'The Walking Dead' Director Greg Nicotero Talks Glenn's Kills, the Saviors' Humor, Gabriel's Heroics, and Morgan's Craft Project

Those Saviors are some funny dudes, even if it’s only masking the sheer destruction they’re capable of (and likely to unleash, soon). The Walking Dead executive producer, director, and special effects whiz Greg Nicotero, who was behind the camera for last Sunday’s “Not Tomorrow Yet,” talks to Yahoo TV about how the Saviors make him laugh out loud, how they made Glenn cry, and who he thinks the real hero of the attack on the Saviors was. And he clues us in on what, exactly, Morgan was up to with his DIY project in Alexandria.

I knew this was a Greg Nicotero-directed episode when I saw the scene at the Saviors’ hideout. It’s incredibly intense.

You know, I wish we would have had a little more time with that scene to play out. There’s a direct contrast between the emotion that we show in the first two acts of the episode. We have a break up, we have a couple getting together, we have another couple having to say goodbye, we have another couple saying they want to do things together. There’s a lot of emotion. It’s showing that these people have every intention of going on with their lives and surviving. It’s like, OK, if you want to break up with somebody because you thought they were the only girl left in the world, but there’s somebody else out there, then you fully are committed to the fact that there is going to be a tomorrow, and a next week, and a next month. We really go to great lengths to show that our characters are human, and they have emotions, because they’re about to step in and do something that is reprehensible.

There are some crushing moments. The Abraham/Rosita breakup, and then Glenn making his first kill. Steven Yeun’s reaction was perfect.

That was one of my favorite scenes to shoot. For his kill, and Rick’s kill, we actually created extremely realistic heads, knowing that they would never be filmed. When we shot Steven’s kill, we had an actor in the cot for the lead up, then, once we got to the stab, we took the actor out, and we put a dummy in there with a beautiful, very detailed fake head. I had Adam [Miller], our prop guy, lay underneath the cot and put a ring on his finger and lay his arm across the chest of the dummy. When Steven walked in, he saw a real human hand with a ring on it. He walked up, and he kneeled down, and he took the tip of the blade over this eye and stabbed the head through the eye. It was something, from a directorial standpoint, where I wanted to give Steven as much ammunition as I could for that emotional moment. It’s deep, and it’s dark, and it’s painful, and it’s horrible. I remember him walking in and looking and me and going, “There’s a ring on that. That’s a real hand.”