Kari Skogland, director of Falcon and Winter Soldier, on the program’s action and improvisation

Kari Skogland has directed a handful of films that most people have never heard of – Men with guns, Chicks With Sticks, Fifty dead men walkingand more – but the focus of his career has rarely been on film. She has worked on some of the most striking and notable TV shows of the past 30 years, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Queer As Folk, The L word, Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias, Longmire, Vikings, House of cards, and Living Dead. She is also a screenwriter, producer of programs like NOS4A2 and Sons of Liberty, and the CEO of his own production company, Mad Rabbit.

So it’s no surprise to see her take on the direction roles in Disney Plus’ new Marvel Cinematic Universe series. The hawk and the winter solder, which seems likely to play out like a five-hour film in six episodes. She is the type of capable industry veteran who is called upon to take charge of all types of series, although she tends to drama and action, which are in the front and center of Hawk and Winter Soldier. Polygon recently went on a video chat with Skogland to talk about how she approached the direction of the series, and how she uses the camera’s positioning to shape the series’ emotions.

Many of the action films that Skogland watched as inspiration for the program will not be a surprise to viewers: “I took a very deep dive into all kinds of films that seemed to have an out-of-game tone, but they all taught me something, “she says.” We went to the obvious places, like Lethal Weapon, 48 hours, Midnight race, The list goes on. “

But Skogland also wanted the series to have a deeper emotional aspect than some of those ingenious’ 80s movies, so she watched many more discreet emotional dramas too, from Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider to David Lean’s great epics: “all these films that were exclusive,” she says. “You have to train your synapses. You put it in a pot and stir it, and hopefully what comes out while you make decisions is something unique. “

She says that one of the biggest inspirations for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier it was the french film The Untouchables, about a wealthy quadriplegic who hires a young man from the projects as his caregiver. “I was very inspired by the vulnerability that the characters showed,” says Skogland. “It is a spectacular film. I think it helped me feel safe when exploring some of the vulnerabilities with Bucky and Sam, that we could go that route and really get into them and feel for them. Because their vulnerabilities have actually made them stronger. “

Part of the exploitation of these vulnerabilities had to do with the positioning of the camera: in scenes with Sam Wilson, also known as the superhero Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, the camera is usually farther back, showing wide spaces and observing the surroundings of Sam. “He has an expansive world,” she says.

But in scenes with the most troubled anti-hero Bucky Barnes, played by Sebastian Stan, the camera moves uncomfortably close. “Bucky, I felt, is in a prison of his own making, and I wanted to convey that through framing. We did extreme close-ups of Bucky, where we kind of read the inside of his brain. It is an extreme use of focus, of the focal plane. You can be next to someone, maybe behind them, and put the focal plane on just part of their face, and it made us feel like we knew what he was thinking, we were in his thoughts. “

Skogland says Hawk and Winter Soldier it’s more of a character-based story than previous Marvel films, and it focuses on men who are “two sides of the same coin, but still feel very different”. She says having six episodes to tell her story was an important part of building tension between them. “You start cheering for the characters in a different way,” she says. “We can see them without their suits, and we get into their lives, and it becomes a very real world. We can ask and sometimes answer questions we don’t ask when we only have two hours to tell a story. “

The problem with a film, she says, is that the characters are always in “the way to save the world”, so they don’t have time to deal with their personal lives, because that would seem like they “threw the ball at the important things they should be doing. “

Skogland says that another nice aspect of working on the program was making room for improvisation. She says that Mackie and Stan are friends in real life who didn’t need much guidance to play mocking rivals: “Believe me, they take care of this very well on their own. They are great together. We looked at their interviews a lot, the various press conferences they participated in, and I was very excited about what I saw. And part of what I had to do was get out of their way and let them do what they did. A lot of that was improvisation and improvisation, because they are simply able to do that. I see the script as a script. It is always malleable, it is always something where you can find new ideas. And they are very good at that. “

She also wanted to try new ways to deal with the action sequences than before, and to deal with Falcon’s fighting style in new ways. “I immersed myself in extreme sports videos,” she says. “The technology has changed, so I was able to adopt smaller cameras that we can apply to people, the GoPro of everything. I was able to jump in that world, which means that we could get coverage that we hadn’t really seen before. And we were able to hire a team that could do extraordinary things in squirrel outfits. “

“I wanted to see Falcon fly in a way that we’ve never seen before. The most important thing for me – with both of them, actually, but with Anthony in particular – was that we were flying with them. That we really felt that we weren’t looking at the him but flying with his. The same is true with the fighting sequences and choreography as much as possible. “

Inserting emotion into the action sequences is “quite complicated, after all,” she says, but it was a necessary part of the story. “I wanted to feel the emotional charge in the fights, especially for Bucky, who would you like to fight. He’s coming from a place where that fight for him is over. So it was very important for us to embrace this emotional space that he is in. ”