"Firstly, I think the scripts that Kirsty and Marieke wrote." "They were very, um..." "I think they're very different for... ..on the kind of Australian comedy landscape at the moment." "There's a lot of comedy being made at the moment that sort of has elements of being behind the scenes of sort of workplaces, workplace comedies, or mockumentary's still kind of fairly popular." "And both of those things weren't things that I was that interested in making, in a comedy." "So what appealed to me with this was that I'm quite interested in the dramedy comedy, the dramedies." "And this seemed like just a really nice, well-written comedy that isn't sort of trying to make you laugh at every turn." "It does have a narrative and a story." "And as a director, that's what I was kind of interested in doing next is sort of taking on something that had more of a narrative... ..a narrative arc throughout the series." "So that was really appealing." "And just the team behind it- to work with Marieke and Kirsty and Liz at Porchlight as well, who've made such great stuff before." "It just seemed like, yeah, a really good one to get on board with." "Casting was quite a long and extensive process - maybe too extensive." "We saw many, many, many, many, many people and because..." "I mean, the first thing everyone said when they read the script is," ""Roo's gonna have to be very, very well cast,"" "and it was really hard to kind of..." "Particularly with the kind of creative core agreeing on a consensus of who we saw Roo being." "But, you know, ultimately a lot of the performance is like a subtle comedy performance." "We needed someone who first and foremost had those kind of comedy bones." "When you're making television like this and you're shooting so much and we're, you know, shooting the entire series in five weeks, as a director, I can't really teach someone to be..." "..give them funny timing and instincts." "They have to have that to start with." "So finding Alison and working with Alison, she definitely has that." "She's got that kind of, you know..." "She brings those little nuances, those little kind of comic moments to the scenes." "Collaborating with writers can go down one of two paths." "You get the ones that their word is gospel - and, thankfully, Marieke and Kirsty aren't of that variety." "They're very open to tweaking the scripts as you're seeing them." "Because it's never the same." "Once you write something in a room by yourself it's always different when you see it played out in front of cameras on location." "So they've been really good at kind of being open to collaboration, which is a big thing in itself." "As a director, I think of myself as being primarily a performance director." "Performance is kind of 90 % of my concern once I'm on set on the day." "I like to spent a lot of time with Justin, the DP, beforehand." "And this has been a good production in that sense where we've been able to recce stuff, get to the locations, we know the angles and can block it all out, so we know what angles we wanna shoot." "It's somewhat limiting in terms of the time frame because we are shooting, you know, up to nine minutes a day sometimes." "And we're not doing..." "And to be honest, I don't see the show being that tricky anyway so we're just sort of shooting it in a way that's fairly traditional, I guess." "Like, pretty, um..." "Trying to give it a bit of a filmic kind of look, longish lenses, backgrounds kind of falling away out of focus and into darkness and depth." "But for the most part, yeah, all quite simple."