Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
PHOTOS: (TOP, LEFT) PHOTOFEST; (TOP, RIGHT) EVERETT; (BOTTOM) SHUTTERSTOCK FOCUS I LOVED THE FIRST season of Mr. Robot. Sam Esmail is a great writer and a great director. In Mr. Robot, the filmmaking and the cinematography are first-rank, auteur filmmaking. If you do that for 10 hours at that con- sistent level of cinema... the shots, the sequences wouldn't be out of place in an Antonioni film. I'm four or five hours into the sec- ond season and I'm savoring it. The thing about Mr. Robot is it's topical. It creates this kind of sur- realistic hacker character. Series like Breaking Bad and The Killing were beautifully shot, but I think Mr. Robot takes it to a whole other level. Esmail is pushing the TV language in a way that The Sopranos did. I RECENTLY WATCHED the first season of [director] Stephen Falk's You're the Worst, which sets itself up as outrageously funny, then surpris- ingly confronts real issues surround- ing mental illness. Great performanc- es, both laugh-out-loud funny and tragically heartbreaking. I am also enjoying Donald Glover's shocking, funny, heartbreaking, Atlanta, especially with Hiro Murai's bold choices. In Episode Two, there is a great shot when Darius walks into the room, sits down on a couch with his back to the camera, Paper Boi enters and sits in the foreground facing camera. These two are in the same room having a conversation but they are in two different worlds. Saroo and his girlfriend Lucy go for a run in Australia, that location had to echo India much like his real world was echoing the world on the com- puter or in his mind. That engineer- ing of the locations was key to the look of the film." Davis' key ally in this regard was a friend of over 20 years' stand- ing, cinematographer Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher), with whom he had collaborated in his days as an accomplished commer- cials director. "This was a very spe- cial reunion, because I'd lost Greig to his big projects in L.A.," Davis says. "But this project was just an extension of the way we've always worked. Both of us use a lot of light- ing. My whole approach is very much about using the locations as a world, trying to find the beauty in the time of day we shoot•or the ug- liness of it, in cases. We never want- ed it to feel designed or contrived, but at the same time we had to push the story forward." As for the leap from small to big screen, Davis took it very much in stride. "With a feature film, it's com- plete. A TV series is like a novel, in that you can meander with charac- ters. But this had to work as one art- work. And you have to make tougher decisions, because you don't have that room to wander." GEN NEXT | CONTINUED C A N ' T M I S S V I E W I N G Stephen Gaghan DIRECTOR » Syriana, Gold Michelle MacLaren DIRECTOR » Westworld, Breaking Bad My favorite on-set tool—my only on-set tool—is a yellow number 2 pencil with a healthy eraser. The SNL scripts change so frequently and so completely that I spend most of our prep days remarking my camera blocking and production cues. My predecessor, Beth McCarthy-Miller, used a mechanical pencil and a large, separate gummy eraser. I tried, but never developed her digital dexterity: pencil drop, eraser pickup, eraser action, eraser drop, pencil pickup. I was stuck in my old school routine: pencil-flip, eraser scrub, re-flip, rewrite. Well, it works for me and has inadvertently led to my SNL legacy: Because of Don Roy King, there is, for the first time ever, a pencil sharpener (electric!) in the 8H control room. Don Roy King's Pencil T O O L S THE DGA AND EMMY AWARD WINNER HAS DIRECTED MORE THAN 200 EPISODES OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, AND COUNTING. 28 DGA QUARTERLY