In Loki season 2, the titular character is dealing with the repercussions of He Who Remains being killed and the ensuing chaos in the TVA. Loki, along with TVA allies Mobius, HunterB-15, and O.B., search for a way to keep the timelines safe even as others within the TVA want to keep the status quo of pruning branching timelines. However, things get even more complicated when Victor Timely, an apparent He Who Remains variant, is added to the mix while Renslayer and Miss Minutes plot their own TVA future.
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead took over as the lead directors of Loki season 2 following Kate Herron’s work on the first season. Eric Martin stepped in as head writer, taking over for series creator Michael Waldron. Loki season 2 includes an impressive cast led by Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di Martino, Jonathan Majors, Wunmi Mosaku, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tara Strong, and Eugene Cordero, with Ke Huy Quan joining the cast.
Screen Rant interviewed cinematographer Isaac Bauman about Loki season 2. He explained how he differentiates the time periods and settings from the 1800s to the TVA, while also revealing the movies that he looked to for inspiration and which Kang variant is his favorite.
Isaac Bauman Talks Loki Season 2
Screen Rant: Loki season 2 is a banger, every episode is just better than the last. Can you talk to me about the daunting, but also exciting, challenge of taking on an MCU project like Loki?
Isaac Bauman: Yeah, at first, it’s super daunting. It’s like, “Oh, my God, this is one of the biggest shows in the world, the budget is big, the talent is big, the scripts are huge.” But the thing is, what you realize pretty quickly as the process gets into the swing of things, is, “Oh, it’s not daunting at all. This is the most supportive, loving, warm environment where anything goes and creativity is supported, and the support is there, the infrastructure is there to execute these things.” You know, “The time is there, we have enough time to prep, we have enough time to plan, we have enough time to discuss these things.” So, it actually be goes from daunting to “Oh, I got this” pretty quickly.
Can you talk a little bit about the creative process? You’re working with several directors throughout the season, and it still maintains this cohesive look, especially over different eras and time periods.
Isaac Bauman: Yeah, that’s a point of pride for me. One of the things that I try to spend a lot of my time on in prep is defining the look of what you see up there on screen. It has to be delineated and planned out, component by component, so every single tiny thing is just something that is put into a document at one point. I wrote a 700-page document of the look of the season, and of course, many of those pages are reference images and plots of the sets and stuff like that.
But I created a massive bible, basically, that was a style guide for the look of the show, and in the process of that, it was just for myself to wrap my head around it. But it also becomes a useful tool to share with other people and say, “Hey, give this a look over, let me know what you’re thinking,” and then other people start to understand it, too, and will even police you on things, you know, “Hey, didn’t you say we’re gonna [do this]?” So, it becomes this kind of bigger, meta thing that everyone is aware of, and the whole crew becomes a part of enforcing the lug basically.
What were some of the things that jumped out in season 1 immediately that you knew you would be able to carry over to season 2, and what were some things that needed to change?
Isaac Bauman: Season 1 had a very specific look, I think the main thing we changed — I like to say that we changed everything, so there wasn’t much that carried over. Technically, there may have been a couple things, but really, there weren’t. At the same time, I copy-pasted the approach to season 1, because the way I saw it, the approach to season 1 wasn’t any specific technique or aesthetic or look or anything like that. It was the fact that the DP of season 1, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, brought her own voice to the work so much. If you look at season 1, and then you look at the things she shot before season 1, you can clearly tell it’s the work of the same person.
This is a progression on her journey through the craft, and I am such a different cinematographer. My work looks nothing like her work before or after Loki, so what I realized the approach actually was just her doing whatever the hell she wanted, you know? So, when I got season 2, I was like, “Okay, if I’m really going to do as good of a job as her, I need to do the same thing,” meaning I need to do everything completely differently the way that I would want to do it.
I love that, putting your own signature on the show. Can you discuss making the show look and feel different, especially with so many other Marvel shows and movies coming out there?
Isaac Bauman: Yeah, it starts with having a specific vision in mind. In the case of Loki season 2, we wanted to do a number of different things, but primarily we wanted to ground it in the aesthetic that the production design possessed already, which was inspired by late ’60s, early ’70s. Kind of that Soviet brutalism, and mid-century modern, and multiple different aesthetics, but all from that time period blending together.
So, I was like, “Well, what if the show looked like it was shot at that time, more modern, and it’s kind of large format-y, and a little bit softer lighting, and it’s modernized, but it is a modernized version of that cellular oId film.” Not like modern film, like late ’60s, early 70s stock film is what we modeled our LUT after, for example, “How do you make it as specific at that time period as possible?” Then, once this starts coming together, you get lots of different ideas for this, and this and that. And then the trick is to get approval for everything.
The faster we were told constantly, “You can do anything you want, but only if you come up with your ideas early, and get it up the chain of command.” Because in the past, I think some people have had ideas later on in the process, or even in post-production, and at that point, it’s like, everybody needs to basically rally around and sign off on and handcuff ourselves to the show bible way before we even start shooting in order to have any chance of executing this aesthetic.
Loki season 2 explores various time periods and locations. How do you adapt your cinematography to convey those type of challenges effectively? Especially with something like going back to the World’s Fair in Chicago?
Isaac Bauman: The first thing you do is you look at the time period, you say, “Well, what did it look like back then? What did still photography look like back then? What did paintings look like back then if it’s prior to photography?” Or, ‘What did movies in that era look like?” So, you look to that era for inspiration, and then you integrate those cues into your approach to photographing that.
