Were there any films or other works you looked at for reference as you prepared for your episode?

For Episode 3, when I first read the script, it felt like a Western and a samurai movie. So I watched a lot of Kurosawa — there’s obviously a pretty strong “Yojimbo” feel going on with the street battle. And obviously a lot of those were George [Lucas]’s references. I also brought in a little of John Woo’s “Hard Boiled,” with the baby in that movie. I had grown up with a lot of that — my dad was Chinese and I grew up with a lot of Hong Kong action movies.

You’re often working with characters who are masked. Does that present particular challenges, for your actors or for you as a director?

It’s definitely more challenging. A lot of the way we worked with Pedro — and that’s part of what Dave and I were trying to get the hang of when we started shooting — is his physicality became incredibly important. We had to develop a language, a physicality. There’s a lot of stillness in the character. All his movement is intentional. There’s no fidgeting or relaxing, so that any time, even if he makes a small move or turns his head, it becomes meaningful. We couldn’t do it with his face or with his eyes. It also becomes critical, as a director, to use the camera to support that emotionally, to help convey what he’s feeling a lot of the times.

How long did it take to stage the big shootout sequence that concludes the episode?

That was a large undertaking, to say the least. [Laughs.] It was pretty fast and furious, in terms of the time we had to get through it. The kitchen sink is in that scene. There’s droids, there’s puppets, there’s flying Mandos. There’s explosions and moving speeders. On the one hand, it was a huge challenge. On the other hand, it was amazing. Everything is out here and it was a giant playground.

Knowing that you’re going to be directing Werner Herzog in your episode, did you treat him any differently, or do you think of him as just one more player in your company?

Normally, you just approach them as actors, but Werner is special. One of the weirdest moments I had on set, in my life, was trying to direct Werner with the baby. How did I end up with Werner Herzog and Baby Yoda? That was amazing. Werner had absolutely fallen in love with the puppet. He, at some point, had literally forgotten that it wasn’t a real being and was talking to the child as though it was a real, existing creature.