Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo turned heads last year with his striking work in director David Lowery’s fantasy “The Green Knight,” so it should come as no surprise that Palermo was behind similarly striking work on Marvel’s Disney+ series “Moon Knight.”
Palermo has been making waves on the indie scene over the last few years with work on films like “A Ghost Story” and “You’re Next,” and it’s precisely that connection that put him on the radar of “Moon Knight” directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.
“I was invited by Aaron and Justin to do an interview, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I believe I was recommended by David Lowery to them,” Palermo said of his “Green Knight” director in an interview with TheWrap. “And then I think they’d seen ‘You’re Next’ and a bunch of other things and we hit it off quite well. I interviewed and then only a few weeks later I was on a plane to Budapest and beginning this journey.”
That journey involved pulling Marvel fully into the horror realm, with Palermo shooting the show’s fourth episode in which Grant (Isaac) and Layla (May Calamawy) descend into a tomb and come toe-to-toe with the undead.
“That was a fun, very genre-hopping episode of being kind of ‘Indiana Jones’ and then being a horror movie,” Palermo recalled, adding that while he looked at “Indiana Jones” and the Stephen Sommers “Mummy” film for inspiration, he also looked at other shows and films to discover what he didn’t want to do.
“It’s often I need to find things that I don’t want to do, then I can position myself against it. Sometimes when I look at something that’s really successful, it’s hard for me to even figure out why it’s successful. It’s not always about lighting, there’s other alchemy involved that’s hard to really put your finger on. But when you look at something that’s maybe overlit or too studio lit, that’s kind of where I could say, ‘Oh, that’s what I don’t want to do.’”
In collaboration with Benson and Moorhead, Palermo said they pushed the boundaries of how spooky the episode could get.
“For us, it was about how scary can we make it? How horror-ish can we make it? How much darkness are we allowed to do? How much violence are we allowed to show? I’m glad that those jumpscares work.”
So were Disney or Marvel nervous about the level of horror that they’d be bringing to “Moon Knight?” Palermo says their attitude was to shoot it and decide in post-production if there was anything that needed to be pulled back.
“They had a really interesting perspective on that stuff in that it was just kind of like, let’s just shoot it all and let’s figure it out and see how violent or how scary we’re allowed to be, and then find it in editorial,” Palermo said, adding, “For me, it’s always what’s off camera that’s the grossest and scariest. So our guidance from them was just to shoot it and we’ll sort it out later and figure out how much blood is acceptable and how scary we can go.”
On the flip side, Palermo delighted in crafting the fake movie that Grant is shown watching in the asylum. “I was just cackling all day,” he said. “It was really a breath of fresh air in the middle of a very long, very hard production.”
So after getting a taste of a Marvel production, is Palmero game for another go-around?
“I had such a great time working with Marvel and they were so supportive and complimentary, if the right feature project came up, I’d absolutely be interested,” he said. “Right now I’m exploring other things after having done a Marvel project, but I would love to return. For me, as a cinematographer, it’s always about the director. Am I excited about him or her and am I inspired by their vision for the project? That’s ultimately what it comes down to at the end.”
“Moon Knight” is now streaming on Disney+.
