Following last week's impactful series finale, we were able able to sit down with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier director Kari Skogland to get all the details about Sam Wilson's triumphant debut as Captain America, the redemption of the Winter Soldier, and her experience helming the acclaimed six-episode miniseries.
While she understandably didn't get into spoiler-territory regarding what may or may not come in the future, she provided plenty of insight into developing the series and some of the unique choices she made in order to do justice to both Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, as well as a number of other prominent characters, including Baron Zemo.
Check out our video interview (which includes full SPOILERS) with director Kari Skogland below, and please don't forget to like and subscribe!
ROHAN: We finally get to see Sam accept the Captain America mantle and he gets the new title card, but was there a reason why Bucky kept the Winter Soldier name rather than adopting his Wakandan name, the White Wolf?
KARI: "No reason that I know of. It was important that we change the one title because that was obviously what the show was about, so I guess more to come. I have no idea. "
ROHAN: Sam’s new suit really turned out great. Was that the version you had locked in from the start or did you ever test out different looks before deciding on his final suit?
KARI: "The costume design of it takes months, it’s not only the design, but there’s the build of it, which then changes the design a little bit because some things work better than others. It’s a very long process, and it was really a tremendously emotional moment when Anthony walked on-set wearing it finally after all the months of planning. I think we all plotted and we really knew that we were making something special."
ROHAN: I really admire how you shoot characters, and how intimate you make those scenes feel. The use of extreme close-up, like, for example, in Bucky's therapy scene, and then revisiting your Punisher episode with how you shoot Ben Barnes' Billy Russo. Could you maybe elaborate on how you approach filming these key character moments?
KARI: "You try and use the camera like a tool that will capture the emotional context of the character. In the case of Bucky, in the therapy scene, the reason I was very in-tight, looking at him so closely because I wanted to feel the claustrophobia of his situation, where he was in his head.
Like, in contrast, Sam, who is much freer in where he lives and who he is, that was all very fluid and there was a lot of movement. A lot of it handheld, to give it more of an energetic, experiential quality to the coverage that we did with him. So, what I try to do is pick and choose where we need to emotionally be engaged or inside with the character or in their perspective.
It’s ultimately about choosing a perspective and sticking with that perspective for the scene or if you switch perspectives, know that you’re switching perspectives, and then again, stick with that for the duration of wherever you’ve chosen. So, I use a lot of focal length, as well, you’ll notice, it’s very pronounced in the therapy scene, but I use it all over, where I use short focus or deep focus. It’s where I want the audience’s attention to go. Whose perspective are we in? So, that’s a lot of - and also, cameras shifts where I eliminate edits. So, it’ll shift from one character to the next through a conversation so we don’t have to cut to it. It just has a natural drift."
ROHAN: I've always wanted to be a director myself, so I really just loved how you shot this series and especially those intimate scenes. I really noticed it a lot more than I normally would.
KARI: "Good, well thank you for that. I mean, it’s intentional, and it’s meant to be signature. The idea was to help create a signature quality to the show as an overall look and feel and hopefully, we achieved that because it also wanted to serve the fact that the film is very grounded, it’s a much more grounded world that we’re in than it has been in the past, so I wanted it never to be objective, but always to be - or when we are objective, to feel that it’s intentional. That we’re watching it go down versus being in it."
ROHAN: You've said you wanted to make this series more grounded and the final battle is indicative of that, with the battle remaining pretty contained to one area. Did you ever intend for it to be bigger, like the Captain America films, or was it more important to have Sam's debut feel more personal?
KARI: "It was always intentional because we were the sequel to Avengers and that was a huge spectacle with otherworldly characters and a really otherworldly setting in most of it. So, we wanted this to be the antithesis, the completely polar opposite, a much more grounded quality to it overall as well as - we wanted to capture a very relevant conversation, and our themes and topics we embraced in this project needed to be relevant and very present because they were a very present, relevant conversation in the real world now. It was all part of capturing the experience of it and being relevant to the audience right now."
ROHAN: Baron Zemo (Daniel Brühl) ended up back in prison, where he seems pretty content with how things turned out. But we see that he’s also in league with Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) - were you intending on setting up the Thunderbolts or Dark Avengers?
KARI: "No, I have no idea, honestly. If I did have an idea, I couldn’t tell you - *laughs* - but I honestly have no idea."
ROHAN: The series has plenty of callbacks to The Winter Soldier and to Civil War. There's a really nice moment in The First Avenger where Bucky essentially introduces the world to Steve as Captain America, exclaiming "Hey, let's hear it for Captain America!" When Sam makes his debut as Cap, was there any version of that final scene where you planned on giving a callback to that moment?
KARI: "No, we didn’t really look at - this was its own unique thing. There were little callbacks throughout, like I used the finger-scraping, but truthfully, we sort of kept this one in its own space, so other than making fun of where Steve is, we wanted to keep it in its own space, so I didn’t echo."
ROHAN: You’re a veteran director, having done so much amazing television, but was there anything you learned from being inside the Marvel Studios beast that you look forward to bringing with you to future projects?
KARI: "I learned a lot about a certain kind of action choreography that I had not worked in before. I had worked in a lot of action, but this particular superhero of it was terrific to learn. I really enjoyed working with the Marvel teams, they’re all very, very positive. Everybody’s after doing the best they can be and do, looking for the best storyline, making it relevant, not shying away from themes.
I think going forward, I’ll miss working with them, but going forward I think I would like to bring that same kind of collaborative positive energy to every project. I think I do anyways, but nonetheless, this was very pronounced, it was a very wonderful team, who are very inclusive, very diverse and I think, enjoy and respect each other and that’s a unique space to be in our business, which is a tough one. So, it’s an egoless place and that really counts."
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is now streaming, exclusively on Disney+