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50 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTO: BETTINA STRAUSS; (OPPOSITE) SARAH SHATZ/ABC hurried images that center on black peo- ple and black lives. I want folks who watch Empire and Scandal and Being Mary Jane to watch Queen Sugar. There is a certain current appetite for the more heightened scene, and so I wanted to provide that as an entry point for folks, so I can bring you into the heart and space of the rest of the show." Time After Time's Marcos Siega incor- porates the feasibility issue into his cre- ative vision every time he directs a pilot. His new series continues his collaboration with executive producer Kevin William- son, for whom Siega directed the pilots of The Vampire Diaries and The Following. Time After Time—based on the 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells, who time-travels to the present to pursue his friend Jack the Ripper—will air Sunday nights, paired with ABC's Once Upon a Time. Rather than dolly back and forth on his actors in close-up, Siega wanted to push in on them only when the emotion within the scene called for it, as he had observed in Spielberg 's films. "It really required some thinking in how you're going to block something, and why the actors are moving during a scene," Siega says. "Because there are six acts, you have to build to an act-out six times in the episode." He added: "On cable TV, if you get a 56-page script, your show could be 53 minutes, 46, whatever. You can edit it together very purposefully." Zaillian, for instance, benefited from this freedom in making his final cut of The Night Of pilot adhere to no particular time frame. "In the editing, I ended up with nine hours of material for eight slots," he said. "Rather than editing out an hour, the solution was to make the first episode longer, and the last episode longer." Rewriting the Pilot Playbook L O N E A M O N G T H E D I R E C T O R S inter- viewed, Hiro Murai had never made a TV pilot. Not that he was really thinking much about them when he shot Atlanta. "I was very aware of my lack of experience in the field, and so was Donald, in bringing me on board," says Murai, who as a music video director has worked with The Shins and Kendrick Lamar, among others. "I don't think we were ever too concerned with what a tra- ditional TV pilot looks like. A lot of the choices we'd make were predicated on choices we made in short films." While pilots these days are adapted from blogs, magazine arti- cles and historical events, Atlanta is adapted from a short that Mu- rai and Glover made in 2014 called Clapping for the Wrong Reason. Shot in a mansion above the Pacific Pali- sades that belongs to the NBA player Chris Bosh, Clapping follows Glover as he pads around the property, from capacious room to cliff-side pool, in the course of making a rap album under his stage name, Child- ish Gambino. "The main M.O. for that piece was creating a world that pulls people in," explains Murai. "It was never about telling a very specific story." While their pilot establishes a linear premise—Earn's deci- sion to take a risk on himself by taking a risk on his cousin—it moves without explicit deliberation. The pilot opens on a con- frontation outside a liquor store that the viewer is joining in progress; the casualness of the violence and the interplay among the characters introduces the tone of the show. In a later scene, Earn has a random encounter on a bus with a (possibly imagined) Nation of Islam figure who bears no imme- diate relation to the story. In this way, Earn's character is being revealed less through story than a pastiche of visual moments, and Earn's own participant-observer gaze. The pilot was shot on location around the downtown Atlanta area, over six days. "I like shooting locations just because too much control on the stage can be a bad thing," Murai says. The approach mirrors Earn's rootlessness and identity crisis. Murai points to the "meandering, existential comedies" of the Coen brothers and Sofia Coppola as stylistic influences. "They have a really cool way of milking comedy out of a tone poem almost," he says. "That was something we really hadn't seen in this world. We wanted to see how it would mesh." A Peter O'Fallon, above, was tasked with having to establish two sets of storylines and characters for the show-within- a-show series UnReal; opposite, Marcos Siega (in glasses), was inspired by the disciplined elegance of such features as Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in his look for the time-travel drama Time After Time.