For example, in the 1800s, one of the things that you see all the time are these portraits of people that are really blurry and smudgy, and kind of desaturated, so we used longer focal lengths. In the TVA, we’re always on the super wide lenses, but then in the 1800s, you’ll notice suddenly, it’s a lot of longer, more telephoto lenses, so that the background just gets more swirly and distorted, and the edges are less clean. It was the same with every time period.
Were there any specific challenges in lighting or shooting scenes in the TVA for you?
Isaac Bauman: The TVA is pretty crazy with all scenes that we have, because of this handheld photography style that we adopted with the wide lenses, there’s never any place to hide lights or equipment, or anything like that, really. So, all of the lighting, the key lighting, has to come from the set. Kasra Farahani, the production designer, and I worked pretty closely to make sure that all of sets had lighting in the right places, and that lighting is usually coming from above. Just think of the iconic chronomonitor set with that giant light over it.
Every set kind of has that same philosophy behind it, there’s usually some big broad soft source on the ceiling of the set, and that creates really beautiful light that makes the set look beautiful, and it’s very dramatic on the actors. But the problem is that gives people raccoon eyes a lot, where because the light is coming from above, it hits their head and their nose and then their eyes go black. That was the big challenge about shooting in the TVA, because every set is being lit from above, it’s like, “How do you prevent that from happening when we’ve decided that we are not allowed to put lights on the set?”
So, what we did was we made a battery-powered light on a painter’s pole that was wired to a battery unit and a backpack, and one of the sparks — that’s what they call them in England — would chase the camera, and was basically chasing the camera the whole time, and tries to position the lights such that wherever the actor is looking, they’ll get that little ping of eye light, and it’ll lift up the light level below their eyes, so you’ll be able to see their eyes as well as the highlight that’s being reflected in their eye.
But it’s tricky, because you see the camera is very active, and the light, you don’t want to have that like it’s suddenly close to someone and get way brighter, because you don’t want to feel the presence of light. So, the entire time we’re in the tent like riding this knob, basically like, “Oh too bright, too dark,” just trying to massage the level of the eye light unit as it gets further or closer to the talent.
In this last episode, I felt like there was an homage to Back to the Future with the miniatures, the way that O.B. kind of describes the miniatures not being to scale. Did you draw any inspiration from any other film or TV shows for your work on Loki season 2?
Isaac Bauman: Yeah, my favorite reference is actually just this abstract vision that I have in my head that I think I came up with it, because I must have seen it somewhere, and then I discovered it’s actually just an amalgamation of a lot of different references. Then, I have to do the hard work of pulling all these different references and trying to organize them in a way that they add up such that other people see what I’m seeing in my head, when they’re all compacted together into the look you see in the season. But, it’s tough to find shorthand references that are this one thing.
I will say 2001: A Space Odyssey was a major reference, and the look of big-budget studio films of that era in general, like Live and Let Die, that Bond movie that we reference. But then, we had more modern references that were films that were set in that time period, and kind of adopted some of the same retro techniques we wanted to, like Munich actually was a huge reference for us.
This show has a fan following that obsesses with Easter eggs and hidden details in the show. Did you incorporate any visual cues in the cinematography for the fans for some of these Easter eggs at all?
Isaac Bauman: That’s a good question. I did not, and I wasn’t really aware of — I picked up on the Back to the Future Easter egg stuff that you were just talking about with the model in episode 4. But, I didn’t have any fan type of Easter eggs in the cinematography.
You’ve worked on all, but I think one episode of this show, have we seen your favorite Kang variant yet on the show?
Isaac Bauman: Um, wow, yeah, I think Victor Timely is pretty hard to top.
Can you talk about collaborating with the other department heads? You talked about working with Kasra a little bit, and I know Kasra is really in-depth with his blueprints. Can you talk about working with department heads to achieve the proper look, and lighting situations for Loki season 2?
Isaac Bauman: Yeah, collaboration is just incredibly fundamental to your ability to execute something on a high level. It’s a symphony, right? Every instrument needs to be playing the same song, and my relationship with Kasra was very special He was coming from the first season, so I, in a lot of ways, looked up to him as, “Okay, he is the guiding light of the whole look of the show.” And that’s why I like to say, truthfully, that the cinematography this season was inspired by him and his work.
The cinematography was inspired by the look of the TVA sets, I looked at those sets, because in the first season, the cinematography, Autumn’s approach is very hyper modern, she is on the cutting edge of where cinematography is going, and that’s what she brought to Loki season 1. She was like, “We’re taking the MCU into the future,” and I was a little bit more like, “Okay, well, what if we made the cinematography look like the production design? What if it was just one package? Cinematography, production design, just exactly the same aesthetic.” So, that’s when it came back to, “Well, alright, how do we make it look this was a movie that was shot at the time that these sets were inspired by?”
About Loki Season 2
Along with Mobius, Hunter B-15 and a team of new and returning characters, Loki navigates an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous multiverse in search of Sylvie, Judge Renslayer, Miss Minutes and the truth of what it means to possess free will and glorious purpose.
Check out our other Loki season 2 interviews here:
- Kevin Wright
- Christine Wada
- Dan DeLeeuw
- Kasra Farahani
Loki season 2 debuts new episodes on Disney+ every Thursday.
