The season one premiere of Marvel's "Loki" kicked off by reminding fans of a key scene from "Avengers: Endgame." The show's director, Kate Herron, revealed how the scene was modified to fit the new Disney Plus series.
"It was actually a really fun hybrid," Herron told Insider in an interview on Tuesday.
The first episode of "Loki," released on Wednesday, opened with a scene from "Endgame" in which the Avengers traveled back in time to the events of 2012's "The Avengers" to retrieve the time, mind, and space Infinity Stones.
Revisiting 2012 meant that the superheroes crossed paths with Tom Hiddleston's Loki, who invaded New York at the time and was in possession of the Tesseract (the glowing blue cube that housed the space gem). During the team's botched mission, Loki escaped from custody in the alternate timeline after a briefcase containing the Tesseract landed near him.
"Loki" began with the aforementioned moment from "Endgame," but there were slight differences between the two scenes.
"I reused footage that they'd filmed for ['Endgame']," Herron said, adding that the team "re-tailored" the scene by adding more close-up shots of Loki to show the moment from the God of Mischief's perspective this time.
Herron said that she also "filmed a few new shots" of Hiddleston, like the close-up of Loki mockingly waving to the Hulk as the packed elevator closed without him.
In "Endgame," a similar moment was included, but the shot was wider and didn't focus on the trickster.
Herron also incorporated unused footage from "Endgame" that didn't make the final cut of the movie.
"It was a lot of fun," she said. "I mean, what a treat as a director, getting access to the library of the rushes of all these other brilliant filmmakers."
"That was the real fun thing with the opening, was getting to show that moment that everyone knows so well, but from a completely different POV," Herron added, saying that it reminded her of "Rashomon," a 1950 Japanese film in which four witnesses share contradictory versions of the same event.
"Like you kind of see this moment in time, and then it's through a different perspective. I think that definitely echoed across the rest of the episode," she said.
