Two Floors Up: A Conversation with ‘Saturday Night Live’ Digital Shorts Director Tim Wilkime

There is a moment every Saturday night, somewhere between the cold open and the first commercial break, when a pre-tape rolls on Saturday Night Live and the live studio audience encounters something they were not entirely prepared for. The collective exhale of a room hitting a perfectly timed visual gag. The disbelieving laugh that follows a sketch that has, up to that very second, been playing it completely straight. That is Tim Wilkime's territory, and he has been building those moments for four seasons at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Wilkime grew up in Illinois, making movies on his parents' Betamax camera, and followed that instinct through CollegeHumor, Adam Ruins Everything, The Late Late Show, and The Tonight Show before landing two floors up at 30 Rock. Along the way he directed the Please Don't Destroy videos that became some of the most beloved comedy content of their era, and a short film called Milton that won the SXSW Vimeo Staff Pick Award in 2019. His last name used to be Wilkerson. When he married, he blended both names. That detail alone tells you something about the man.

I spoke with Tim about the pre-tape format, what Please Don't Destroy taught him about editing, how he directs dramatic actors differently than a ten-year cast veteran, and what feature film is currently living in his head.

This interview has been edited for flow and clarity.

Rahul Menon: You grew up in Illinois making movies on your parents' Betamax camera. At what point did you realize that making people laugh specifically was the thing, and not just making things in general?

Tim Wilkime: With comedy, you know when it is working because you get an audible emotional response out of people, almost like horror in that way. When I would make something funny and people would laugh, it was like, oh, I can figure out what makes this happen. And then I just wanted to replicate that feeling. I grew up watching Saturday Night Live and that was just what interested me as a creator. It becomes this question of: how do I put that magic on screen? And once I figured out how to do that somewhat successfully, any class project that allowed a video component, I automatically made it a video project. It was the only way I felt like I was really excelling in school.

RM: CollegeHumor was genuinely one of the formative comedy environments of its era, a place where a certain kind of visually inventive, absurdist internet comedy was being invented in real time. What did working there teach you about comedy filmmaking that you could not have learned anywhere else?

TW: I always think of CollegeHumor as my graduate degree in making comedy. At CollegeHumor I suddenly had actual budgets, actual crews, professional writers, and great performers. Up until that point, I only knew how to do everything run-and-gun. Having the privilege to just focus on directing completely changed my perspective on filmmaking as a collaborative art rather than a one-person operation. When you work with different writers and performers, you pick up little tricks from each of them and it inspires your own work in ways you could not have gotten to alone.

RM: You moved through CollegeHumor, Adam Ruins Everything, The Late Late Show, The Tonight Show, and then two floors up at 30 Rock to SNL. That is a really specific, almost cinematic arc. When did you know you were heading toward SNL, and what was it like when you actually got there?

TW: I was never really aiming for SNL that hard, because it felt so unattainable. I told myself: if it happens, great, but I am not going to get my hopes up. What happened was I met someone from one show, and someone from a different show, and those two connections converged into the perfect recommendation when the SNL job opened up. I had never been aiming for it until one day it literally presented itself.

That career arc sounds clean in retrospect, but Wilkime describes it with the candor of someone who knows how much of it was convergence rather than strategy. The SNL job did not arrive because he was aiming for it. It arrived because he had spent years building a body of work that made him the right person for it when the moment came. There is a lesson in that for anyone in the middle of their own climb.

RM: SNL pre-tapes are their own completely specific art form: they have to feel cinematic enough to earn their place on television, funny enough to compete with live sketches, and sharp enough to land in under three minutes. How do you think about that format as a filmmaker?

TW: At SNL, you are always trying to pack as many laughs per minute into a piece as possible. Earlier in my work, I would let things breathe, make a four or five minute sketch. But at SNL you are competing for a slot on the show between other pre-tapes and live sketches. So you think: how do I make this as short and as funny as possible so it gets on air? It creates a healthy, competitive environment and ultimately a more efficient filmmaker.

RM: SNL works on a schedule that would break most people: the host arrives Monday, the show is live Saturday. As the pre-tape director, where do you actually slot into that week, and what does Tuesday through Friday look like for you?

TW: Wednesday is the read-through, which I watch remotely while thinking through three or four different sketches that seem likely to get assigned to me. It is not until ten at night that I get the call telling me what I have, and from that point I have about ten or fifteen minutes to think before jumping into a Zoom with my entire unit: AD, DP, production designer, costumes, hair, everyone. On Thursday you prep all day and adjust to any changes that come out of the rewrite. I am shot-listing into the night, usually going to bed somewhere between two and three in the morning, and then I am up at five to drive to the stage.

