The director Michelle MacLaren may not be a household name, but her work has in fact been seen in a many a home: her credits include episodes from popular television dramas like “Game of Thrones,†“The Walking Dead†and “NCIS.â€
And then there’s AMC’s “Breaking Badâ€: in 11 episodes over five seasons, Ms. MacLaren has helped create and capture some of the most intense moments in that frequently tense series. Her credits include the standout episodes “4 Days Out†in Season 2, “One Minute†from Season 3 and last year’s midseason finale, “Gliding Over All,†which has earned her an Emmy nomination for drama series directing.
In a recent phone interview, Ms. MacLaren discussed the process of making a montage, the logistics of filming a huge pile of (fake) money and the cast of “Breaking Bad.†These are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Where are you right now?
I am sitting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, getting ready to go out on a night shoot for “Game of Thrones.â€
How much longer will you be there?
Until the end of October, but I am coming home for the weekend of the Emmys.
Did you have to specifically request that off?
I did. [Laughs] But they were very nice and very accommodating, which is really sweet.
You’ve directed some key episodes of “Breaking Bad.†Do you get your pick the episodes you want to direct?
I don’t. Not at all. Because I’m an executive producer of the show, I’m involved in setting the schedule, but there’s a lot of different things that go into it, so we don’t know which episode is going to have what for the writers or the directors. Really it’s all about where the story falls. My feeling is, from when I started on “Breaking Bad,†there’s no reason to pick and choose because every episode is great. Whatever episode you get, you’re lucky to do it.
In “Gliding Over All†there was not one but two complicated montages, can you talk about the process of shooting each one?
A montage is incredibly challenging. When I can, I’d like to know what the music is going to be ahead of time because that will affect the beat, the pace of the montage. In the case of the meth-making montage with “Crystal Blue Persuasion†[by Tommy James & the Shondells] of course we knew the song ahead of time and worked out every single one of those beats and then talked about them with the writer, Moira Walley-Beckett, and Moira wrote them in the script. I spent hours and hours breaking this down, and I think I had over 100 shots in that montage at first pass. I think we got it down to 79 or something crazy like that.
The prison montage was also challenging for us because we had one day to shoot in this prison and we had one prison location. We needed to make it look like three different prisons. Our wonderful production designer Mark Freeborn helped in taking different sections of this jail that we made look like prisons and then wardrobe had three different prison uniforms. Designing the montage and what the various murders were going to be, we looked at the various ways we could kill people and we did a lot of research. A few members of the crew came up and gave me some research from people that they knew. It was kinda sad but you can get a lot of that kind of research on the Internet. We wanted to make it as authentic as possible.
What were the logistics of setting up the scene with the huge pallets of money in the storage locker? It’s just such an unreal amount of cash.
That is actually a very expensive scene. It’s fake money. You’re not allowed to shoot real money. There’s a prop house in Los Angeles that makes it. If you look closely, it says “motion picture money†on it. It’s quite accurate and it’s illegal to copy their money even though it is fake. Our prop department rented all of their money. Our construction department built a block underneath that, and we put the fake money all around the block and put more stacks of on top. It was really complicated and incredibly expensive. Every single dollar had to be accounted for. For weeks, you would walk to our production office and you would see these rooms of prop guys counting the money because there was so much of it.
Can you talk little bit about what it is like to work with this group of actors?
They are wonderful collaborators, extremely talented and very well prepared. They’re smart. They’re funny. Sometimes I forget to say cut because I am so lost in the performance
