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The entire series remains a prickly delight, challenging and dazzling in equal measure.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Theres a lot of fascinating visual choices made in this episode.
Neither of which are either noir-ish, or German expressionist, or black and white, for that matter.
As opposed to, from an objective point of view, depicting an event.
What was your approach to portraying violence against Black folks without being exploitative?
So that exists in the piece, but that exists in hopefully a very specific context.
So I plan everything very, very carefully.
Trauma has a life of its own.
And so those traumatic intrusions needed to be visually separated from the curated memory.
Im sure that made things more tricky in the shoot.Seemingly every choice I made made things harder on me.
Once I made that choice, I committed to it.
And it of course makes everything on a production level way more challenging, because theyre all one take.
So everything has to be right, it has to be rehearsed within an inch of its life.
And a lot of the sequences are at night.
One of the most striking things to me aboutWatchmens direction is its very assured handling of tone.
I dont have enough superlatives to describe his writing.
I only met Cord on the show, and hes also just a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant writer.
So that tonal balance existed on the page, truthfully.
How did you direct the performances to help support that tonal balance and rhythm?
Because they are very striking.Regina King is a national treasure.
Louis Gossett Jr. is a national treasure.
Jovan Adepo will soon be a national treasure.
Danielle Deadwyler is an insanely, insanely brilliant actor.
And I could go through Jean Smart.
I could go through that entire cast list for the episode.
Look, it felt like we were all united by common purpose.
Other than that, they just delivered.
Theyre amazing in and of themselves.
Do you consider it the pain from an old wound?
But as it pertains toWatchmen, for sure, race is, I guess, the central wound.
So that is something that we are trying to say about a number of those things.
