Second act
Director Azhur Saleem discusses his work on historical romance Outlander: Blood of My Blood, returning for its second season and his love of “old-school romantic epics.”
Azhur Saleem would be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu. Over the last year, he’s reconnected with some familiar faces while shooting episodes from the second seasons of both historical ‘romantasy’ Outlander: Blood of My Blood and crime drama After the Flood.
“It’s my year of season twos,” he tells DQ, “and it’s been really nice, actually, to come back to both shows. You don’t have that ‘first day at school’ feeling.”
Saleem landed his first TV directing credits on sci-fi series Doctor Who, picking up three episodes during the 2021 Flux season starring Jodie Whittaker. He then shot all six episodes of ITV’s After the Flood, which debuted in 2024, before helming the final three instalments of Blood of My Blood S1, which debuted earlier on Starz in the US earlier this year.
In between, he also directed two episodes of Anansi Boys, the yet-to-be-released Prime Video fantasy series based on Neil Gaiman’s novel. But it was on the set of that series that Saleem met DOP Neville Kidd, who had previously worked on Outlander and offered up Saleem as a potential director for Blood of My Blood.
“In the original Outlander show, they start in Scotland, they go off to America via Jamaica and Paris and all that,” he says, “and the fact this show was going to be entirely set in Scotland was what appealed to me, because that’s what I thought was the most exciting thing from the early seasons of Outlander. And I love Braveheart. It was like, ‘Great, I can do my version of that.’
“There are three films that were real touchstones for me growing up, in the vein of the romantic epic – Braveheart, Titanic and Gladiator have that big, epic quality to them, with landscapes and action as well as the romance and drama. The opportunity to do that on a big-budget show was very appealing.”
Produced by Sony Pictures Television, Blood of My Blood is a standalone prequel set in the Outlander universe, following the romances between Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) and Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy), and Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine) – the parents of Outlander’s Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) and Claire Beauchamp (Caitríona Balfe).
With the show unfolding against the battlefields of the First World War and the rugged Highlands of 18th century Scotland, the two couples must defy the forces that seek to tear them apart, in surprising and unforeseen ways. The cast also includes Tony Curran (Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat), Rory Alexander (Murtagh Fitzgibbons Fraser), Séamus McLean Ross (Colum MacKenzie), Sam Retford (Dougal MacKenzie) and Conor MacNeill (Ned Gowan).
As production progressed on S1, Saleem had access to the rushes from previous filming blocks to get a feel for the tone of the show and the actors’ performances. Then when he began prep for his own episodes, he found showrunner Matthew B Roberts gave him plenty of freedom to bring his ideas to the show.
“Obviously there’s the look and the style of it, and a lot of it is the DOP can help maintain that. But Matt’s very open to however you want to shoot it, whatever feels right for each episode, and what was great about my last three episodes was each one of them was completely different.”
He describes episode eight, A Virtuous Woman, as a chamber room drama, with the action focusing on Ellen as she undergoes a “virginity test” to prove her worthiness to marry into the Grant clan. “It’s all about the tension building up, so we shot that with building tension in mind, building a sense of dread.”
Episode nine, Braemar, was an Outlander version of Glastonbury Festival, “this big gathering with all the characters coming together. That had its own flow to it, which was lovely,” the director says. Then the season finale, Something Borrowed, “was just bonkers in a great way, just everything happens.”
Compared to Outlander, Blood of My Blood has a “slightly darker, grittier edge” to it, with numerous intimate scenes complemented by action sequences and dance numbers.
“There is definitely a lot more conflict between the characters in this show than there was in Outlander,” he says. “What was quite nice about this is there’s politics between the main family and the brothers vying to be laird – and you’ve got Ellen, who would make a good laird but, because she’s a woman, she can’t take that mantle. It’s really nice to have that juicy drama running throughout the show.
“We played a little with that in terms of the visuals and getting a little bit more down and dirty with some of the action stuff we’ve got in episode 10 and even episode eight, where it’s a very traumatic in terms of a woman being forced to go through a virginity test. You’ve got a lot of men watching, and it was about working out the balance between making it quite a traumatic episode but making you feel like it was needed, that you had to watch it, without it being gratuitous. That was key in terms of how we explore that visually and give it this sense of weight and dread.”
Episode nine, Saleem says, is a good example of how he likes to use the camera: connecting scenes with a moving camera that follows characters moving from one story to the next. “I really wanted this sense of flow and just simple Steadicam work. Connecting all the stories was key,” he continues. “I think that came off quite successfully, that the story then moves from one scene to another.”
