Created by Matt Corman, Chris Ord and Dario Scardapane, Daredevil: Born Again, the two seasons which make up this series are rather impressive accomplishments. One of the really cool things about it is how much physical making went into it. Yes, there are special effects and computer generated images, when it aided the production to use tech of course they did. But they also built extremely detailed, complex sets on soundstages, like the hideout that Matt and Karen spend so much time in at the start of the season.

When I met with the series costume and production designers, Emily Gunshor and Michael Shaw who worked on both Season One and Two, I started by asking about that tiny private world the crew had created for these Daredevil: Born Again characters to live in.

“We wanted to create an escape,” production designer Michael Shaw explained, “a hideout and an escape at the same time. Once you go through that opening, you wanna be transported to another place. We used Anne Frank's hideout as a model and we actually created a model of Josie's 3D model, showing what the staircase would look like going up to this place, up to the top floor, through the hole, through a closet into the building next door so that you felt like there was a journey that they had to take to get into this hideout. And the architecture of it is completely not anything you would find in New York, it's more of a Haussmannian-style Paris, World War II, 1940s type of hideout. We wanted it to feel very romantic because of the danger, they're hiding out and there's something romantic about what they're doing. We built that as a set and we wanted it to have a lot of texture. Whenever you see Matt in his office in the first season, or at his home, we always want you to feel like there's a tactile world around him. So there was a lot of brick and a lot of timber and texture and that contrasts Fisk’s world where everything is a bunker. When you see the detention center, when you see all of that concrete, all those hard angles, that's Fisk.”

Characters & Spaces That Work Together

When Daredevil: Born Again was put into production, the point wasn’t to remake the source material; the people behind this series wanted to make the story as realistic as possible, they wanted to convince us that the plausibility of it all could pull the show away from the genre of fantasy.

“We wanted to open the show with a really bold, big statement,” Shaw said. “And it was a lot for everybody to wrap their heads around. We knew we would have to do a lot of visual effects and find a ship that would work that we could rent, because you can't really rent a cargo ship, they make too much money. So we rented a small ship that felt okay from the front, you can almost believe if we were to extend it, we could make it into a much larger ship. We also had the ability to shoot the ship on the East River. So we did a lot of our own models before handing it over to visual effects. The whole cargo hold aspect of it was done on a stage. And ironically, our stages are long, narrow shoe boxes that are really complicated to build sets in, but it worked perfectly to be a cargo hold because basically that's what a cargo hold is. It's like a stage. We got away with a lot, just dressing crates in there. We didn't have to build a lot of scenery. But one of the complicated discussions we had over and over again was, how to marry the scale. We had to design the cargo hold before we actually had the ship. So we had to overlay our stage into the actual specs of the ship we found. We had to change a few things, but for the one episode, I think it worked out pretty well.”

“You did an amazing job on it,” costume designer Emily Gunshor said to him, “it was a beautiful set.”

“One of the things that's important to note about our show,” Shaw said, grinning at his colleague in thanks, “in terms of all the design, everything is grounded in reality. So we're not making a comic book. We're not making some Gotham city shield that feels like a police logo. We wanted to just feel like the NYPD. I think that one of the things that's so important about grounding the show in reality is that it resonates on a lot of different levels. Real drama should make you think about what's happening in the world today. We were all very conscious, from the very beginning, that this has to feel real, because you don't have to be a Marvel person to appreciate what the show can offer.”

“Everything we did,” Gunshor added, “we're always trying to pull it out of fantasy and into reality. For costumes specifically, it gets really challenging because we do have a Daredevil in a super suit and it is very much a real super suit. We found ways to keep the whole rest of the universe in a level playing field, even our superheroes are pretty grounded considering. We set the precedent for the Anti-Vigilante Task Force in Season One, at the very end when Fisk created them. And in Season One, he didn't have full backing so they had a patch that had the Mayoral Seal on it. Then for Season Two, we went through a lot of iterations and renderings with Marvel about how stormtrooper-y they were gonna look versus how realistic. We did design and build that vest. I started it and had it made out at Weta in Australia. The whole idea was keeping it grounded, looking at real tactical vests, thinking about how we can put this on and make it cool. Then as props come on, the vests go to props and we get more weapons and helmets and stuff, but we were always looking at what the real thing would be first.”

Colors Alluding To Deeper Meaning

In the first season of Daredevil: Born Again, our hero was pretty much the only character to wear red, one of those details in costume design that helps characters tell their stories, even if it’s something that might not always consciously register with the audience.

