'The Walking Dead' Season 6 Preview: Greg Nicotero Talks the Movie-Like Premiere and a Daryl-and-Rick Episode Ahead

The Walking Dead fans are excitedly awaiting this weekend’s Season 6 premiere, but the episode’s director, TWD executive producer and special effects makeup whiz Greg Nicotero, had other pressing matters on his mind when he spoke to Yahoo TV this week.

“I’m actually sitting in Norman [Reedus’s] apartment, watching his little robot clean his floors,” says Nicotero, who… wait… Norman Reedus uses a Roomba?

“Yes. It actually tried to follow us onto the balcony, which made me laugh, because I thought of R2-D2, wanting to follow us out. It was lonely,” Nicotero says, before adding that he and TWD fan favorite Reedus were also “just talking about the next two days of craziness ahead of us. We’re so excited.”

Related: ‘The Walking Dead’ Season 6: Everything We Know So Far

Nicotero, Reedus, and most of the rest of the cast and producers are in New York City for the new season’s premiere, which will be seen by 17,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on Friday night. It’s a fitting debut for a 90-minute Season 6 opener that’s not only supersized in running time, but in storylines, and most definitely in the number of zombies on screen. Think thousands and thousands of walkers, the largest herd — and herd is the word — ever seen on the show.

Nicotero, who was also an executive producer on the just-completed first season of the TWD companion series, Fear the Walking Dead, shares a few hints about what makes the premiere so movie-like, and about a very special episode that Daryl Dixon fans are going to freak out about.

On his reaction when he read the season premiere script, which not only features the plethora o’ walkers, but also plays with the time setting in an interesting way:
“Every episode that [showrunner] Scott [Gimple] puts in my lap to direct is always bigger, more challenging than the episode before. He had mentioned to me, ‘Listen, you did such a great job with the episode with Tyreese’s passing, in terms of telling the story visually.’ He felt that it was a great opportunity for us to stretch our legs and push even further in terms of our storytelling narrative, by shifting through time and letting the audience put together this little puzzle. We show them the last piece of the puzzle, and then as the episode progresses, you give them little pieces, little clues, so by the time you get to the end of the first episode, the puzzle has been solved, and the photo of the puzzle is this gigantic season ahead of us. It’s a stroke of genius on Scott’s part, for sure, in terms of crafting.

“I wanted to make sure that it felt big in scope, that there were big shots that would have our audience watching it as if they were watching a movie. I really approached it from the standpoint of ‘OK, if this was a $100,000,000 zombie movie, what would we do?’ And that’s what we shot. We found ways to creatively pull off mega herds of 30,000 walkers… it was really important to me, as the director, to expand our world incrementally so that we didn’t feel our world was just confined to Alexandria. It’s mind blowing to me that everybody has picked up on exactly that, talking about the episode, saying that it’s big, and it’s epic, and it’s grand. It’s exciting for me to know that we achieved what we set out to accomplish, which was to put in an entirely new version of The Walking Dead in front of our audience, which is one that’s bigger, one that’s more suspenseful, scarier, and just has a tremendous scope to it. Which, by the way, will not end after the first episode. This is just the beginning.”

The premiere includes a new development in Daryl and Rick’s (Andy Lincoln) relationship, which sparked an episode later in the season fans are going to be very excited about:
“Afterwards, Andy and Norman and I were sitting around like ‘Man, you know, it’s such a great dynamic between [Rick and Daryl], that moment… it led to the germination of an episode down the road, where it’s almost virtually just the two of them. That chemistry between the two of them was so great. There’s not a tremendous amount of great Rick/Daryl episodes, because when people split up, it ends up being Daryl and Beth or Rick and Michonne… shooting that [season premiere] scene really laid this idea down that we pitched out, this concept of finding an opportunity for these two characters to have this great chemistry together. I’m not going to tell you which episode it is, but it’ll be great.”

On the success of the first season of Fear the Walking Dead:
“I think it’s always been, especially since even back to the graphic novel, it always opened with Rick in the hospital, there was so much mystery to [the beginning of the apocalypse]. From the beginning, we always knew there was a rich world there, with a lot of opportunities to tell different stories. We had explored that for several little mini experiments with some of the webisodes. That showed there was an appetite out there for expanding the world, and I love the fact that it’s so different. You can’t really compare [FTWD and TWD], because they’re just completely different shows.”

Related: Take a Bite Out of Our ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recaps

On the massive celebration of the season premiere at MSG:
“I don’t know yet [what to expect], because I haven’t been over there yet. I’m going to go Friday afternoon, and we’re going to do a little quality control check, see what it’s like. It’s interesting, because we’ll be experiencing it with everybody else. All I know is that Led Zeppelin played there. That’s all I give a s–t about. I get to host an event at a place where Led Zeppelin played. That’s my big excitement for the night.

“It does feel a little bit like, the band is coming to town to play, and it’s a really odd sensation, because I flew up with Andy and Norman and Christian [Serratos] today, and I was just looking at them on the plane and like ‘God, we get to go celebrate something that we f–king love to do everyday, with 17,000 people.’ It really takes your breath away, when you really think about the fact that we all, everyday we say ‘We have the f–king best job in the world.“

The Walking Dead Season 6 premieres Oct. 11 at 9 p.m. on AMC.