Scenes featuring Ellen’s virginity test were also storyboarded, for intimacy’s sake as well as to build tension, with the camera starting wide before moving increasingly closer to the character.
“We had this great shot, this crane shot. It was one of the first images I had – that when she’s actually having a physical exam, it would start above her, because I wanted this out-of-body experience, and we just slowly move in. We timed it perfectly so that you see the physician’s hands going between her legs, but it just goes out of shot at the right time, so you see it happen and your brain just fills in the rest,” the director says. “It was quite nice to take something that wasn’t an action sequence but then storyboard that completely to make sure we would hit all the right beats.”
Storyboarding accounted for much of Saleem’s prep time on the show, alongside using floor plans to map blocking and camera placement. “On a show of this scale, the production design side is huge and the costume [department] is huge. That becomes a really invaluable tool to say exactly what we’re going to do,” he notes.
Returning for S2, which began production earlier this summer, Saleem was able to pick up where he left off – and praises the cast for creating a really “easy” environment that allowed them to continue exploring their characters.
“They’re great. They’re really exciting and they’ve all pushed themselves even more for season two because, especially for the main leads, their lives change on quite a large scale. So it’s nice that they’re maintaining who they are,” he says.
“But I love working with actors, I love the craft side. I love storyboarding and action and fights, but I also love a scene with two people in a room and just exploring with actors and delving deep into it. You just want to make sure the actors feel like they’ve given all they’ve got for each of the scenes you’re doing, which is really nice.”
His experience working on several episodes of Blood of My Blood was quite different, however, from making S1 of After the Flood, on which he shot all six episodes.
Written by Mick Ford and produced by Quay Street Productions for ITV, the mystery thriller unfolds in a small town hit by a devastating flood. When an unidentified man is found dead in a lift in an underground car park, police assume he became trapped as the waters rose. But as the investigation unfolds, PC Joanna Marshall (Sophie Rundle) becomes obsessed with discovering what really happened to him.
“I was almost punch-drunk by the end of it,” says the director, noting that this is partly why he only directed three episodes of the upcoming second season. Tom McKay (Ten Pound Poms) takes up episodes four to six this time around. “Sometimes you don’t know where you are, and that’s when you trust your team around you and it becomes day by day.”
In fact, he had only originally signed on for the first three episodes of After the Flood S1, but it was during prep, when he began sharing ideas for how later scenes might play out, that he was offered the chance to take the season to its conclusion.
“Because the show was quite ambitious, it made sense to try to do it all as one big thing and shoot out each location, so it was partly necessity and partly also because I had an idea of what I wanted to do,” he says. “It was just great to have that continuity with the actors, with the crew, with the look of the show from start to finish. It was quite intense. It’s purely stamina. You just have to make sure you’ve got the energy to keep going and make sure you manage your own eating and exercise.”
The decision to stay on meant he could also take part in post-production, all the way to the sound mix, “which rarely happens” because a director will often be thinking about their next job by that stage.
By comparison, directors working on a US show can deliver their own cut of their episode, which is then delivered to producers. On Blood of My Blood, “what’s quite nice about my three episodes was there were a few little changes that Matt came in with, but pretty much it’s my cut. The things they changed were just order of scenes, and that’s to do with the storytelling for later on and for season two.
“That’s another reason why I came back, because there’s a sense of freedom. You get the trust to carry on and do it because Matt always says, ‘You get what the show is.’ That’s really important when you’re doing TV directing, especially on what is a branded show. It’s got legacy. It’s got a huge amount of fans. So being able to fit into what the show is is really important, and trying not to fight it and turn it into something else. I just have a love for old-school romantic epics so I was like, ‘Great, this is exactly what it needs to be.’”
Saleem is also “super proud” of his status as a British-Asian director, which he says is “still a very rare quantity” and is something he doesn’t take “lightly.”
“There are stories I want to do that are about my heritage, but there are also shows like this, which has got nothing to do with my heritage, but I can draw on my own background in terms of the character storylines,” he adds. “It’s just to show that you can work in this space and at this scale if you look like me. That’s really important to me, and it’s great to be able to do that and have those opportunities and just keep going, step by step, and keep building up my career.”
Like Outlander: Blood of My Blood? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
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tagged in: After the Flood, Azhur Saleem, Outlander, Outlander: Blood of my Blood, Sony Pictures Television, Starz