Thanos' snap and the consequential Blip have become an extremely important part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The new Disney Plus series Hawkeye offers its own take on the blipped characters and directors Bert and Bertie explained how the epic scene in the fifth episode, featuring Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova, was filmed.
In the penultimate episode of Hawkeye, audiences witness Yelena moments before the Thanos snap, and her confusion when she discovers that she has lost five years of her life. After not getting a single line of dialogue in the fourth episode of Hawkeye, where she was first introduced in the series, Pugh's Yelena stole the show in the latest episode.
Hawkeye directors wanted Yelena's experience of the Blip to be completely natural and wanted the viewers to feel like they were experiencing it with her. In an interview with Buzzfeed, Bert revealed that they intentionally filmed it in a way that felt continuous. “We wanted to do it in a way that we hadn't seen it done before,” she said. What’s interesting, though, is that the scene was filmed over a few days, and the camera crew had to remember exactly where Pugh was standing and her movements so that nothing would seem out of place.
In the scene, Yelena is seen walking into a washroom, looking at herself in the mirror, and then looking down to wash her hands in the sink. At that precise moment, the snap results in her disintegrating into dust. While fans have seen that before, the next scene immediately brings her back, which is a bit of a surprise. Viewers instantly see her come back to life and look extremely confused at the changed appearance of the location. Her reaction is similar to Monica Rambeau's in WandaVision.
The washroom that Pugh stands in during the scene was a custom-built set inside a mansion, which was put together so that the directors could shoot the scene in one smooth flow. They wanted Yelena to walk inside from the living room and then back out to reveal how the world had changed. “The transition to get from one moment to the other was done in post-production, but the green walls are real and everything that changed was real in the bathroom and the living room changes, too,” Bert revealed.
In her first appearance in the MCU, Yelena appeared beside her sister Natasha Romanoff in Black Widow. The story was set in 2016, after the events of Captain America: Civil War. But, the Black Widow post-credits scene places Yelena in the present, where she visits Romanoff's grave. The first few minutes of Hawkeye's “Ronin” episode explains where Yelena was for those missing years in her timeline.
Hawkeye is streaming on Disney Plus.
Source: Buzzfeed