Interview: ‘Ms. Marvel’ cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin talks working in Bangkok, setting up superpower fight scenes and what inspired him on set

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There are many pieces that have to fit together for a television series to work properly. The director, the set decorator, the sound mixer and many others work together to bring to life some of the most interesting stories that audiences have ever seen. All of these jobs are important, but close to the very top of importance in jobs is the Director of Photography, who works with the director to create interesting frame compositions and set up coverage of shots for the best ways to capture different scenes.

This is no different on the set of Disney+’s Ms. Marvel, which incorporates superpowers and fight scenes into the narrative, making the cinematographer’s job slightly more complicated as they have to find balance in covering these kinds of scenes to provide realism to them. There were three cinematographer’s that worked on the series (Carmen Cabana, Robrecht Heyvaert and Jules O’Loughlin), each of them doing two episodes each (out of six).

I recently spoke to Jules O’Loughlin about the two episodes he worked on (episodes four and five), what it was like working on a Marvel tv series, how he prepped for different scenes and what it was like shooting in Bangkok.

Tyler Doster: What brought you on to a Marvel show and specifically what about Ms. Marvel had you interested?

Jules O’Loughlin: It came to my agent in, I think it was November of 2020, the year COVID hit us. And my agent said projects had come [in]. “It’s a Marvel project. It’s a TV series. Are you interested?” That’s like, “Well, yeah. Sure. It’s Marvel. Let’s have a look at what it is.” There were two things that really interested me in the project. One was that our superhero Kamala was going to be the first main Muslim superhero. Not only was she Muslim, but she was a girl and her heritage was Pakistani. And I had been to Pakistan some years before. I loved the country, super interesting people. But I just thought the combination of that, an American born 17-year old, Muslim, this just sounds awesome. What a great recipe.

So that initially got me interested, but then it was, “Okay, who’s the director?” And of course it’s six episodes, three DPs, three directors, and the director was Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. And so I had a look at Sharmeen, at that stage I wasn’t familiar with her documentary work. And the more I kind of delved into who Sharmeen was, the more I went, “Wow, this person sounds amazing. I have to work with this director.” She was a very, very kind of strong social background with supporting women in Pakistan. All her documentary work or most of it were about women in Pakistan. She just sounded like a powerhouse of, not only a human being, but two Oscars, seven Emmys for her documentary work. So immediately I was like, “Well, I’ve got to work with this person.” So they were the two things. The character… Of course, Marvel because it’s like, “Wow, it’s a Marvel show.” Absolutely, I’m interested, given that Marvel [has been] such a huge part of the zeitgeist for the last 10 years. But it was the character and it was the director.

TD: What is different about working on a Marvel show than in anything you’ve done before?

JOL: Well, superheroes. I’ve never worked with superheroes before. And I guess it’s the Marvel family. It was really interesting because you think you’re going into this massive machine where it’s almost like this massive corporation. It’s going to be all singing, all dancing, bells, and whistles, and toys. And it’s not that at all, it’s a much more intimate experience. And I’m talking about Kevin Feige and Victoria Alonso down. Those guys are really quite intimately involved. And then we have our producers, Sana Amanat and Jenna Berger and the whole… If I can call it a machine, it’s not really a machine, it’s a family. The family feels intimate. It felt much more intimate than I thought it was going to be.

And it wasn’t actually a machine. It’s these people who travel with Marvel, who are Marvel, Kevin and Victoria, and this great network of people from the colorists to storyboard artists, to a whole range of people that are part of that Marvel family. And then we kind of slot in, Sharmeen as the director, myself, and all our crew, and we become part of that family. So it was much different to what I expected to be. I guess it was like having this fantastic group of people who were like family and friends that you’re a part of.

TD: How did you prepare to shoot scenes where there were superpowers in them? How do you get that kind of coverage?

JOL: So Kamala’s superpowers, she has this telekinetic ability. She creates this energy, which in a way crystallizes or has structure. So it’s kind of energy and it’s form, it’s physical, and it emits light. That’s the big thing for me is that this power that she has is light emitting. So for me, I immediately have to think about the fact that I need interactive light on set. So the first thing is Sharmeen and I storyboard the sequence. When we talk about the sequence, we have the shot list, then we have it storyboarded. And then from there, we talk to VFX Super, Nordin [Rahhali], and then that is sent away and it’s a previs [previsualization, the visualizing of complex scenes in a movie before filming.]. The previs comes back, we talk about, it’s refined and then you kind of just keep working on that until you have a structure for a scene.

And so within that, I then start working on how do I get interactive light into the coverage of that scene. So even though VFX is a big part of it, I tried as much as possible to look after the financial side and the time side of those VFX shots. I couldn’t put big lighting instruments into all those shots. I could occasionally put something in there, which I knew was going to be painted out. So I had to come up with methodology in which to show the interactive light of her power. And then, we had to design some certain lighting instruments that is part of her hand or behind something, LED ribbons. So that’s how those VFX sequences came about and that’s how we did them.

TD: How do you prepare for coverage of fight scenes?

JOL: Well, once again, it starts with shot lists. The idea of what is this fight scene? What is the story? What kind of action is it? Is it a moving camera? Is it a handheld camera? So you kind of come up with ideas that are really story centered. What’s the story of this fight scene? And then we start working with our stunt coordinator and fight choreographers to come up… We have our ideas and we talk to them, and they throw their ideas in the mix, being our stunt guys. And then we come up with the plan of what this sequence is? What does it entail? And then it’s just working really on the day.

