The Ms. Marvel Disney+ TV show is unlike anything else in the MCU to date. It's a character-driven adventure, one in which star Kamala Khan explores her history and heritage. This journey ultimately takes her to Karachi, and even involves time travel back to the time of the Partition of India. Ms. Marvel episodes 4 and 5 were actually shot in Thailand, but Marvel successfully converted sets and locations into a beautiful image of Karachi. The studio was only able to pull this off because of the skilled team they had assembled - including cinematographer Jules O'Loughlin.
O'Loughlin worked with the cast and crew to make Marvel's plans a reality, and the result was a show with a remarkably strong sense of place. Marvel has always followed the lead of the comics, which claim to be set in "the world outside your window" (albeit with gods and monsters). Ms. Marvel episodes 4 and 5 were set in the world outside a window in Karachi, and it felt as realistic as the show's portrayal of Jersey in other episodes.
Screen Rant had the opportunity to speak to Jules O'Loughlin about his work on Ms. Marvel, exploring how the team recreated Karachi - and honored the history of India, in scenes set during the Partition.
Screen Rant: Could you give us a quick run-down of what you shot for Ms. Marvel and what it involved?
Jules O'Loughlin: OK, we shot in January 2021 - 2020 was the year Covid hit, I was on a show in LA when that happened, we got shut down and six months later we started up again. But in January 2021, I went to Bangkok to shoot episodes 4 and 5 of Ms. Marvel - there's a reason why we went to Bangkok. The other episodes were all shot in Atlanta.
January 2021, we entered hotel quarantine in Bangkok for two weeks, then after quarantine we shot from January through to May. It started out in great conditions, the Thai government were handling Covid very well. But Covid exploded toward the end of the shoot, it became quite difficult. But we got through it.
Screen Rant: There have been reports of reshoots for Ms. Marvel, were you involved with those at all?
Jules O'Loughlin: No, I didn't do those. They actually weren't reshoots, they were pick-up shoots. There was nothing that we shot in episodes 4 and 5 that was reshot, but extra scenes were added. That's a thing that happens a lot on big movies and TV series. You go out and you shoot the script, then they edit it and find they need more material, clarity, or what have you. Those pick-up shoots weren't done in Thailand; they were all done in Atlanta for all six episodes.
Screen Rant: Could you tell me a little about how you got involved with Ms. Marvel, and what drew you to that project?
Jules O'Loughlin: Yeah, I was in Los Angeles at the end of 2020, shooting The Old Man. I got a call from my agent to say a project had come in from Marvel, and I was immediately interested. It is Marvel, and Marvel is such a deep part of the zeitgeist in modern film-making, and there's so much going on in the Marvel world. I immediately thought I'd got to look at this project, but there were two aspects that really got me apart from the Marvel thing.
The first thing was the character of Kamala. A unique character, Marvel's first fully-fledged Muslim superhero. Not only that, she was a teenage girl, an American teenage girl of Pakistani heritage. I just thought that combination - American, Pakistani heritage, Muslim, superhero - what is there not to like about that recipe? It's fantastic. I've been to Pakistan before - I traveled extensively through Pakistan, I love the country, I love the people, and so that really got my attention.
The last thing was the director, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is - on paper - a pretty amazing person. She's a two-time Oscar-winning, seven-time Emmy winning documentary director. Not only that, she's very much involved in a lot of social programs in Pakistan, highly regarded there. I did my research, I started delving into her, I was blown away. She sounded pretty amazing. Then I met her on a Zoom call, and we hit it off immediately. I just thought I had to work with this woman, she just sounds amazing. The rest is history; I've worked with her, and I love her, she is amazing, she's everything the Google search said she is but so much more. She's a really decent, wonderful human being, and I loved working with her every minute.
Screen Rant: I loved the Partition sequence, because it created this sense of chaos and turmoil so effectively. How did you do that?
