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'Massive genre nerd' Kate Herron calls Loki a love letter to sci-fi

Riffs and references include Brazil, Dune, Blade Runner, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and (almost) Sesame Street

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There’s a scene in next week’s episode of the new Disney+ series Loki that had director Kate Herron convinced she was doing the right thing when she took the reins of the show. Without giving too much away, let’s just say it features a heated debate in an armory between the characters of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius (Owen Wilson).

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“It kind of reminded me of two fans fighting at Comic-Con,” she says with a laugh. “It was really fun shaping the characters with them.”

Herron, a self-described “massive genre nerd,” says when she first heard that the folks at Marvel were developing a show around the Asgardian god of trickery, “I was just like, I have to be part of it!”

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To that end, she went into the meeting with a “huge pitch” that I somehow imagine to have been a giant black binder, held together with a bungee and bulging with photos and Post-it notes.

“It had music, style, story ideas, cast ideas; it was massive. I just wanted to give them a full download of everything in my brain and everything from the pilot script that had made me so excited, and what I loved about the character of Loki. Just because I thought, they might not meet me again, and I don’t know who the other directors are that they’re meeting but they’re probably going to have more experience than me.”

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She’s not sure exactly what it was that won over studio head Kevin Feige. “I remember in my playlist — we never ended up using this in the show — but I had a really weird song from Sesame Street, and Kevin loved that. I think he was like, ‘This girl is weird.’ I came in with so much passion and excitement.”

So maybe it was that. Or it could have been her background in short film and television, which included working with Idris Elba on a short-lived BBC comedy series in 2017, and directing four episodes of the Netflix series Sex Education in 2019.

Or it might have been the four years she spent working for Britain’s National Health Service. Much of this seems to have seeped into the design and layout of the Time Variance Authority, the bureaucracy where Mobius works and where Loki is being held pending sentencing for crimes against the timeline.

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“It was just based on me working as a temp in an office and working on this archaic technology like an old computer that doesn’t work any more and no one wants to update,” says Herron.

At the NHS, she recalls, “We did all our filing still on paper, and we had a big basement of all these folders.” In the second episode, when Loki and Mobius visit the TVA archives, “I was persistent that they had to have those little rubber fingers where you turn the pages. I used to use one of those! Or posters about keeping your desk clean.”

The Time Variance Authority owes at least a little of its look to Britain’s NHS.
The Time Variance Authority owes at least a little of its look to Britain’s NHS.

Herron says she took liberally from all her science-fiction genre favourites. For their practical effects, she was inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Set design elements were borrowed from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Blade Runner and Metropolis. Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels were a touchstone for the fish-out-of-water tone. The “time doors” are from Dune. (I presume she means the 1984 version; she’s going too fast for me to backtrack.)

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“Basically I stole from everyone,” she says. “Look at the font on the computers; that was loosely inspired by Alien. I just wanted it to be a big love letter to sci-fi.”

That extends even to the show’s musical choices, which included a fair amount of the eerie-sounding instrument known as the theremin. You can hear an old recording of 20th-century theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore playing The Swan in the office of Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in one episode. Herron won’t name the unused Sesame Street song, saying it might be a spoiler.

“Operatic and bold but also a little different — like Loki!” is how Herron describes the series’ score, which came together with the help of composer Natalie Holt. She also credits the pandemic (sort of) with giving her extra time to work on editing, music choices and character development. After filming was shut down for six months in March of 2020, Herron kept working at the production offices in Atlanta. “We just tried to make the best of it,” she says with a shrug. “I’ve been living like a lighthouse keeper.”

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It would seem to have been worth it. Fan reaction to the first two episodes has been overwhelmingly positive. (The first episode is on Disney+ now; the second can be seen next Wednesday, June 16, with four more to follow over subsequent weeks.) A second season is expected to start filming next January.

Herron sounds like she still can’t quite believe it. “To be given the reins of it was amazing,” she says. “We weren’t shooting these episode by episode. I was just filming it like six hours. It’s like we went out and made a huge movie.”

And the chemistry that sent fans into paroxysms of joy when the series’ first trailer dropped a while back has clearly infected the director as well.

“Owen and Tom have such different backgrounds,” she says. “Tom is like a classically trained Shakespeare actor, and Owen is like an indie darling. He did Bottle Rocket and he’s an amazing writer, so he came up with these incredible riffs and comedic moments. But I think that the fact that they’re so different is really what makes them so exciting to watch on screen together. Their chemistry — it just works.”

Loki is streaming now on Disney+

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