'Moon Knight' Directors Break Down Episode 4 'Indiana Jones' Knock-Off Movie

The last episode of “Moon Knight” had some crazy stuff going on.

Episode 4 directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson sat down with Entertainment Weekly to spill the beans on everything from the Indiana Jones references to the trippy mental hospital sequence that ended in a confrontation with a hippo deity.

Apparently, the cast and crew were in good spirits including the campy Indiana Jones knock-off.

“Everyone had a lot of good laughs that morning,” Moorhead recalled. “Everybody was just having an absolute blast, being as cheesy as we possibly could.”

“Production on that was really interesting because you're working on a Marvel show with literally the greatest filmmaking technicians in the world, and now you're asking everyone to intentionally make something that looks like it was made with toothpicks and papier-mache,” he continued. “That was a very interesting experience.”

Moorhead revealed that “we actually asked the writers to write an extra minute of the scene so that it could play in the background as needed. We actually got to shoot twice as much of that. Now we want to make a whole series of it. It has some of the most ridiculous dialogue that they could come up with.”

Moorhead said, “The end of episode 4 is actually a gift of the script.”

“It came from wanting to do the least expected thing and completely disorient the audience, while also being completely true to the character that we've built over four episodes,” he explained.

“Also the comic book character: There's a run of Moon Knight written by Jeff Lemire, and [Greg] Smallwood did the art, and it has a lot of similar feelings and visuals to what happens at the end of episode 4,” he added. “So we're really glad to be able to honor the original comics, the ones that we were the most drawn to when we were trying to crack Moon Knight. That's where the inspiration came from, especially visually and tonally.”

Moorhead joked, “A lot of what we do is chasing what Oscar (Isaac) is doing.”

“We feel like the show is at its absolute best whenever we're marrying what we're doing to honoring what Oscar's doing. I think that's pretty clear to anyone that watches Moon Knight,” he continued. “We've talked about this scene feeling like it's underwater, not just because he's been sedated, but because the entire audience has just been subjected to an entire worldview shift of what this show is.”

He also added that the fly in the scene that landed on Marc’s hand was completely accidental. “There's this wonderful take where a fly lands on his hand on accident,” he explained. “That's a real fly!”

At the end of the episode, Marc and Steven run into a giant hippo deity as they attempt to escape the mental hospital.

“It's funny. We only had one or maybe two shots with this [hippo] character,” Benson recalled. “She showed up to set, of course, dressed in a goofy greenscreen outfit, and we just tried about two dozen different takes on that scene. We just kind of stood off to the side, and she immediately trusted us and took the direction in stride. Even though we had met only just minutes before, and she just screamed for us every which way.”

“It was really interesting from a technical standpoint. The way we shot that is there are three performers screaming in that scene, but there were never two people together,” he continued. “We had someone pretending to be a hippo, screaming by themselves. Then we had Oscar Isaac as Marc, screaming by himself. Then we had Oscar Isaac as Steven, screaming by himself. None of those people were together. It's like an opera of screaming.”

For what fans can expect in the series’ final two episodes, Moorhead teased, “ I think if you were surprised by episode 4, get ready to be surprised again by episodes 5 and 6. I know it just sounds like a nice little tag, but I promise you that's actually the case.”

New episodes of “Moon Knight” are available to stream on Wednesday on Disney+.