6 Things We Learnt From Greg Nicotero About The Latest Season Of The Walking Dead

An Uneasy Alliance

♦ Episode 13 of season 8 of The Walking Dead is on AMC this Sunday and here’s 6 things we learnt from the show’s Executive Producer Greg Nicotero about the current run in a chat he just did with Entertainment Weekly. Warning: Spoilers ahead if people haven’t seen last Sunday’s episode The Key…

1. The relationship between Daryl and Rick has changed again on the show:” It’s important to see these two guys on the same page again. They both want the war over, they both want Negan dead. That’s all there is to it. It’s a really great sequence and we talked a lot about exactly how we wanted to portray that moment because up to that point, they weren’t on the same page, so even in the shots, you can see that I have Rick on one side of the frame and Daryl on the other side of the frame, with the grave markers breaking up the frame so that we’re visually trying to separate the two of them. Then, once they start talking, you realize that they are actually both fighting for the same thing. Listen, Carl just died. It’s the first chance for Daryl to even acknowledge that with Rick on a one-to-one basis.”

2. They are building drama in the battle between Rick and Negan, he points out:”We’re definitely building some momentum, and in this particular episode, they established that the Hilltop has lookouts spaced every mile or two apart, and they’re setting up a perimeter around the Hilltop. And the idea is as soon as one person sees something, they’ll sound a horn and alert everybody else to the fact that the Saviors are coming. Rick chooses to go on lookout and he sees Negan, and basically instead of alerting everyone else, he’s taking terms into his own hands.”

3. Rick is taking matters into his own hands now:”He’s going rogue. Part of the best thing and the worst thing about these people is they can never stick to a plan because there’s so much emotion and so much power behind everything that’s at stake, and so Rick goes rogue. Instead of signaling the horn, he’s taking matters into his own hands. He drives down, he knocks Negan’s car out of the convoy and basically tries to kill him.”

4. Creating a fiery Lucille threw up some new challenges for the programme makers, Nicotero reveals:”Some of the Lucille fire stuff, we coated the bats with a special material. We’re able to physically light it on fire. When, for a few shots, we had to make contact with the bat, we had a bat that basically had an orange glow stick as part of it so that we can get the interactive light. We wanted to stay close and we wanted it to be disorienting.”

5. The whole scene with Rick was very carefully orchestrated, he admits:”I was very involved with Jeff Schoen, our production designer, in terms of building the room in a very specific way. One of the things that was really important to me was that I wanted the room to catch on fire. I didn’t want it to just be a couple zombies with flames on them because we had done that before. So what was important to me was that once these walkers are on the ground and Rick hits the one in the stomach and it falls on top of the pile and it stands up, it’s engulfed in flames, and another zombie’s engulfed in flames.”

6. The scene gave them the chance to stretch their visual muscles:”It was a great opportunity for us to have zombies coming out of the darkness, seeing these zombies on fire, and still having these two characters fighting. A day or two before we shot that scene, I went in with just me and Andy [Lincoln] and Jeffrey [Dean Morgan], blocked out what I wanted, and talked them through it, and then we walked through the motions. I said we should duck here, swing the bat here, and then you duck down and then the bat comes this way. Then, the day that we shot it, we brought our stunt coordinator in and a lot of the department heads and we walked through all the choreography. I had to shoot that entire sequence in about three-quarters of a day, so I needed everybody to know what we were doing. Plus, we had to shoot one section of the room where we had one of the walls removed in case there was any issues with fire, so we wanted to make sure that we were as safe as we could.”

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