Mimi Leder (‘The Morning Show’ director/producer): ‘You take those big swings and they’re fun’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I still wake up with a lot of fear and that hasn’t changed, no matter how well you know your craft,” declares Mimi Leder about what has and hasn’t changed over the years since her early days as director on TV classics “China Beach” and her Emmy-winning work on “ER.” For our recent webchat she adds, “it’s a very motivating factor. I guess having worked so long in television and so many different genres, it gives you quite a bit of confidence.” We talked with Leder as part of Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&A event with 2023/2024 awards contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
It’s been two years since Alex Levy (Jennifer Aniston) and Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) dominated our TV screens on the Apple TV+ drama “The Morning Show.” The dynamic duo are back for a third season, continuing the behind the curtain story of the fictional morning news program. Leder, who received a directing nomination for Season 1 of the show, directed the season premiere, episodes two and six, as well as the upcoming season finale in addition to her producing duties on the show. And true to form, this season has everything — laughs, tears, melodrama, romance, political and cultural milestones, and of course space travel. Yes, space travel.
“The most exciting part of it is taking the big swings like going to space,” Leder admits. “Oh, our characters are going to space. Oh, okay, we have to build a rocket ship. All right, what does it look like? What does it feel like? How are we going to do it? We don’t have a budget to do that. You take those big swings and they’re fun,” she says of the plot line that saw a “Morning Show” anchor offered a seat on a billionaire’s space flight. “It took months of prep actually to shoot the interior of the space capsule in one day, to do all the zero gravity,” she says, adding that it “takes a lot to prepare for space and a lot of green screen and a lot of sets that we had to build.”
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