“It’s been a very strange day.”

Deborah Chow has directed episodes of Mr. Robot, The Man in the High Castle, Jessica Jones, Reign, and Better Call Saul, so she knows the demands and expectations of devoted fans. But she wasn’t prepared for the, let’s say, force of the reaction to her work on The Mandalorian.

Chow directed episode three — titled “The Sin” — and its explosive finale, which featured a group of hovering Mandalorian protectors in a shoot-out with a gang of bloodthirsty bounty hunters while the hero flees with a newly rescued Baby Yoda. The scene lit up social media—and her phone.

“I woke up to many, many texts and emails about it, and it’s sort of like, ‘How did everyone watch it so early in the morning?’” Chow told Vanity Fair on Friday, in a new interview for our Still Watching podcast on the Star Wars series. “It’s definitely unexpected, and I’m really happy for the show.”

You can hear her full conversation in the show, along with an interview with actor Emily Swallow, who said she based her blacksmith leader The Armorer in part on Chow’s quiet authority on set.

Chow also directs episode seven of the show and is now working on a new Obi-Wan Kenobi series for Disney+. Here's what she had to say about episode three of The Mandalorian:

Father’s Influence

Chow said the episode takes a lot of inspiration from 1961’s Yojimbo — Akira Kurosawa’s classic about a nameless ronin who finds himself in a town plagued by competing crime lords. She also credits her love of Asian cinema to her late father.

“My dad was Chinese, and he was a huge movie fan, when I grew up he was watching Hong Kong action films. So it kind of gets that reference,” she said, citing John Woo’s 1992 cop-and-kid thriller Hard Boiled as another reference. “I tried to bring out a little Hard Boiled with the baby. It was kind of an amazing thing because it was like coming back to classic cinema and filmmaking. So there’s definitely a lot of my dad in that episode.”

“Sadly he didn’t get to see this. But he would be very proud. He would probably also be in shock.”

First Woman in Space

Chow’s work on The Mandalorian makes her the first woman and the first filmmaker of Asian heritage to direct a live-action Star Wars story.

“Even when I first got this job, it didn’t even cross my mind. I don’t know what fairyland I was in, to not think this was significant. But I went through prep and it didn’t occur to me until somebody said it on one of the first days of shooting.”

She noted that Bryce Dallas Howard directs episode four of the show, and the second unit team has several female directors. “It didn’t occur to me that I was the first one to leap.”

“I want it to be about the work. I want to be a good director, not a good female director, not a good Asian director. But by the same token, obviously, my career path and the representation… it is important. It is meaningful. I want to see more women directors and I want to see more directors of color.”

Lifelike Baby Yoda

Making any kind of Star Wars can be a surreal experience. Between puppets, droids, humans hidden behind helmets, and people dressed up as aliens, she said she looked around one day and thought: “Oh my God, does anyone have eyes. Is there a human face anywhere?”

The little green star, known for now as Baby Yoda, was just as enchanting in real life as it is on screen. “I worked with the puppeteers and the visual effects [artists], and just worked with it like it was an actor. It would just be about emotion. I’m not going to try to tell them technically how to do it. But we would talk through it.”

She wasn’t the only one to talk to Baby Yoda as if it was real. For more from Deborah Chow, subscribe to Still Watching: The Mandalorian.