So, once again, we storyboard these sequences. Our stunt team then go away and they invariably shoot their mock up of these sequences using their stunt guys. And then they come back and they present a sequence shot on video to us based on the ideas that myself and Sharmeen and the stunt coordinator have. And then we look at that and we give notes. And then we refine the previs. So we go in on the day knowing exactly what we have to shoot. Sometimes a lot of it is main unit, especially if it features heavily our main cast. And then some stuff we can siphon off to a second unit. Now that’s the fight sequences. There’s also the chase sequences especially in episode four. Now we had a second unit director, Gary Powell, who’s super experienced second unit director and stunt coordinator. And incidentally, I’d worked with his brother, Greg, on three films in London. A family of stunt guys, very famous family in the UK.

And so a couple of those sequences, especially our big chase sequence in episode four was kind of helmed by Gary. So Sharmeen and I had ideas for that sequence and we threw them to Gary and then with a much more detailed plan of ideas of what that sequence would be and how to shoot it. So then, Gary shot a lot of that sequence as a second unit. And then I inserted all our main cast into that. So anything involving main cast, I did that stuff. So that was a kind of a dance between main unit, Sharmeen and myself, and Gary and his DP.

TD: How is the prep different for a couple of episodes versus doing a full feature film?

JOL: So if you are setting up the show, then you can drive a lot of the stylistic choices and what the show is. But for Sharmeen and I, we came in episodes four and five. And so to a certain extent, we’ve got to pay homage to what has come before, in episodes one through to three. But the beauty of our episodes is that episodes one through three and six take place in Jersey City. And ep four takes place in modern day Karachi and had a little bit of flashback to India, 1947. And then ep five, the first half of that takes place in India, 1942 to 1947, and incorporates a huge partition scene. So our episodes, we had to have a handshake with the episodes that came before us, but the beauty of ours was that we had a unique location, Karachi and period India.

So our episodes, they do take a… Not like a detour, but they kind of shift away a little bit from what has happened before. They shift away in the look and the feel of those locations, which shot it in Bangkok. Bangkok for Karachi in Bangkok, and Pattaya for India, but the sheer nature of those locations, you are going to have a different look to what has come before. And the other thing that we wanted to do, we wanted to lean into Sharmeen’s documentary background. So we wanted to infuse aspects of those two episodes with a slightly more of a documentary feel, what I would termed, cinematic realism. Where the original episodes had a much more kind of formalized camera treatment, ours were… We still had that formalized treatment in parts, but we did infuse certain sequences with a more handheld documentary type feel.

TD: What was it like shooting in Bangkok?

JOL: So at that time, it was the beginning of 2021 and COVID was rampaging throughout the world, but Bangkok and Thailand were a little bit similar to Australia, where I live and where I’ve just come from. The Thai government had COVID quite well under control. The case in Bangkok, they had a very similar kind of quarantine protocol going in similar to Australia, two weeks of hotel quarantine. So COVID, when we first got there, there wasn’t a lot of it around, but we still had to actually have all our COVID protocols in place. Mask wearing all the time, testing three days a week, not a lot of extras on set, so we had those limitations. But with those limitations, we also had weather.

When we first arrived in Bangkok, we had 30 degree temperature, really hot, relative kind of humidity. But as the shoot progressed, we pushed more into the monsoon and it became incredibly humid. And we had a lot of thunderstorms. So we were not only faced with the COVID aspect of shooting, but we had weather that we were coping with as well. And in the last month of the shoot, almost every day, we would have to be shut down for one, two, three hours at a time because of massive thunderstorms that were coming through.

So yeah, we had some challenges. But apart from that, shooting in Bangkok in Thailand was awesome. Fantastic crew, big component of the crew were Thais. But the crew, I must say, it was international. It was like the league of nations. We had a big Pakistani cast, director was Pakistani, my gaffer was from New Zealand, Australian operators. I had an American DIT. And then Americans, Canadians, and New Zealand spread throughout the crew, along with the Thais. But shooting in Bangkok was, apart from what those things mentioned, was fantastic. Fantastic crew. We loved every moment. Really good.

TD: What kept you inspired on set?

JOL: Well, the most inspirational thing for me during the shoot was working with Sharmeen. I nicknamed her ‘the whirlwind.’ She is a force of nature. She’s a fantastic personality, big personality. She’s a great leader. She was forever mindful of the responsibility to the show and to the character and to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the other thing that she brought with it was this gravitas of, not only her background as a director, but her culture that she brought to this show. And of course, with Ms. Marvel, this South Asian and Pakistani culture is infused into this show in such an enormous way. But Sharmeen brought the gravitas of being true to her culture and being true to her city, which was really important, getting the aspects of the Karachi right in Bangkok.

But the biggest thing was bringing truth and authenticity to the sequence of partition. Now, partition is a history of people who live in Pakistan and live in India and Bangladesh, for that matter. Everyone has a partition story. All the people in that region are affected by what happened in 1947 with partition. So for Sharmeen, it was crucially important that we got that right. She was really my great inspiration for that show. Having a great leader, having a great personality, and a really decent human being as my director, that was such a fantastic thing for me.

TD: What’s next for you?

JOL: Well, I’m shooting at the moment. Just six weeks ago, I started pre-production on Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which we’re doing for 20th Century and Disney. So I’m shooting that in Vancouver. It’s going to be a really big show, loving it. Working a lot on it, which is this new, fantastic technology that we have at our fingertips, so that’s what I have going on at the moment. And at the same time, as Ms. Marvel, I was lucky to have another show that’s just added on FX, and Disney, and Hulu, depending on where you are in the world. And that show is The Old Man. It’s the Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow TV series, which is like Ms. Marvel, it’s absolutely dynamite and worth checking out.

Ms. Marvel is currently available to stream on Disney+.

Photo: Patrick Brown/Marvel Studios