Known for House and Once Upon a Time, Jennifer Morrison has built a second career as a director. On the podcast Silence on Set, she explains how she learned, how she adapts to each series and how she directed the first four episodes of the second season of Dr. Death.
Two careers at once
Morrison was directing theatre in high school and college, before acting took over. On the sets of her series, she treated filming as a film school, asking endless questions. Her first short, Warning Labels, was followed by the feature Sun Dogs and a long list of television episodes: Euphoria, One of Us Is Lying, Joe Pickett, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies. She deliberately sought out pilots and first seasons, to try as many genres and tools as possible.
Watching every daily
Her method for joining an existing show is to watch all the raw footage from the pilot: everything that was tried, what worked and what was cut. She also writes to the cast, cinematographer and showrunner before arriving. In more than 300 episodes as an actress, she says, she could count on one hand the directors who did that. In television, every scene must bring something new, otherwise why is it there?
“Dr. Death”, season two
For the second season of Dr. Death, she directed the first four episodes, shot together in 40 days. Two timelines got two looks: warm images with anamorphic lenses for the love story, cooler, sharper ones for the medical storyline. New York had to stand in for several European cities. Six years in a fake hospital on House had prepared her for surgery scenes. She praises Mandy Moore, who started filming with a six-week-old baby. Morrison was writing her next feature film and thanked her fans for following her curiosity from one project to the next.