Two hundred pages. The document that Mohamed Diab (clash, The women of bus 678) prepared with his wife, producer Sarah Gohar, and presented to the bonzes of Marvel to convince them that he was the ideal director for the series Moon Knight, was 200 pages. We are not talking here about a pitch elevator ! The process was still worth it since the Egyptian filmmaker found himself at the controls of four of the six episodes of the sixth series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, whose broadcast begins on March 30 on Disney +.
“The document presented, mainly through photos, the locations where the filming would take place, the development of the characters, the music, the editing, the references on how we would shoot the action scenes. It covered everything. So much so that when we finished it, I said to Sarah: “If we don’t have this job, something is wrong in this world”. “Two years later, I can say that the series is exactly like what we had imagined”, indicated the director in an interview.
Less known than other members of the Marvel team, Moon Knight – created in 1975 by Douglas Moench and Don Perlin – is, in civilian life, Steven Grant. In the television adaptation, he lives in London, works in a museum shop where Egyptian history takes up a lot of space. Unlike the Spider-Man and Iron Man of this world, he doesn’t know he has a secret identity. In his head, he suffers from memory loss, he wakes up elsewhere than where he slept, sometimes badly damaged. In reality, he shares his body with Marc Spector, a mercenary who happens to be the human avatar of Khonshu, Egyptian god of the Moon and revenge.
And there, put quotation marks to “reality”. Because… what’s right, what’s wrong in that? Is Steven’s body really at the service of forces beyond him or does the man suffer from dissociative personality disorder? From the outside, the series thus looks like a mixture of Indiana Jones and Venom. Until we fall into something completely different. What is sympathetic, full of humor and adventure is then imbued with horror and psychological drama.
This is what spoke to Mohamed Diab, known for his independent films that play the card of intimacy, close to humans and humanity. We are far from the great “Marvelian” deployment. Except that in his view, one does not prevent the other: “It is possible to present an intimate story in which large stock occurs. It was by making this point that he convinced Oscar Isaac to get on the boat while the actor, after Dunes and the Star Wars, wanted and needed small scale. The quadruple character he embodies here — with his face uncovered, he plays Steven Grant and Marc Spector; and, under the moon-white costumes, Mr. Knight and Moon Knight—offers him the possibility of being vulnerable and shy, drooling and violent, funny or sensitive, invulnerable or disoriented. Oh ! And, in addition to playing with body attitude, he offered to change accents depending on the character in control of his body.
Filmed in Hungary, Jordan and Atlanta, Moon Knight also allows Mohamed Diab to offer viewers an Egypt… truly Egyptian: “This story is rooted in Egyptology, it takes place in the mythology of ancient Egypt and in Egypt today. However, most of the time, on the screen, we are portrayed in a way that we call orientalism, that is to say, shown in an exotic and dehumanized way. It’s funny, but it’s also hurtful. »
Still, the filmmaker wants to believe that he won the bet (and the production) “because I was the right director for this project, not just for my origins”, he concludes with fervor. He knew that the Moon Knight’s fate would not be handed to him on a silver platter, but he was willing to work hard, very hard, to win the moon.
They said (at a press conference)…