Director/actress Bryce Dallas Howard discusses season 2 of The Mandalorian and directing her second episode Chapter 11: The Heiress (having previously directed Chapter 4: Sanctuary), including that Apollo 13 easter egg.
Did you feel any pressure bringing Bo-Katan to life and connecting to fan-favourite arcs like The Clone Wars?
I think I would have had it not been for Katee Sackhoff playing Bo-Katan, or if Dave Filoni wasn’t there. But because Dave Filoni was there, and Katee had played Bo for a decade – for me, it was basically about ensuring Katee’s vision and Filoni’s vision, along with Jon Favreau’s vision… how can I facilitate that?
That was my primary focus, rather than being like, “I have a perspective on The Clone Wars, and here’s that perspective [laughs].” There are folks who have spent more time on this and have inhabited these characters in this world. So that was the fun of it for me. It was about getting all the experts in the room together, and being like, “I think this is the story you’re telling. Does that sound right?” And they’re like, “Yeah.”
That’s more my role [laughs].
The Apollo 13 Easter egg was a wonderful homage to your father, Ron Howard. Are there any more Easter eggs that fans haven’t spotted yet? And if so, could you tease what they might be?
Gosh. That’s a good question. Were there? I mean, Apollo 13 was definitely something that I referenced, more than anything because I so vividly remember my experience, because I was there the whole time.
One of my jobs on set – I was 12 and turned 13 during that movie, which is crazy; my son is 13 right now, so it’s very eerie to me – but one of my jobs was to get everyone’s orders for lunch together, because, during lunch, we would watch dailies.
I would gather the lunches, and then I would watch the dailies during lunch, and then it was rinse and repeat for dinnertime. And so I was there every single day, and saw how they do every single thing. And because we were shooting stuff in space, I was like, “OK, OK, there’s a few shots that I just really, really want to make sure we get.”
Also, because my grandfather was an aerospace engineer. My mum’s dad worked at NASA. So there are certain things that I just wanted to incorporate so that, if you were watching, you would know how terrible a landing it was [laughs]. We needed it for folks who don’t fly – it needed to look like the worst landing that Mando had ever experienced [laughs].
But for folks who actually know how to fly a plane, it just looks like, “Oh my gosh, it’s a miracle he survived” – given the angle in which he was trying to pierce the atmosphere and all of that.
So Apollo 13 definitely played a role. When I first read the episode, I was like, “This is like a Bruce Willis heist movie, you know? And the fun of someone who’s a lone wolf, joining up with a gang, and then going on a heist.” That was very fun to me. I was really into the beats of that journey.
Initially, there wasn’t really a character for the captain. Like, the Titus Welliver character didn’t really exist. The pilot and the co-pilot and all of that. It was a very small thing where you just went up to the bridge, and they were like, “Uh oh.”
But I really wanted there to be sort of this ‘mano a mano’ energy. Those heist movies have these great villains so that definitely got built up as a result. Which is really fun. There was a lot of discoveries along the way.
Also, in the first season, I love action, and I love shooting action, and I love myself participating as a performer in action. And so, for the second season, I was really thrilled to get an action episode. I was like, “Yeah, I just love that. I love warriors ganging up together.”
When you were approached to direct The Heiress, were you told about the wider context of season two, and where the story would be heading next?
That’s something that is really amazing to me – the level of trust that Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have with their directors. We definitely had a larger sense of the context. I mean, that was absolutely thrilling for me as a fan [laughs]. It’s unreal.
Read the full interview by David Opie here.
