Kate Herron, who directed all six episodes of Loki on Disney Plus, has revealed that she really did her homework before pitching that particular vision of the God of Mischief’s solo outing to Marvel Studios.
The acclaimed director of Daybreak and Sex Education recently told GoldDerby that she pulled out all the big creative guns to tackle one of MCU’s first risky ventures into the world of television. Apparently, Herron’s pitch involved a 280-slide PowerPoint presentation that included everything from set design to architecture and music choice.
“The whole pitch was everything — style, casting ideas, Gugu was in my pitch, music, I had a playlist for them. I think I had 280 slides. It was a lot and I remember just talking really quickly and just going through hundreds of pictures, but it had everything in it, like retro-futuristic technology, the Brazil aspect of the TVA, brutalist architecture mixed in with the Midwest kind of Mad Men-style [and] the look of The Void. I wanted it to look like an overgrown garden and a forgotten place.”
Considering how Loki ultimately turned out, visually speaking, it seems that Herron served the project as more of an auteur than a creative who stands behind the camera to make sure that they’ve got everything they need. Herron further explained the importance of doing your own thing as a director as opposed to what they expect you to do, noting:
“It was like a big download of my brain. The key thing for me, though, was I was not going to second-guess what they’re after because I’m never going to know that because the secrecy at Marvel is so real, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ve got these really good scripts, I’m just going to take my interpretation of them to them and say if you hire me, this is what you’ll get.’
“And I think that’s really key as well for a director because I … think there can be a feeling of ‘Oh no, I need to kind of just do what they want and I’m sort of lucky to be here.’ Don’t get me wrong, I’m very lucky to be here, but more in the sense of ‘OK, well, I’m just gonna tell them my interpretation of it.’ And I remember Kevin Feige saying that was a big part of what got me the job.”
With even the crew of Moon Knight recently going out of their way to praise Marvel for the creative freedom it gave them while making the show, it seems that Kevin Feige gives much more wiggle room to his producers than we originally assumed due to the fictional universe’s interconnected and continuity-sensitive nature.
As for Loki, Tom Hiddleston has just revealed that the second season of his MCU show will start filming soon.