With Moon Knight now streaming, we sat down with director Mohamed Diab (Amira; Clash; Cairo 678) to discuss the trippy series premiere as well as working with leading man Oscar Isaac, who plays the titular hero along with his numerous personalities, including Marc Spector, Steven Grant, and Mr. Knight.
The acclaimed Egyptian director explained how he wanted to bring the most authentic Egyptian experience to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and offered some incredible insight into his initial conversations with Isaac and how those talks helped convince the actor to sign on for the six-episode series.
Diab also describes his amazing experience working with Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios and how they allowed him and the Moon Knight team to create the most unique MCU project yet.
Check out the full interview below!
ROHAN: It's really inspiring to see an Egyptian director helm such a massive story set in Egypt - can you tell me more about creating this subsection of the MCU and giving the audience a more authentic Egyptian experience?
MOHAMED: I just wanted you to feel like you were walking in the streets of Cairo and meeting normal people. Usually if you did - and that's the difference between the orientalist look and the normal look - you're just connecting with people more because when you see our story, and you see Layla, she seems like a normal person. She seems like what you would think, she doesn't fall into those tropes of being submissive or men are bad or all those tropes. She's just a normal person.
Even through the music and the songs that we use. We have a beautiful art scene. It's not just the tropes, that completely oriental old music that you can’t relate to and even always feeling exotic or even the place the way it's shot. Usually, you see the pyramids, and you see the desert. Well, Cairo is as big as Mumbai, it's huge. It's one of the biggest cities in the world, it has skyscrapers. Every time I see that, I feel like you when you see Apu, and I’m like God, we're more, we’re different. We're more than that and that's all I wanted.
I have the feeling - and by the way, I only think our show is the first step. I wish to do a lot more, but I was allowed to bring as much as I can and I did and I even have an Egyptian composer. One of the three editors is Egyptian, I did as much as I could, but I was lucky too. Even my collaborators like Stefania Cella, who was the set designer, Meghan Kasperlik, who was the costume designer, they were people who did a great job into delving into the culture as much as they can, and really delivering Egypt to me, because by the way, after everything I've said, we didn't shoot in Egypt. We shot in Budapest, but my great dream made it into Egypt, and I'm so proud of that.
So, it's not just about shooting there or not, but sometimes people are so lazy that they shot Egypt in Jordan, which looks like Egypt, but hey leave everything that looks like Jordan. It's like seeing a movie set in the middle of Paris, and all of a sudden, you see Big Ben, you know what I mean?
ROHAN: Can you tell me more about your initial pitch to Oscar Isaac and bringing him back into the Marvel fold after his less-than-ideal experience on X-Men: Apocalypse?
MOHAMED: Oscar was exhausted from big movies, he just came from Star Wars, X Men, Dune, and he wanted to do something small. So, to convince him - or something intimate, not small, something intimate - and to convince him that we can do that on a bigger scale wasn't an easy job at the beginning.
Oscar saw my films, and he told me, “Mohammed, what the hell are you doing here?,” because this is exactly what he wanted to do, one of my intimate films, and I told him, it's not exclusive to small films, we can do that on a bigger film.
I think he was my biggest ally through the project, to make this into a character study, to make this into something different and I'm so proud of the result that we have at the end because if you've got all the action, if you've got all the big things, there is still a story. There's a story about someone who's struggling to learn how to live with himself and ironically, I actually feel if you saw my films one day, this feels like an extension of my films. Everyone who knows my films will see episode one, for example, in the premiere, they felt okay, this makes sense. Now, I understand, there is a bridge between this and that.
So, I was lucky to have Oscar with this mindset, because he wasn't a guy who wanted to be with Marvel and just say, “Okay, I get it. I made it. Let's get paid. Let's put on the cape. Let's get the figurine.” No, no, he wanted to do something special and I would say the same thing about me and Ethan, who is a legend in independent cinema and in the independent world and all of a sudden, making the choice to join something like this. So, he needed for himself to have something special. So, the two of them and May, presenting and representing an Arab character, they always brought it on. I always had to be ready and had to always be questioning everything and that made us all work to make the story deeper and better.
ROHAN: He's so good in this series, what was it like directing him as all these different versions of the same character? It really feels like he just flips a switch and suddenly, he's Marc or he's Steven.
MOHAMED: That experience started with Oscar. I think the first thing was finding the voice for Steven and we struggled to find the voice of Mark. That was much harder by the way. Steven is just like that - *snaps fingers* - you fall in love with him right away. The challenge was, guess what, after a couple of episodes, someone else is going to be in the driver's seat and we were scared that the audience were going to flip, “Okay, I love someone and now you're just giving me someone else?” But, that was one of the most important things to work on to make people understand Marc’s struggle and he doesn't feel like a bad guy and you understand that he's too in the gray and he's coming from a place of pain.
The first couple of weeks, Oscar only wanted to do one of them a day, but then I started asking him, you know what, there were a couple of mirror scenes where he has to be the two characters and we're just like, let's play. Let's try that and all of a sudden, Oscar between just like the few seconds of the pan, he becomes someone else. I tell him he got taller, you feel like the demeanor changes and it became something that he loved so much and enjoyed so much that he wanted to do it every time the two of them are talking and he was doing it so well that every time, it felt like a play and we were clapping. He became two different people. Ironically, none of them are Oscar. He's a third person in real life.
ROHAN: While the show is clearly set in the MCU, you did have a lot of creative freedom to take the story wherever you wanted it to go. What was your experience working with Kevin Feige and the team at Marvel Studios?
MOHAMED: I was definitely intimidated in the beginning. I'm working with probably the biggest cinematic universe in the history of cinema and the most successful as well, telling the story of the new Gods of our society. They are always going to be urban legends in our society and in our pop culture, but the biggest shock, for me, was how hands on someone like Kevin is. He's developing like 20 shows and his handprints are on everything.
You have to be smart enough to understand when you're doing something like this, that they hired you for a reason. You have some secret sauce, but they have secret sauce too. Those guys, I was definitely there to learn a lot from them and I was allowed, I will tell you the best thing about my experience, I was able to work with my wife, who's my partner, and producer in everything that I have done before and she's now a producer on this show. We put together a 200-page pitch that became the project. Today, it’s the project. So, I would tell you that they allowed me to bring my taste, and they allowed me to bring my vision and today my vision is the show.
I think not everyone knows how to collaborate, but I felt like I clicked with the guys. We had the same voice and we did something that we're all proud of and maybe one of the things that really affected the show was allowing us to have those table reads before shooting - Oscar, me, Sarah, Grant Curtis, our executive producer, the writers, and the cast, for sure. All of us reading every scene, turning every corner. No idea is a bad idea and it really really helped the script and it really developed the script and I'm sure it helped us shoot less in the reshoots. We have the record of the least reshoots in the history of Marvel Studios, four days.
ROHAN: This has been great, I've always wanted to be a director myself and it's always a thrill being able to do something like this and pick your brain about filmmaking.
MOHAMED: If you direct good drama, you can direct anything and I love that, in the past twenty years, all the super successful people like Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, Sam Mendes, who have done big action sequences in movies are actually people who directed drama first. Best of luck, I hope to see you with your film and hope to talk to you again after the show's done.
When Steven Grant, a mild-mannered gift-shop employee, becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life, he discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc’s enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt.
Moon Knight is now streaming!