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The Walking Dead: Nicotero’s important night shoot

By Susie Graham

WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 05: Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead executive producer, director, and special effects makeup supervisor; participates in the 'Behind the Scenes of The Walking Dead, Smithsonian Associates' panel discussion at the George Washington University, Lisner Auditorium on February 5, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for AMC)
WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 05: Greg Nicotero, The Walking Dead executive producer, director, and special effects makeup supervisor; participates in the 'Behind the Scenes of The Walking Dead, Smithsonian Associates' panel discussion at the George Washington University, Lisner Auditorium on February 5, 2016 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for AMC) /
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The Walking Dead director and executive producer Greg Nicotero talks about the scale of the premiere and the importance of shooting it at night.

The midseason finale left us hanging not with just one big cliffhanger, but with quite a few loose ends. Loose ends, mysteries, questions and several mini-cliffhangers, really.

Everything from the entire jigsaw puzzle of the first half of the season and the ramifications of  failure of the plan to draw the walkers away from the quarry is unfolding before our eyes.

Entertainment Weekly caught up with Greg Nicotero to talk about just that. He directed the mid-seaason premiere, which will air this Sunday to kick off the remainder of season 6.

"Episode 9, basically, takes all of these various storylines and slams everything together in an epic man against the undead battle that is unprecedented in the history ofThe Walking Dead.It’s the action movie version of The Walking Dead.With reshoots and with additional photography and things, I think we were over 1,300 walkers for episode.I had the biggest crew that I ever had on the shoot on set.  So again, it’s one of those episodes where we tie up a lot of loose ends, and what’s exciting about the second half of the season is it really launches the show into a different direction, which I know a lot of the producers and a lot of the cast are very excited about. In Walking Dead tradition, we wrap up certain storylines and then we venture forward in the world in a very different way than we have in the past."

It’s great to hear that things get wrapped up. It’s also great to hear that they are looking at moving into different territory. We know that beloved comic characters are in the near future–Jesus, Gregory, the Hilltop, the Saviors, and, of course, Negan.

The herd and the stories that were in progress at the end of episode 8 left the characters at the edge of a new era for Alexandria when the dust settles and those who remain will need to decide what they are willing to do to survive and move forward.

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This episode has the potential to be a top episode in The Walking Dead history if all of the hype turns out to be true. It has finale mixed with premiere written all over it in the way it includes beginnings and endings and is sure to include death, emotion and a shift in direction of the story as well as the thinking of the characters.

In order to make the premiere as unprecedented and epic as he wanted it to be, Nicotero needed to make some important decisions and take some risks. One of those was shooting at night. It was such an important choice for him, he made concessions in other areas.

"Well, that was something that I was extremely passionate and adamant about. When you spend eight episodes of the show seeing the walkers advancing on Alexandria in broad daylight, I felt that it was very important to introduce a bit of the genre element of the spooky, nighttime, boogeyman-coming-out-of-the-dark, Night-of-the-Living-Dead sort of vibe and feeling. Even when they were pitching the episode, I had said, “Listen, we really need to try to make this episode at night because it will give the show a different look.” I didn’t want it to feel like, Oh, here’s another scene with a bunch of walkers in broad daylight in the sun."

Related Story: The cast looks ahead to the rest of season 6

"So we had to make a lot of concessions because lighting big zombie crowd scenes at night — those kinds of scenarios are difficult and expensive. So I basically gave up a day of shooting to guarantee that we would have our money in the budget to shoot at night. So when I went into the episode, I was like, okay, I either made the best decision of my career or made the worst decision of my career by giving up a day of shooting to allow the mood that I felt the episode requires. In retrospect, as soon as I watched the episode edited together, it was the right call, and I was really proud that we had kind of stuck to our guns, and it was very important to us that it be a night shoot."

Next: Who is most likely to die in 6B?

It’s going to be so exciting for the audience to see how these choices turned out in just a few days now! The anticipation and terror are almost equal in measure. The Walking Dead has become fearless and huge again. Huge, but with fewer survivors soon.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

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