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46 DGA QUARTERLY harder things for writers to understand sometimes— it's the final rewrite," says Peter O'Fallon, a longtime television director who shot the pilot of UnReal, Life- time's seriocomedy set behind the scenes of a Bache- lor-like reality show. Of course, every pilot presents its own set of direc- torial challenges, which for O'Fallon on UnReal was figuring out how to shoot a show that had another show inside of it, both with a full complement of char- acters. "It was a head-spinning exercise that ended up being a very complex puzzle," says O'Fallon, who was given 10 days and 26 actors to achieve the task. "I would stop now and then and have a look at the whole picture to figure out where we were on both shows." For Ava DuVernay, who teamed with the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) on Queen Sugar, her in- tent for the pilot was to create a lushly photographed, generously scored, and leisurely paced interpersonal story about a black family and its Louisiana legacy, touched off by the death of a patriarch. She was also aware that nuance, character and a palpable sense of place were not enough to reel in viewers for the long haul, so the challenge was creating a sense of immediacy by introducing a heightened sense of drama in the pilot's story line. "Pilots are tricky because there are so many things you have to accomplish," explains Hiro Murai, the director behind Atlanta, a comedy on FX created by and starring Donald Glover. "For FX, it's about letting the audience in—knowing more back story about [series protagonist] Earn, having Earn be more accessible." DGA Quarterly spoke to six directors about the making of their pilots—from the stylistic template they strove to establish to the crucial role that casting plays. Some had a direct hand in creating their shows or became producers after directing the pilot in order to see their visions through. Establishing Tone, Character and Great Expectations E G A R D L E S S O F G E N R E , o r s t o r y f o r m , tone is a major point of emphasis. Steven Zaillian shot the pilot for his HBO limited series The Night Of over 24 days of mostly night shoots on the streets of New York. Among the first things you notice in the pilot is the way the exteriors are lit, with a murky, bluish tinge. Periodically, perspective shifts, and we're see- ing the action through a surveillance camera inside of a scene, at a convenience store or toll bridge. "You have control over your color timing to such a degree now," Zaillian says of his lighting design. "I wanted that blue to feel cold." In The Night Of, Nasir "Naz" Khan (Riz Ahmed) is an upstand- ing Pakistani-American college student who lives with his family in Queens. In the pilot, over a fateful, nightmarish night, he steals his father's cab to hit up a Manhattan party and ends up charged with the brutal stabbing murder of a young white woman in her Upper West Side brownstone. Did Naz do it? The first third of the 80-minute pilot suggests this is the central question of the series. It isn't. Basing The Night Of on the BBC series Criminal Justice, Zaillian and his co-screenwriter, novelist Richard Price, are instead setting up an eight-episode, multi-character drama in which jaded and fractured people move almost by rote through drab, institutional buildings to enact the resolution of one man's guilt or innocence, while Naz undergoes R