Director Falcon and Winter Soldier, Kari Skogland, on the action and improvisation of the program

Kari Skogland has directed a handful of films that most people have not heard of – Men with guns, Chicks With Sticks, Fifty dead men walking, and more – but her career focus was rarely on film. She has worked on some of the most eye-catching and eye-catching TV shows of the past 30 years, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Funny like people, The L Word, Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias, Langmyn, Vikings, House of Cards, en The Walking Dead. She is also a film writer, a producer of shows such as NOS4A2 and Sons of Liberty, and the CEO of her own production company, Mad Rabbit.

So it’s no surprise to see her take directing duties for Disney Plus’ new Marvel Cinematic Universe series The falcon and the winter attic, which probably looks like a five-hour movie over six episodes. She is the kind of skilled veteran in the industry who is called upon to pick up the reins for all sorts of series, although she is prone to drama and action, which is both front and center Falcon and Winter Soldier. Polygon recently jumped on a video call with Skogland to talk about how she approached directing the series, and how she uses her camera placement to shape the series’ emotions.

Many of the action films that Skogland sees as inspiration for the show will not surprise viewers: “I dived very deep into all sorts of films that seemed like they might have been off-putting, but they all teach me something,” she says. went to the obvious places, such as Deadly weapon, 48 Hours, Midnight Run, the list goes on. ”

But Skogland also wanted the series to have a deeper emotional aspect than some of the smooth ’80s movies, and she also watched many low-key emotional dramas, from Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider to David Lean’s extensive emails: “all these films that were unique,” she says. “You have to train your synapses. You put it in a pot and stir it, and hopefully it’s something unique that comes out when you make decisions. ‘

Photo: Disney Plus

She says one of the biggest inspirations for The falcon and the winter soldier was the french movie The untouchable, about a rich quadruple vacancy appointing a young man from the projects as his caregiver. “I was very inspired by the vulnerability that the characters showed,” says Skogland. ‘It’s a spectacular film. I think it helped me feel safe to explore some of the vulnerabilities with Bucky and Sam, that we could go down the road and really end up in it and feel for them. Because their vulnerabilities actually made them stronger. ”

Part of the investigation into the vulnerabilities involved the placement of the camera: in scenes with Sam Wilson, aka the superhero Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, the camera is usually further back, with wide spaces, and he takes Sam ‘s environment in. “He has a vast world,” she says.

But in scenes with the more concerned anti-hero Bucky Barnes, played by Sebastian Stan, the camera moves awkwardly close. ‘I feel like Bucky is in a prison he made himself, and I wanted to convey that through a framework. We did extremely close to Bucky, where we read the inside of his brain. This is a very extreme use of focus, from the focus level. You can be on someone’s side, maybe behind them, and put the focus on just a part of his face, and it made us feel like we know what he’s thinking, we’re in his mind. ‘

Skogland says Falcon and Winter Soldier is more of a character-based story than Marvel movies in the past, and that it focuses on men who ‘are two sides of the same coin but still feel very different’. According to her, six episodes to tell their story was an important part of building tension between them. “You start rooting the characters in a different way,” she says. “We can see them without putting on their suit, and we get inside their lives, and it becomes very real. We can sometimes ask and answer the questions we do not get to when we only have two hours to tell a story. ‘

Photo: Disney Plus

The problem with a movie, she says, is that the characters are always in ‘world-saving mode’, so they do not have time to address their personal lives, because it would feel like they ‘dropped the ball on the important things’ ‘they’re supposed to do. ”

Skogland says another enjoyable aspect of the work on the program was making room for improvisation. She says Mackie and Stan are real-life friends who do not need much direction to play competitive rivals: ‘Believe me, they take care of it themselves. They are great together. We watched a lot of their interviews, the different press conferences where they had been, and I was very encouraged by what I saw. And part of what I had to do was just get out of their way and let them do what they do. A lot of it was improvisation and ad libs, because they can just do it. I consider the text to be a road map. It’s always malleable, it’s always something you can find new ideas for. And they are very good at it. ‘

She also wanted to try new ways of handling action sequences as before, and address Falcon’s fighting style in new ways. “I took a deep, deep dive into extreme sports videos,” she says. ‘Technology has changed, so I was able to embrace smaller cameras that we can slap on people, the GoPro of everything. I was able to jump into that world, which means we could get coverage we had never seen before. And we were able to hire a team that could do extraordinary things in squirrels. ”

‘I wanted to see Falcon fly in a way we’ve never seen before. The most important thing for me – with both, but especially Anthony – was that we would fly with them. That we really felt we were not watching by him but fly with him. Same with the battle series, and the choreography, as much as possible. ”

Inserting emotion into the action series is ultimately ‘quite complicated’, she says, but was an essential part of the story. ‘I wanted to feel the emotional charge in the fights, especially for Bucky, who does not want to fight. He comes from a place where the struggle for him is over. It was therefore very important that we embrace the emotional space in which he is. ”