Ali Selim (Sweet Land, Mad Women) directed Secret Invasion with the goal of creating a mature spy thriller. He always knew that he would have to hand the Nick Fury character to The Marvels director Nia DaCosta (Candyman, Ghost Tape), but he decided to focus on the story of Samuel L. Jackson’s (Pulp Fiction, Captain Marvel) aforementioned character attempting to stop a Skrull rebellion. Ali Selim sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss this character movement.

“They’re not protracted conversations [with the team from The Marvels]. It’s just simply, ‘Where do you need him?'” he said. “‘You need him here? Great.’ And then we write into that. So that kind of stuff is very simple because it’s all above my pay grade.”

Ali Selim also discussed how he got hired. “They set out to make this mature espionage thriller and found me after my experience working on The Looming Tower and CIA and FBI things, where I understood the grounded world of trust, suspicion, and paranoia,” he said. “So that’s the tone they wanted to bring to this, and we ended up at the same fork in the road at the same time.”

Selim also discussed the connections between the US and Russia conflict in the show and the one in the real world. “Well, the real-life parallels didn’t really come up until we were halfway through shooting, so it’s coincidence, serendipity, danger and all of the above,” he said. “But the thing that I like about it is that this show is meant to be real and grounded. The stakes are Earth and humanity, as opposed to something off in outer space that’s more abstract or fictional. So the real-life conflict between Russia and the U.S. only helps to make this story feel more real.”

Read the full interview here. New episodes of Secret Invasion release every Wednesday on Disney+.