, on set. Rehearsing this actually informed a lot of the style of filming it. I was originally going to shoot it differently and after the rehearsal I realized I was going to shoot it in a way I don’t think I’ve ever shot a scene before.
It was a terrible idea. It doesn’t have to look that way on film. It’s not like you’re going to do everything from an elaborate tap shot, but we covered basically every side of the entire conversation, moving from room to room in one shot, and we didn’t use a hand-held camera, which just means we had to build a very, very precise track and a sound plan to cover it, and the set wasn’t really set up for that kind of thing. It was a huge effort from everyone to cover the scene like that, but I wanted to do it because after rehearsing it with them, I knew it wasn’t a scene you wanted to take apart. You don’t want to go, “OK. We’ve got you in the bedroom and you just hang in there while we get it set up again,’ because they were so on top of the moment and we were going to lose so much. The rehearsal was huge for us.
With this scene, I want to go back to the question of honoring the big moments without necessarily overstating their importance, because I think you could make an argument that this conversation is the most important in the entire series to this point. You obviously can’t play it that way either, but how big and how small have you rehearsed the emotions on display?
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