"The Walking Dead's" Silent MVP Isn't a Zombie, He's the Director of "Juice"

He's been working steadily in Hollywood since the mid-1980s, but Ernest Dickerson still isn't a household name yet—though he should be. Especially since he has directed some of ratings juggernaut The Walking Dead's best episodes, including this Sunday's explosive mid-season finale. It's time to finally show the man some love.

Think back on the biggest and craziest episodes of AMC's The Walking Dead—it's likely that all of the hit zombie drama's fans will recall the same ones. There's the season two opener ">"What Lies Ahead," in which Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his fellow survivors get engulfed by a horde of walkers on a desolate, claustrophobic highway. There's also ">"Beside the Dying Fire," the season two finale that plays like George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead as re-imagined by Neil Marshall, with hundreds of zombies attacking Hershel's (Scott Wilson) farm and splitting Rick's group apart. And don't forget ">"18 Miles Out," an isolated hour focusing on Rick and Shane (Jon Bernthal) trying to get rid of a prisoner but running into a schoolyard's worth of flesh-eaters and coming to blows themselves.

What do these episodes have in common? Ernest Dickerson directed them. He's become the show's go-to filmmaker when it's time to get all big and super-charged. Which explains why showrunner Scott M. Gimple and his producers chose Dickerson to direct this Sunday's mid-season finale, "Too Far Gone." As that "On next week's episode" preview made clear, it's full-scale war on the prison's terrain. The Governor (David Morrissey) and his new group want into Rick's makeshift fortress, and they're ready to blast Rick, his loved ones, and their precious headquarters to smithereens with the Governor's new tank if they don't get their way. Expect tons of casualties, explosions, tears, and bloodshed.

Also expect Ernest Dickerson to kill it behind the camera. The 62-year-old shotcaller began his career as a cinematographer, working with Spike Lee on his early classics, like She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X.  After moving into the director's chair himself, he directed Juice, Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight, Bulletproof, and Never Die Alone, among others. But all the while he was building a rep as one of television's most reliable and efficient episode overseers. Since 1990, he's directed standout episodes of ER, The Wire (including the award-winning season two episode "Bad Dreams"), Law & Order, Treme, and Dexter.

With The Walking Dead, this lifelong horror movie lover is working right in his wheelhouse. By the time "Too Far Gone" ends Sunday night, and the body-count is high and fans are shell-shocked, Dead heads should salute Dickerson—even if, as the man himself explained to Complex, the industry is slow to show its respect.

Keep reading to learn more about Ernest Dickerson's background, the making of Juice, and why he's hoping to lead the charge for black genre filmmakers.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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Born and raised in Newark, NJ, Ernest Dickerson first saw architecture as his career path, majoring in it at Howard University as an undergraduate. But there was always that movie bug inside him; he'd grown up watching monster classics and sci-fi flicks. Once he enrolled at New York University to study cinematography as a grad student, moviemaking became his primary hustle. At NYU, he met fellow student Spike Lee, for whom Dickerson served as director of photography on the set of Lee's debut short, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, finished in 1983.

"I grew up loving horror movies. The earliest movie I can ever remember seeing was a horror movie about a giant octopus that destroys San Francisco. It was called It Came From Beneath the Sea, an old Ray Harryhausen film. I must have seen it in a theater when I was four years old, right when it came out. I saw it in Boston when I was there for the summer, on vacation. It's one of the movies that's always stayed with me. There are images in that film that have forever affected how I see the ocean at night.

"When I went into high school, I really started getting into Alfred Hitchcock. I liked adventure films too, like The Great Escape and David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. In Washington D.C., when I was at Howard University, there were great old movie theaters that would show two classic films back to back. They would have double bills like, Nicolas Roeg with Walkabout and Don't Look Now, and then Orson Welles with Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. That's how I started appreciating other films outside of horror and science fiction.

"The filmmaker who stuck with me the most and really made me want to become a director was Stanley Kubrick. A Clockwork Orange is a major film for me. 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon are also major.

"I went to Howard to study architecture, but what happened was, I tried to get part-time work after classes at an architect's office but nobody could hire me. All the work I ended up getting was in photography, which led to me becoming a cinematographer. After I graduated, I got a job at a medical center where I learned even more about photography. Some of the guys I worked with there were big film fans, so we'd go see double bills whenever we could. Then, for graduate school, I went to NYU as a cinematography major. At NYU, you got a chance to do your own films no matter what your major was, so I was able to write and direct my own films there."