Jules O'Loughlin: Well, a little backstory about Partition. It was the biggest sequence that we shot, and probably the biggest sequence of the show. That in itself was a challenge. But the thing about Partition, and this is something Sharmeen said very early on indeed, was that we had to do it justice. There was a lot of gravity to that sequence; every Indian and Pakistani family have a Partition story, it's a momentous event in history and especially for people of the subcontinent.
We had to do it justice, we had to be very respectful of that sequence - and bear in mind we're juggling a couple of things here. We've got the Marvel thing going on, with Kamala and her super-powers and the fun that's associated with her and the show. We've got to balance that with mindfulness about how we handle the Partition sequence, and be very respectful. That was super-important to Sharmeen.
Then you get into the nuts and bolts of that sequence. There were probably 200,000 people - not how many we have, but when you delve into the history of what was going on, there were probably 200,000 people in that situation in and around that railway. How do we do that? We could only use 200 extras, we were limited by COVID, so there was judicious placement of extras, VFX, everything else going on. And then, it's a momentous scene. How do I light a scene like that? Big lighting fixtures, cranes, massive soft-boxes in the air - how do I cover that scene?
So it all comes down to planning. You've got to plan intricately with a scene like that. Fail to plan, plan to fail, that's one of my mantras. And so a lot of discussion about what that sequence is, what's the story, shot-listing, storyboarding into pre-vis, making an animation of the sequence, and then multiple scouts to the location, working out where cranes can go - that in itself is a giant logistical exercise, where to put them across a railway network! It was a really big sequence that required a lot of planning, and we really treated it with respect.
Screen Rant: I felt there was a really strong sense of place around the scenes filmed in Bangkok, but set in Karachi. How did you create that sense of place?
Jules O'Loughlin: Sharmeen is from Karachi, and of course Kamala as a character, her family is from Karachi. For Sharmeen, she said she wanted to write a love-letter to Karachi. We shot in Bangkok - where could we shoot these two episodes? Some takes place in Karachi, some in Partition India, where in the world can we shoot this relatively safely because of COVID issues, where we can lean into a decent film industry, and that will give us the locations? Bangkok, Thailand and Bangkok, became that place.
Then, you're faced with finding the location for that shoot. We were lucky that, in Bangkok, there's a big backlot that a chap owns - originally he bought three or four city blocks, he was gonna knock it down and develop it into high-rise, and then when he first bought it he rented it out to a film production. Word has it that he fell in love with film-making, and for some years now that's what he's been doing there. We got a location like that, and our production designers transform it into Karachi, changing the facades of buildings, adding dressing, extras, the cars, lights, smoke, and the atmosphere...
The whole time, we've got our director Sharmeen orchestrating the whole thing to make it like Karachi. I guess it's what the industry calls smoke and mirrors, you're often shooting in locations that are set elsewhere, and it's part and parcel of what we do. We had a wonderful director who really put her thumbprint on the look and feel of these episodes to make them feel as real as possible.
Screen Rant: How did you shoot those tremendous chase scenes, and create such a strong sense of momentum around them?
Jules O'Loughlin: Once again, the chase and action scenes are built on planning. Sharmeen and I, in the first instance, we have the script and we figure out what the feelings are we want to evoke, how we want to move the camera, what's happening with the characters. Once again, we start shot-listing and then we storyboard, and then we get our stunt team involved.
On this show, we were lucky to have Gary Powell as our second unit director, he was very heavily involved with the chase scenes and the choreography. He's from a family of stunt-men, I've actually worked with his brother Greg on three films in London, it was great to meet one of the other brothers. Gary is a fantastic director in his own right, a fantastic second unit director. He brought his sensibility to those scenes as well, we all spent a lot of time working out what those scenes were going to be and how we were going to shoot them. You make a plan, and you execute it.
That chase scene on the streets of Karachi is really fantastic. We're all really proud of that scene, and hopefully the audience loves it as much as we loved making it.
Screen Rant: It was definitely impressive. How did you integrate the light effects from Kamala's powers with the environments you were filming in?
