Loki Director Reveals Inspiration for TVA Design

The series premiere of Loki arrived on Disney+ this past week, cluing fans into a whole new corner [...]

The series premiere of Loki arrived on Disney+ this past week, cluing fans into a whole new corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In addition to bringing in the unconventional new journey of Loki (Tom Hiddleston) following the events of The Avengers, the first episode provided an expansive look at the Time Variance Authority, the organization the God of Mischief will be reluctantly partnering with. One of the most striking aspects of the TVA is its visual aesthetic, which uses a liminal and surreal approach to show the majesty of the unconventional organization. ComicBook.com's Brandon Davis recently spoke to Loki director and executive producer Kate Herron, who revealed exactly how that style came to fruition.

"It was a really big challenge, because it's this organization that exists outside of space and time," Herron explained. "So I was like, 'Okay, there's no sun. It's not on a planet. So how do I show this?' And something really awesome in the comics where they show the TVA, is they have those images of the desks stretching off into infinity. So that's definitely something that me and my production designer and our visual effects team took a lot of inspiration from. In that viewpoint, it's almost like a city that stretches into infinity — but it's not really a city, it's just an office that stretches into infinity. So I think we definitely took inspiration from the comics."

"I'm also a big fan of sci-fi, and I wanted the show to be kind of a love letter to sci-fi," Herron continued. "So I stole from everyone — Blade Runner, Metropolis, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. [There are] so many different places that we pulled from. I grew up in Southeast London, which — there's a lot of brutalist kind of architecture around that. They filmed A Clockwork Orange near where I live. I was excited to kind of pull that idea that we've seen in films like Blade Runner, but marry that up with the more Midwest kind of classy, heroic style. Because the TVA are heroic, and I wanted to show that."

"It was fun kind of melding those two styles together, and then also just bringing in with that my own experiences in offices. I worked as a temp a lot, and I remember the technology where I used to work wasn't the most updated. So I was like, 'Oh, it'd be so fun if like technology in the TVA maybe isn't the most sophisticated looking technology. But it works and it's powerful, so why replace it?' So we have this kind of retro-futuristic kind of look across a lot of our tech and it was really fun. And some of that does have references to sci-fi. I think the font on one of the computers is very similar to the font on the computers in Alien. The time doors we have were inspired by Dune. So I think there's definitely a lot of nods that people that love sci-fi will enjoy, and it was honestly just like a really fun playground to be in."

In Marvel Studios' Loki, the mercurial villain Loki (Hiddleston) resumes his role as the God of Mischief in a new series that takes place after the events of Avengers: Endgame. Kate Herron directs and Michael Waldron is head writer, with a cast that also includes Owen Wilson as Mobius M. Mobius and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Ravonna Renslayer.

Loki debuts new episodes every Wednesday exclusively on Disney+. If you haven't signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.

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