Why Director Jamie Babbit Was Excited to Return to The Arconia for ‘Only Murders in the Building’

Only Murders in the Building returned with a vengeance. The mystery surrounding the murder of Bunny Folger unfolded through the sophomore season with the show’s trademark precision, wit, and pathos, and it felt more personal since Bunny was such a fixture of The Arconia. Director Jamie Babbit returns to Only Murders just in time to put the last piece of the jigsaw in place, and her work on the finale should earn her serious consideration.

Not only was Babbit eager to return to the storied halls of The Arconia, she was anxious to wrap up this year’s mystery.

“Oh, yes,” she says at the start of our early morning conversation. “I am very fond of everyone that works on it. You don’t get better than this cast, do you? It’s a lot of fun to work on a puzzle show, especially when you get to put the pieces of the puzzle together in the end.”

Babbit directed the final two episodes of season two, so she gets to drive the mystery home. In episode 9, our intrepid trio is separated from one another, but they are each paired with a different character. Selena Gomez questions Michael Rappaport’s cop, Nathan Lane and Martin Short have an elevator confrontation, and Steve Martin gets answers from Shirley MacLaine. This episode is ferociously paced, and the credits roll before we know it.

“I think what’s really fun about Only Murders in the Building is that the cast is out-of-control and otherworldly talented, so we get to play with new people in a new sandbox every year. I am such a huge Spike Lee fan and Michael Rappaport is in so many of his pivotal films. It was an honor to work with him, especially with him and Selena [Gomez] as a pair. Nathan Lane is such a joy and he gets to explore this masculine, dangerous side on this show. He has such depth as an actor, but he often doesn’t get the opportunity to lean into this kind of macho, dark businessman who will fight for his son. When he had to learn sign language and really connect with this character, it really shows that depth. I truly feel that way about Marty [Short], too. Emotionally, he can go to such a deep place, and not every comedian can do that.

In a lot of cases, comedians can weaponize humor as a way to cope when they were a kid–I sometimes say that you are either born funny or you’re not. I think it has to do with trauma and how some people react to it, and I think a lot of young people deflect with humor. It can become this highly tuned skill that they have to avoid vulnerability or intimacy. What’s cool with Marty is that he can go to a deep place or he can cover that vulnerability while being physically funny and mentally quick. It’s a weapon, and his is so finely tuned, and that’s such a gift for a director.”

Babbit brings such a breeziness to her episodes, and I was surprised that she admitted the reason behind her desire for a brisk pace in all of her projects.

“Throughout my career, the thing that has made me most nervous is boring people,” she says with a big smile. “But I’m a Cheerleader was 85 minutes, so even if a scene is just funny but not doing much, I’ll cut it. During COVID, I got a call from Lionsgate to do a director’s cut of But I’m a Cheerleader, and they suggested that I could put more scenes back in. I went back into the original scenes–that were very funny–and they were great. I don’t remember why I cut them initially, but it was probably because I was scared of boring the audience. I put them back in, and I really enjoyed them. I’ve always leaned into fast pacing, and, what’s great about Only Murders, is that John [Hoffman] and Dan Fogelman have similar notions. We all like things to clip along at that pace.”

The finale does an audacious thing where it brings almost every one of our key players back but puts them in one room for the big reveal of this season’s killer. Not only is a killer being unmasked, but there are a few layers of supposed theatricality placed on top of it. It’s truly chaos, but Babbit makes sure we never lose focus and it never devolves into madness for the sake of madness.

“One of my favorite movies is Clue,” she says. “When I read the script, I thought it was amazing that they were nodding to that movie. I then had a thought of, “Am I going to get all of these actors for five days?” I was not able to, unfortunately. I had one day to block it and four days to film it, and then I would have to keep things in mind like all the blood Steve had to get all over himself. We only had Tina Fey for one day. We only had Michael [Cyril Creighton] for one day, because he was filming [The Marvelous] Mrs. Maisel at the same time, so I ended up blocking it with a Howard and a Cinda double. If there is a shot of Tina in the background or if the camera was over her shoulder, that wasn’t Tina. A lot of those shots ended up in the final cut. Or I had to figure out some creative framing in order to cut off the Howard double’s head because his body was in the shot and I had to get inventive. On the last day, Tina was able to slide in and get the best of it. Steve and Marty and Tina have all this history together with SNL and just their friendship, so it was very fun to have them play around with the tomato gag and those great, very Steve-y comedy bits. Tina loves playing a villain, so this was a great opportunity to do that. That was such an amazingly fun day. The hardest actor to deal with in that chamber was that stupid bird. He realized that he was on a soundstage, so when he would come out to sit on the perch, he would fly into the rafters. He’d taunt us. If I had wings, I’d do it too.”

That slow motion sequence made my body’s limbs weak. It’s so unbelievably wacky that it works because the actors are dedicated to the ridiculousness, and Babbit used one of her favorite camera standbys to have Steve Martin perform directly to us.

“That shot is actually a direct rip-off of a shot that I did in But I’m a Cheerleader where Megan walks into her intervention,” Babbit says. “I put a wide angle lens in front of Natasha [Lyonne], so you see RuPaul offering cookies. There is nothing that I love more in comedy than a wide angle lens right in front of an actor and have them directly speak to the camera. It’s a very fun feeling for me. I will alsways go back to that in my storytelling.

Only Murders in the Building is now streaming on Hulu.