In Season Two, the mayor’s wife Vanessa wears only red or white, and the color tells us a lot about the emotional state of NYC’s First Lady and what effect it is having on her Kingpin husband.

This made me think about dragons from the Welsh tradition, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. There is something fundamentally human about the way we cleave to team colors, the ways that red and white have been alluding to team membership since before people started writing their stories down. For the costumes and the world of Daredevil: Born Again, the use of color is always intentional. That’s throughout both seasons but this second one especially. Kingpin, obviously, is iconically coded white, but after the death of his wife we start to see him wearing more and more black. I felt like this was to mirror his grief and the character’s internal struggle to make fundamental choices about who he is and the actions he was willing to take.

“The colors red, black, and white are a story point for the show,” Gunshor explained. “For Season One, we limited red except for Daredevil’s suit. Then coming into Season Two, Fisk is a very white character as far as his suiting, we used a lot of cooler whites because he's in a colder, edgier place and in his life. Vanessa pretty much only wears red or we see her all in red. And that was very, very intentional, she is becoming this figure. And then as soon as she's gone, Fisk kind of is falling out of who he is, falling out of the Kingpin moment, except for that last big battle when he ends up being covered in red. The whole season, we were building up to this white versus red battle and who that red is and building the whole sea of red. You know, we have 500 extras all sharing their red propaganda with devil ears. And that location, that set was so beautiful for the big final showdown. It added to the red-versus-white of that moment.”

The Daredevil: Born Again scene from Season Two, where Kingpin has his party is similarly Arthurian; it's not literally a Round Table, though the blocking and set makes certain the idea of circles remains.

“It was really a lot driven by the directors wanting a certain kind of blocking for the scene,” Shaw explained to me. “But yes, there's a central table and all the tables are around that. And this was a set that we built pretty much for this scene. One of the things we did in the drapery, we paid attention to kind of castle-like details, like a keystone, a very King Arthur's Court detail. You don't really notice it, but you feel it. We wanted all the walls to feel kind of dark, so you're really focusing on the characters, so we chose blue wallpaper, a darker palette for that whole room so everyone would pop against it. We wanted you to focus on what was happening, to have this interface between all the different characters as they're talking about other people.”

A City Without Fear

The throughline, across both seasons, of the City Without Fear videos, they seemed like a place where Gunshor and Shaw would need to work together closely; between the bobble-head-esque mask, the physical space where those clips were shot, all of it a careful balance between character and environment and none of it pulled focus; the whole bit maintained the physics of this story, it added tension and morality and posed a lot of questions that drove the plot forward.

“One of the things that's really interesting about working with Emily,” Shaw said, “and we started the show together, we are so in sync, is that we don't have a huge amount of meetings. We do communicate, but somehow everything always just dovetails perfectly. It's a really lovely thing to be surprised every time I walk onto a set and go, ‘man, we didn't even have a conversation about this wardrobe and it works perfectly in the set.’ I think that's just a testament to how talented she is.”

“Well, I feel like I come and harass you,” Gunshor said with a laugh as she looked over at the production designer. “I'll see your renderings or they'll send me some pictures of what the couch or what the table's gonna be, or how much of it we're gonna see. I think for the BB report specifically, all season, there was like a continued discussion with Dario Scardapane and the directors about what we were doing, how we were doing it, what kind of place it was, at what point BB was gonna take the mask off or put the mask on. I feel like our conversation was more of, ‘this is like a weird black box.’”

“There was nothing about it in the script,” Shaw added. “There was no description of the set, it was scripted as a line. We came up with this white box, and we built in the pipes and the conduit you see on either side of her, I wanted it to draw your eye to her. We put those onto a brick wall and we painted everything white. But for the mask, we had a lot of conversations about Halloween, and how grotesque it was gonna be.”

“There were so many references,” Gunshor told me. “I guess the ultimate idea was that this is a mask that now the city is mass producing at the Halloween Adventure Store. And it's because if you go there, you can find any political figure or famous person. And we all know what that mask is. We knew she was gonna have some version of the white suit. She is so tiny and he is so big, so we really played with her about how much padding we put under it. And even the day we were shooting it, I had batting and was stuffing in more of it. We kept looking at the suit against the proportion of the mask, which was so large. And the actress, Genneya Walton, is so tiny. I love the way that they cut it all together, her and the white against the brick. And in those worlds, you know, we really discussed and changed the color palette and the scenery, the trees are supposed to be green and there's purple balloons.”

