Sam Levinson from "Euphoria" at The Hollywood Reporter Directors in Focus event in Los Angeles on May 2.

Alberto Rodriguez

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“We knew he was sick. He had Stage 4 cancer, but we thought we could do it. HBO knew that he was sick and they couldn’t insure him. And they said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think he’ll make it,'” King recalled. “And then he got better and better. Like the more he was in service, and feeling energy and strength.”

King continued, “He became less and less sick, and the doctors were saying, ‘What are you doing? The tumors aren’t growing. What are you doing?’ And he was just being happy, and then when he died, everybody was really sad. And one of the things that I remember is Entertainment Weekly said, ‘Television star Robert Michael Morris dead at 77,’ and I thought, it would almost be worth him leaving if he heard him described as a television star. He would almost take that.”

Michael Patrick King and Chris Gardner speak during The Comeback panel.

Rich Polk

In a conversation with THR‘s David Canfield, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson spoke to Zendaya’s talent for physical comedy after screening a scene from the show’s third season in which her character, Rue, must escape from a Jeep stuck on top of the border wall.

“What’s so spectacular about Zendaya as an actor is the physicality that she has, and I think it goes back to her Disney training, that she’s able to move with such humor and tell a story,” Levinson noted. “I always knew going into opening up this season that I wanted to do something that really just threw us into the middle of the action, but with a certain kind of absurdity to it. We ended up having this border wall sequence, which I think we’ll take a look at. I sort of imagined it as a mix of Buster Keaton set in this modern drug world.”

He also complimented Sydney Sweeney for her ability to adapt when her part in a pivotal scene was changed on the day of shooting, emphasizing, “What’s interesting is if you push it a little bit, she becomes brilliant. You just do a few more takes, and she can reach these levels that are very honest emotionally, but also deeply funny. She’s able to anchor the scene with this kind of madness and chaos going on around her.”

John Wells and Mikey O’Connell speak during The Pitt panel.

Rich Polk

The Pitt, meanwhile, is known for its hyper-realistic emergency room scenes, and executive producer John Wells spoke to the complexity of creating graphic medical sequences in a chat with THR‘s Mikey O’Connell.

After screening a scene in which the show’s doctors perform emergency surgery to pull a baby from its dying mother’s womb, Wells mused, “A podcaster who I love referred to that as The Pitt‘s version of the bank robbery scene in Heat. Those scenes, and we have them fairly regularly, are really like doing stunts. I’ve done a lot of stunts, big action stunts.”

He added, “That took about three days to shoot, but you’re doing it in sequences, and they’re all different kinds of problems. The uterine bag that we cut, we only had four of them; it’s sort of like you only have two shots at the car rollover. And then we had problems because the baby, once we put the animatronic baby in the inside, and then put the goo on it. The amniotic fluid that was inside dissolved, all the stuff that was on the baby, then we couldn’t get it out.”

Jet Wilkinson speaks during The Testaments panel.

Rich Polk

While many of the directors spoke to the technical challenges they faced while

THR's Directors in Focus Event Features Euphoria, The Pitt Creators