‘Daredevil: Born Again’ finale directors discuss ‘the beautiful, multilayered poetry’ of Daredevil, Kingpin, and Bullseye
There’s a discernible bookend quality to season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again, thanks to the creative reboot that happened over the course of production. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead directed the final two episodes of the season, as well as the premiere, giving an overarching arc that carried through smaller stories like the St. Patrick’s Day bank robbery or the hunt for the serial killer Muse (Hunter Doohan).
“The big things that we did were changing the tone a little bit, into something a bit darker,” Moorhead tells Gold Derby. “By the way, when I say ‘we,’ I mean the two of us, but also of course Marvel and Dario [Scardapane], our showrunner. We also made it more serialized, stretching arcs through every episode. And amusingly, everybody was missing ‘oner’ fights. So we got tasked with being able to bring a oner into the universe, which we would've fought to do anyways.”
Moorhead is referring to the brutal one-take fight scenes, inspired by Park Chan Wook’s cult film Oldboy, that defined the action of the previous Daredevil series. Benson and Moorhead began this season with such a battle, in which Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Charlie Cox) tried his best to kill Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter/Bullseye (Wilson Bethel) to avenge the murder of Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson). In the earlier version of the show, Foggy’s death occurred offscreen, but Benson and Moorhead knew that as “one of the defining events of Matt Murdock’s life,” viewers really needed to see it.
“It would change everything for him,” Moorhead says about Foggy’s death. “It’s not just because he's sad about his friend, but he did another thing that night where he tried to kill someone. In doing so, he crossed the line and it made him feel like he just didn't have the privilege anymore of wearing the suit. So he actually put on a different mask. He puts on the mask of ‘I'm only Matt Murdock,’ which is a lie. He talked so much in the Netflix Daredevil about ‘letting the devil out.’ In this season, he's got the devil inside for a little while, and we have to know why. We wanted to hit that part really hard.”
Despite his best efforts, Daredevil didn’t kill Bullseye, and the assassin was sent to prison instead. But he escaped in the penultimate episode, and the finale proper began with a cliffhanger in which Bullseye tried to kill Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Vincent D’Onofrio) and his wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer) as vengeance for the latter hiring him to kill Foggy and then leaving him to rot. In a big surprise, Matt threw himself in front of Fisk, taking a bullet for his greatest enemy. It’s a new wrinkle to their complicated relationship that neither saw coming, and they react instinctively.
“There's this beautiful multilayered poetry to Matt taking that bullet for Fisk, with a lot of different ways to look at it,” Benson says. “One thing is said outright in the episode, when Dex asks Matt, ‘isn’t that what a good man does, defend his worst enemy?’ It's a really beautiful sentiment, especially given how the episode ends. But there's something deeper here between Matt and Fisk that Aaron and I were constantly trying to capture in the visual language of the show: They’re obsessed with each other. Obsession comes in many forms, but think about that first episode. Matt is on a date, potentially experiencing falling in love with someone, and Fisk is dealing with profound marital issues and also has just become mayor of New York City. And where are they at the end of that episode? Obsessing over each other. So there's many layers of pathos and poetry to Matt jumping in front of that bullet. There’s literally a love story there, in a weird kind of way.”
But Bullseye plays an important part in that scene too, as the man who fired the bullet. The original Daredevil series ended with a three-way battle among Daredevil, Kingpin, and Bullseye, and that triangle is shaping up to be a big part of Born Again as well. Benson and Moorhead wanted to convey that visually. So Daredevil is always red, Kingpin has his white suit, and now Bullseye is bathed in blue light. The latter came from on-set experimentation.
“Our gaffer Charlie [Grubbs] wanted to show us something when we got to the prison set for the first thing we were shooting with Bullseye in Episode 8,” Moorhead says. “We’re in love with his lighting and geek out about it all the time. So even though we were just in a daytime hallway, Charlie hit ‘party mode’ and it became a rave. That ability to change the light was just so exciting that we thought, ‘Let's just dim the lights blue for one take and see how it goes.’ As soon as we actually did it, there was so much oohing and ahhing that we decided that this was now Bullseye’s thing, our way to focus into his psyche.”
After the failed assassination attempt against the Fisks, Bullseye vanishes into the wind. The resolution of his tension with both Daredevil and Kingpin will have to wait until the next season of Born Again. But hopefully viewers have now learned to pay attention to Benson and Moorhead’s visual storytelling to learn about how the characters feel, beyond just what they say. “Something that wasn't in the script but was incredibly important to us was that when Matt gets shot, there's a moment where he falls into Fisk's arms,” Moorhead says. “He doesn't know what to do but to catch him. It’s a split second in slow motion, because of course he then just dumps in. But there's a moment of disbelief in which these guys are actually holding each other for the first time ever, and that is symbolic of their entire relationship."