Shoot day is Friday. We are on camera by eight in the morning. You might wrap as early as four in the afternoon or go until ten at night depending on cast and host availability. Saturday I stop at my colorist on the way to 30 Rock, spend about an hour setting the look of the piece, and by eleven I am in the edit. We work on it straight through until it airs. Then you go to the party, and rinse and repeat the following week.

That schedule, ten-minutes-notice to Wednesday night Zoom to three-in-the-morning shot-listing to Friday shoot to Saturday-morning color to air, is genuinely staggering. The fact that any of these pre-tapes feel considered and cinematic given that timeline is itself an argument for what working at that pace, week after week, actually does to a filmmaker's instincts.

RM: The Please Don't Destroy guys have become one of the most beloved things about modern SNL. You have directed a lot of their videos. What is it like working with them, and what do they bring to a set that makes the end product so consistently excellent?

TW: Before they came to SNL, those guys already had a very strong and specific vision for how their videos should work. They are amazing writers, and performers that are always thinking about the edit. They write a lot of alts for that exact reason. They want to go into the edit with a bucket of options that we can shape into the strongest piece possible. They were some of the people who early on taught me the value of shooting and blocking in a way that makes the edit as modular as possible.

There is a recurring theme in how Wilkime talks about his collaborators: they sharpen him. CollegeHumor broadened what he thought comedy could be. Please Don't Destroy raised his editing tempo. His best pre-tapes are clearly the product of someone who has been genuinely changed by the people he has made things with.

RM: You once campaigned so hard to direct a KFC commercial that you made a documentary about the experience. That is either the most committed or most unhinged thing I have ever heard. What actually happened there, and what did it teach you about going after something with that kind of irrational conviction?

TW: I think the KFC thing was the first time I really just went for it without any guardrails. In this business, you fake it until you make it for a very long time, and you have to go into your career with a kind of unhinged conviction. So it did not feel as crazy as it probably looked from the outside, because it was just applying that same energy to one specific strange idea.

What made it exciting was the improvisation of it. With the KFC thing, I could do literally anything I wanted because I was the only crew and the only performer. Being totally open to any possibility, following your gut when you recognize two different paths and just committing to one with full conviction, that is still something I carry.

To this day, executives will bring up the KFC thing as something they really responded to. I think it is because it was completely grassroots. There is something about that front-facing, one-on-one quality where people can follow along with your story and feel like they are part of it.

RM: You have said you want to make a feature next. After everything you have learned at SNL, CollegeHumor, and in short films, what kind of feature is actually living in your head right now, and what is the thing that is still standing between you and making it?

TW: I have one feature already written. It is a dark romcom meets crime comedy, currently in the packaging phase. The reality is that even though I have worked in comedy for a long time, I have never made a feature comedy. So I am not seen as a sure thing, which means I have to bring a lot of other value to the project before a studio will greenlight it. The movies I want to make are genre-mashing. I want something dark and strange underneath the crowd-pleaser, a Trojan horse for a Coen Brothers kind of sensibility. The second feature I am writing is a sci-fi buddy comedy movie. What is standing between me and that one is just finishing the script.

RM: Last one. If the Betamax camera from your parents' basement could see what you are doing at 30 Rock every week, what do you think that kid from Illinois would actually think?

TW: I think he would just be very excited that the things that inspired him growing up are the things he is actually working on. I was the biggest Will Ferrell fan as a kid, and now I have worked with Will Ferrell on the very show that made me fall in love with him and with comedy in the first place. That is just amazing to me.

I became a filmmaker because of a passion and joy for making things. That is still what I tell young people: be in it for the love of the craft. If that love is unrelenting, a career will present itself from it eventually. I am glad I stuck with it through all the ups and downs, because the passion was always there. I would tell my younger self to enjoy the ride and trust that good things are coming.

The kid from Illinois with the Betamax camera would not believe it. That is the closest thing to a thesis statement Tim Wilkime offers in this entire conversation, and it lands with the specific weight of someone who actually means it rather than someone performing humility for a magazine profile. He has worked with Will Ferrell on the show that made him fall in love with comedy. He has directed things that make studio audiences gasp. He goes to bed at three in the morning and wakes up at five and does it again the following week.

What this conversation keeps returning to is the relationship between constraint and creativity. The SNL schedule, the three-minute limit, the modular shooting style: all of it is constraint, and all of it, in Wilkime's hands, becomes permission to be decisive and to trust your gut. The Coen Brothers sensibility he wants to bring to feature films is already visible in the pre-tape work. It has always been there.

The only thing between him and that feature is finishing the script. And if the Betamax kid from Illinois has taught us anything, it is that Tim Wilkime tends to finish things.