“My favorite part is just seeing the finished product and playing it in front of an audience, whether that be a theatrical experience or whether it be a television experience and you’re following the reaction online. How does it make people feel?” reveals Olatunde Osunsanmi (“Star Trek: Discovery“) about his favorite part of the directing process. We talked to Osunsanmi along with David Paul Meyer (“The Daily Show“), Luke Korem (“Milli Vanilli“) and Randy Zisk (“Mr. Monk’s Last Case”) for our exclusive “Meet the Experts” TV directors roundtable discussion. Watch the full video above, and click on each person’s name for a solo chat.
“There’s this wonderful thing, I think, that happens through the process,” Osunsanmi adds, “whereby the audience and myself seem to end up on the same page and seem to understand each other. And it’s that understanding that I think is pretty special.” Zisk, meanwhile, points to the very beginning of the process as his highlight. “Sometimes the preps are fairly long,” he points out. “Your nerves are like, how’s it gonna start? How’s it gonna work? And we finally get to that last day of prep and we wake up the next morning and start filming. To me, that’s probably the most exciting part. And then it’s off to the races from there.”
For Meyer, “you start to really gravitate, for me, towards the people that you’re with every day,” especially when you’re shooting 150 shows a year. “I love working with our crew, our director’s team, stage manager, associate director, and just the relationships we build as well as the people, like the writers and the producers … Those relationships over time are what you really start to connect with.”
Korem is a documentarian, so he relishes “finding those unexpected moments, whether it be in production or in the edit. In documentary, you have an idea where the story might go, but you’re always surprised by what someone says, or in the edit you come in and your editor has done something that you hadn’t imagined and you have those moments of magic where you go, oh my god, that just took it up another level … It’s the magic that you find when you’re making it that makes it so great.”
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