Over the course of his over-40-year directing career, Michael Dinner has worked in virtually every genre imaginable, from comedy (the IndieWire-approved “Off Beat“) and medical dramas (“Chicago Hope,” “Grey’s Anatomy”) to coming-of-age stories (“The Wonder Years”) and contemporary Westerns (“Justified” and its sequel, “City Primeval“).
“I’ve done a little bit of everything,” Dinner told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “I sometimes joke that I practice the great American pastime of reinventing myself.”
Dinner’s latest bit of self-reinvention is as a sci-fi filmmaker on Apple TV‘s “Silo,” where he joined the series as a producer and director in Season 2. The show gave Dinner the opportunity to reunite with his “Justified” partner Graham Yost, who created “Silo” and asked Dinner to come to London to work on the second season. “I thought it was going to be a six-month gig,” Dinner said. “It turned into a year, and then it turned to three years.”
Dinner stayed on through Season 3, which premieres today on Apple TV, and then Season 4, which he just wrapped after spending most of the last few years in England. Although Dinner ultimately fell in love with the dense sci-fi world adapted from Hugh Howey’s novels, the initial draw was simply the opportunity to work with Yost again. “I committed without even seeing or reading anything, because of Graham,” Dinner said.
That said, once Dinner dove into the series, it was clear that “Silo” offered irresistible opportunities as both a science-fiction tale and a mystery, as it follows the lives of 10,000 people living underground who don’t know why they’re in the silo or who built it — all they know is they can’t leave. In Season 3, the mysteries multiply as “Silo” follows parallel stories: one involving underground heroine Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) fighting to learn the truth about her situation after her memory is wiped clean, the other an origin story that finally reveals how and why the silos were built.
That origin story takes place in present-day Washington, DC, while the material in the silos occurs 300 years in the future. The new storyline takes full advantage of Dinner’s gifts as a genre stylist, as the season premiere (the first of three episodes directed by Dinner), introduces not only a new setting but a new romance between Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and reporter Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick).
Their investigation into a government conspiracy adds a new cinematic flavor to “Silo,” as the present-day material allows Dinner to work in the tradition of political thrillers like “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View.”
“I don’t want to date myself, but those are some of the movies that made me want to do what I do,” Dinner said. “When I was a kid, I had a friend by the name of Larry, and we would jump on a public bus and go down to the Esquire or Bluebird Theater, and we’d see these movies made during the second heyday of American filmmakers like [Alan] Pakula, like [Francis] Coppola, like Sydney Pollack.”
Dinner wanted to avoid quoting directly from movies like Coppola’s “The Conversation” and Pakula’s “All the President’s Men,” so he didn’t revisit them before shooting “Silo” — but they’re so ingrained in his DNA that the influence is undeniable, and all the more effective for being understated.
For the most part, Dinner’s visual choices are motivated less by outside references than the scripts by Yost and the show’s other writers. “Things evolved organically,” Dinner said. He noted that while he tended to rely more on handheld camerawork in the underground storyline and more on dollies and Steadicam in the present-day sequences, this stemmed more from responding to the energy of each individual scene than from a prescriptive approach to camera movement and lensing.
“I didn’t want to overthink it,” Dinner said. “At first I was worried — did there need to be some kind of stylized visual component where the two [storylines] were meshing together? I kind of dumped that and said to the other directors, ‘Trust the script. It will mesh together.’” Dinner felt that the two worlds were ultimately unified by the music — he gave high marks to composer Atli Örvarsson for finding a sonic language that wove the various subplots together — and by the fact that, while the milieus may be different, both storylines share thematic similarities.
“Both stories are detective stories,” Dinner said, adding that even within the underground there are multiple detective narratives. “Juliette is trying to piece together what happened to her. Billings [Chinaza Uche], the cop on the show, is trying to figure out what happened to this woman, Orla [Quelin Sepulveda].” In all the stories across both timelines, Dinner said there’s a common thread about memories and how they can be manipulated, and that exploring it was part of the appeal of the new season — not just for the audience, but for the director. “It was fun to do.”
“Silo” is currently streaming on Apple TV. The Michael Dinner episode of Filmmaker Toolkit will air later this summer. To hear the entire conversation and make sure you don’t miss a single episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