“The Fisk propaganda machine is creating the illusion that everything is fine,” Shaw said. “And it is really literally like the fascist propaganda versus the anti-fascist propaganda, the rebels coming out with their own broadcast telling you the truth, and it was brilliant the way they finished it.”

“Michael would pick a set that had lots of greens and trees and looked like it was like a perfect glass building,” the costume designer told me, “so then we could put more well organized, brighter colors on people than we see in our normal grounded New York world.”

Jessica Jones

It feels very important to say that in Daredevil: Born Again, Jessica Jones has one the most perfect leather jackets of all time, it is almost as glorious as those designed by Elvira Gasanova. The lady Jones deserves it of course, she is wonderful, and though she doesn’t appear til the final third of the season, I had to make a point of asking about the character in this story that this writer loves most.

“Krysten Ritter is just an absolute dream to work with,” Gunshor said, “so collaborative and down to really play. For a character who wears boots and a leather jacket, you might think it's very simple. But we scoured the earth for the perfect leather jacket for the season. We must've had two racks of just jackets, to look at shapes and decide which one. We were thinking about where she might have been for the past 10 years and how we’d make it feel like her, but also make it a little bit more mature. Then custom made boots for her so that we could achieve design and the look and the toughness of what we wanted it to be as well as comfort. And then she's just a badass and I feel like that's a lovely thing for so many fans, that she can be a mom now and still be a badass, which we love.”

“You know,” Shaw added, “what you’re mentioning, it makes me think that we do that constantly. Even the most simple things, what looks like the simplest wardrobe or set, we spend a lot of time making it right, making it perfect. And you might never know all that goes into that. You know, nothing is just off the rack, it's all bespoke."

“The simpler it looks,” Gunshor said, “the harder it was to achieve, 100%. Because we bought jeans that had absolutely no holes in them, and then we were handpicking exactly which line and where it hits on her knee for the shredding. You know, that takes somebody hours and days, you need your breakdown team.”

I wanted to know about Jessica Jones’ home too, it's another place where the lighting is warm and there is a hazy sort of softness about the space that feels like implied safety. At least ‘safe’ when compared with a lot of the other Daredevil: Born Again locations these characters are maneuvering through.

“We wanted to convey that she's now domesticated,” Shaw explained. “She's living in a suburban home and at the same time, it is a bit of a hideout and she's escaping. We really wanted it to feel like she's got taste, it's a nice place, she's got maybe some money. But it was important that we found a spot that had a lot of windows because they wanted to see action. We looked at a lot of really modernist homes that were glass boxes, so you could be playing a scene inside and see people coming around the corner from outside.”

When Fiction & Reality Blend

This show went into production before the beginning of the current political climate, which makes for some eerily prescient moments if one consciously considers the temporal lineup of production alongside geopolitical events of the last few years. Dystopian fiction has been doing that for years, under the umbrella of science fiction and away from it; this is me telling you again, Lovely Reader, that the arts are the conscience of any culture.

“It was really surreal,” costume designer Emily Gunshor said, “because we had been talking about this and doing this before preemptively to anything in the real world like it was happening. And as we're always looking for ways to ground what's happening in reality, we had already been looking at previous protests, or back into the 1940s for resistance and rebellion. We had been looking at older references. Little did we know that like while we were happening, we were getting real life references at the same time.”

“All of our fascist and anti-fascist references were from World War II,” Shaw added. “And Star Wars, and other franchises, it's not like it's a new concept; rebels versus the authoritarians. But the cages were really, in a weird way, very difficult to do and even hard to look at because it just felt like, what are we doing? Are we promoting something? There's a connection made, that's also part of the whole grounding process. I think maybe this is subconscious for us as people who are creating, wanting it to feel real is also wanting to feel contemporary and wanting it to feel like it's part of the zeitgeist and part of the culture. If you create something that actually speaks to what's happening on some level, it resonates and becomes more real. It's not just a blind superhero who can see on some level, it goes beyond that. I think that Daredevil: Born Again becomes a show that is appealing to people who are not Marvel people.”

All episodes of ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ Seasons One and Two are now available to stream on Disney+.

MORE FROM FORBES

ForbesHulu’s ‘Paradise’ Gets An Upgrade Which Comes From Intentional DesignForbesCreating Real Magic For Season Two Of ‘Percy Jackson And The Olympians’By Rachel Elspeth Gross

Forbes‘The Lowdown’: FX’s Brilliant Neo-Noir Designed For The 21st CenturyBy Rachel Elspeth Gross