AMY SHERMAN ! PALLADINO " Occasionally!
I think I harassed Amazon every day telling them to pick it up for all ten episodes. Like, I guaranteed them that people were going to love this show and that they were never going to have this opportunity again. It was a hard sell. We ended up being the first show on the platform to ever go straight to series. Not only that, they allowed us to go out and make the show we wanted with complete creative freedom. DANIEL PALLADINO : During Gilmore Girls , we’d bang our heads against the wall for twenty-two episodes a year because we were sitting behind directors who did not understand what we were after. We spent so much time babysitting. So, for Maisel, we thought, “As long as we’re on the set, we may as well start directing.” We could hone the whole thing from beginning to end. And if a mistake is made, we’re the ones who made it. AMY SHERMAN ! PALLADINO : Dan and I both started as writers, so the way we approach any story is through writing. A lot of the reasons we started directing in the first place was because we wanted to make sure that the thing we had been holding on to in our heads that we worked so hard to get on paper came to fruition. A lot of directing is self-preservation. DANIEL PALLADINO : Yeah, we break the stories in the room together. We often each come up with shots for each other’s shows, too. Like, I’ll say, “You should do this,” and she’ll say, “You can do this.” It would be a huge error for us to just do a cool shot for a cool shot’s sake. We do know how to keep the action within a scene, and the scenes within an episode, so the writing is always dictating camera. AMY SHERMAN ! PALLADINO : Dan’s a nightmare. There’s a lot of cage fighting! (Laughs) You know, because I created it and did the pilot, we established the traditions that I’d start the season. And we innately have di ff erent styles. Fancy shots are fun, but it’s about the scene and what’s going on. When two people are sitting at a table, I don’t need to see swooping overhead of birds flying by. And because I was a dancer, I innately look for physicality and approach things that way. Every “oner” shot goes to the right. At some point people were like, “You can go to the left, too!” It never occurred to me! Dan is more methodical. But our basic approach to directing is very similar.
DANIEL PALLADINO : So, we’re in the kitchen, and she says to me, “I’ve got this idea for a series.” AMY SHERMAN ! PALLADINO : Our kitchen should be in the Smithsonian. DANIEL PALLADINO : I knew it was a great concept right o ff the bat. It’s a world she knew. It’s a world I knew because her father was my father-in-law. But you could also see it running for years because that journey is going to take time. Even an overnight success in the business takes several years of really hard work. And it’s a woman! AMY SHERMAN ! PALLADINO : The roles were very defined for men and women at the time. Women were supposed to be moderately educated enough to get a husband and make a nice chicken and have kids. The workforce wasn’t necessarily a goal. Certainly, not something like stand-up comedy, where you’re getting up and making jokes about your personal life. There are a lot of roadblocks. Putting a woman smack dab in this moment, there’s our story. DANIEL PALLADINO : We’ve talked to a lot of female comics, and they say that the world has fundamentally not changed. It’s still male- dominated. The women who did do it back then, like Phyllis Diller, had to hide behind a character. AMY SHERMAN ! PALLADINO : I had one of those non-specific meetings with Amazon, and the [execs] sort of said, “Well, what are you thinking is the next thing you want to do?” And I just blurted out this idea. They thought it was exciting and wanted me to go write the pilot. The only other time that happened was for Gilmore Girls, and all I had for that was a mother and daughter being best friends. I was a little more armed for this world. It was a kismet moment, and it worked out. DHANA RIVERA GILBERT (co-executive producer) : So, flashback to 2016. I had been brought on by Amazon to help with this pilot. Amazon is only a few years into the original content game at this point, and they had this whole process of making pilots that rarely went into series. But after I saw the first cut of our pilot, I knew this would be amazing.
SEASON 1
The Creation AMY SHERMAN ! PALLADINO (creator, writer, director, executive producer) : My father [Don Sherman] was a stand-up comic, and I grew up on his stories of Greenwich Village and touring and Las Vegas and club dates. He and his friends would just sit around smoking the odd-smelling cigarette and make each other laugh for hours and hours. That was my
childhood. Meanwhile, I’m in the San Fernando Valley, where everything’s, like, a di ff erent shade of beige. This lifestyle seemed so colorful and energetic and fun and wonderful and horrible all wrapped up in one package. It also seemed like a rich area for story, so it was always in the back of my mind. DANIEL PALLADINO (writer, director, executive producer) : We like to pitch ideas to each other and boo or throw tomatoes at the ones we don’t like.
3
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker