If you’ve binged it, you know that Season 3 of Marvel’s Daredevil is a no-holds-barred superhero thrill ride unlike any we’ve seen in Netflix’s corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The new season even clears the high bar set by the very first installment of Daredevil back in 2015. Matt Murdock may be bloodied and exhausted all these years later, but his show still pulls no punches.

Much of the success of Season 3 comes from two sequences that had viewers on the edge of their couch cushions: Episode 4’s 11-minute one-shot jailbreak/prison riot sequence, and Episode 10’s nail-biting duel-almost-to-Karen’s-death between Daredevil and the madman soon to be known as Bullseye. Both those moments have one thing in common: director Alex Garcia Lopez.

Lopez joined Daredevil Season 3 and, along with a truly impressible roster of directors, executed the intensely personal vision of new showrunner Erik Oleson. That in-depth POV, that desire to get inside the heads of these characters fans have followed for so long, really came into focus on Lopez’s two episodes, “Blindsided” and “Karen.” During a phone interview, Decider got inside the head of the man who got in Matt Murdock and Karen Page’s heads to great effect. Here’s how Alex Garcia Lopez pulled off the definitive superhero TV scene of 2018, and how he turned images from the comics into flesh and blood action.

DECIDER: I want to start by talking about Episode 4, “Blindsided,” and the scene everyone’s talking about–that 11-minute-long oner of Matt Murdock battling his way out of a prison in the midst of a riot and attempt on his life. Why did you decide to shoot those pages of the script all in one shot?

ALEX GARCIA LOPEZ: When you first get the script on the first day of pre-production, you read the script and ideas start to come to you, right? Some good ideas, some terrible ideas–you just got to start writing down whatever pops into your head as you’re reading it. A lot of times those ideas, that gut feeling tends to be right, you know? I remember at that point I had obviously read episodes one through three and knew that Matt was in this very dark hole, this crisis of faith, this self-destructive journey pushing all his loved ones away and being very selfish. In a sense, his only mission was no longer to help people or his loved ones around him, but to just nail Fisk. That’s the only thing he cared about, and he’s physically not what he used to be. He’s falling apart, mentally he’s a mess.

All those things are driving him to kind of make bad decisions, right? He steals a wallet from Foggy, he goes to jail to get this name, he’s not thinking straight in many ways and it comes back to bite him. Fisk has got his fingers in many pies and the prison is one of them. Matt gets drugged and now he has to escape. All that claustrophobia, all that anxiety, all of that felt right for a oner because that’s usually what oners create for an audience. They put the audience at the edge of their seat, because literally you’re going, “Oh my god, when is this going to stop? What’s happening?” It really puts you and the shoes of the protagonist, which is something that Erik [Oleson], the showrunner wanted to do the entire season, very subjective storytelling.

So it felt right on every level. It felt right in the sense of the emotional needs of where Matt was and of how desperate he was going to be, not only to get out and be alive but suddenly convince the Albanians to work with him before they stab him, and once he has that piece of information, to get out. So on an emotional arc level it felt right, and obviously this is Daredevil and this is a superhero show. It also felt right because this is what this show is kind of known for.

Was there ever a time in the process of planning this oner out that you thought about hiding cuts just to make it easier? Because it’s all one take, which hardly ever happens in oners nowadays.

With Chris LaVasseur, the cinematographer, and Jeff [Dutemple], the cameraman, I told them, “It’s wide, let’s stay wide.” We never get too close, because then people will argue, “Oh they used a pan” or “They cheated it.” We used a wide lens and there is no doubt at any point that we’re not cutting it. So that was the original approach, and then we started gaining more and more confidence as we approached the filming. Every team, especially Gary [Stearns] the stunt coordinator and his team, [Chris] Brewster who plays [Charlie Cox’s] stunt double, were rehearsing every day and filming in the process and showing it to me. The goal was just to do it.

Now obviously we had an emergency back-up plan. When we came up with the idea, when he beats up the guards the alarms start going off, the prison starts going into a riot. We wanted to stylize it with the red lights blinking, red and darkness, knowing that if we had to, that blackness could get us out of jail…no pun intended.

What ended up happening was, after we got it and watched it and it was right, Erik [Oleson] and Chris [LaVasseur], when they were editing at the end they wound up boosting the brightness when it goes to dark so that you can see that we’re still in the cut, that there’s not a single moment of doubt.

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When we talked to Charlie Cox about shooting the scene, he mentioned that you thought you had it really early on with take two, but you stuck it out and ended up getting the perfect one. How did you know when you got the take?

It was weird because one day we rehearsed with every department, rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. The next day we started very early around 6 or 7 a.m., and the first take we did.. it worked! Beginning to end, Matt got all the way to the cab and passed out. That was a huge confidence boost for everyone. It was literally 7 a.m. and it was really cold in New York and everyone was like, “Oh my god, this is going to work.” If that didn’t happen, I don’t know what it would have done for morale. It was a huge boost.

And then, in typical fashion, then they all went pear-shaped. Take two, three, four, and five I think were all false-starts. Then we got one which was very good, which was take two as Charlie mentioned, and then we broke for lunch. We came back, we spoke during lunch and there were these tiny little tweaks that we wanted to improve in the scene with Matt and the Albanians just in a pure performance way. We came back and everyone felt super confident and we did it and that was the one that was take seven I believe.

As if that jail brawl wasn’t enough, you also directed Episode 10. The episode is half a Karen Page origin story and half a no-holds-barred showdown between Daredevil and Bullseye in a church. That fight specifically has some really next-level Easter eggs from the comics. Specifically, the episode takes two panels that are horrific for Karen Page in the comics and it flips them. How directly did the comics inspire you, and how did you work in those references into the fight?

That was all to the credits of Erik and his writing team. I had the comic [Daredevil #5, 1999] and when I read the script, I went and looked at the comic and, as you said, they flipped it. [They did that] knowing that when people watch this episode titled “Karen,” and then it was going to end up she’s hiding in the church, everyone is thinking, “This is it for her. What a nice way of killing her. We give her a backstory and then kill her in the church [like in the comics.” Then [the writers] turn that upside down and she actually ends up saving the day.

So that story and character twist is all credit to Erik and his team. I love the comic, so I told Chris, the cinematographer, we should make the church red. In the comic book there are moments were the church goes really red–like when she dies, when she gets the baton in her heart, it’s just like a red frame. I was just like, “That’s what we need to do.” Obviously, you step away from the slightly grounded approach to the show and you just have fun. It’s that thin line between when you spend time with characters on an emotional level, when you do things that feel grounded, and then when you have fun because people want to see those moments too. As you see in the cut it’s a red church. It doesn’t make sense in the real world but it’s Daredevil vs. Bullseye fighting for Karen’s life. So yes, let’s go red.

So it’s also interesting because the second half of the episode is so red, but the second half of the episode is so cold. I’m picturing like greys and like cool blues, how did you go about marrying those two halves of the episode? They are such different halves but they are both so about Karen.

So that was again done with on purpose. We spoke with Chris the cinematographer. When I read the episode her sort of heartbreak, her sort of loneliness in this small town, working for that dying diner. Her hopelessness she feels and how alone, and she’s with this deadbeat sort of a character. To me it was just screaming Winter’s Bone and Mud, all these sort of great indie films. You know Fargo and so on where it’s cold, the small town plays a big character. It was muddy and snowy it’s horrible, she’s got this beat up truck. Blues and cold temperature and the camera were used to really push how she felt at that point in her life. Knowing that we were then going to cross back to reality and it’s going to be super juxtapose with this strong red.

I called Deborah Ann Woll the show’s secret weapon in my Season 3 review, and Episode 10 really proves that. What was it like transitioning from working on “Blindsided,” a really Daredevil-centric episode, and “Karen,” which focused on a character that’s been a supporting player up until this point?

[Deborah Ann Woll]’s a darling. She’s super talented, she’s a professional, so she brought so much excitement and she was ready for this. Its Season 3 and she really wanted to kind of spend some time with the characters. She was game from day one. So we got to do something which I always love to do, and sometimes it doesn’t happen with these schedules, we got to rehearse a lot. Deborah and her whole family and Will Stout, who played Todd–her whole story, we rehearsed for two days trying to nail the characters’ relationships, like how she made that journey from being with Todd and finding solace in him at the beginning to how that very quickly went into, after 15-20 minutes or so, her shooting him to save her brother. How do we make that feel very organic, and real, and honest?

For example, when Todd pushes her brother outside of the truck, because the brother kind of threatens him about the drug-dealing, all those little things we talked about a lot because they’re important for her journey to feel truthful. Then to shoot Todd, to get out of there with her bleeding younger brother, then that heartbreaking line that she says to him as she’s driving, “Why did you do that?” And then he says, “I lost mom I don’t want to lose you too.” She looks at him for a moment and that obviously kind of instigates the crash, flips the car, and boom–he’s dead. Deborah was amazing, she had great ideas from day one. We just rehearsed and got to play seven to eight days in New York, and it felt magical. It was great.



I feel quite lucky that I get to work on things that I’m passionate about. I always try to be picky with my projects and my work. When I was a kid, my favorite superhero was Batman because there was this darkness to him, this troubled past, slightly abandoned child. And I think Daredevil shares a lot of similarities with that, this kind of lone wolf that’s constantly straddling this thin line between doing what’s right and totally doing the wrong thing, getting the people around him that he loves in danger, and the relationships that fall apart because of his decisions. I think that constant darkness, fighting his own demons and sometimes doing the wrong things is what I always like, characters that have to make really tough decisions are what draws me. I think this season when Erik told me what his plans were for it to go really dark with him, I thought it was just amazing… genius.

Stream Marvel's Daredevil Season 3 Episode 4 "Blindsided" on Netflix

Stream Marvel's Daredevil Season 3 Episode 10 "Karen" on Netflix