Jules O'Loughlin: As far as Kamala's powers, she has a telekinetic power and there's an energy emanating from her, but also a crystalline structure that she creates. It's an energy that gives off an interactive light. For myself and for our VFX supervisor, it was really important we did as much in camera as possible. We didn't want to leave it all to our VFX guys. The more in camera you do, the more realistic the effect's going to be. For Kamala, you've got this blue and purple hued light, my challenge was to create as much of that interactive light on set as possible.
It's a real dance between getting lighting fixtures on to the set but hiding them from the camera. I used larger lighting fixtures off-camera for energy walls and the like, and then smaller LEDs behind her arms or in her clothes, hiding smaller units around the set. Occasionally there'd be no other way but to have a lighting fixture in-shot that the VFX team erased in post, but I didn't want to do that. Their job is big enough as it is, time and money is of the essence. As much as I could, I hid those lights off-camera.
It's not just about the color; it's about the timing of the light as well. As her powers grow, or when she deploys her power, the timing of those lights has to be right as well. In this day and age, you have precision control over the timing of those units, so it's either me handling the on-and-off, fade-up or fade-down, or it's my gaffer doing that.
Screen Rant: I just want to home in on another aspect of the episode, the flashback scenes. Some of those felt more fantastical, very romantic. How did you create the atmosphere around the rose field, for example?
Jules O'Loughlin: We wanted to view the flashbacks with a sense of nostalgia, we wanted to romanticize them. It's essentially a love story between Aisha and Hasan, and we wanted that reflected in the photography. Once again, it comes down to lighting - warm, big back-lights, big HMI units, gels, with warm gel to give a warm back-light; flaring of lenses, so as much as possible you don't have light hitting the lens. And then a gentler kind of camera approach as well, a more lyrical and romanticized camera approach - so the use of steady-cam and long-tracks. And then, to add to that, there's the color grading in post-production, the power that we had in post-production to affect the image and either recolor or enhance it - almost like Photoshopping the images in post-production.
Screen Rant: I've been seeing a lot of concept art for Ms. Marvel, some of it from scenes we haven't seen in the show. Were there any scenes cut that you were particularly proud of?
Jules O'Loughlin: That's interesting. In the heat of battle, it's such a frantic exercise shooting a series like this that it all kind of blurs.
Yes, there was a particular fight scene that we shot in an abandoned train-yard in Bangkok - this was a real location as well. The lines were overgrown with vines and trees; an amazing location. We had a fight scene there with Kamala and our Red Dagger and the Clandestines that was cut from the film.
It's always a pity when that happens. A lot of work goes into the filming, and that one I remember. It was probably about 38 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and it was a really physically tough scene to shoot. But it didn't fit with pacing and story. It often happens; you shoot scenes that are then cut from the final film. But that's one I do remember, just because of the difficulty of the shooting conditions we faced on those days.
Screen Rant: It's always a shame, but I think there's a phrase you hear sometimes - 'Kill your darlings.'
Jules O'Loughlin: Or in Australia we say 'Kill your babies' - we're a bit harsher! That's it, and a good studio will do the same thing. You're trying to make as good a story as you possibly can, if a sequence or scene weakens the story then more often than not you want to get rid of it.
Screen Rant: Can you give us an idea what you're working on at the moment?
Jules O'Loughlin: I'm in Vancouver, and I'm shooting a series for 20th Century and Disney+ called Percy Jackson & the Olympians. It's the same story as the previous films, same writer, same series of books, but this is our own take on it. I'm working on this series with Dan Shotz and Jon Steinberg, two showrunners who I love working with them, we're having a lot of fun here in Vancouver.
Ms. Marvel Synopsis
A great student, an avid gamer and a voracious fan-fiction scribe, she has a special affinity for superheroes, particularly Captain Marvel. But Kamala struggles to fit in at home and at school—that is, until she gets super powers like the heroes she's always looked up to. Life is easier with super powers, right?
Check out our interviews with Ms. Marvel stars Iman Vellani, Mohan Kapur, Zenobia Shroff & Saagar Shaikh, Rish Shah, Yasmeen Fletcher & Matt Lintz, Farhan Akhtar, Aramis Knight and Travina Springer.