“That was the last flight out as Covid hit,” he nods. “But it saved the show. It’s shocking how ignorant I was about the scale of what we were doing at the start. Really vaingloriously dumb. We had a writers’ room, I was directing, budgeting and casting, all the while with this terrible anxiety that I had ruined my life. I was waking up every day going, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ Covid reset the whole table.”
Grounded in Hollywood, and now with more thinking time and a fresh perspective, he tore up scripts and started organising a new team. “I turned into a cockpit creator,” he grins. “I started doing meetings on Zoom, which really helped me remember everyone’s names.”
He hired British directors Toby Hayes, Susannah White and Ben Caron of Black Mirror, Generation Kill and Sherlock fame and recruited Chernobyl production designer Luke Hull. Lockdown’s shifting restrictions even meant some UK locations were easier to shoot in – like the Barbican and Canary Wharf.
Gilroy cannot praise British craft enough. While Jon Favreau shot The Mandalorian in a Volume (a 3D special effects studio), New York-born Gilroy preferred sets and building whole villages and towns at Pinewood… and the quality of the 400-odd speaking-part actors.
“Another American show-runner said, ‘You’re going to be a pig in s–t with actors’,” he grins with delight. “British directors won’t hire them because they’ve been on EastEnders or did a TV commercial, but the talent pool here is sick. People show up on time, know their lines, and respect what they do.”
It was, he says mournfully, old-school shooting. “I don’t think they’ll make TV shows like this in the same way ever again,” he sighs. “I watched The Good, The Bad and The Ugly where Clint [Eastwood] comes up to the prisoner camp in the desert with 700 extras and I got so sad. Can you imagine the social life on set for that month? What a gas it was to be there? No one’s ever going do that again. You’d tile the crowd. You’d CGI the set. All that fun is gone. I just don’t see anybody doing a show like this on that scale again.”
