On January 31, the Assistant Directors and Unit Production Managers of the projects nominated for the 78th Annual DGA Awards were celebrated during the Western AD/UPM Council’s 23rd Annual Meet the Teams event.

Hosted by the Council’s Education Committee and the Meet the Teams Organizing Committee, the online event gave DGA members the opportunity to hear firsthand accounts of what went into the making of these notable productions for film, television, and commercials from: UPM Will Weiske from Paul Thomas Anderson’s theatrical feature One Battle After Another; 1st ADs Jeremy Marks from Josh Safdie’s theatrical feature Marty Supreme, George Nessis from Miles Jay’s ChatGPT commercials Dish, Pull Up and Trip and Andreas Nilsson’s Apple iPhone 16 Pro commercials Garrett and Big Flex and Eric Tignini from Amanda Marsalis’ dramatic series episode “6:00 p.m.” and John Wells’ episode “7:00 a.m.” of the show The Pitt; 2nd AD Amir Khan from Ryan Coogler’s theatrical feature Sinners; 2nd 2nd AD Kaitlin Heins from Lesli Linka Glatter’s episode “Episode 6” of the limited & anthology series Zero Day and Kyle Newacheck’s movie for television Happy Gilmore 2; and Assistant UPM & 2nd 2nd AD Sean Fogel from Ben Stiller’s episode “Cold Harbor” of the dramatic series Severance and Antonio Campos’ episode “Sick Puppy” of the limited & anthology series The Beast in Me.

With their work illustrated by clips from the nominated productions, the conversation was moderated by 2026 Frank Capra Award Recipient Gregory G. McCollum who said, “Congratulations to the panelists and to all the nominees! Thank you very much for participating and joining the panel. I’m looking forward to having a good, insightful conversation about all our projects today.”

Weiske paid tribute to Adam Somner, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1st AD on One Battle After Another, calling him, “the greatest AD that ever lived.” He credited Somner with figuring out how to pull off the film only using practical effects and spoke about the complexity of shooting the car chase scene at the end of the film. “We had to go out to that road several times just to figure out how to make it happen on several different roads, some of which we could control completely, but a lot of them, like with the river of hills we weren’t able to shut down. It was a thruway for shipping trucks, and we could only hold the traffic for a certain amount of time. There were limited places where we could stage equipment and stage gear.”

Khan shared how Ryan Coogler’s Sinners team had to be adaptable to shoot in springtime in New Orleans due to the unpredictable weather. “We were just having to twist the Rubik’s Cube and figure out how to build out the rest of the week and the rest of the days. Very, very tricky process. The exterior juke joint location, we were initially going to go there but then we had to go to rain cover, so we stayed on stage. Then the next day it was a gorgeous day, and everybody thought, ‘This is great! We’re gonna go on location tomorrow.’ But then, we had to go to cover again because the location was engulfed in mud. We then had to wait days for the mud to dry out for us to get there.”

Marks revealed Josh Safdie’s quick shooting schedule for Marty Supreme. “The whole schedule was forty-six and a half days, plus three days in Japan. So, there was an aggressive pace to it. I think the longest in the schedule we were anywhere was four days to do the whole Wembley sequence. There was a progression every day. There were no easy days. Our stage days were complicated; there were big sets that we’d built and a lot to shoot. We were just trying to get as much as we could, just maximizing our days. The creation of worlds was really important and there were a lot of different ones that we had to put together and figure out.”

Heins shared what it was like to work with DGA Past President Lesli Linka Glatter on Zero Day saying, “Lesli’s a dream! She is the greatest because she leads with kindness with every crew member, with every person. She is kind about her notes; she wants to make everyone feel involved. It’s why crew members come back to her jobs countless times.” She also recalled the challenge of coordinating hundreds of extras on Kyle Newacheck’s Happy Gilmore 2 set and the practical effects used in the film. “There were 900 extras. We would leave Manhattan around 4 o’clock in the morning and try to fill as many buses as we could to get up to 850-900 by shoot call into the stadiums. All the effects were practical. We built this tilting green in the middle of a Jersey golf course, 50 feet into the ground. It popped up and would spin around. I would stand in the middle every day as the sun was coming up and show the crew what would happen as it tilted with the 15-foot dropping sand dunes and all that kind of stuff.”

Tignini talked about the culture on set of The Pitt and said that the creators and producers wanted to tell the story in real time. “We wanted to shoot it in continuity order too. At first, it sounded challenging, but it’s actually kind of liberating because we can track everything better that way. We have no tape marks, no last looks, we don’t use dollies or cranes or anything. We’re handheld. There are no director’s chairs on set. No sides. They want the actors to be off book. And we shoot pretty fast. A lot of times we’ll shoot like scenes one through five all together and it’ll just flow one into another and follow characters throughout the whole emergency department section of the set. Somehow it works. It feels like a theater company sometimes with all of us working together.”

Nessis addressed his work on the nominated projects and called out Miles Jay’s ChatGPT commercial. Dish. “All the spots in the campaign were oners but Dish was particularly technical. We shot on film, 200-foot mags and the initial approach was to pass off the interior camera, attach it with a drone to magnets and then pull out. Through testing, and to stay within the time constraints that we had, we ended up just getting it out the door through the platform that was built. It was a three-story apartment adjacent to a lower rooftop parking garage. And we shot it all in a day, so we rehearsed, blocked and had to adjust some of the dressing to get out the window in time, capturing the moment. In commercials it’s a game of seconds.”

