Director Alex Garcia Lopez helmed two episodes of the absolutely stellar Daredevil season 3—the best Marvel Netflix season there is, actually—and the challenges of each couldn't have been more different. His first, episode four ("Blindsided"), contains the biggest action set-piece in the small-screen MCU's history, an 11-minute one-take brawl inside a prison that sees a drugged Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) fending off waves of convicts and prison guards while also enlisting the help of an Albanian gang, When the director return to the series for episode ten, "Karen", showrunner Erik Oleson tasked him with bringing things way, way down, for a moody, introspective flashback to Karen Page's (Deborah Ann Woll) violent small-town past.

In this one-on-one phone interview, Lopez spoke to Collider about designing that massive, 50-stuntperson prison fight, the most frustrating false starts, the euphoria of finally getting it right, the tone he wanted from Daredevil's first flashback episode, and much more.

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Image via Netflix

COLLIDER: When you first find out that the plan is to do this massive, one-take fight scene, what’s the first step to making that a reality?

ALEX GARCIA LOPEZ: It was a few steps, because it wasn’t written that way. Lewaa Nasserdeen was the writer and wrote it like this huge 12-page scene. Once I read it I fell in love with the idea of doing it as a one-er, to feel the anxiety and desperation and the slightly almost suicidal journey that Matt is in. I pitched it to the powers that be, and once everybody really liked the idea, there was still, like, is it possible? The first thing we did was to go to the jail—it was like the day before Christmas, actually, or two days before Christmas—and me and [Gary Ray Stearns], our stunt coordinator and his team, and Christopher LaVasseur the cinematographer, the three of us we went out there, the whole morning, just walking through the whole space. Trying to come up with some sort of plan, an idea of the journey, having in mind that there would be some Texas switches involved for Charlie and [stunt double Chris Brewster], and also for the camera and sound man. So the first big thing for the three main components—stunt coordinator and the camera department, who in many ways acted like stuntmen themselves—for them to see if it was logistically doable. We walked away after that three, four hours brainstorm session feeling really confident.

And then it’s that thing of like when you got a great team around you and you throw an idea out there, and then it’s just fantastic when everyone ups their game and gets excited and they start throwing back better ideas. Trying to increase it and make it better. That’s what happened. Gary and his team were so inspired by the huge challenge to do this one-er with I think it was like 50 stuntmen. He went away and they started rehearsing, he would show me the clips, the videos of them starting to practice it. First, it was Brewster alone, then the moment when everyone got super excited was when they did the whole thing. Without Charlie, but they did the whole journey, filming on like an iPhone. Purely just on a stunt technical way. And they felt very confident that they were going to be able to do it.

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Image via Netflix

It’s obviously this massive, impressive thing on a purely technical level, but what thing specifically were you thinking about to make sure it was also character-driven?

LOPEZ: Totally. And that was something that, from day one when I spoke to Erik, he told me that—this was before they even started filming episode one—his whole idea for the season was to step away from what season 2 did in the sort of grand fighting scale and bring it to a much more grounded and more visceral and subjective level. With Matt, or Fisk, or Foggy, whoever was leading that particular episode, to be wiith them as they struggled or had to choose high stakes. When I read my episode...clearly Matt is going through this slightly self-destructive journey, mea culpa style, where he separates himself from his friends, he’s trying to reinvent himself, he’s almost on a suicidal journey.

And he’s making bad choices. He gets to the prison and he’s not fully fit, he’s still hurting physically and mentally, and gets to the prison and thinks this is a great idea. Obviously, it comes back to bite him. So, to be in that moment with him where he’s drugged, but also physically not what he used to be, when he’s desperate to get this information from the Albanians, everything he’s trying to do is not well-thought out, really. His desperation and anxiety to get Fisk, it all felt like we do scenes as a one-er, all that anxiety, all that claustrophobia, it comes automatically because there’s no cuts. I think the audience automatically starts to feel on the edge of your seat. You’re going, “Oh my God, what’s happening?” You keep pushing that. When I pitched the idea to Erik, he was like, “Right, when we get to the moment with the Albanians, that’s when we cut right?” I was like, “No, no, no, that’s where you keep going, man.” That was a four-page scene, and in that moment Charlie—and Matt but definitely Charlie—he’s going to be exhausted. The drug is kicking in, he has to defend himself before the Albanians stab him, he has to convince the Albanians to team up with him because Fisk is the common enemy. He’s going to be out of breath, he’s going to be exhausted, spilling blood. If we continue that as a one-er we’re really going to feel it, we’re going to be holding our breath as well. That’s why the one-er, yes, on a technical and entertaining level was going to be there, but I felt it was all coinciding with what Matt felt.

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Image via Netflix

What was the furthest you made it through that turned out to be a false start? Is there any time that sticks out where you were like, “We were so close!”  

