Back in 2004 director Nicole Kassell was enjoying one of those rare Hollywood Cinderella stories. Her first feature, the haunting and atmospheric The Woodsman, had not only snagged bona fide movie star Kevin Bacon in the lead, but was a genuine hit on the festival circuit, from Sundance to Cannes to Toronto. It was the kind of breakout moment that landed many of her male contemporaries billion-dollar action and comic book franchises. But that’s not what happened to Nicole Kassell.

Instead, Kassell had to wait seven years for her second feature, the Kate Hudson dramedy A Little Bit of Heaven, to hit theaters. Lambasted by critics and grossing a scant $15,000 in its tiny release, the movie landed Kassell in “Jail. Hardcore. Like deep, deep dark jail,” she told Vanity Fair in a recent phone call. “It’s through my work in television that I’ve kind of clawed my way out.”

As the executive producer and director of HBO’s Watchmen, Kassell is working for the second time with Damon Lindelof, after directing several episodes of his previous HBO series The Leftovers. Though she’s been working fairly steadily in television since 2011, Kassell said “when I did the first episode of The Leftovers I felt more like I was making a feature than I had in awhile.”

Television is commonly dominated by “the culture of the showrunner,” as Lindelof describes it. “Obviously I’ve benefited tremendously as a result of that shift which happened around the late ’90s.” But even as many people have talked and written about his TV shows as if they had sprung, fully formed, from his head, Lindelof himself is not interested in hogging all the credit. Talk to anyone who actually worked on Watchmen, and you’ll hear them mention Kassell—“Nicky”—in almost every creative decision made along the way.

And that’s been the case for other directors Lindelof’s worked with too, from Lost directors-producers Jack Bender and Stephen Williams to The Leftovers’ Mimi Leder, a woman who famously wound up in her own movie jail after directing 2000’s sentimental Pay It Forward. “I’m not being modest when I say Jack was running Lost with Carlton [Cuse] and I. Mimi was running Leftovers with me. Nicky was running Watchmen with me,” Lindelof said. After Leder directed the fifth episode of The Leftovers and Linedlof saw the dailies, he flew from L.A. to New York and begged her to stay. But Kassell has been Lindelof’s closest partner on Watchmen even earlier than most.

Lindelof superfans already know that Kassell’s calling card for Watchmen is one of the most talked-about episodes from the final season of The Leftovers. “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World” follows Christopher Eccleston’s character, separated from the rest of the cast, on a sea voyage involving a lion sex cult (yes, really) and, possibly, God himself. It was an especially, delightfully bizarre hour in a bizarre season of television, and Kassell grounded all the madness in an emotionally pure performance from Eccelston that carried audiences all the way through to the episode’s stunning conclusion.

As soon as Kassell heard Lindelof was doing Watchmen next, she bought the beloved Alan Moore–Dave Gibbons graphic novel and put it on her bedside table. And there it stayed, unread, for a year. “I decided not to read the source material until I was onboard because I felt since I wasn’t a fangirl, that let me preserve my objectivity,” she said. “Knowing that [Lindelof] is a fan and that Watchmen is so in his DNA I wanted to not be beholden to it.”