When critics and bloggers discuss the early 1990s wave of "hood movies," the two usual talking points are John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991) and the Hughes brothers' Menace II Society (1993). Both are widely regarded as the best of the lot, but there's a third entry that's just as good, if not better: Juice, Ernest Dickerson's directorial debut. Released in January 1992, the New York picture starred a then-unknown Omar Epps and a burgeoning rapper-turned-actor named Tupac Shakur.

Four friends in Harlem (Epps, Shakur, Jermaine "Huggy" Hopkins, and Khalil Kain) want to make names for themselves in the streets, particularly loose cannon Bishop (Shakur), who thinks his crew "ain't shit." They obtain a gun, attempt to stick-up a bodega, and descend into betrayal and tragedy after one of them is gunned down. Friends become enemies, Tupac Shakur gives a powerfully unhinged performance, and the soundtrack is a '90s hip-hop head's dream playlist, with original tracks from Eric B & Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and Naughty by Nature.

As is the case with most feature film debuts, Dickerson's first movie was almost left on the shelf, and, even lamer, envisioned as a lighthearted comedy by potential backers. Thankfully, Dickerson stood his ground.

"We originally wrote Juice in 1982. I wrote it with my friend Gerard Brown. The plan was that we'd use it to debut ourselves as a writer/director team. After we finished the script, we started shooting it and recruiting actors, just like we'd done at NYU for our student films. There was a newspaper called Backstage that helped us find up-and-coming actors. We figured we'd be able to shoot the entire feature on 16mm for a couple hundred thousand dollars. Eventually I showed what we'd shot at that point to an agent. The agent said that there was no way Juice was ever going to get made.

"Juice was written as a film noir, with 16- and 17-year-old protagonists. I got no encouragement on it, though, but my cinematography career started taking off, and Gerard became a writer in residence at the Public Theatre in New York, so the script just went on the shelf until around '91. A couple of characters changed, due to the actors who wanted to be involved in the film, but the story basically stayed the same.

"How it got out there was, Gerard got a new agent and she wanted to see examples of his work. He showed her Juice and she really got it out there to production companies. Some of those interested companies wanted to turn Juice into a comedy. They wanted to make it lighter, more of a coming-of-age story. They wanted African-American kids who were working on television. Gerard and I had no interest in doing that.

"Ultimately, we were contacted by two young, new producers, and one of them was David Heyman, who's gone on to produce the Harry Potter films and, more recently, Gravity. His first movie was Juice.

"It was kind of strange, because after I did Juice, I went and photographed Malcolm X for Spike Lee. I remember we were shooting Malcolm X in Egypt when Juice came out. Unfortunately, in this industry you get known for doing only one thing, and at that time I'd just shot a movie and I was photographing a movie. So the question around the industry became, 'Well, what is he? Is he a director of photography or is he a director?' Consequently, I wasn't able to get another directing job for another two years.

"The only reason I was able to get Surviving the Game was because I was leaving my agency; I didn't like the material they were sending me. One of the things they sent me was a rap musical version of Alice in Wonderland, called Yo, Alice. [Laughs.] I was getting stuff like that, so I changed agencies, and that's how I was able to find Surviving the Game.

"When I was editing Surviving the Game, I found out about Demon Knight. The producers came in and saw some rough footage from Surviving the Game, and on the basis of that they hired me for Demon Knight. Thankfully, because I got Demon Knight before Surviving the Game was released, the industry wasn't able to pigeonhole as me the director who works with rappers-turned-actors, following Tupac in Juice and Ice-T in Surviving the Game.

"Finding the right story and the right script has always been tough, and it remains tough to this day."

Ernest Dickerson's integral role behind the camera on The Walking Dead makes perfect sense to anyone who knows him. Horror is his comfort zone.

Back in the mid-'80s, after honing his skills with Spike Lee's Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, Dickerson worked as a cinematographer on the George Romero-backed anthology series Tales from the Darkside. Then, in 1995, he directed the Tales from the Crypt brand's first major motion picture, Demon Knight, an R-rated freak-out starring a Jada Pinkett that's become something of a cult classic among horror aficionados. Eleven years after Demon Knight, Dickerson shot "The V Word," a slightly comedic take on vampires aired as part of Showtime's ambitious Masters of Horror anthology experiment.

