Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead open about the show’s trippiest episode yet.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for episode 4 ofMoon Knight.
Moon Knightis already a weird show.
Oscar Isaac (and Oscar Isaac) in ‘Moon Knight’.Marvel Studios
ButMoon Knightis a six-episode miniseries, and we’ve still got story to go!
So Marc wakes up, moments after his apparent death.
Here, Marc isn’t an adventurer but a mental health patient.
And on the TV, there’s a VHS tape playing.
The name of the film’s swashbuckling archaeologist hero?
Eventually Marc stumbles upon a sarcophagus, and there he finds the real Steven imprisoned.
(Again, we said it was weird.)
I wanted it to feel like the audience is just as drugged as Marc is in that moment.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What was the inspiration for this mental hospital sequence?
AARON MOORHEAD:The end of episode 4 is actually a gift of the script.
That’s where the inspiration came from, especially visually and tonally.
The entire scene has this wonderfully unsettling quality to it.
As directors, how did you want to amplify that feeling?
Obviously, what is more exciting than being creeped out?
MOORHEAD:It’s obviously not a visceral scene.
It’s not kinetic, it shouldn’t be moving fast.
It should feel surreal.
It should feel like the point of view of Steven/Marc in that moment.
That’s where I think over a decade of our prior films really came in handy.
It sounds like you wanted to do the same with how you filmed it.
MOORHEAD:A lot of what we do is chasing what Oscar is doing.
I think that’s pretty clear to anyone that watchesMoon Knight.
Why is there a weirdIndiana Jonesknockoff movie right in the middle ofMoon Knight?
He finally gets out.
He jumps out, but it turns out he was on an airplane, and he’s free-falling.
It’s Marc Spector hugging himself, and he says, “Goodbye, Marc.”
It’s as he’s achieving integration and understanding who he is.
So when they first see each other in person, they would instinctually just embrace.
That was something we were really leading towards with all the other episodes.
We wanted to earn that moment.
What do you remember most about filming that?
The energy to his acting in that role was impressive to the point of being exhausting to watch.
There’s this wonderful take where a fly lands on his hand on accident.
That’s a real fly!
You mentioned the wonderfully campyIndiana Jonesknockoff.
How did that come together?
That was a very interesting experience.
Everyone had a lot of good laughs that morning.
Everybody was just having an absolute blast, being as cheesy as we possibly could.
That must’ve been fun.
You get to take a break from makingMoon Knightand instead spend a day making a ridiculous ’80s adventure tale.
We actually got to shoot twice as much of that.
Now we want to make a whole series of it.
It has some of the most ridiculous dialogue that they could come up with.
BENSON:It was essentially someone sharing way too much information about their parental relationships for way too long.
Tell me literally everything about that shot.
BENSON:It’s funny.
We only had one or maybe two shots with this [hippo] character.
Even though we had met only just minutes before, and she just screamed for us every which way.
It was really interesting from a technical standpoint.
We had someone pretending to be a hippo, screaming by themselves.
Then we had Oscar Isaac as Marc, screaming by himself.
Then we had Oscar Isaac as Steven, screaming byhimself.
None of those people were together.
It’s like an opera of screaming.
Moon Knighthas two episodes left.
What can you tease about episodes 5 and 6?
