How ‘Goodfellas’ and Minecraft inspired ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’ director Nzingha Stewart [Exclusive Video Interview]

Joyce Eng
·5 min read
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“Goodfellas” may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of “Daisy Jones & the Six,” but the Martin Scorsese crime drama served as inspiration for Nzingha Stewart, who directed four of the Amazon Prime Video series’ final five episodes. The back half of the limited series showcased the titular band at the height of its fame in the 1970s. More money meant more drugs, more problems, more messiness. It’s a far cry from the first half of the series, when the upstart group was just trying to land its big break, and showrunner Scott Neustadter encouraged Stewart to make her block completely different from the first one.

“I think it was always probably floating in the ether because I did watch ‘The Last Waltz,’ which was Scorsese’s documentary on a rock band just in me doing research on shooting live concerts. So it might’ve already been planted somewhere back there,” Stewart tells Gold Derby during our Directors Guild of America Awards TV nominees panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I thought about it in ‘Goodfellas’ because at first I thought, ‘Well, they’re bigger, maybe it’s slicker, maybe it’s because they’ve got more money.’ And I thought in ‘Goodfellas,’ that almost operates in two halves too. The first half is they’re low-level gangsters, there’s not that much money, they’ve got to give back everything in tribute. And by the second half, when the money is really coming, the cinematography changes and gets purposefully sloppy and beautifully messy, really handheld, and it’s not the super fluid oners anymore. We did a lot of oners at the concert so it felt like we were seeing a live show and cutting it all up. But it just hit me, like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s how we do it.’ We start to get messier, we start to feel the rough edges that there’s drugs and money and all kinds of debauchery happening.”

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The series is framed by the making of a present-day documentary on the band’s meteoric rise and sudden end. Stewart received a DGA Award nomination for her work on the finale, “Track 10: Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide,” which is primarily set on the day of what would turn out to be Daisy Jones & the Six’s final performance at a sold-out show at Chicago’s Soldier Field. To block out the massive concert, Stewart, who began her career directing music videos, turned to toys.

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“It was a megillah. My DP Jeff Cutter and I would sit down on Saturdays and I had all these little toys from Minecraft. We’d be like, ‘This one’s Daisy and this one’s Billy and this one’s Karen,’ and, like, set up the stage,” she reveals. “And then we had to do the same thing with the script because it moved backwards and forwards in time so much that we had to write out, ‘This happens in this time,’ ‘This happens in that time.’ And then, how do I make a shot that transitions from something onstage to something happens either in the recent past or a while ago? So it was a lot of just sitting down and thinking, ‘What exactly is this?’ Like, what happens? What is this beat? Then what happens after that? What’s the best order to cover that in? How do we best move the camera? How do we transition in and out of these different timelines? And how do we make room for the tiling and all of the stuff when you have 30,000-seat audiences to ‘fill’?”

The key moment during the concert occurs during the group’s performance of “Look at Us Now,” which Stewart also names as her favorite Daisy Jones track. Moments earlier backstage, Billy (Sam Claflin) had told Daisy (Riley Keough) that his wife, Camila (Camila Morrone), had left him. “Let’s be broken together,” Billy, in his drunken haze, tells Daisy. But Daisy has a moment of clarity and realizes they can’t recklessly go on like this. And so during the song, she mouths to him to “go” get Camila back, and Billy takes off.

“That scene is one of my favorite moments in the whole show. And really because it’s sort of the culmination of, I think, all of the work that we did previously,” Stewart says. “I was making a show for me and this might be different from the other block and even from the showrunners. For me, what I was rooted in was, this is a show about people showing each other grace. At every turn, whether it’s Karen (Suki Waterhouse) knowing Graham (Will Harrison) would never leave her and he should have the life that he wants, she shows him grace even at the expense of her own heart in letting him go. It’s people forgiving each other. It’s Camila forgiving Billy and showing him grace. It’s Daisy showing Billy the ultimate grace of being let go. That was the thing I talked to all the actors about. This is what the show, for me, is. It’s about people showing each other grace at their most human, fragile, messy selves. There’s somebody who loves you enough to forgive you.”

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