Zombies are a natural fit for Dickerson. "What became abundantly clear in our early meetings was that Ernest loves genre, which one might not know looking at all of his credits. He's been a fan throughout his entire life," says The Walking Dead executive producer Gale Anne Hurd. "That was especially important when we were launching the series, to make sure we had directors who didn't look down their noses at the horror genre, but respected it and understood what we were going for. Ernest did from the time that we first met."

"Initially, I really went after The Walking Dead. One of the early writers on the show, a guy named Chuck Eglee, was a good friends of mine because he was a writer on Dexter before then. I had met [initial showrunner] Frank Darabont before. I met him at a DVD store, so I think when Chuck mentioned my name as a possible director for the first season, he must have remembered me and he knew my work. He had me direct episode five, 'Wildfire,' and it was great. The script was by Glen Mazzara, who became the showrunner after Frank left. It gave me a lot of really great scenes, scenes that allowed me to find the poetry in the horror.

"There's a surprising lack of egos on a show that's so hugely successful. It's such a big hit all over the world, but it's surprising how nice everyone is on that show. It's a tough show to make physically. It's easily the toughest show I've ever worked on. You're always shooting in the woods. [Laughs.] You're always fighting ticks and other problems of nature. They gave me the second season finale, with the zombie attack on Hershel's farm, and I only had nine days to shoot the entire episode. It was absolutely huge, with all the walkers and all the action. That's one of the things I love about working on that show, though. They see me as a filmmaker and allow me to design all of the action and get it done my way.

"It's tough on The Walking Dead, though, because they always give me these big episodes. This mid-season finale is huge. It has big action, a lot of stuff blowing up. Yeah, I feel honored that they know I can pull these incredible scenes off in practically no time, but that's a testament to the crew. It's like a family. I always have a lot of fun going to work on The Walking Dead."

You'd think AMC would broadcast the fact that a veteran like Ernest Dickerson is one The Walking Dead's primary directors. It should be a badge of honor—after all, horror pundit Mick Garris christened him as one of the genre's Showtime-worthy Masters of Horror in 2006. Unfortunately, directors working in television rarely, if ever, receive the public acclaim they deserve.

Ernest Dickerson is one of many TV directors whose skill has greatly enhanced some of the medium's best programs, alongside unsung peers like Michelle MacLaren (Breaking Bad), Tim Van Patten (Boardwalk Empire), and Paris Barclay (Sons of Anarchy).

"In truth, perhaps directors on films get too much credit," says Gale Anne Hurd, executive producer on The Walking Dead. "There's an imbalance. Often times, either the producer or the writer is responsible for about 90% of the finished film, but because of the auteur theory that developed in France, we think the directors are doing it by themselves. And the reverse is true in TV, where most of the light shines on the showrunner. Unless the showrunner is also directing many of the episodes, TV is a much more collaborative medium. Television directors absolutely should be given more credit for their work than they typically receive."

Like his peers, Dickerson works tirelessly, traveling around the country while bouncing from one show's set to the next. It's a journeyman-like career that, for Dickerson, is endlessly rewarding.

"Television is mostly recognized as being a writers' and producers' medium, so the contributions of directors are diminished. But hopefully that's going to change because television is changing. Television is becoming more cinematic, more daring in its storytelling, and hopefully that will bring directors forward and help their contributions get recognized to a greater degree in the future. I like to think that modern-day television is the new American cinema. It's able to tell stories in ways you just can't do in features.

"When I first started doing television, it was more about doing movies for TV. I did a lot of movies for Showtime, and those were movie movies. When I started getting into series, though, I was lucky because a lot of the series I was getting wanted filmmakers. They wanted directors who could bring something different to the medium. That's how it was on The Wire. They wanted to see how individual filmmakers could tell the larger story, and the decision is always theirs because TV is powered by the writer and the producer. Most of the shows that I've done, they want me to come in and interpret the episode script in my own way. Shows like The Wire, Dexter, and The Walking Dead require a more cinematic approach to direction, so they want filmmakers who can do that. So I've been lucky that those are the shows that I've gotten.

"Now, that said, I have done shows where I was locked into a certain thing and I wasn't able to contribute much. There was this one show I did where I felt that if I hadn't even showed up to work it wouldn't have made any difference. Times like that, you just say, 'OK, this one's for the money.' [Laughs.]

