JOE RUSSO: Welcome to the DVD commentary
for Captain America Civil War.
I'm Joe Russo.
ANTHONY RUSSO: I'm Anthony Russo.
CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: I'm Chris Markus.
STEPHEN McFEELY: And I'm Steve McFeely.
JOE: And we...
ANTHONY: Should we do that over, guys?
McFEELY: No... You didn't like that? JOE: Yeah.
ANTHONY: Just kidding. McFEELY: Somebody...
ANTHONY: No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
JOE: I was trying to come up with a fake band name for us,
but I just... I wasn't quick enough.
(McFEELY CHUCKLES)
ANTHONY: All right, so, the movie's playing.
MARKUS: I've seen this movie... McFEELY: Oh, that movie.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: Uh, so, we talk a little bit about Bucky's backstory.
Anybody have anything?
MARKUS: Well, he went through hard times
and this is just a little taste of how much it sucked to be Bucky.
JOE: And how he was treated in the facility he was kept in.
McFEELY: I mean, this an example of how many, uh...
The first of many decisions about how to present
all the many plot strands we had.
JOE: Right. McFEELY: Right?
I mean, 'cause it's a flashback that starts the movie.
That then forces you to jump, you know, a couple time periods.
And I believe... And we certainly tried other places for this,
- but there was just no way to really... - MARKUS: Yeah.
We also danced around for a while in terms of a MacGuffin...
'Cause I think we wanted to connect it
MARKUS: There were many drafts where they were chasing
- something called the mind crown. - (LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: That's right. That's right.
MARKUS: And then somebody very wisely went,
"Couldn't it just be like a notebook with some words in it?"
ANTHONY: Will you guys talk about the word sequence?
'Cause Joe and I get that question a lot and we always...
Ready to comply.
Everything he says is the title of a forthcoming Marvel movie.
(McFEELY CHUCKLES)
McFEELY: Um, I think we picked Russian words that sounded...
JOE: Interesting.
JOE: Yeah.
McFEELY: And then, even when you read them,
it wasn't, you know, kittens and puppies.
MARKUS: Yeah.
McFEELY: It's something... MARKUS: Obliterate.
McFEELY: that had a connotation to it.
ANTHONY: So, you guys were really thinking about
how it sounded in Russian?
McFEELY: A little bit, yeah. MARKUS: Right, yeah.
McFEELY: To be fair, I think
everything in Russian sounds interesting.
MARKUS: I think it was also about how it sounded in...
ANTHONY: Right. MARKUS: How it read in English
to make you think you were watching something cool.
(ANTHONY CHUCKLES)
JOE: So, this is probably the...
One of the more subversive things that we did in the movie. Which is...
ANTHONY: Yeah, we ruin a beautiful vintage Cadillac.
JOE: That's right. ANTHONY: It's very subversive.
Broke my heart.
JOE: But this plot point that we had to try and make you believe
was actually what the movie was about.
That it was not about who was in the car,
but it was about what was in the trunk of the car.
MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: Uh, and that these blue gel packs
were, uh, gonna become a key story point.
Which implies a more traditional structure for a superhero film.
Because those blue gel packs can create super soldiers.
Um, and a lot of work went into...
The two things, I think, were the hardest in the script
were that misdirect and balancing Cap and Tony throughout the movie
to make sure that each felt like they had an equal voice in the film.
MARKUS: Yeah. MARKUS: And equally represented
in terms of their point of view.
So that by the time you got to the end of the movie,
you are left with a very complicated choice to make.
You couldn't tell who was wrong and who was right.
And that, you know, hopefully, you do leave the theater
and argue with your friends and family about who is wrong and who is right.
MARKUS: I would just like to say I love Wanda's chipped nail polish.
ANTHONY: That's a really good thing about the shot.
JOE: Real method.
WANDA: (ON RADIO) It's a good target.
There's an ATM on the south corner, which means?
Cameras.
Both cross streets are one-way.
So, compromised escape routes.
