“As She-Ra, she doesn’t know how to act. This is all new to her, and it’s a little clumsy at first. It’s like an uncomfortable suit. She’s like, ‘Okay, here I am. I’m very glamorous, I’m very strong, people are looking up to me — because I’m very tall.’” – Noelle Stevenson, show runner
It was a challenge for us. For Ryan and I we saw the opportunity to create something with Marvel that they haven’t done. You know, that’s the way I looked at how I would utilize the money is I had more of an opportunity to bring place to it. And be more detailed about it. And because it wasn’t a place that existed or had really been defined in any other film – I’m talking about Wakanda – we could really play with that and we wanted to do a lot of practical builds. We didn’t really want to use a lot of blue screen. And that’s also where the money went.
ON BUILDING REAL SETS INSTEAD OF RELYING ON VISUAL EFFECTS:
We had a lot of extensions. I would build so far and then I would extend. We tried not to put the VFX in front. Pretty much every single set is practical and then the bigger world outside of that would become an extension. It was a lot about making sure that those VFX were in the background. And that it was tactile and tangible and the actors had things to act off of and could sit in and you know that’s really where it went. It was to creating all of these builds. And even some of the exterior stuff that you see in the trailer, we built. You know the waterfall? We built it. And it was an extension then because it was really tall. I mean it was huge. But it was fantastic to have that water being real being live being there and people wading in it all day everyday and fighting in it and doing the thing that they’re doing and having the extras in their beautiful costumes by Ruth Carter up on the set. It was just breathtaking and when you see something like that for the first time that you did, that you worked on for months, it was just… it just took my breath away.
ON THE RESPONSIBILITY OF BUILDING A UTOPIAN AFRICAN WORLD:
It’s the first time I actually did a world building on that. And it was a lot of research. I mean we went to Africa. I was there for quite some time. Ryan and the producers joined. And we traveled extensively for a few weeks. And it was a lot of research. It was talking to people, taking pictures of everything and connecting with… we were in South Africa mainly… connecting with it, with the motherland. And understanding all of the tradition, all the different tribes, how they responded to each other, what things were important in their lives. That was part of building that world and then pushing it all into the future so for me it was always understanding that Wakanda had been there for 10,000 years and then what does it look like now. And there was a lot of discussion because it was supposed to be a place that was never colonized too. So what does that look like? There was a lot of discussion about that and how we make that relevant.
ON THE CHALLENGES IN REPRESENTING WHAT AFRICA COULD BE IF IT WEREN’T COLONIZED:
It’s a huge thing. And it was daunting because I felt a lot of responsibility to get it right. And also to create Wakanda, create its own feel and look, outside of… because over time it has morphed. All of these tribes came together, and while they’re individual tribes, they’ve created this country, so in a sense they are one. I hope people could look at it and really feel, like, Okay, yeah, this feels good, this feels right. It doesn’t feel false in some way and that this could have been what happened. Of course, you know, vibranium helps.
Question of Smoke 