"It can be daunting jumping back and forth from one show's world to the next. It's tougher when you're going into new situations. The thing with shows like Dexter and The Walking Dead is that I've done so many episodes for them, it becomes easier to settle back into the show's rhythms each time. I've gotten familiar with the vibe and politics on those sets. The first time you work on a show, though, you have to figure out the politics on that set. That can be tough. You have to find out where the power is; you find out what you can and can't do.

"It's tougher nowadays, too, because nothing shoots in Los Angeles. Right now, in fact, I'm in Austin, Texas, working on [NBC's] Revolution. It's my first time working on this show, so I've been here for a week getting to know the city and learning this show's world. I'm coming right off of The Walking Dead, so I'm going from one post-apocalyptic show to another one. It depends on my schedule. I finished The Walking Dead, spent a weekend at home, and then I flew out here to Austin so I could start location scouting and casting calls. With location scouting, we've been driving all over the area, spending hours and hours in a van. And that has to happen every time you start work on a new show.

"A lot of shows reach out to me, and I try not to do them back-to-back, because I like to actually be involved in the editing. I wasn't home long enough to edit my latest Walking Dead episode (season 4, episode 13), so I've been editing it on the road over FaceTime and the phone with my editor. I'm not crazy about that, though; I'd rather be in the room with my editor."

In May, Complex put together a feature titled "The Unfair Business of Being a Woman Director in the Boys Club of Horror Filmmaking," a collection of interviews with women working in horror. Like the filmmaking community as a whole, the world of horror directing is a largely male-dominated one. But there's an even lesser represented group of artists in horror that, once again, is indicative of problems in the movie industry at large.

Aside from Ernest Dickerson, you'd be hard-pressed to name another black director making horror films. Or science fiction films. Or anything other than intimate, character-driven dramas, broad comedies, and period heart-tuggers about slavery, segregation, and civil rights issues. And Ernest Dickerson isn't happy about that.

"A couple friends of mine have been doing pretty well in television. Seith Mann, who's African-American, has been working consistently. He did one Walking Dead episode this year and one last year. Anthony Hemingway, too, has done a lot of television episodes. But because television directors aren't given a lot of play in the media, it's tough to know who these people are. Seith was a guy who followed me around on The Wire, and then I co-sponsored him to get into the Directors Guild of America, and he has been working pretty steadily. Anthony Hemingway started out as an assistant director on The Wire, and then went on to direct a bunch of Wire episodes and eventually his first feature, Red Tails. He's still doing a lot of television work.

"One of the film projects I'm trying to get made is a science-fiction piece that's an adaptation of a novel written by an African-Canadian. He's a science-fiction writer and the two leads are black. I think that's making the task of selling the script and trying to get money for it a little bit harder right now. Things change, though, so I'm hoping that a movie like 12 Years a Slave will help people in the industry see the potential and open themselves up to movies led by black casts that aren't just historical stories. When it comes to telling black stories, the tendency is to look to the past instead of looking to the future. That's one that's missing from what a lot of African-American filmmakers are getting made. The majority of it is focused on what happened in the past. I want to see some stuff that deals with the future, like the script that I'm working on.

"This new project is an adaptation of a book called The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, written by a young writer named Minister Faust. It became a cult novel, and it's this really, really cool book that, when I read it, I couldn't put it down. I tracked down Minister Faust, he knew who I was, and we've been collaborating on the script. The script is just called The Coyote Kings. Now we're just trying to find a way to get it made.

"Science fiction is a very ripe area for African American filmmakers to explore. There have been some intriguing examples of science-fiction films that have been made extremely well on really small budgets. Chronicle only cost $15 million and you could never tell. There was a really great science-fiction film called Europa Report that opened earlier this year, too; it was a space movie made a few million dollars and was shot in Brooklyn. It's an incredible piece of work. Another great example is Gareth Edwards' Monsters, which only cost around $500,000. I'm inspired by those movies. Because of them, I'm trying to think more outside the box. I'm even looking at the crowd-sourcing method that Spike Lee took for his next movie, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.

"Between that film and Oldboy, that's two genre pictures from Spike now, and hopefully we'll start seeing more black filmmakers working in the genre community. I think some will pop up. Last year I did a week-long seminar at Howard University, about directing and cinematography, and a lot of the students there were interested in doing science fiction and horror projects. Some of them talked about how they're always writing science fiction and horror material. The desire for that kind of movie is definitely out there. We just have to keep plugging away at it and find ways to make it work."