TV Directors Emmy nominee roundtable: ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble,’ ‘Moonage Daydream,’ ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Sometimes when you’re a director of television. it’s the moments you don’t expect to be more than connective tissue on a project that prove most interesting and surprising. Take the project that earned directing partners (and husband and wife) Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton their Emmy nomination this year, the FX limited series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” Dayton points to a scene involving co-star Claire Danes in which her character has just engaged in primal scream therapy. “She’s just gone down this rabbit hole and she’s with this guy she’s having an affair with, and just silently eating a salad,” Dayton says. “Taking really big bites,” adds Faris. “And it’s so funny and weird and loaded,” Dayton continues. “Claire showed you can make eating a salad a layered performance. “We were just thinking, ‘Do we even need this scene?’,” Faris admits, and she turned it into something that cracked us up.”

Yes, sometimes eating a salad is more than just eating a salad. We spoke to Faris and Dayton as part of Gold Derby’s “Meet the Emmy Nominees” TV directors panel, which included 2023 Emmy nominees Faris and Dayton along with directors Brett Morgen (the HBO David Bowie musical documentary “Moonage Daydream”) and Bryan Rowland (the FX sports docuseries “Welcome to Wrexham”). Watch the exclusive video interview above. Click on each name above to watch that individual person’s chat.

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A moment that resonates for Morgen came when he was about six months into the assembly of his documentary, and he went to Hawaii to quarantine during the pandemic. “I had this idea that I wouldn’t come back until I finished the film. I had my Avid (editing machine) with me, and I literally slept with it next to the bed. One morning I woke up at I think like 2 in the morning, and I had this feeling for the end of the film. I cut for three hours, went back to sleep, woke up[, looked at what I had done…and that was the finished film. That was the last 15 minutes of the film, with very little maneuvering thereafter. It was the ultimate surprise and gift the next day.”

For Rowland, as a director of documentaries and doc series, it’s not any one thing that proves significant in the delivery. “It’s just random things that you don’t really notice on set but resonates more on screen than what I’d notice in person,” he emphasizes. “I’ve been surprised by how many times that’s happened, where it’s saved a scene or a sequence or something that I never really thought much about while doing it. But when I come back in for the edit, it’s really helped make everything come together.”

Asked about misconceptions that people have about their job as directors, Dayton maintains, “The biggest one is that all directors sit on the set and direct everyone and direct the performances. I think that for us, we prep, we know what we want, but in many cases we try to say as little as possible.” Adds Faris, “It’s more like whisperers.”

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