Having now reached the end ofThe Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it’s easier to appreciate the immensity of what the production led by directorKari Skoglandwas able to complete. The six-episode series took MCU fans all around the world, from the Louisiana coast to European cities tofictional hives of scum and villainy, for a character-focused story about Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) working with Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to take on issues beyond simply stopping intergalactic threats.
On top of the normal production issues any TV show faces,Falconalso had to take on the complications that come with production shutting down due to a pandemic. But as Skogland explained to Collider in this one-on-one interview, the months of shutdown didn’t really change the story, mostly because it would have been impossible given the way the production schedule worked.
This means that, according to her, the original plot remained relatively intact — meaning there’s no pandemic-related plotline on the cutting room floor. But below, Skogland does reveal whatdidget added to the show when they returned to finish production, whether they at any point planned to reveal the identity of the mysterious Power Broker before the final episode, and how the final shot of the series ended up being a happy accident as well as one of the first things they shot.
Collider: So, in between production getting shut down because of Covid and your return to finishing up things, were there any dramatic story changes that happened in that time?
KARI SKOGLAND: No. We started shooting in October of 2019 and we had shot about 75 percent [before production shut down]. So we really knew the story we were telling for sure. So when we shut down, we only had about 25 percent left to shoot. So I think the only story changes we made were small character tweaks. We had discovered that we really wanted to know Karli a bit more. So I think we added a scene between her and Dovich, where they got to just talk about what it was like to take the serum. I wanted to feel them and their history just a little bit and get a bit more inside how they were thinking and feeling in that moment. So it was small things like that where we were able to kind of sharpen our pencil. But in terms of the big themes that we were already talking about, we were absolutely just on the same track.
I think also we might’ve added or tweaked the scene with Lamar and John Walker, because we had discovered through the process of it all that we really wanted to know… we wanted to dig into what John Walker was thinking. And I think we had it a slightly different way. And so we tweaked that scene to reflect what we had discovered through the process of shooting John Walker and who he was and how much he, in many ways, was just an earnest guy trying to do the right thing, but didn’t have the right tools, the right DNA of him as a soul. We wanted to deepen that conversation with him and Lamar, so we went inside that a little bit. These are the small tweaks we did — it was all character-based and that was it.
So, the conspiracy theories about how the original plot involved a pandemic are totally not correct.
SKOGLAND: No. Yeah, you can debunk that.
After the finale came out, there was the newsthat there may be aCaptain America 4featuring Sam. How much of that did you know about during production? And how did you have to accommodate for anything in relation to that? Or is it just completely something you had no connection with?
SKOGLAND: I still don’t know anything about it. I don’t even know that the headline’s true. So I have no idea about any of that.
Something that was really fascinating about the finale was, of course, Sharon Carter getting revealed as the Power Broker. Was that a reveal that always felt like it was going to happen in the last episode for you? Or were there talks about moving it up?
SKOGLAND: Well, that was another thing we played around with a little bit — where to do that reveal. Because what’s great about the whole Marvel process is allowing creative experiments to happen. So really through that editing time that we had while we were between starting up again, we were able to experiment with where that wanted to be because we had most of the episodes. So we could take a look at moving it around.
So then when after we shot, we moved it around again a couple of times, and at one point we had sort of a flashback thing where we tried different ways, different perspectives to look at it. And then we stuck with the story. We have a head editor was a guy named Jeff Ford who has done a number of Marvel shows and movies. And he had sort of a new perspective on where it might sit the most impactfully, and he was terrific at extracting the moments and helping us figure it out. So that was certainly something we experimented with quite a bit.
And then when we finally landed, it just seemed to be perfect. But that’s the process of experimentation. You have to go around. Sometimes you come full circle. In that case, we actually came full circle, but it seemed to fit better the second time around.
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Were you block shooting or were you shooting episode by episode?
SKOGLAND: No, we were block shooting. So that’s why I’m saying we couldn’t change our story. We’d blocked shot the show.
Was the big party scene at the end of Episode 6 shot pre-Covid?
SKOGLAND: Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. We tracked that back. That was actually in the first week of shooting back in October of 2019. And it was sort of an impromptu thing. We had planned a much bigger version of it and then we sort of scaled it back a bit. And I thought, well, let’s put a community together and kind of jazz it up a bit. So it became much more impromptu, and it was so great because there was probably 50 or 60 people there. But each one of them had… actually one guy could play the thing. Like “I can play the spoons,” one guy said. So it actually was exactly what you see, sort of an impromptu party, which is what it needed to feel like.
Was it at all weird to start production essentially with the big finale scene?
SKOGLAND: Of course. In fact, we shot the end scene, the very end with [Sam and Bucky] together — we probably shot that on day four. We block shot and that we could have only done that if I was directing the whole six, which is the beauty of having one person authoring the six hours is that you are able to be quite nimble. You go to a location, you shoot it out and then you move on. So it is quite practical. There’s a practicality to it.
That final shot of Sam and Bucky — was there ever more to it, like more dialogue in the script, or was it always intended as this very clean, pure thing?
SKOGLAND: Well, it was inspired in the moment, actually. I saw this great sunset and there we were in this great setting. And I thought “Let’s grab this.” But I didn’t know whether it would stick because it was quite early on to be shooting the end shot of the show. I typically come into any project knowing what the opening shot is and what the end shot is. And I plan for that. Having said that, it never ends up being whatever it was I planned for, because something else happens. And so it morphs and changes and we draw from the footage other things.
That one, funny enough, stuck and it was never planned for. It was just me going, “Oh, let’s just do this. It looks great. And it might be an interesting moment.” We all just fell in love with it, because it was so genuine, but it truly was more of us kicking off the adventure in the moment than finalizing it, and I fully expected to shoot something else. But those are the lovely, happy accidents of production. It’s always a path of discovery.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldieris streaming now on Disney+.
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