LOPEZ: It was funny, because we rehearse the whole day and then we come back early—because this was January so you’re fighting daylight—we started very early, around 6 AM, and funny enough the first take we did we went through the whole thing. He got into the taxi and I called "cut". Now, there were some little hiccups here and there, but we got it in the can. I think that gave a huge boost of confidence to everyone. Then, typical fashion, the next three or four takes were massive failures. We bumped the camera at the beginning. They were all false starts. Pretty much in the same area, that first office scene which is a very tricky stunt coordination. There are two Texas switches there, there’s a lot of fighting. All it takes is one misstep, boom, you hit the camera, or you just miss a hit and that’s it. You have to start again. So slowly after three or four false takes, that confidence we had after the first take started to fade away and we were on like take five and suddenly everyone was like, “Oh my God, we’re approaching the lunch break.” Then we did this sixth take and that was great. It worked, the whole thing felt fantastic. We cut to lunch and there were some little tweaks that me and Charlie wanted to do, and also the actor that was playing the Albanian gang member, just little thing we wanted to perfect more on a purely performance, character level. So we said, “Let’s go one more. We can do this now.” We did it, and that was the final take. So I think it was take seven that ended up in the show.

Can you describe the reaction when you look around and say “Okay, I think we got it”?

LOPEZ: It was weird. I yelled “cut” and we had all these huge monitors in this space in the jail for playback purposes. Everyone ran back, we had like six or seven monitors so everyone could watch it, and we played it back and when it finished playing it was just completely euphoria. Everyone was screaming and hugging each other. And for about five, ten minutes I totally went blank. Almost like everything went a little bit blurred. It was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe we actually did it.” I remember I was hugging the writer, a great guy, very talented, and we were hugging each other and we were both wearing the actual orange jumpsuits. I actually still have it in my office. But we were just euphoric. It was a lot of love. That was my last day of filming for that episode, so it was a nice way of going out.

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Image via Netflix

You also directed episode ten, “Karen”, which not only doesn’t feel like anything else in this season, it almost doesn’t feel like a Marvel Netflix show. What type of tone were you trying to strike with that?

LOPEZ: Yeah, and that was all done on purpose. Erik called me and said, “I want you to do episode ten, it’s a completely standalone, independent episode. It’s finally Karen’s backstory. Tamara Becher wrote it.” A great writer. I read it and automatically in my head, I saw that cold, small New England-ish town. Typical small town that has fallen apart. Slightly derelict. Very quickly, Winter’s Bone came to mind. To have this very grounded, kind of sad, broken dreams approach. Very blue. Very cold camera temperature. We wanted to keep everything very still and let the camera be static and move very soft and only when Karen was moving. Just letting the great writing and great acting do its work. Letting her story breathe. I also wanted to show a lot of her world so we shot a lot of exteriors and we shot a lot of mood moments.

It was funny, when we got there a week before filming to the town we shot in, it’s quite actually a very picturesque town. It’s a really cute little ski town in upstate New York. It had just snowed, like two feet, and it looked beautiful. And I was like, “Nooo! What are we going to do? It looks perfect.” Then thankfully, the location manager found this quote-unquote dark side of the town. Crossing the train tracks. There was this one main street where we filmed a lot of the episode where it was kind of derelict. Then luckily, it rained, and that’s what I wanted. It rained and created that disgusting, dirty, muddy, gushy in between mud and snow, which just looks really horrible. I think that contributed a lot to the mood, to the style, to her broken dreams, being stuck in that one horse town. Then Jeff Nichols, he’s one of the great American directors at the moment, he did Mud and Take Shelter, he used a composer named [David Wingo] a lot, which we used a lot for references and the mood. Very minimalistic and heartbreaking music. So that was the idea, to go back to Karen’s backstory until boom, we jump back and there’s another huge fight at the Church.

It’s interesting that in Karen’s backstory there is violence, but it’s so different from your typical Daredevil, comic book violence. It’s just real, domestic violence. What’s it like to jump back and forth between those two styles?

LOPEZ: Totally. I was brought up in the British system of filmmaking. Rehearsals are a big thing and I’m a big fan of rehearsals. Deborah and the whole team was up for it, so we rehearsed quite a lot. We talked about the characters. We talked about exactly that. How much do they push each other? How much do they shove each other when Karen’s brother (Jack DiFalco) comes out of the truck. The brother says like, “I’ll call the police on you” and Todd (Will Stout) pushes him. We wanted to feel all that crescendo to the point where she grabs the gun, make it feel very real and grounded. In that way, you just boil it down to very simple blocking. You don’t try and go very flashy. You let the great actors do their work. You’re there to support them and capture it in a very simplistic manner. When Todd is beating up the brother it’s very simple filmmaking. You try and make it what it would feel like when a fight happens. It’s dirty, it’s chaotic, it’s scary. Her reactions, right? It’s all about the reactions, how she reacts, screaming and crying that her brother is being beaten up and therefore how she has to make a decision to grab a gun and shoot Todd. You boil it down to very basic human reaction and the camera just rolls.

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Image via Netflix