‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ director Nzingha Stewart: ‘You have to stick the landing or the show doesn’t work’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Prime Video’s “Daisy Jones and the Six” ends with a look that says more than an entire monologue could express. After years of estrangement, former band members and creative soulmates Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) and Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) reunite to fulfill one of the last wishes of Billy’s late wife, Camila (Camila Morrone). When Billy knocks on Daisy’s front door, he greets her with a smile; she, in response, has a look of reticence that slowly melts into a grin before the series smash cuts to the final credits.
Co-creator Scott Neustadter has compared the ending to “The Graduate.” “I hate happy endings,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m really allergic to happy endings but I really love hopeful endings. To me, there was a lot of hope at the end of the book. [‘Daisy Jones’ author Taylor [Jenkins Reid] and I both have talked about this a lot and we would never want to tell you guys what we think happens. But I love the fact that you can debate it and you can have different ideas about what happens next.”’
More from GoldDerby
SEE‘Daisy Jones & the Six’ team teases the possibility of Season 2
But while Neustadter co-created the series along with Michael H. Weber (the two have worked together as screenwriters for years and were Oscar nominees for “The Disaster Artist”), shooting that final moment fell to Nzingha Stewart. The prolific filmmaker, who has worked on some of the most popular shows of the last decade – including “Grey’s Anatomy,” “How to Get Away with Murder,” “Pretty Little Liars,” and “Maid” – directed four of the final five “Daisy Jones” episodes, including the finale.
“With a scene like that, you have to stick the landing or the show doesn’t work. That scene has to work or nothing we did before matters,” Stewart tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview when asked about the final shot. Stewart says when it comes to major scenes like the “Daisy Jones” ending, she’ll sometimes even close her eyes and pretend she’s at home watching the finished show on her couch. “As an audience member, do I feel this does resonate for me emotionally?” she says. “Am I moved?”
In terms of shooting the scene and Keough’s reaction, Stewart says she made numerous small tweaks and played with the degrees of Keough’s smile. It took a little while, she says, but it finally worked. “There was the moment of like, ‘Okay, I felt it, we’ve got it, we’re good,’” she says. “They had tons of options, just in case, but there is a take for sure that works. I felt like something happened between the two actors.”
Primarily set in the 1970s, “Daisy Jones and the Six” is about the title rock band, a fictional group that bears some resemblance to Fleetwood Mac. The band’s meteoric rise and fall is tracked through a faux documentary where the primary collaborators look back and discuss key events from the group’s history. (The book by Reid was written as an oral history.) In directing the back episodes, Stewart says she was given carte blanche to make the show look much different than what came previously.
“Scott sort of said the words every director wants to hear, which is, ‘I want you to make this block your own and don’t worry about what the first block is doing. I’ve envisioned this as two separate movies, where the first movie is about a small, scrappy band from Pittsburgh. And the second half is like they’re the biggest band on Earth,’” she says. “I thought a lot about what does it look like when you’re the biggest band on Earth? It wasn’t just that there’s more money now so things are slicker and glossier. For me, it was, there’s more money now so your real self is put on display for everybody and things get messy. There’s more access to your vices and to people enabling you and encouraging that behavior and thinking like that’s part of a rockstar lifestyle.”
Stewart says she was inspired by Martin Scorsese’s classic “Goodfellas,” particularly its final act when drugs spin everything out of control.
“There’s a joy of filmmaking in ‘Goodfellas,’” she says. “It feels like you’re hurling yourself at the subject and that was what we tried to do – we are just throwing ourselves at Billy and Daisy. We’re enjoying running in with a camera and chasing them around. It was fun to shoot.”
“Daisy Jones and the Six” is the third project Stewart has made with Hello Sunshine, the production company co-founded by Reese Witherspoon. Stewart says she loves working with the company – which also produced “Little Fires Everywhere” and “From Scratch” – because of its ethos.
“They champion stories for women. So stories that I find interesting and valuable and thought-provoking, they are making those shows,” she says. “But they also – and this is not a small thing – realize if you give people a color a chance to shine, they will often do that. It wasn’t like, ‘Well, you can do our diversity project.’ It was, ‘No, you can do ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ with Reese, and you can do ‘Daisy Jones,’ which was their biggest show at the time, and still may be.”
Stewart says that trust and the freedom to bring in her own team to direct the final episodes were key to her success. “You take real ownership as a filmmaker in making it yours and not just sort of showing up and doing your best, but trying to fit the mold,” she says.
All episodes of “Daisy Jones and the Six” are streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
PREDICT the 2023 Emmy nominees through July 12
Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?
SIGN UP for Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest predictions
Best of GoldDerby
Sign up for Gold Derby's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
