Watchmen director breaks down how the pivotal Episode 8 was filmed

Polygon

Executive producer Nicole Kassell, who directed Watchmen's three key episodes, says "it was incredibly challenging to do 25 pages of two people in a bar where you can’t see one person’s face, and to make that engaging and dynamic. We broke down how to film it in a very limited period of time, very analytically trying to create a progression of the visual language through those scenes so it was still cinematic. With very methodical prep, I storyboarded with the cinematographer, Greg Middleton. We photo-boarded it, literally getting actors to come sit down for us and do pictures of what we were going to shoot, while going through the script scene-by-scene and word-by-word. Due to filming restraints, I did repeat some shots through multiple scenes, so we could do block shooting, but I was very judicious on what shots I would repeat, so we wouldn’t be seeing the same shot throughout the episode. And the transitions were scripted. Those were one of the most important things to us on the show, the transitions between scenes. They were absolutely calculated. Every in and out point was designed. So even if the editing evolved, we had that anchor of the ins and outs."

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