STEVE: Means our guy doesn't care about being seen.
He isn't afraid to make a mess on the way out.
JOE: Why don't we talk a little bit about the development process on this.
Uh, go back to the beginning.
McFEELY: The beginning-beginning. JOE: When there was no civil war.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: It was basically...
Winter Soldier had just come out.
Kevin had approached the four of us
and said, "You guys wanna do another one?"
- McFEELY: Fast. - (LAUGHTER)
JOE: And we all said "yes."
And you know, he said, "Okay, great, what do you wanna do?"
And then we spent months in a room
going through ideas, one of which was...
McFEELY: What're you leading me towards?
JOE: The mad bomb. McFEELY: The mad bomb?
McFEELY: We certainly...
You know, the biggest thread was the Bucky search.
MARKUS: Yeah. McFEELY: Right, and so that...
And that remained. Much of that remained in Civil War.
But what we were pursuing was,
somebody tries to flush Bucky out of hiding
because only Bucky had a secret that
was, um, 50 years old or what have you.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
MARKUS: Which had...
I mean, it was gratifying that it lived inside Civil War
because it had good things in it.
Um, but it just came to nothing.
It, literally, came to somebody robbing the stock market.
McFEELY: That's right. It was a very traditional third act.
MARKUS: It was so disheartening when we got to that third act.
It was like, "Oh, it's about money."
JOE: Another one of these. ANTHONY: Yeah.
McFEELY: Yeah, another one of these.
JOE: That, I think, is what was appealing to all of us about Civil War,
is that the inherent structure of it could be subversive
and could deconstruct the genre.
Um, and I think, um, we had some story elements
that, you know, we were able to pull threads from other movies
to create the core emotional arc of this movie.
McFEELY: Right. ANTHONY: Yeah.
MARKUS: But what was nice was that we knew
Bucky had killed Tony's parents.
And as long as we had Bucky,
it was almost like there was this unbelievable fact
that we can either completely ignore,
which seems like such a waste,
or it's gonna blow up whatever plot we're...
if we're talking about taking over the stock market,
you can't talk about killing Tony's parents,
'cause then you're gonna kill your plot.
So, it was lovely when we got to do Civil War
and suddenly the thing we were avoiding got to be central...
JOE: The primary issue of the movie. McFEELY: Yeah. Right.
JOE: And, you know, just...
Ultron was being worked on while we were working on the script.
So, we all got to see a screening of it and then when we realised
Oh, Tony could have incredible guilt coming out of that movie.
MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: That there could be culpability for him,
that there could be culpability for the Avengers.
Well, how does the world feel about what just happened in that movie?
The fact that in Winter Soldier, we had a sequence
where you saw, where it was implied,
that Bucky had something to do with the murder of the Starks.
And that Cap hadn't said anything yet about it.
So, there was a few elements.
And I think Civil War is, and people have said this, the, um...
"It's the movie most dependent upon everything that has come before it."
McFEELY: Certainly. ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: In order... You have to have seen a number of the Marvel movies
to understand this movie.
McFEELY: It is richer for that experience.
I mean, it's a thing unique in film at this moment which is...
I mean, part of this... I like this movie, I think it's great.
It's 'cause everyone did good work.
But it's also because good work was done in 10 or 12 movies beforehand
- that we got to pull on. - MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
We even got to, uh, enrich...
I think this movie actually enriches, looking backwards,
some of the other movies where, you know,
plot lines are picked back up again
(STUTTERS) and the ramifications are dealt with.
ANTHONY: Yeah, that's a good point.
JOE: Yeah, the threads are coming from a lot different films.
And they're heading forward into a lot of different movies as well.
MARKUS: By the way, I just heard...
Well, not literally just now.
That this building, which is the Atlanta Civic Center posing as Lagos,
has been torn down.
ANTHONY: Oh, my! MARKUS: It is no longer there.
ANTHONY: Wow! McFEELY: And it's also MIT.
