Spoiler alert: If you haven't watched the Feb. 3 episode of Justified, "Noblesse Oblige" — written by Taylor Elmore and Benjamin Cavell and directed by Peter Weller — stop reading now. As he'll do throughout the season, showrunner Graham Yost takes us inside the writers' room.

Peter Weller, who was a friend and fan of Elmore Leonard, was so happy to come direct Justified after he helmed two of Sons of Anarchy's heaviest Season 7 episodes ("What a Piece of Work Is Man" and "Suits of Woe"). What kind of conversations did you have with him, and what did he bring to this episode?

He brought a lot to it. It’s hard for someone to come in this late in the game and really just fit in, and he fit in perfectly. He'd been interested in doing the show for a while, and [executive producer/director] Michael Dinner had been suggesting him. You know, we all hate actors who become really good directors — but not as much as I hate actors who become really good writers, like Dan Futterman and Danny Strong. Peter's a very smart guy, and he had great stories to tell of his wild times and people he's known. So he was really engaged and emailing me, "Hey, how about if I start this scene here with Boyd and Ava lying on the bar, because one time I found myself at three in the morning at a closed bar in New York and I was lying on the bar with a woman." And we said, "OK, let's do that."



How great were those dailies to watch of Walton Goggins and Joelle Carter pretending to be drunk?

The interesting thing is, that whole scene was something Tim [Olyphant] actually suggested. He was working backwards: It would be fun if, when Raylan called Ava in for her come-to-Jesus scene with Vasquez and Rachel, she be hung over. I think in the original formulation, we were going to have Ava and Boyd start to make out at the end of [Episode] 2, when she says Pizza Portal, and so we backed off from that and decided to put that at the end of Episode [3], where it would have more impact. So we just liked the idea of them drinking all night, getting s--t-faced, telling stories, and just the details in that scene: When it looks like Ava's going to lose it, and Boyd says, "Are you going to pop?” — it's just a term I hadn't heard before for vomiting. They had a lot of fun doing it, I'll tell you that.



Another great scene in the bar was when Boyd and Walker came face-to-face. Was there a lot of discussion about that meeting?

There was. We love to get to things like that where Boyd is self-aware enough to know that he talks a lot and will use 40 words when four will do. But in the first drafts of that scene, Boyd wasn't eating a hamburger and there was more back and forth, and Walton's idea was to have Boyd eating hangover food. So he's trying to get a big fatty thing in his gut to soak up the alcohol and combat the hangover, and so Boyd doesn't have to say much. It was a different way to go and something that, much to the chagrin of the writer sometimes, we look at and go, "Yeah, that was the right way."



Related: 'Justified' Postmortem: Graham Yost Talks Premiere Shocker

Since Walker would recognize Boyd and his crew, they sent Ava to the Pizza Portal to do recon. Choo-Choo seemed quite taken with her. Will that come back into play?

That I'll just sort of de-spoiler. That doesn't really come back around. It was just Ava using her Ava-ness. We've tried to stay pretty true to the notion that Ava is a spectacularly beautiful woman in this town, and that we're not just sort of doing the TV thing where we've got a beautiful cast and no one remarks on it. So she has that power and she uses it... I mean, in person, Joelle is hideous, but onscreen, she somehow comes alive.



Next thing Ava knows, Avery Markham (Sam Elliott) shows up at her door.

What we wanted to accomplish is pretty straightforward, which is sort of this disarming menace. Sam just personifies that in our show this season. The way Peter shot it was great — just with Sam kind of tilting his head over and looking in, seeming very charming, but you know what it means.



I loved the conversation at Ava's table, down to the shot of Walker lurking in the background in the dark.

Peter's decision was to start back, so the camera's in another room. You see Markham, and then the camera slowly moves and reveals Ava, and then reveals Walker standing in the shadows. So you get these three pieces of information. I think that actually Walker is in a position where you could be seeing him first, but your eye doesn't go there because the light takes you to Ava, and then you realize that he's in the background. That was just very simple, elegant filmmaking.

