Daredevil: Steven DeKnight on taking over for Drew Goddard, Easter Eggs

Steven S. DeKnight, the outgoing Daredevil showrunner, whose duties on the Marvel Netflix collaboration will be taken over for season two by Doug Petrie (Buffy, American Horror Story) and Marco Ramirez (Sons Of Anarchy, Da Vinci's Demons), has chatted to Collider about his work on season one.

In the video interview, the former Spartacus showrunner discusses taking over the project from Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, The Cabin In The Woods), whom he could not praise enough: "Drew and I go way back [the pair co-wrote scripts on Angel, and worked together on Buffy The Vampire Slayer], I can't say enough good things about him. This show is as much his as it is mine. He had a fantastic idea and I was thrilled that I was able to come in and execute it."

"I inherited a great roadmap from Drew Goddard before he left. There was a thirteen-episode layout with each episode generally with one or two sentences saying this is what this episode is about. I remember one of the first meetings I came in for with Netflix, they said, 'what do you want to change with Drew's layout?', and I said 'Nothing.'"

For a start, there wasn't time to start chopping and changing, as Daredevil scripts were still being written close to the wire. According to DeKnight, "When I came onto the project when Drew Goddard had to leave to spearhead the Sinister Six movie, we had two scripts, the first two that were written by Drew Goddard, there was a third that was being written and we were about ten or eleven weeks away from starting the shoot, so it was very tight. When we started shooting episode one, we had six finished scripts and episode seven was being written." 

DeKnight also praised Netflix's flexibility in terms of scene-length, "There's this old rule, when I was working in network television that no scene could be longer than two pages [...] I always bucked that rule and my view is that a conversation should be as long as a conversation needs to be. The great thing about the Netflix model is that they were fine with that. They were fine if we just had a long conversation, as long as it was interesting and the drama was there, no-one ever said 'this is longer than two pages, can you start cutting it?'"

Daredevil's extensive inclusion of Marvel Easter Eggs also came under discussion, with DeKnight confirming, "There are Easter Eggs that are so obscure that I didn't even know what they were. [...] There are some Easter Eggs that are really for the hardcore fans and there are some that other people will recognise"

Watch the full interview by clicking on the link below.

Collider