JOE: That's a bit of a heartbreak. ANTHONY: Yeah.
MARKUS: Yeah, it's a nice building.
ANTHONY: And it stands in for MIT as well. Yeah.
No, this building looked like it was
gonna be on the verge of being torn down
while we shot there, so not surprised to hear that.
JOE: Something that is interesting about the film,
and I think something that we were excited about
when we all stumbled on the concept for Civil War,
is that this is a unique kind of storytelling.
And it's not something you can do unless you have a cinematic universe,
a healthy cinematic universe, that has a lot of movies before it.
Which just basically allows us to focus on character interaction.
For a majority of the film, um, we don't have to do set up.
This movie is impossible if you have to set up every character in the film.
McFEELY: Right. MARKUS: Right.
JOE: If you had to follow a traditional,
you know, cinematic structure
or what we've come to know as a, you know...
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: A two, two and a half hour closed-ended experience.
- We could've never made this movie. - McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: And what was nice was we didn't even,
just 'cause of the way the story's being told,
we didn't have to do backstory on the new characters, either.
Because we have one that people have seen five movies about
and one who isn't necessarily a mystery in the movie itself
So, being Panther, couldn't explain too much about him beforehand, so...
CROSSBONES: Take this to the airstrip.
We're not gonna outrun them. Lose the truck.
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
Where are you going to meet us?
I'm not. (GRUNTS)
I've got four, they're splitting up.
I got the two on the left.
(PANICKED CHATTER)
JOE: Let's talk about our support team for a second here.
McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: Speaking of the, yeah, stunts...
Heidi Moneymaker, who is Black Widow's stunt double in this sequence,
she has some amazing work here.
JOE: Who did us a real solid by coming in
and helping us with some of the action.
A movie of this scale is immense.
So, we did have some compression in the schedule
and we needed some help to get these things done.
But we do have an incredible stunt team
that is carried over from Winter Soldier into this movie,
who really, there's an example right there...
Who really take a lot of very physical hits
in order for us to get that visceral...
You know, "you feel the punches" quality to the action.
And I just wanted to give a shout-out to them for that
and for all the, you know, really inventive...
Here's another example, right here...
The really inventive work that they do choreographing these fights.
This is one of my favourite fights I think I've ever seen,
and this was choreographed by our Stunt Department
and Chad and Dave as well.
MARKUS: And what's amazing is when we watch the stunt viz of this,
this isn't sped up, there are no effects.
Heidi just does these things.
She can swing around a person's head and smack somebody else.
ANTHONY: Yeah. ANTHONY: Well, it's amazing.
ANTHONY: It is amazing.
And this, by the way, was shot in Atlanta in the summer
even though it doesn't look like Atlanta.
But it was extremely hot.
It was extremely hard conditions to shoot something
where you're this physically active and aggressive.
JOE: Uh, but this being set
in Atlanta is a good segue into our incredible visual effects team
who put Lagos in around us.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: (STUTTERING) So, that we could work in Atlanta,
you know, in a very specific location
that would allow us to get more time.
Where we could spend more time and money on the fight sequences
and on getting, um, great character work out of the actors
instead of moving to a different location where we'd spend a lot more money,
you have to move the crew.
So it was a real credit to them for all the work that they do
that I think the people don't see.
- Don't know that is their work. - McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: As well as our production designer, Owen Paterson.
I mean, what you're seeing here,
this is just a big empty pit in an industrial area in Atlanta, so...
The whole market, all the buildings in the market,
that was all developed and built by our production design team,
and like Joe was saying,
everything surrounding that is all by our visual effects team
and it all ends up turning Atlanta into Lagos.
JOE: They're real, what we call plates of Lagos,
meaning we sent a photographer or camera crew over there
that took footage of Lagos
and then our VFX team reconstitutes that or uses that as a template,
you know, for a three-dimensional world
that they create and then put around the characters.
McFEELY: Maybe it's time to talk about Civil War.
- The comic versus the film. - JOE: Sure.
