'Fear the Walking Dead' Pilot Director: The Art of Embracing the Shadows and Building Tension

One of the great — and terrifying — things about directing a television pilot is that you’re effectively writing the handbook for the look and tone of the rest of the series. So when filmmaker Adam Davidson landed the plum job of directing the pilot for Fear the Walking Dead, the prequel to the AMC zombie hit, he was able to immediately establish the visual and narrative cues that would set this series apart from its parent show. In a wide-ranging conversation with Yahoo TV, Davidson provides an insightful account of how he devised the visual style of Fear the Walking Dead, what happened when the series moved its production base from L.A. to Vancouver, and the numerous times he had to explain to customs officers why he was bringing women’s clothing into Canada.

I was born and raised in L.A., and it’s never been the place that I’ve seen portrayed onscreen all the time, with perfect weather and the people looking perfect. For me, growing up, I always saw the cracks in the concrete, the smoggy air, the houses and buildings blown away by windstorms. So in Fear the Walking Dead, we want to tell the story of the people who don’t makeL.A. look so glamorous. This is the backstage of L.A., the people who live on the other side of the river of concrete. For them, it’s hard enough to keep your kids in school, have a relationship, and get through the day. It’s like, “The car’s broken, the kitchen needs work and what the f–k, now we have killer zombies!”

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For me, what was interesting about directing the pilot was to explore not shooting it as a horror movie, but as something very real and grounded. Obviously there are scary moments, but it should feel very much like you’re right in the trenches with these characters. Very early on I spoke to [co-creator and executive producer] David Erickson, and said “You’ve got to check out Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” That’s a good touchstone, because it dealt with a similar idea of people discovering what’s human and what’s not human. The real person dies and is replaced by these pod people. And you don’t know that they’re fresh-turned! In Fear the Walking Dead, we’re in a world where our characters don’t know anything about zombies. There isn’t zombie literature or zombie movies. They have no understanding of what’s happening apart from “What’s wrong with my friend and my neighbors?” You have to get close to find out, but getting close puts you in more peril.

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When L.A. is portrayed on film and television, you often lose the shadows because everything is overlit. Growing up and living here, I know that most people hide from the sun. They pull their shades down and live in the shadows. So one of the stylistic choices we made was to embrace the shadows, which is a metaphor for the story itself. There’s a darkness looming that people aren’t aware of. And I wanted the camera to feel very much present and immediate, so you’ve got to retrain the camera operators. They’re taught as technicians to anticipate things, like if someone’s talking and somebody enters the room, the camera will turn to catch that person coming in. Here, we wanted the camera to be a little late, because when we’re living life, we’re not always catching everything right away. We’re always a little bit behind. I think that adds to the anxiety: We’re just catching things at the last second. We should be on guard, and we’re not.

We wanted to use natural light and mix it with other light. The way we live now, we have fluorescent bulbs and incandescent bulbs and sunlight and moonlight and highs and lows that mix up color. That adds to the tension. We also shot the pilot with anamorphic lenses from the ’70s, which does something to the image. It bends light in interesting ways; you can see how the edges of the frame are slightly warped. It’s not the way you see the world, so it makes you feel off and tense, like something’s wrong. We found a German company that’s making these new anamorphic-style lenses and bought the only box of those to use for the series. That’s a testament to our cinematographer, Michael McDonough. He’d done the movie Winter’s Bone, where he used natural light in an interesting way to create this eerie world. I loved working with him.

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Even though we’re following a family through the fall of Los Angeles, I wanted to keep L.A. alive in the frame. It’s a city of 14 million people. Everyone talks about L.A. as being a flat city, but to me it’s actually a city of many hills and many pockets of communities. I played football in high school and it was a crosstown league, so we would go all over L.A. One of the schools we visited was Wilson High in El Sereno, and I remember that it overlooked downtown L.A. You could see so many hills, and my hope is that every time we’re filming one of our characters and you see hills in the background, you have a sense of the city beyond, that there are people in all those buildings. So even though we’re in this intimate story, in your head you’re thinking, “What’s happening to those other people?”

Our main characters live in El Sereno, and the neighborhood feels very much in sync with the characters we’re portraying. They’re working-class people in a neighborhood of modest income. El Sereno is not a stereotypical bad neighborhood; people make their living and have been there for generations. The entire pilot was filmed in L.A. and we were picked up for two seasons off the pilot, but then AMC told us that they were moving us to Vancouver. Vancouver is a beautiful place and I’ve filmed there many times, but it’s not an obvious substitute for L.A. There’s different topography, different light, and a different character altogether. AMC gave us the opportunity to shoot the majority of the episodes in Vancouver, and portions in L.A. But I kind of flipped the whole thing and arranged it so the majority of our exterior neighborhood work was in L.A., while we did our interiors and other scenes in Vancouver. So when we needed to show the wider world, it could be filmed in L.A.

I directed the first three episodes, including the pilot, Kari Skogland did episodes four and five, and Stefan Schwartz did the finale. I feel like the season breaks down into three different parts. The first few episodes are linked together, then there’s a time jump, and then there’s the finale. I worked very closely with the directors in terms of trying get what we could achieve in Canada that was linked to L.A.’s look and locations. There’s one funny moment in one of my episodes where we were shooting in Vancouver and we had skateboarders going by and I had to stop them because they didn’t look like L.A. skateboarders. I said, “They gotta lose the socks.” Subtle things, you know. Some people would say that nobody will notice, but people do!

Like in L.A., homes don’t have carpeting. It’s very weird. They did in the ’70s, but now you don’t really see it. So in Vancouver, the crew would be putting carpeting on the floor and I was like, “Don’t do that yet!” Like, these are working class people, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have a sense of taste and style. And if you go out to vintage stores for props, you can find some cool things without spending a lot of money. But when you go to vintage stores in Canada, you don’t find the same things you would in L.A. So I’d go back to L.A. on weekends and load up on boxes of costumes and stuff to bring to Vancouver. I’d always be sweating in the customs line at the airport. They’d open up the suitcases and go, “Why is all this women’s clothing in your suitcase?” I think we did a good job of finding a way to make it work. It’s a real international production.

Fear the Walking Dead premieres Sunday, Aug. 23 at 9 p.m on AMC.