Mohamed Diab’s journey from Egyptian cinema Marvel’s Moon Knight
Mohamed Diab, the renowned Egyptian director, was in film school in Los Angeles when he got a piece of advice that’s still ringing in his head.
“They told me, ‘If you want Hollywood, they’re going to treat you like s***. But if Hollywood wants you, you’re going to be treated like a king,” Diab tells Esquire Middle East.
If Diab hadn’t listened, his life would have gone very differently. After all, his dream was always to be a filmmaker like Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve, making films with a huge budget on a grand scale that have the zoomed-in full-hearted intimacy of an indie darling. He would likely have stayed there, far away from his home, maybe never telling the stories he was destined to tell—the stories that would ultimately allow him to bring Egypt to Hollywood like never before.
“I realized at that moment that the best stories I can tell are stories about us—stories about Egypt. I went back home and made my films,” says Diab.
The films he made set the Middle East ablaze—each startlingly provocative and widely acclaimed, with El Gezeira, a film he wrote, becoming Egypt’s official submission to the Academy Awards in 2009, Cairo 678 winning the top prize at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2010, and Clash, his 2016 film, chosen as the opening film at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard category—one of the most coveted honors in all of cinema.
Clash’s outsized success brought in huge offers for Diab to finally make the jump to Hollywood, and while initially he believed his moment had finally come, he was overcome with a sinking feeling when he actually read the material he was being sent over.
“I just didn’t click with any of the scripts that I read or the offers that I got. I decided that me and my wife, my producer and co-writer Sarah Goher, were going to have to write our own projects,” says Diab.
The two started furiously working on original material, and the idea was working. They sold two projects, one to Blumhouse Productions, the company behind Get Out, Whiplash and BlacKkKlansman, and one to Thunder Road Films, the company behind John Wick, Sicario, and The Town. They even started working on their own Arab superhero story. Everything was going to plan, but then COVID put everything on hold.
Sitting at home in lockdown, uncertain of what to do next, Diab finally received a call from his agent. Marvel was interested in him.
Hollywood wants you. The old adage echoed in his brain. The moment was finally here. And Diab said to his agent: No.
“No, it would be very hard for me to do something that is not my own,” said Diab, and left it at that.
Diab also knew the process he was in for. Likely, he was on a long list of other top-name directors and he would have to apply, putting in a huge amount of work with no certainty that it would even happen. Why would he go through all of that?
And then Diab read the first episode of Moon Knight, and everything changed.
“Jeremy Slater’s script was so interesting and unique. Sarah and I immediately put together a 200-page project presentation—all made up of pictures, detailing exactly how we wanted to do the project. It contained the music, the colours, the tone, the editing, how we wanted to develop the characters, the locations—every single thing a director would think about. And it all just felt like second nature,” says Diab.
Marvel took one look at the bible they’d laid on the table, and said yes nearly immediately.
Why Moon Knight was right for Mohamed Diab
Ok, but here’s the question—why Moon Knight? What made this hero different from the dozens that Marvel had debuted before? And why was Diab the right person to tell this story?
Moon Knight has always been something of a black sheep in the Marvel catalogue, debuting back in a 1975 issue of Werewolf by Night as a man who received his powers as the result of a curse from an ancient Egyptian deity—a man tinged with darkness that led every interpretation thereafter to feel somewhat alien to the standard Marvel style.
And that is what made Diab the only man for the job, a man who not only could tell a hard-hitting dark story on a grand scale with the character focus that the story required, but a man who would finally do right by Egypt, avoiding orientalist and othering portrayals, rejecting tokenism, and making sure that the story would not only be told right, but be told by Egyptian voices other than just his own.
“I love Egypt, and I think representation is about people and is about places. There are Egyptian characters in the show, all played by Egyptians, and it was very important for that to be overseen by an Egyptian director. But beyond that, we also portray modern Egypt just as we do old Egypt, avoiding showing them in any way that makes it seem ‘exotic’. Egypt itself needs proper representation. You’ve never seen Egypt as authentically depicted in Hollywood as it is here, in the past or present,” says Diab.
Diab also brought along some of the best talent in Egypt behind the scenes, recruiting Ahmez Hafez as one of the series’ editors, and Egyptian composer Hesham Nazih to write the series score.
“To me, this had to be a success story, because that’s what would inspire Hollywood to bring in more from Egypt and the Arab world. And it’s working so far — Marvel loved Hesham and Ahmed, for example, and I’m sure they’re going to work with them both again,” says Diab.
Times have changed. In the years back when Diab had moved back to Egypt to tell Egyptian stories, one of the greatest Arab directors of all time, Hany Abu Assad had made the journey in the other direction, setting course for a Hollywood that was not yet open to telling his stories, Diab recounts.
“Hany stayed in Hollywood over 14 years, and one of the things that he told me is that you have to have thick skin. He went through so much hardship in those years—so many failed attempts, through no fault of his own. He told me he once pitched a brilliant show about Arab American characters, and he got a flat no. They didn’t want to tell Arab stories. Now, every company wants this story to be part of their portfolio,” says Diab.
Marvel, too, has learned from past mistakes—both their own and of others. While Diab laments the treatment of his friends and colleagues before him, he recognizes that the long-overdue change is finally here, and with the right partners such as Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, he has the opportunity to build something special, and help open the door to many others from the region in the process.
“All of us are learning things in Hollywood. I’m happy that we’re living in a time when Hollywood wants to correct the idea of representation. Because, if you do it right, it works. It changes people’s minds, it gets people closer to each other, and shows the world that we’re all human and we are all capable of being both normal and abnormal,” says Diab.
Moon Knight is just the beginning. From here, Diab is living to ensure that so many unconventional Arab stories will be told—intimately—and on the biggest canvas possible.
Moon Knight premieres June 8 on Disney+ across the Middle East