‘Ghosts’: Rose McIver on Directing Her Costars & ‘Goodfellas’ Inspiration

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Ghosts Season 4 Episode 13, “Ghostfellas.”]

Ghosts takes a page from the mafia genre for its latest installment, “Ghostfellas,” which star Rose McIver stepped behind the camera to direct.

In the episode, well-intentioned spirit Pete (Richie Moriarty) decides to share an old family recipe with Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) that he can try out in the newly-opened restaurant, Mahesh. But it turns out that the sauce which uses Dr. Pepper as a special ingredient belongs to Carol’s (Caroline Aaron) side of the family and was kept secret for a reason.

When Carol’s nephew, Anthony (Lenny Venito), stops in for dinner and tastes the sauce, he gets angry and confronts Jay, asking where he’d acquired the recipe. It turns into a long drama that puts Sam and Jay in Anthony’s crosshairs and also reveals to Pete that Carol’s family was in the mafia. While Anthony pushes to have the dish removed from the menu, he begins showing up and making unreasonable requests in a move that Carol notes is a signature to his strategy of breaking down individuals he’s hoping to victimize.

This also means that Pete discovers the truth about his travel agent job, which was mostly legitimate but also unknowingly a cover for the mafia as associates would commit shady business behind closed doors in the back of the office. Despondent over learning the truth, Pete struggles to cope.

Meanwhile, Carol tells Sam and Jay she held onto incriminating evidence as the bookkeeper and they can use it to blackmail Anthony into leaving them alone. In retrieving the evidence from Carol’s storage unit off-property, they also bring Pete a box of postcards from clients who thanked him for his travel agent work.

While Sam and Jay are able to sort out their mafia problem, Pete also gets closure surrounding his legacy and is able to hold his head up high despite the travel agency’s mafia ties. Below, McIver opens up about directing for the first time, working alongside her costars in a new capacity, and taking influence from Goodfellas.

Congratulations on directing your first episode. How does it feel?

Rose McIver: Thanks so much. I feel incredibly lucky. It is a coveted position. I’ve been wanting to [direct] for 10 years… and it’s a really, really tough role to get. So I feel really lucky to be here on a show with so many of my friends and collaborators that we’re all familiar with each other and have a great shorthand. So it couldn’t have been a luckier start.

A lot of this episode is set in Woodstone’s new restaurant, Mahesh. Was it fun working in a new space in this role?

Yeah, we had filmed in the barn for the [previous] episode… So it was incredibly fresh, but it was lucky in that you want to be the second episode in a new location where things still haven’t been shot a million different times and from every imaginable angle, but the technical crew has ironed out how they can best rig their lights and where the boom operator is able to hide and not be seen in a reflection. So I got the luxury of being able to shoot in an environment that we had just established and still had so many wonderful textures to play with.

This episode is aptly titled “Ghostfellas.” Did you know the title when you signed on to direct and did Goodfellas have any influence on your approach?

Absolutely. Yeah. It was fun to have a slight genre twist on an episode. It’s something we don’t do that often, and I really loved it. I re-watched Goodfellas in the weeks leading up to shooting [the episode] and was able to pepper little moments in tonally. For example, where Anthony makes a very terrifying joke, and it intimidates Jay, and then [he’d] suddenly subvert it and laugh… was very much supposed to be reminiscent of Joe Pesci, the sort of intimidator element of the story where there’s a lot of suspicion. There’s a lot of somebody having one up on somebody else and trying to play with that as much as we could in camera movement and in how we framed those pieces of footage so that somebody might loom over somebody else or might feel backed up against a wall. We got to play with a few motifs, and that was a fun aspect of shooting an episode that had that mafia bend to it all.

How did you work to balance the episode’s emotions with its comedic beats as a director? Especially within that travel agency environment.

I worked with an incredible first AD, Matt [Jemus], and my DP Michel [St-Martin], who were collaborators. Being a director in episodic television is not being an auteur, it’s being a really good selector. It’s being a good advocate for people in different departments and listening to what people offer. So lots of ideas came from lots of different people, and it’s about curating those. So when we were shooting in that travel agency particularly, our crew lit up because there was this new environment. We actually got this one shot, which I really loved. But again, when you’re editing 21 minutes of television, things get pared down. But we did film a sequence, which was the door closing. It’s supposed to be reminiscent of The Godfather, the final door closing,

And we had Pete mindlessly counting traveler’s checks, unaware of what he was contributing to, what he was part of. Ultimately in the cut, it was a luxury shot that we didn’t have time for, but it was fun to explore. Shooting that and getting your whole crew and team on board with what it is you’re trying to achieve and the vision and the tone of the material, it wakes things up in people. So I actually find that incredibly valuable regardless. It took us 20 minutes to get that shot, and that ended up helping so that then that afternoon when we went to shoot in the barn kitchen, everybody was aligned in their thinking of looking for moments like that and trying to evoke that kind of sensibility.

What did you want to capture with the emotional payoff of Pete receiving all of the postcards from his past clients?

It helps when you’re given an emotional beat, and I could not feel more confident than I do with Richie Moriarty. He’s so brilliant. He is the king of pathos. He knows exactly how humor and tragedy are two sides of the same coin and is able to play between those. So I definitely went into that with a lot of confidence just in knowing that Richie had the skillset that he needed. But then there’s also just getting levels on the day and exploring. We only do two or three takes max of any piece of coverage that we get. And so making sure that I had just some variation in the levels so that whether it be in how angry he gets, how much conflict we build to how morose he is afterward, and do we see the beginnings of him understanding that he does have meaning. When I was able to get into the edit, the final storytelling was really done. He’s so responsive. He’s an incredibly good reactor, which is so helpful and makes him a very direct-able actor.

What was it like working with guest stars Caroline Aaron and Lenny Venito?

Such a privilege. These are seasoned veteran actors who have this incredible wealth of experience, and I’m a first-time television director asking them to trust me with choices. They were so respectful, supportive, and collaborative. I thought we got to some really fun places with the material, and they both know the genre so well. They knew the style and what we were playing and had so much to offer me in terms of that genre. So it was lovely to work with them. Caroline, I think, is just such a brilliant, hilarious actor. She’s so funny to me. She’s got things in her back pocket that she can whip out at any moment.

Did you try out that sauce recipe?

I’ve got to be honest, the Dr. Pepper lost me, they’re adding Dr. Pepper as a magic ingredient… I’m not a Dr. Pepper fan, definitely not fighting for an endorsement deal. I’ve never been drawn to it. I do love pasta and pasta sauce [though], and actually so does my nine-month-old daughter — I make her pasta sauce with olives and all sorts in it.

Do you hope to direct again in the future?

I’m desperate to. I had such a great experience, particularly in this environment, the ability to learn and build my confidence with people who are immensely talented and make me feel so supported. I hope I get the chance to do more there. And then I look forward to exploring it elsewhere as well, so that there may be opportunities where I’m able to direct on projects that I’m not attached to as an actor and that I’m purely able to sit with all my papers around me. But I’m so lucky to have even had one episode, so just sort of pinching myself about that at this point.

Ghosts, Thursdays, 8:30/7:30c, CBS