Veep: Emmy Nominated Director Dale Stern on His Unique Approach to Shooting “Mother” [Exclusive Interview]

Director Dale Stern can attribute part of his success to a cup of caffeinated hot chocolate. Seriously.

Stern was recently nominated for an Emmy for his work on HBO’s Veep, an honor that caught him a bit by surprise.

I had the chance to chat with Stern about his nomination, what it’s like to work on Veep, and how a dose of caffeine may have actually helped him get that job.

The news that he’d been nominated for an Emmy actually caught Stern off guard. “It didn’t register at first. I was on set with a hundred people, and one of my friends texted me and said, ‘congrats on the nom.’ And I’m thinking there was a problem with predictive text. I’m thinking, what they hell are they trying to say?” Stern recalled.

“Ten minutes later, my phone started blowing up. I didn’t even know that was the day they were making the announcement, so it took me a while to piece it together. And I realized, oh my gosh, I’m nominated for an Emmy!”

“It’s pretty amazing,” Stern continued. “It’s kind of surreal, actually, you know? It’s almost like I’m reading about somebody else.”

Although Stern has worked on Veep since the beginning of the series, the episode he was nominated for, “Mother,” was the first episode for which he served as Director.

“I’ve done all the shows as a creative collaborative, as an [Assistant Director]. I’ve done all the shows since the pilot. It’s like many other shows; there’s a bunch of hands stirring the pot. I’m more of a creative AD than a schedule AD, so you know, every take I’m throwing ideas out. I’m pitching for a word, or a different way of blocking, or way to shoot it,” Stern explained.

“I finally put my foot down. I was supposed to direct one a couple of years ago. But they didn’t want to replace me,” he laughed. “So I was like, okay, what do I have to do? Get fired? So I finally put my foot down.”

It’s a good thing, too, because Stern was able to work on a particularly special episode.

“I’m truly grateful because they gave me this amazing, deliciously dark episode of “Mother,” which is rich with such delicious dark comedy, I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into it.”

Stern took a unique approach to directing Veep Season 5 Episode 4, “Mother,” and it paid off.

“The biggest challenge was to make sure that the actors had nothing distracting them. This was a very special episode. Everyone knew it. As soon as this came out everybody knew, whoa, this was outside the box,” he said.

“I knew that giving the script that Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory so brilliantly penned, that I had to do a lot of work and prep to make sure that all the ducks were in a row once we got to the set. So my approach was a little unorthodox for the show,” Stern explained. “I worked with Burt Reynolds years ago, and he was amazing. He was a great teacher, and he taught me the more dramatic way, and an old-school way, of how to approach a scene, and how to shoot it, and how to edit it.”

“So I got access to the locations, and I took the script and I acted out all the parts. Every scene, to figure out the best way to block it — the best positions for everyone to interact with each other naturally,” Stern continued.

“I took pictures of myself doing it, and I took videos of like, walk and talks, and I made a little package.”

“I reviewed it with my showrunner, David Mandel who liked it an approved everything, so then I went to work making blocking sheets, and kind of making sure that I removed every single one of those distractions for the actors,” Stern explained.

“I wanted to make sure that when we got on the set, that everyone kind of felt comfortable. That they knew what they were doing and felt comfortable with the blocking.”

Stern is also known for his work on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he was working on that show when he got the call to meet with Armando Iannucci about Veep.

“We finished up the day, and one of the PAs at Curb Your Enthusiasm made me a hot chocolate with coffee — and I don’t drink coffee. You can’t give me caffeine, because you never know what’s gonna come out of my mouth,” he admitted.

“I drive across town to go meet him, and I can feel it coming on. My leg is twitching in the car, my head is spinning. I’m like oh God, relax, relax, relax.”

So when asked why he should get the job on Veep, Stern said exactly what came to mind.

“I said, ‘Armando, it’s like this. I can roll the cameras, sit back, and let you do everything. Or, you can go sleep in your trailer all day long, and I will make sure your show is exactly the way you want it.’ And we just stared at each other for about five seconds, and he goes, ‘Right! Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much.’ And he got up and left.”

Stern was sure he’d blown his chance at the opportunity, but in fact, the opposite was true, and he got the job. “I was really, really excited to dip into a pool of British humor,” Stern said. He was also especially excited to work with Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

“What Julia delivers is beyond the page and beyond the suggestion. Her performance transcends. It’s just unbelievable what she can do,” Stern said.

In directing “Mother,” he did what he could to make her performance stand out even more. He remembered the scene when Selina is trying to say goodbye to her mother, but she can’t find the words.

“It’s so powerful to me. I wanted to get that camera right up in her face because A. she’s beautiful and B. what she does there is just magnificent. She made me cry, you know, and laugh also.”

Comedy is something Stern said he’d been drawn to since he was a child.

“I was very sick as a kid. I was in and out of an oxygen tent until I was like seven years old. I was really dramatically sick. And so all my time at home away from school, I would just watch comedies,” Stern recalled. “I just fell in love with comedy.”

Stern said he’s excited to start working on the next season of Veep, and that he’s planning directing more episodes. “I’ve asked them to give me another outside the box, you know dark [episode] again.”

Veep returns for Season 6 in 2017.