McFEELY: As in Winter Soldier,
everybody always wanted to start with a Lemurian Star sequence, you know,
or even James Bond is a good example.
The eight-minute kick-ass action sequence.
But as opposed to some James Bonds where it's clearly a different story,
we definitely wanted, as in Winter Soldier,
for it to have something...
Couldn't afford for it not to have something to do with the plot.
And so, in this case, it's basically, this movie's Stamford incident.
In the comic books, some heroes that you may or may not know,
you know, accidentally trigger an explosion that blows up a school.
And therefore the reign of God comes down on them
and every country on Earth says you have to be registered.
- Um, this is our version of that. - MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
McFEELY: And hopefully has got character consequences to it,
particularly for Wanda in this case.
MARKUS: I would just like to point out
in this scene, that is not a special effect.
- That's Robert's brother, Jerry Downey. - (LAUGHTER)
MARKUS: This young man looks remarkably like him.
ANTHONY: Well, I will note this.
Hope Davis and Robert Downey Jr. Are almost the same age.
One year separates the two of them.
JOE: So, again, credit goes to our visual effects team.
This was the last shot that was dropped into the movie.
You know, about two weeks before it was seen on-screen...
Maybe a week and a half before it was seen on-screen.
So, a lot of work by Lola, a visual effects company,
was put into this shot.
We didn't do them any favors by delivering them a oner.
McFEELY: That's right. That's right.
JOE: But that was the intent...
Was we wanted this to feel like a stage play.
So, it would have that kind of..
ANTHONY: Throwback feel. JOE: Throwback feel to it.
The emotion of that.
But, also, to be from the perspective of the MIT audience
that's actually watching this being...
You know, this is a projection on a stage,
so, subliminally, you have the same effect
where you're almost a voyeur or a proscenium...
It's being presented to you in a proscenium.
McFEELY: Is that why you wanted to do it in the one?
JOE: Yeah... We just wanted... ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: Because ultimately, it is a trick.
McFEELY: I love it. Okay.
MARKUS: It's also Robert's last shot, right?
'Cause he had to shave the beard in order to shoot it.
McFEELY: Yes. That's right. ANTHONY: That's right.
But there's also something about this scene being
like sort of period dysfunctional family.
It was just kind of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
McFEELY: This is Ordinary People here. ANTHONY: Yeah, exactly.
So, there's a lot of things pushing us to that sort of tone in that oner.
McFEELY: Gotcha. Yeah.
MARKUS: And then this developed differently.
I mean, this originally was a flashback.
JOE: It was and then we thought that the...
I think we all agree that the flashback was just too traditional of a structure.
MARKUS: Yeah. JOE: And, uh...
MARKUS: I mean, Tony's the perfect character to...
McFEELY: Right. Robert had... Robert definitely, you know...
MARKUS: Yeah.
McFEELY: Tony just doesn't have flashbacks.
(CHUCKLING) He's kind of just, you know, where's his tech?
JOE: Tony can make the flashback real.
McFEELY: Yes. Yes.
JOE: Or he can show the flashback to an audience.
You know, that's the fun thing with Tony Stark,
is you can think big with the character
because of his money and his genius and the technology at his disposal.
You can do a lot interesting things with the character.
ANTHONY: Like, for instance, have a holographic teleprompter
- that hovers over the audience. - McFEELY: Why wouldn't you?
(CHUCKLING) Right.
MARKUS: And this theater is the inside of the Atlanta Civic Center,
which I appear to be obsessed with.
(McFEELY CHUCKLES)
Uh, the outside of which was the Center for Disease Control.
McFEELY: Do you guys wanna talk about, uh, Downey's performance?
This is the beginning of a more mature, darker Tony Stark.
JOE: Yeah, the intent in this movie...
Because we knew where we were going with the character,
that we had to motivate Tony to want to kill Bucky Barnes in the third act
in order for the third act to work correctly.
Uh, that Tony would have to be off-balance.
