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An interview with Eric Kripke, featured in issue #12 of Supernatural Magazine.
The Official Supernatural Magazine: How did you feel when the decision was made that you’d be directing the season finale?
Eric Kripke: I felt a really intense amount of pressure to make the episode great. Because it was the finale, I knew how large the scope and size of the episode were going to be, how epic it needed to feel. On top of that, there was the added pressure that it was the first finale that Kim Manners hadn’t shot, and obviously Kim had decades of experience and knew how to handle episodes of this size, and I had directed a total of one other episode of television besides this. So I have to say I felt quite nervous and very stressed, and I felt the pressure to live up to the standards that Kim set.
Did you pay homage to Kim in the way you shot the episode?
EK: I definitely felt like Kim was on my shoulder as I was going through my shot design. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I asked myself several times, “What would Kim do here?” There’s this Kim Manners characteristic close-up, which is this really tight close-up that kind of cuts off the chin and the forehead, and I found myself using that close-up a lot, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, but I think I did it because I wanted it to feel like a Kim Manners finale in some ways.
The first Supernatural episode you directed was written by Raelle Tucker. Was it better or worse to be working off your own script this time?
EK: Mostly it made a difference for the worse, because when it’s somebody else’s script
I have the advantage of being able to, as head writer, rewrite it to my taste and make any changes I want to make. Then if the episode didn’t turn out or wasn’t very good, for whatever reason, I could always blame that other writer. [Laughs] But on this one, I really felt like I was standing out there without any cover; I felt if this one didn’t work, there’s only one person to take the blame and that’s me, so I ended up feeling a bit more pressured.
Do you have any fun behind-the-scenes stories about working with Jared and Jensen on Lucifer Rising? Did the infamous pranksters try to pull anything over on you?
EK: Maybe everyone was tired at the end of the year or maybe everyone wanted to be on their good behavior because I was in town, but there were actually no pranks. Everyone showed up really prepared, ready to play. There’s a lot of joking around, and a lot of the jokes were off-color, but there were no practical jokes.
Well, causing the apocalypse is no joke, that’s for sure. Was it always your intention to have the boys fail to stop Lucifer from rising?
EK: Yeah, there was always a plan to raise Lucifer by the end of the season.
Overall, how was the experience of returning to directing?
EK: I have to say that I really had a lot of fun up there. Once you get on set and start working, it really is a blast. It really is so much more fun than writing. Going into it, I was really sweating it. I knew because it was the finale, it was gonna be huge, it was gonna be hard to get done on schedule, we were going to have to rush through it. There were things in this episode like ratchet poles that pulled the stuntwoman back and all sorts of other things that I’d never done before and had no experience with, and so much more CGI and visual effects than I had to deal with last time. The fact that I was the writer meant I felt the added pressure to make sure the script was really great. So all that weighed pretty hard on me. I probably averaged about three, three-and-a-half hours of sleep a night. I subsisted the first week and a half on a diet of dried toast because my stomach was too nervous to process anything else. It was intense, but once I got past the initial butterflies, I had the time of my life!
Read the full interview in issue 12 of The Official Supernatural Magazine on newsstands now.
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