American cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, whose previous work includes the recent version of The Green Knight, shot episodes 2 and 4 of Marvel’s Moon Knight for Marvel and Disney+. He chatted with Stewart Hotston about the influences and challenges of this very unusual Marvel show…

Bill Sienkiewicz’s work on the comics: did that influence you visually and if so how?

Yes, the comics were a huge inspiration for me and there’s so much incredible imagery all throughout the runs. The things that got me most excited were some of the more psychedelic imagery.

There’s a great image of, I think it’s maybe Marc or Steven, pulling off his face and then there’s Mr Knight below him, on the cover on one of his runs. Some of that really haunting psychedelic imagery was really exciting and I was so glad that when episode 4 landed on my lap, I would get a chance to explore some of that.

Episode 4 feels like a modern take on Raiders of the Lost Ark: was Douglas Slocombe at the back of your mind when you were thinking of framing and shooting those scenes?

Yes, it’s hard not to, for anyone really. Those movies are just burned into our minds, all the images of Harrison Ford.

We really wanted to go much darker and scarier, in a way, because we knew we were in the horror genre, whereas Raiders and movies like that aren’t exactly in that world. I wanted it to feel a little more real as to what it might look like.

I really like this horror movie, The Descent. It’s set deep within a cave. How scary it is when they’re tight against the walls, the claustrophobia of trying to move through tight spaces. That movie is always an inspiration to me because it’s one of the most terrifying movies I’ve ever seen. So I tried to bring some of that world in to the Marvel world and find out how comfortable we are, not only with it being visually dark but also being scary. We tried to push that a little bit with some of the violence and things like that.

You’ll be pleased to know that when Layla gets grabbed by the wizards my son, who’s thirteen, screamed, both times that he watched the scene!

That’s incredible! I watched it with my wife, who was around for production and knew that there was something like that but never, of course, saw footage. I knew that moment was coming but she just totally leaped off the couch – she also screamed when his hand came out of the hole as well.

You forget about these things when you make it, that it has that effect, because you get so down the road of the technical challenges. How is he going to come out of that hole and grab her? How fast can we do it? I love to watch it with someone who hasn’t seen it.

How much of the tomb scenes was practical versus CGI? And what were the challenges in melding those together?

All of the tomb sets were standing sets. So when they first enter there’s those two giant… sphinxes or sphinxi? I’m not sure.

We’ll go with sphinxes.

Those are all real and Stefania Cella, our production designer, built that set, and built the workers’ quarters where they first encounter the Heka priest. Then there’s the Alexander the Great tomb which was all real and the wall that Layla scales: all of that was real.

There’s of course some set extension in that one when you pop out super super wide, to make it a bit bigger, but she had every freedom to walk on and scale it just as she would if it were real. Of course there were pads below but I’m so thankful that it was real.

For me, I need to be in a real space. I don’t particularly like shooting on green screen. If I could choose to shoot outside I would much rather do that, to have something physical to light, to get to understand the space. I think it’s helpful also to the actors to really live in it and understand what they’re interacting with.

Obviously with episodes 2 and 4 there’s quite a lot of focus on the relationship between Marc and Steven. In episode 2 it’s more about Steven’s existential fear that if he lets Marc have control, that might be it, whereas in 4 there’s a bit more of a reconciliation. How did you go about shooting Steven versus Marc?

We talked early about it. Should we be framing Marc looking up at him, making him feel bigger and strong? Should we feel a bit looser with Steven to give him more of a manic energy? Some of that stuff happened but what I found is that Oscar does so much that the camera didn’t need to do a lot. He can just turn it on and suddenly his posture is different and then naturally the camera just follows him differently. When you’re following the action, it’s just a different way of shooting already, so I really didn’t need to do too much.

There’s some editorial things as well about the way they handle Marc versus Steven but again, all hats off to Oscar, how much he does for us playing those two characters so differently and so uniquely.

For the asylum scenes in episode 4, how did you want to present what Marc/Steven are going through at that point?

