Moon Knight directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead were struggling to find work before they landed the Marvel gig, the duo has revealed.
In an interview with The New York Times, Moorhead confessed that he and Benson faced “a decade of being completely unemployable” before booking Moon Knight.
After being rejected by studios time and time again, Moorhead and Benson invested their energy into independent filmmaking, in films like 2014’s Spring, and 2017’s The Endless. Those experiences, they agreed, solidified their creative vision within the mystery genre.
Working with Marvel, however, despite public perception, wasn’t about “[erasing] our personality and [working] within the machine,” they clarified. “We put a lot of ourselves into [Moon Knight],” Moorhead said, also assuring that Marvel showed a genuine interest in their voice, present mostly in the show’s visuals, given that the writing was done by a separate team.
The professional relationships made throughout the production of the show were another positive aspect of working with such an established and successful studio for the directing team. “[Moon Knight] has given us opportunities to work with collaborators we wouldn’t otherwise, which has expanded our creative worlds,” Benson noted, adding that production for the show felt a lot like “a second film school.”
The well-received 6-episode series gave Benson and Moorhead’s careers the push they deserved from the get-go. The duo directed two episodes, with Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Diab leading the remaining four.
Moon Knight has been lauded as one of the best projects to come out of the Disney Plus/Marvel Studios collaboration, with We Got This Covered’s David James calling it “the best MCU Disney Plus show to date.” A lot of the praise is down to the innovative, adventurous writing, but the fantasy production’s directing is also unlike anything Marvel has put out since joining forces with Disney.
Moon Knight is now available to stream in full on Disney Plus.
