The highly enthusiastic and effervescent Italian production designer Stefania Cella brought what’s described as “an unrelenting pursuit of exquisitely authentic and balanced, sometimes delicate, often beautiful and always functional design” to Moon Knight’s production. Stewart Hotston caught up with her…

 

I’ve loved the framing of the whole Moon Knight series. As a person of colour, seeing Egypt  without lots of filters was really great. It felt less MCU and more Marvel Comics – as someone who’s read the comics, I felt like I could see a lot of the design and a lot of the feeling of the show was coming out of the comics.

Certainly it was an educational process for me. For Moon Knight I didn’t know the character so I educated myself by reading the older comics and the newer ones that had a redesign, I think in the early 2000s.

I think when you bring up the framing, certainly the comics were an inspiration for the scale. Some of the fantastic drawings in the comics, where the pyramids are in the centre of New York City or the mixing of cultures that live with each other, that to me was certainly an inspiration but also the scale of Egypt was an inspiration. We tried to keep the scale of the ancient Egyptian culture and the God scale, the monuments and the Gods that they have. For example, [Steven’s] apartment is a attic and obviously an attic has a connection to a pyramid because of the shape. So we tried to design it in a way so that there is always a very subtle connection to Egypt.

How did you picture Marc versus Steven? Oscar Isaac obviously brings a lot to it in terms of his physical presence but it seemed to me that there were subtle tags and tells that distinguished the two characters.

Yes, in the apartment we say that Steven lives there most of the time. He’s book smart, he’s a historian, he’s studied, has a passion for Egyptian antiques, obviously he loves books… So mainly the apartment is habited by Steven [but] there are a few details that suggest that Marc could be there sometimes and could have arrived at some time. As if we put all of his belongings into a storage room and that’s where he is but the only place that they would share would have been that one.

So everything else was easier to differentiate by costume or by or behaviour they have towards certain things, or the way they drive the car, or the way the approach going down into the tombs. Those things were easier, the actions they do.

Raiders of the Lost Ark and the pulp movies from the 30s and 40s which Raiders itself was referencing – what influences came from those?

Well, Indiana Jones was very much an influence to approach the adventures of the tombs sequence when they’re going down, but also we really wanted to make it our own thing. So to me it was more an educational process on the things that were valid and the things that were not working for us.

In this specifically, the adventure part is the part in the tomb, but the part in Cairo for example, we wanted to be very realistic. We tried to do a homage. I went to Cairo in December last year and I spent some time there with [executive producer/director] Mohamed [Diab].

I was in Egypt twenty years ago when I was a girl and it’s changed and grown into a metropolis. I wanted to really give a homage to what is really not the postcard [view] of Egypt, in terms of just the pyramids and just the antiquity, but also the streets. When we go onto the rooftop, we did full research on the pigeon culture they have – all the pigeon towers, that’s why they are in the background. We built some of them for the rooftop.

I see what you’re saying, in terms of trying to stay in line with pulp movies but we really wanted to have our own [feel]. So there are parts that are taken from the adventure type but also we wanted it to be a little bit more grounded in reality.

I do love the mix and the connection: we can tell a story that is supernatural or surreal or a comic story, but to ground it in a real environment, to me, is the most challenging but also the most interesting part because you try to keep it accessible by giving a real environment and not too surreal that it takes you a little bit out of it. I don’t know if that makes sense, it does for me.

How closely did you work with Mohamed Diab developing this?

Oh a lot. I think the fantastic part of working with any production for Marvel is the involvement of a group. I really love that because you start to design where there is [just] a first idea and you design thinking of the story with the filmmakers. So you’re not just being handed a script – yes, you’ve been handed a script but then have development on how to make it better for [everyone in] the group. Oscar was very much involved and when Ethan [Hawke] started he was very much involved in his own character. They were all very present so it becomes a dialogue between all the parts which is great. (laughs)

What were the biggest challenges in bringing this to life?

For me, the biggest challenge was the authenticity of Egypt but not just that. Even designing the Chamber of the Gods was a challenge because we wanted to give the sense of scale that Egypt has when you go. The monuments, Abu Simbel and Luxor, they’re all immense in scale but then you have [to remember that] humans inhabited it. The first pass that I designed for the Chamber of the Gods was very tall and when I put in the 3D model of the human, I had just a moment.

So with the group we realised that we need to bring down those Gods, even in an overscale shape. We need to bring the scale with the avatars, with Oscar when he comes in.

So we dropped them all down and instead just used their physical appearance as humans. We used the animal related to that God then the Chamber actually became this grand room with lions and snakes and falcons. Suddenly it became this amazing place that doesn’t just have faces but is also representative of the Gods, in their animal shapes.

When we realised that there was a better way to do it, Ammit as the snake and Horus as the falcon, that was just a dream for a designer to create!

That was something I had to crack and then obviously Egypt, for the tombs we had an Egyptologist and someone who was translating hieroglyphs. Alexander the Great’s  tomb has never really been discovered; nobody knows where his body is because he died while he was moving from Macedonia to Egypt, nobody knows where he’s really buried. Alexander wanted to be considered one of the last Pharaohs but he also was Macedonian so in the hieroglyphs behind the tomb, there is the story of his travel from one place to the other.

Also some hieroglyphs are Macedonian and some hieroglyphs are Egyptian because you really want to unify these. That was besides the story but it was for authenticity.

Moon Knight is streaming on Disney+ with new episodes every Wednesday; click here to read our other coverage