‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Directors Break Down That One-Take Hallway Fight — And Why It Looks So Different From Previous Seasons

Note: This story contains spoilers from “Daredevil: Born Again” Episode 1.

It’s not a proper season of “Daredevil” without a big one-take fight scene — from the iconic Season 1 hallway fight that started it all to the staggering 10-minute Season 3 prison escape set-piece, “Daredevil” has always put a premium on shooting the hell out of a fantastic fight.

Naturally, “Daredevil: Born Again” had to fulfill that promise, and the newly revived series doesn’t waste any time, delivering a big one-er during the pivotal 16-minute opening sequence that sets up the entire season. Directors and executive producers Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who helmed the first and final episodes of “Born Again” Season 1, told TheWrap that their personal style “weirdly jived pretty instantly” and celebrated the “creative freedom” offered to “be bold and to try to continue that tradition from the Netflix show of extremely bold visuals, bold lighting,” and “oners that seemed completely impossible.”

For Benson and Moorhead, their impossible oner depicts a critical, brutal moment in Matt Murdock’s life — the death of his best friend Foggy Nelson and the closest the devout Catholic hero has ever come to breaking his no-kill rule. Fitting for a moment that will change everything for the character, the sequence looks unlike any of the previous signature fight scenes.

“There’s kind of two things to talk about, in terms of using the camera language to back up that moment,” Moorhead explained. “One is, his sensory experience being this kind of dolly zoom that reminds you of vertigo, in a way. But really, the thing to talk about would be the one-take fight scene, right? Because it’s while Foggy is dying and dies, and also is when he commits this heinous act of, you know, throwing someone off a building and trying to kill them, and crossing a line that he’s never crossed before.”

“That scene, that moment, is probably the one thing that would most substantially ripple out into his life, for the rest of his life, shake his faith to the core and make him question his own place in the universe,” said Benson.

“We take it incredibly seriously,” Moorhead continued, “because when we joined the production, the decision had already been made that Foggy was going to die, which broke our hearts as fans. But we thought like, this is a show where the thing that makes it special, especially in the superhero genre, if you want to call it that, is that the violence is ugly and it has consequences, and it’s bloody.

“So if we’re going to say that, if we’re going to say that violence has consequences, then killing off a major character, and really feeling that, and having the grief of that ripple out through the entire show feels right, storytelling-wise. And so it’s not just something that happens in Episode 1 to shock you. It’s the whole season. It’s his entire arc, is recovering from this, if he does it all, because he commits this act that makes him think he’s no longer worthy of the Grace of God, and therefore no longer worthy of wearing the mask and and fighting crime, because he’s not even sure if he’s good anymore.”

Before making the leap to Marvel with “Moon Knight” and “Loki” Season 2, Benson and Moorhead got their start in another shared universe — their own. With a series of indie genre films that includes “Resolution,” “The Endless” and “Synchronicity,” Benson and Moorhead built a horror universe that hinges on a malevolent, unseen, god-like figure meddling in human lives. So if you’re a fan of their previous films, you might recognize some familiar DNA in the diefic camera movements they brought to their “Born Again” oner.

“If it was going to happen, it had to be done right, and we had to be like right there with him the entire time,” Moorhead explained. “The camera language of that is what we call being on ‘the train tracks of fate,’ where instead of throwing a camera on the shoulder and getting really close and feeling like action packed and heart-pounding, that kind of thing, instead the camera kind of has this robotic omniscience, a bit like a deity, like God, and it already knows what’s going to happen.

“It knows the future. It knows that it’s going to get up to that rooftop and this awful thing is going to happen. That’s why our oner has a very distinct strange look compared to other fight scene oners, is that we felt like the camera understood where it was going and what was going to happen, and was kind of dispassionately watching Matt ruin his life.”

The post ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Directors Break Down That One-Take Hallway Fight — And Why It Looks So Different From Previous Seasons appeared first on TheWrap.