That’s a real challenge because you want to play in a fantasy space; however you don’t want the place to feel unhealthy. We wanted it to feel curative and clean – but it doesn’t feel like a modern hospital, actually. The details of the ceiling? That would never be in a modern hospital. Everything is white; every piece of furniture is white or clear. So it’s a real challenge, mainly for set decoration and production design, I think. Then for me, with the colour white, I just tried to stay as pure white as possible and shift only slightly cooler at times. I wasn’t introducing crazy warm light; it was either white or slightly cool.

So my parameters for working were also quite small but the easter eggs that we got to hide throughout that and developing the shot that was his P.O.V when we first pull out of Tomb Busters, and tagging all the various people like the street performer and Billy and Bobby, that was a real joy, to pepper in all those things and to make sure that we were hitting each of them. I hope everyone’s catching all of them because there are a lot hidden in there.

Yes, it’s probably no surprise that the internet is mad for that whole sequence.

That’s great.

How did you get a sense of getting the cities right in terms of shooting? So often, particularly for Middle East and North Africa scenes, people use yellow filters and it was a delight to me, to see that those weren’t there…

I’m glad you liked it. We shot in Jordan as well and some of the deserts there are so beautiful, the blue sky versus the contrast of the colour of the sand. I just found that country so beautiful – what a waste to just put a filter on it and make it this soup of warm.

The contrast is where the beauty is, in my opinion, and the light is quite clean and white. I understand that historically people have [added filters] to make it feel warm. It’s hard to get across the feeling of warmth without adding some warmth to the image but you can feel it on their skin, you can feel them sweat, you can feel heat ripples. There’s other ways to crack that egg, and hats off to Greg Middleton as well for the stuff within Cairo. All that stuff’s his photography and I thought they did such a lovely job.

We have the fight and flight through the museum and I’m keen to understand what you were trying to show in that?

When the jackal’s chasing him? That’s Greg Middleton’s from episode 1. I know they did a lot of storyboarding and a lot of pre-visualisation and the effects did a lovely job of adding the jackal in. I thought it was a really effective sequence when it was finished because I had seen it all the way through from the beginning, really great work from them.

Then there’s a rooftop chase.

That’s definitely mine! That was really challenging and the fight on the street with the jackal was incredibly challenging because it’s a force that’s invisible. We did a lot of prep with the stunt team and they made these incredibly almost Michel Gondry-esque cardboard claws, they made a face for the jackal, and they built all the cars out of cardboard so that we could visualise what the actual location would look like.

Aaron and Justin, my directors, really were adamant that the sequence would be strongest when we can be out wide and not be worried about moving too much – just see them fighting an invisible force. There’s a lot of shots that swoop out and you see them each fighting something.

It was a real technical challenge to find out how to do that. There were people wearing green screen suits on the day that were two people fighting because the jackal is quite large and they each needed something to fight.

That was a really fun sequence and the rooftop also turned out really nice. That largely was a pre-visualisation that, when I came on board, was already in place. I made some very small tweaks just based on my own taste but it was just up to us to execute it. That’s also compliments to the second unit led by Darren the other D.P, who just executed it incredibly well. We collaborated on the light, on how it should look, but I thought they did just an incredible job of executing that.

What was the most challenging thing in terms of shooting and delivering what you wanted to deliver?

The thing that I keep coming to is shooting Oscar talking to himself.

Marc or Steven talking to himself is way more of a head scratcher that you can imagine because when you move the camera it adds another element. You approaching a mirror in real life is a very simple thing, it’s one to one, but when a camera is observing it, it doesn’t always see the reflection, depending on where the camera is.

So there’s a lot of cheating, pushing Oscar’s reflection of Steven or Marc way out into some other place so that the camera could see it as a reflection, and then you figure out where he should look to make it look as though he’s talking to himself.

Of course there’s so many of these times where he’s talking to himself and some of them are so brief – he just walks over a puddle of water, looks down and talks to himself then looks back up. The challenge of lighting that so that you can see him and his reflection as bright as he needs to be [came] because in reality some of these surfaces are not mirrors. It’s not a one to one reflection, it’s much darker, so I would do all these things like blast him with light and then when the camera tilts back up, I pull that light down so that he looks normal and not super overexposed.

Anytime he’s talking to himself, I’d see it in the script and I’d think ‘Oh no, here we go again!’

 

Moon Knight is streaming now on Disney+