While it might feel like Hollywood has just turned the page on the 2025 awards season, first-round voting for the 2026 Emmys kicks off in just over a month, which would explain why the creators and directors of some of this season’s top award contenders decided to spend a balmy SoCal Saturday at the DGA Theater discussing their craft at The Hollywood Reporter’s Directors in Focus event.
The series began with an interview between The Comeback creator Michael Patrick King and THR‘s Chris Gardner regarding the show’s third and final season. King spoke about continuing the show without Robert Michael Morris, who co-starred as Valerie Cherish’s righthand man, Mickey Deane, in the first two seasons and passed away in 2017.
“We knew he was sick. He had Stage 4 cancer, but we thought we could do it. HBO knew that he was sick and they couldn’t insure him. And they said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think he’ll make it,’” King recalled. “And then he got better and better. Like the more he was in service, and feeling energy and strength.”
King continued, “He became less and less sick, and the doctors were saying, ‘What are you doing? The tumors aren’t growing. What are you doing?’ And he was just being happy, and then when he died, everybody was really sad. And one of the things that I remember is Entertainment Weekly said, ‘Television star Robert Michael Morris dead at 77,’ and I thought, it would almost be worth him leaving if he heard him described as a television star. He would almost take that.”
Michael Patrick King and Chris Gardner speak during The Comeback panel.
Rich Polk
In a conversation with THR‘s David Canfield, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson spoke to Zendaya’s talent for physical comedy after screening a scene from the show’s third season in which her character, Rue, must escape from a Jeep stuck on top of the border wall.
“What’s so spectacular about Zendaya as an actor is the physicality that she has, and I think it goes back to her Disney training, that she’s able to move with such humor and tell a story,” Levinson noted. “I always knew going into opening up this season that I wanted to do something that really just threw us into the middle of the action, but with a certain kind of absurdity to it. We ended up having this border wall sequence, which I think we’ll take a look at. I sort of imagined it as a mix of Buster Keaton set in this modern drug world.”
He also complimented Sydney Sweeney for her ability to adapt when her part in a pivotal scene was changed on the day of shooting, emphasizing, “What’s interesting is if you push it a little bit, she becomes brilliant. You just do a few more takes, and she can reach these levels that are very honest emotionally, but also deeply funny. She’s able to anchor the scene with this kind of madness and chaos going on around her.”
John Wells and Mikey O’Connell speak during The Pitt panel.
Rich Polk
The Pitt, meanwhile, is known for its hyper-realistic emergency room scenes, and executive producer John Wells spoke to the complexity of creating graphic medical sequences in a chat with THR‘s Mikey O’Connell.
After screening a scene in which the show’s doctors perform emergency surgery to pull a baby from its dying mother’s womb, Wells mused, “A podcaster who I love referred to that as The Pitt‘s version of the bank robbery scene in Heat. Those scenes, and we have them fairly regularly, are really like doing stunts. I’ve done a lot of stunts, big action stunts.”
He added, “That took about three days to shoot, but you’re doing it in sequences, and they’re all different kinds of problems. The uterine bag that we cut, we only had four of them; it’s sort of like you only have two shots at the car rollover. And then we had problems because the baby, once we put the animatronic baby in the inside, and then put the goo on it. The amniotic fluid that was inside dissolved, all the stuff that was on the baby, then we couldn’t get it out.”
Jet Wilkinson speaks during The Testaments panel.
Rich Polk
While many of the directors spoke to the technical challenges they faced while shooting their shows, Jet Wilkinson, a director on The Handmaid’s Tale spinoff The Testaments, also emphasized the importance of serving as an emotional leader, particularly when shooting traumatic scenes.
After screening a harrowing execution scene, Wilkinson explained, “I think the content for us is to start with just sort of getting over what was happening here. Execution of women at point-blank range, that was hard. Doing those days, we began with addressing all of the background artists: ‘This is going to be hard and it’s going to be confronting, but just know that you’re seen and you’re valued, and we thank you for being here and being part of something so important.’ We wanted to make sure that we acknowledge that this is hard for everyone.”
Jake Szymanski from Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat.
Alberto Rodriguez
Every show is a challenge to produce, but while most of the filmmakers and showrunners who appeared onstage could at least count on scripts, trained actors and a pre-determined shot list, Jake Szymanski, director of Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat, faced an unusual challenge: a main actor who was unaware he was filming a TV show.
This season’s unassuming lead, Anthony Norman, believed that he was working as a temp managing a company retreat for a small hot-sauce company, and Szymanski spoke to the joy the entire crew felt watching him deliver an impassioned speech in the show’s finale to stop the fictional company from being sold to a conglomerate he believed intended to destroy it.
“Honestly, the moment Anthony walked in the door, we said, ‘We did it.’ It almost didn’t matter what happened. The goal was completed,” the director told THR‘s Scott Feinberg. “He went in there. He’s going in there to stop the deal. He has completed his hero’s journey. That’s the moment we all celebrated.”
Szymanski added, “And Anthony gives a speech that no one could have written, right? Because he brings so much of himself and his own humanity to that moment. It goes from big comedy, at the top of the hill with a guy eating crab legs, saying, ‘Yeah, stop the deal.’ We’re all watching it crying, and it’s like a real human moment, like drama playing out in the boardroom.”
Stephen Kay and Scott Feinberg speak during the Landman panel.
Rich Polk
To round out the day of programming celebrating some of the year’s strongest, Emmys-eligible directorial work, director Stephen Kay also stopped by for a conversation around Landman, filmmaker Georgi Banks-Davies dove into the second season of The Night Manager, and Colin Hanks joined producers Jennifer Candy-Sullivan and Shane Reid for a chat about their documentary John Candy: I Like Me.
Colin Hanks, Jennifer Candy-Sullivan and Shane Reid from John Candy: I Like Me.
Alberto Rodriguez
Georgi Banks-Davies and David Canfield speak during The Night Manager panel.
Rich Polk
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