As AMC’s Better Call Saul approaches its series finale on August 15, the Breaking Bad prequel has handed the directorial reins to an all-star team of franchise directors, including veteran writer-producer-directors such as Thomas Schnauz, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. , as well as Breaking Bad favorite Michelle MacLaren. This week’s episode was directed by Michael Morris, who was behind the camera for the season 6 premiere, as well as pivotal episodes like “Wexler v. Goodman’ and ‘The Guy for This’. Certainly ‘Fun and Games’, like ‘The Guy for This’ by Ann Cherkis, is pivotal. How pivotal? Well, we’ll have to see. After two consecutive episodes featuring the deaths of regular characters, “Fun and Games” was casualty-free, but includes key scenes that may or may not end the series with Rhea Seehorn’s Kim, Giancarlo Esposito’s Gus and Mike by Jonathan Banks. Braving a record London heatwave, Morris sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss Jimmy and Kim’s potential breakup, Gus’ romantic conversation with a mysterious man played by Reed Diamond, and what it means to direct scenes that are clearly. important without relying too much on their importance. You directed the season six premiere, but at the time, did you always know or hope that you might get one last crack at the show? As it happened, I knew I was going to another one right at the beginning when we were all preparing the roster of directors for the final season. It was a real honor though because it’s really been a family affair in the last season, with Vince Gilligan doing a few and Michelle MacLaren coming back for one and then Rhea and Giancarlo, so I was happy to get the second one. And you get the script for “Fun and Games,” was there a part of you that read everything that happened in the episode and went, “Oh, they gave me the series finale by mistake!” So I’ll be careful with my answers, because I really don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, including myself. But I will agree with you 100 percent, and I kept saying it actually, that this feels like an end to all of this. It feels like an ending for almost every main character, it’s like their stories are ending. Now I say that not to say that this is true, because there are episodes left that are great and there will definitely be things that surprise people, but for me this episode was an elegy for certain things. It’s very sad, I think, all the way with the Mike and Gus story and certainly, obviously with Jimmy and Kim. There is a lot of sadness that you feel with goodbyes and endings. When you have that inescapable sense of looming finality, from your perspective what are the challenges of honoring those potential final moments, those elegiac rhythms, without overstating that finality, that climactic significance at every turn? You want it to embrace the moments of the end, without announcing itself as grand glorification. It’s a huge part of what I was thinking about in preparing to do this particular one. How do you go about it? I think you have this script that Ann Cherkis wrote, and yes, it has that elegiac feel, like we said, but it’s incredibly alive. What I love about Ann as a writer, and I’ve been so lucky to direct almost all of her episodes, is that she comes at all these things from sideways positions. I don’t know anyone else who would write that scene of Gus in the restaurant after what looks like the end of his story, after that. This is a scene where you don’t blow trumpets and wave flags to say goodbye to Gus Fring. This is just a scene. You have no choice but to be present and in the moment with him, and I think that goes for the Jimmy and Kim scene as well. I directed a scene very similar to the one from last season, a scene written by Thomas Schnauz, where they have a huge fight in the same room and it ends with her asking him to marry her. So for me, definitely, the only way to direct it is just to be very present and not try to make it too important, like you said. The other thing I would say is that one thing I’ve had in mind as we get closer to the end of the series is to try to honor some of the history of the series as well. The episode gave us some opportunities to look back and think back, and I think that helped us, or at least helped me, to feel like we were honoring the ending. We intentionally pulled in some shots from the pilot, including the shot in the elevator lobby with the trash can, a shot in Vince’s pilot, and there were a few things along the way that we consciously said we were trying to get back to as we got closer to the end. But the quick answer to your excellent question is: Don’t. Do the scenes in front of you in the order they are written. So let’s go in order from the top. The opening montage cut to Harry Nilsson’s cover is so poignant and also so very funny. Were the individual shots and montages scripted and how much room did you have to play with? The answer, and you’ll get it from anyone you talk to, I’m sure, but the answer is: “Yes.” The answer is “Both”. The script is extremely developed by the time we have it, and it’s full of wit and it’s full of ideas, but it’s always given to us with a kind of, “That’s the thought, and please if there’s something else, something more, do it.” So they’re very, in a great way, not territorial about what they write, but they also write really good stuff. So in this edit, which was a really ambitious edit, the tone was something that was evident. Talking at length with Ann and Peter, what we all decided we wanted to do was connect these three stories, the impossible recovery from what happened yesterday, we wanted to show that all the elements disappear. It’s in the nature of the show that there’s some comedy in there, because that’s part of the recipe for what makes this interesting. There were some great things written in the script. Not everything was exactly on screen as written, but a lot of it was, and a lot of it was discovery through preparation. It was a really fun assignment. For example, from wiping the blood on the tomato sauce, this was scripted. I loved it so much I was never going to change it. From your perspective and your conversations with Rhea, how did you determine when Kim made the big decisions that she makes in this episode, and how much you wanted us to be able to trace those rhythms through what we actually see on screen and in that execution ? What I like to think is that he doesn’t make any top picks until the parking lot, or at least shortly after the me scene [Howard’s wife] Cheryl. That’s when I figured it out, that this kiss means something has happened and that after that, in a very Kim Wexler way, everything unravels very quickly. He is a man of action. He is not an anxious person. I wanted the kiss to be ambiguous in the moment and something you’d look back on later and say, “Oh, of course. That was it.” But Rhea is Rhea, you always want her to play on Rhea’s face. He’s never going to give you a chance when nothing happens. Never. It is not possible. We talked at length about what was going on and how we envision Kim’s psyche developing over the course of the episode. There are ways we’ve talked that I think are really productive, but there’s no way I’d say to Rhea, ‘I want to see that on your face right now,’ because it’s all there. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’ve seen several people discuss how it was the first time we heard these two characters say “I love you” out loud to each other. How did you realize how unprecedented this rate is? Yes, we were. It will be a good question for Peter and Ann and I can’t remember if I asked them, but did they know this would be the first time those words were spoken? I’m not sure. I honestly don’t know. We knew, though, and Bob and Rhea and I rehearsed that scene long before we shot it. We rehearsed it like a play, on set. Rehearsing this really informed his shooting style a lot. I was originally going to shoot it in a different way and after the rehearsal I realized I was going to have fun with it in a way I don’t think I’ve ever covered a scene before. It was a scary idea. It doesn’t necessarily show in the movie. It’s not like we’re doing it all from one elaborate crane shot, but we basically covered every side of the whole conversation moving from room to room in a single shot and we didn’t use a hand-held camera, which just means we had to make a very, very accurate puppet piece and a sound design to cover it and the set wasn’t really built for that. It was a huge effort from everyone to cover the stage like that, but I wanted to do it, because having rehearsed with them, I knew this wasn’t a scene you wanted to split up. You don’t want to go, “Okay. We put you in the bedroom and just stop while we set it up again,’ because it was so good in the moment and we would have missed so much. The rehearsal was huge for us. With this scene, I want to go back to the question of the value of big moments without necessarily overstating their importance, because I think you could argue that this conversation is the most important in the entire series so far. And obviously you can’t play it that way, but how big and how small did you rehearse the emotions that come through? My career started in…
