WandaVision Director on Pulling Back the Curtain in Episode 8, Agatha Easter Eggs, and Season 2

blended the well-established world of the MCU with a mind-bending trip through the history of American family sitcoms — all in service, as we've come to discover, to a very human and compelling story about one woman's grief.

Shakman is a veteran TV director with credits including It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Good Wife — he also literally grew up on television as a child actor best known for the ABC sitcom Just the Ten of Us. Because this is a Marvel project, there is of course a limit to how much he could say about making this season, especially since there's one episode left and some wild twists still to come. However, in the below interview, we were able to talk about a variety of topics, from his previous connections to many of the key players on screen and behind the scenes, using practical effects, the importance of grief to the story being told, and where he stands on the question of a second season.

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[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for WandaVision, Season 1, Episode 8, "Previously On."]

So I've had the pleasure of speaking to a number of other people who have worked on this show over the course of the season, and one interesting unifying factor I've found is that most of them seem to have known you before the show, and you brought them in to some degree. Was that something you did consciously, or was it just the way things worked out, that these were the right people to come on board?

MATT SHAKMAN: It's always a pleasure to work with people that I know and that I've worked with before because you have that shorthand. But it's also really fun to meet new talented people and to expand that universe of people that you can work with. In this particular case, I made a few calls, like to Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez to write the songs, and Mark Worthington, a production designer I've worked with before and who I know to be a genius.

But in the case of Teyonah Parris, we worked together on Mad Men years ago, but that core path to Monica Rambeau really didn't have anything to do with that experience. Though I loved seeing her again — she's an extraordinary actress and it was super fun to be reconnected.
she wasn't sure if the Mad Men connection had helped her at all. But now we've got that confirmed, which is great.

SHAKMAN: She needed no help. She is amazing.

When it came to Episode 8, given the formats you were already playing with, did you always have the sense that the idea of, essentially, a clip show would be fun to explore?

SHAKMAN: Definitely. I mean, WandaVision has been a meta exploration from the beginning, and so the idea of calling it "Previously On" reflects it the way it was constructed. And that line of Agatha's, which changed so many times but finally became "Now it's time for some real reruns," sets that up in a great way. But we wanted to go back and, aside from the madness of it, really spend time with Wanda in all of these key moments, these moments where we can really appreciate the love she had for her parents and how they all bonded as a family. And then what that loss felt like and the connection to Vision. And obviously what it felt like when she had to realize that he was completely gone in S.W.O.R.D. Headquarters.

Of all the styles and all the genres you got to play with over the course of the season, what was the most comfortable for you and what was the least comfortable?

SHAKMAN: Certainly the live studio audience was the most comfortable, even though it was strange for Marvel. I'm a theater director and I also grew up on sitcoms. So I measured out my life as a child in rehearsal days and tape days and performance days, it was a lot of fun to do.

And then the most uncomfortable probably would have been recreating the '60s or '70s, where the tone and style and what comedy was is so specific. The '70s was the biggest challenge just because it's such a self-parodying generation. The '80s too, to some degree. Big hair and shoulder pads, what were we all thinking? And so we really didn't want it to feel like parody. We didn't want it to feel like a spoof. Because as you see now, this is all the world that Wanda has created and Wanda is awfully good at creating realities. And we wanted to make sure that since Wanda made it, it had to be really, really good.
Over the course of the season, do you feel you were able to do as much as you wanted to with practical effects versus CGI? Is there stuff you're particularly proud you got to do?

SHAKMAN: Absolutely. I think if there were things that we couldn't do with practical effects, we shouldn't be doing them. That was the general rule, right? We wanted to be able to copy the style of these shows and they're amazing. And what the craftspeople behind Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie could do with wires is phenomenal. So if they couldn't do it, then we shouldn't be doing it either. Except, of course, when something is meant to be in the Marvel language, like phasing through Mr. Hart's throat to pull out that strawberry. That's meant to break the rules of what magic looks like in that episode.