INTERVIEW: Nzingha Stewart Breaks Down Crafting Daisy and Billy’s Journey on ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’

Now that Daisy Jones & The Six has come to an end, fans are talking about the love story of Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) and Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) that we saw play out on screen. And one of the reasons that it really worked was because of Nzingha Stewart’s direction. I was lucky enough to talk with the director about her work on the series and what makes this series so special to direct.

One of my favorite episodes of the series is episode 6 titled “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” Because it is the episode that brings to life the Aurora cover that we’ve come to know and love as fans. And while the entire photoshoot is set up to nab the perfect shot, their pick actually comes from Camila taking a picture of Billy and Daisy fighting with each other.

But the trick to a shoot like that is that it is both bring to life the “idea” of the photoshoot as well as the magic of the moment they’re living in. And all those elements couldn’t be easy on a director. So I asked Stewart about crafting that and she opened up about making sure all her episodes highlighted Daisy and Billy’s dynamic.

“It was the coldest day ever on that day,” she said. “I didn’t even know parts of California got like this. It was snowing . And poor Riley is out there basically in underwear and a shawl. And I have on a heated vest and a parka and I mean it was really freezing. Sebastian had a vest over no shirt. So there were definitely elements against this in addition to trying to get things we didn’t have, we had to make it look like golden hour. We didn’t have to get it all in that short period of time. So I did lean heavily on our DP for that. I think it’s like how do you eat an elephant bite by bite? I had to just know this is a big mammoth thing. We only have X amount of hours to do it. Here are the things that are the priorities and then we go down the list from there.”

But she went on to talk about how they made sure those moments we needed popped throughout the filming. “And the priority for me was really, and this was a hard hat trick to pull off, is feeling the tension between the two of them feeling the fight between the two of them and still feeling like those two need to go someplace and have sex and just get this outta their system. And that was really at the forefront, like everything that’s going on always be watching and communicating with the actors and making sure we feel like they’re gonna tear each other apart and they should tear each other apart at the same time.”

You can see the rest of our interview here:

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The entire first season of Daisy Jones & The Six is on Prime Video now!

(Featured image: Lacey Terrell/Prime Video)