DGA Third Vice President Taylor Hackford welcomes the audience.

Moderator Mick Garris with nominees Walter Hill and Edward James Olmos.

Nominee Charles Dutton and friends.

Nominee Peter Markle and guests.

Nominee Randa Haines (The Ron Clark Story) chats with DGA Third Vice President Taylor Hackford and Fifth Vice President Betty Thomas.

Nominee Olmos discusses his experiences while directing Walkout.

Nominee Dutton talks about making Sleeper Cell: American Terror.

Nominee Markle reveals a lighter moment from his recreation of the horror of Flight 93.

Nominees Hill and Haines enjoy the lively panel discussion.

Movies for Television Committee member Mike Robe (right) chats with attendees.

Guests of the symposium enjoy cocktails and conversation.

Movies for Television Committee (L-R) Robert Harmon, Mike Robe, Robert Mandel, Robert Markowitz, Roger Young, Andy Wolk, Peter Werner, and Mick Jackson.

After a screening of scenes from each of the nominated films, moderator Mick Garris led the panel through a series of probing questions that revealed the intricacies of each individual project and the creative and logistical hurdles each of the directors had to overcome to make their films.

Markle spoke of his trepidations at approaching the story of the ill-fated United Airlines flight whose passengers fought back against the 9/11 terrorists and gave their lives to protect others. “I didn’t read it for a day because I thought, ‘No way!’ There hadn’t been a dramatic film and this was a story where you couldn’t document everything that happened because there were no survivors. So I read the script and thought that it was interesting but there had to be more there. There were a lot of phone conversations between family members and folks on the plane. But it was still compelling and the more I got into it, the more I saw it was going to evolve and it would be an incredible exercise in terms of what you would have to add and what you would have to improvise and still stay as true to the facts given the situation.”

Olmos spoke the difficulties of restaging the true story of the 1968 walkout of 10,000 Mexican-American students at five East Los Angeles high schools who were tired of being treated unequally. “The hardest part of this was the casting, trying to find young people who looked the age. We went into an intense period casting in which we I would work with them for 45-50 minutes per person. Usually you when you go into casting you’re lucky to get five minutes. But it was the only way to find them because I knew we would be working with artists who were just burgeoning. We had 57 speaking parts and 18 of them were constantly on camera for most of the story. But we had to move pretty quickly. It was originally designed to be a 44-day shoot and we did it in 26 days. But it was done with tremendous amount of passion by everyone because the material was so close to us. And everyone went along with the program because we were moving so quickly.”

In directing the story of an FBI agent who goes undercover in a terrorist cell in Los Angeles, Dutton spoke of his experiences running counter to everything he’d heard about working in television. “You hear things like, ‘You have to work fast.’ ‘You only have this amount of time,’ ‘You can’t really work with the actors.’ But I found it to be totally opposite on Sleeper Cell. I did have time, the actors were very keen to do improvs and rehearsals.” Dutton laughed that he was assisted in prepping his cast by the nature of the show. “I told the new actors, ‘Listen. The only two people who’re probably going to come back are the stars. So you guys will probably all die off. So what you should do is not give me a hard time, act like this is your last gig, and just act your asses off.’ And they did.”

Haines recalled how she developed the visual approach of her true-life story of Ron Clark, a passionate teacher who leaves his small town home and uses his unconventional methods to inspire students in one of Harlem's toughest schools. “I wanted that classroom to be a dangerous place when he first enters it. These kids are totally out of control and the one thing they’re proud of is that they could get rid of any teacher in two weeks max. So there’s a kind of ferocious energy in those kids and they never sat still, never stopped making noise or moving around. I wanted that feeling of anything could happen at any time and we would go with it if it did. He never knew where they were and it seemed like the right visual style. The fact that there was never enough time helped with that.”

Hill was sent the script for his frontier tale about a two ranchers who become the reluctant guardians of five abused and abandoned Chinese girls by star Robert Duvall who had wanted to set it up as a feature film. “I’m of the school that thinks there are no bad westerns and I thought it was very good story but we would have a very hard time getting it up and going as a feature. The trick of it all was that we had a feature script that was a well padded up 120 pages and A&E would only do it as a miniseries, which was 180 minutes. We had 45 days and I wanted to shoot it big. I thought you couldn’t do this story without making the environment a part of it, so I wanted the horses to be a living character in it and I wanted to tell as much of the story through the eyes of the Chinese girls as possible. I thought they lifted it into something else and made it unique. And I wanted to keep it as simple as I could because the story had a simple dignity and the way it was shot should reflect that.”