And Fogel divulged the undertaking that was the marching band scene in Ben Stiller’s episode “Cold Harbor” of the dramatic series Severance. The sequence required four fitting days, five rehearsal days, one pre-record day and five shoot days. “The first thing we had to do was find someone to help us put this marching band together. We reached out to a great marching band coordinator named Ty Brown, and he put together a 64-member marching band so, they were not a cohesive group. We handpicked and created a marching band that had never worked together, so that in itself was a challenge. We had to put this band together and then start the process to get the music pre-recorded. Every department had to get involved in the making of that scene.”

The panelists also covered subjects that included: how they overcame other challenges on their respective projects; their working relationships with their Directors, an overview of  their individual strengths and how they were used on set, and offered advice to event attendees seeking to emulate their success such as how to find joy in the projects you’re working on and the importance of remembering that feature, television and commercial production is a team sport.

23rd Annual Meet the Directorial Teams of the DGA Award-Nominated Projects

About the Panelists:

Assistant UPM & 2nd 2nd AD Sean Fogel In addition to his work on Severance and The Beast in Me, Fogel’s Production Management credits include features such as Michael Patrick King’s Sex and the City 2 and Doug Liman’s Fair Game; and Ron Howard’s documentary Made in America. His AD credits include episodes of A Capitol Fourth and Royal Pains. Fogel has been a DGA member since 2007.

2nd 2nd AD Kaitlin Heins In addition to her work on Zero Day and Happy Gilmore 2, Heins’ AD credits include features such as Mimi Cave’s Holland, Jon Watts’ Wolfs, Damian Harris’ Brave the Dark, Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money and Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Asphalt City; and episodes of The First Lady and Duster. Heins has been a DGA member since 2021.

2nd AD Amir Khan In addition to his work on Sinners, Khan’s AD credits include features such as James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, George Nolfi’s The Banker, Kay Cannon’s Blockers and Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant; and episodes of Peacemaker, Ms. Marvel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, Daybreak and Atlanta. He was also part of the directorial teams on two 2016 Comedy Series Award-nominated episodes of Atlanta, Donald Glover’s “FUBU” and Hiro Murai’s “Teddy Perkins.” Khan has been a DGA member since 2012 and has served as a member of the BA/FLTTA Negotiating Committee.

1st AD Jeremy Marks In addition to his work on Marty Supreme, Marks’ AD credits include Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s DGA Award-winning feature The Revenant; Martin Scorsese’s DGA Award-nominated features Killers of the Flower Moon and The Irishman and Steven Spielberg’s DGA Award-nominated feature West Side Story; as well as other features such as Chad Stahelski’s John Wick, John Wick: Chapter 2, John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4, Len Wiseman’s Ballerina, Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Todd Phillips’ Joker and Gary Ross’ Ocean’s Eight; and episodes of the mini-series Hawkeye and The Affair. Marks has been a DGA member since 2009 and has served as a member of the Eastern AD/UPM Council.

1st AD George Nessis In addition to his work on nominated commercials for ChatGPT and Apple iPhone 16 Pro, Nessis was also part of directing teams nominated for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials, following nominations for Steve Ayson’s 2021 Mattress Firm spot, Anthem and Dante Ariola’s 2017 Sun Trust spot, Hold Your Breath. His AD credits also include spots for Progressive, Corona, Bank of America, Silk, Geico, AT&T, Hyundai, Nissan, Nike, Lincoln, Google, Toyota, Kia, Dunkin, Verizon and Dell to name a few. Nessis has been a DGA member since 2015.

1st AD Eric Tignini In addition to his work on The Pitt, Tignini’s AD credits include Robert Zemeckis’ DGA Award-winning feature Forrest Gump; other features such as Lee Tamahori’s Mulholland Falls, Jon Turteltaub’s Phenomenon, Aaron Schneider’s Get Low, Nimród Antal’s Armored and Julie Anne Robinson’s The Last Song; and episodes of The Sympathizer, Perry Mason, Good Girls, Get Shorty, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Masters of Sex, Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, Parenthood, Enlightened and In Treatment. Tignini has been a DGA member since 1988.

UPM Will Weiske In addition to his work on One Battle After Another, Weiske’s Production Management credits include features such as Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum, Scott Cooper’s Hostiles, Mira Nair’s Queen of Katwe, Jon Stewart’s Rosewater, Rawson Marshall Thurber’s We’re the Millers, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. He also worked with Anderson as a production supervisor on his DGA Award-nominated feature There Will Be Blood and his feature Punch-Drunk Love. Weiske has been a DGA member since 2006.

1st AD Gregory G. McCollum (moderator) Throughout his long career in commercials, McCollum has served as a 1st AD on countless Super Bowl spots and over a thousand projects for brands across consumer categories from automotive, lifestyle, financial services, sports, electronics, and more. Several of these projects have gone on to receive Emmy Nominations. His AD credits also include features and short films such as Gary McKendry’s Everything in This Country Must, Tenney Fairchild’s The Good Humor Man, Jim Jenkins’ I Can Change and David Shane’s television pilot Driven.  A DGA member since 1985, McCollum’s service to the Guild began in 2009 when he was chosen to serve as a member of the DGA’s Commercial Negotiating Committee, a role he would go on to continue for every negotiations cycle since. He was first elected as an Alternate member of the Western AD/UPM Council in 2018 and has served in that role for seven consecutive terms. He also currently serves as the Chair of the Council’s Commercial Committee and is only the third member working in commercials to receive the Frank Capra Achievement Award.

About the Organizing Committee:

This event was organized by the Western AD/UPM Council Education Committee and the Meet the Teams Organizing Committee which is co-chaired by Lucille OuYang and Redelia Shaw, with member Mark Hansson.

• For more information on the Western AD/UPM Council, click here to visit their web pages.