And the way that we thought we could make him off-balance
was by pulling things out of his life, making him emotionally vulnerable...
Really emotionally vulnerable.
So, Pepper is out of his life.
It clearly is an issue for him, as you can see, by Robert's performance here.
Uh, and not only that but it's compounded by the fact
that he is about to be confronted by the mother of a boy
that died as part of collateral damage in Sokovia.
And Tony is directly responsible for Ultron, so he feels great guilt.
So, (STUTTERS) he's being attacked emotionally on a lot of different fronts.
And it puts the character in a precarious position.
So, as the movie progresses, if there is a touchstone
or something cathartic were to happen to him,
it could potentially push him over the edge.
Which is what happens at the end of the film.
MARKUS: And there's something very satisfying
about the arc Tony Stark has taken from the first movie on,
where, you know, his most recognizable action in the first movie
is to stop making weapons
'cause, "The things I make are hurting people."
And he gets all the way to this movie and realizes,
"The things I make are still hurting people."
McFEELY: (CHUCKLES) Right. MARKUS: You know, it's...
McFEELY: No, he's responsible for Ultron.
MARKUS: Yeah.
McFEELY: And we couldn't just rely on that.
I mean, I assume many people saw Ultron,
probably everyone in the audience did.
But just in terms of storytelling,
you want a scene that crystallizes that issue.
And to not just have to rely on your audience
remembering a year ago.
JOE: And this was influenced by the scene from Jaws,
- where Brody is confronted... - McFEELY: Right. Yeah, that's right.
JOE: By the mother of a boy who was killed
in a shark attack, um, off the shore.
And he now feels great guilt moving forward in the movie because of it.
I think we have to really, um, give a shout-out to Alfre Woodard here
for doing a, you know, very small part in this movie, but a very integral part.
It was so important that the audience feel the emotional impact of this
and to have an actress of her caliber performing this for us
was an incredible gift and a real favour.
ANTHONY: It was Robert's idea, actually, to cast her.
He brought her up for that role
'cause I think he knew how important this scene would be for the character.
McFEELY: And even on set it was pretty clear.
- "Oh, wow! Wow!" - (LAUGHTER)
JOE: Exactly. ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: You know, it was a... And it was just, you know,
Robert is an incredibly big personality on-screen
and you have to have an incredible actor or actress opposite him
- to hold the screen. - McFEELY: That's right.
He does not talk much in that scene.
MARKUS: No. McFEELY: You know, yeah.
MARKUS: And here's our first appearance of the Wakandans.
Is no victory at all.
JOE: It is a dense movie
and it's interesting that, you know, this whole secretive nation
is introduced on Cap's computer screen.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm. McFEELY: Right.
JOE: But it's very difficult to tell this story and keep it on character
if we kept jumping all over the world and...
McFEELY: No, we've mentioned this before.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
McFEELY: I mean, characters come in
when the story requires them to come in.
We cannot have a scene
where T'Challa wakes up one morning and his dad says,
"Hey, time to fly to Vienna," or, you know...
Any character that's just going about their business. This...
They can only come when we need them to come in.
JOE: Yeah, and tied to the main plot of the story.
MARKUS: Yeah, exactly.
ANTHONY: So, I don't know if anybody caught it,
but some people think that Wanda's brother is absent from the film,
but there is actually some child photos over on the desk over there.
McFEELY: (CHUCKLES) Right.
JOE: This was a relationship
we thought would be important for the movie
as a patriarchal relationship.
Illustrating how Cap is the patriarch or a patriarch of the Avengers
and I would say that Tony is the other patriarch.
And the movie really is about what happens when those two patriarchs
come into conflict with one another.
How does everyone choose sides and why?
And typically, you tend to choose sides in an argument for emotional reasons
or for philosophical reasons.
Um, Wanda certainly feels a closeness to Steve.
Steve is a good person, um, a good mentor.
Uh, and she does have a hole in her life.
You know, her brother is gone.
And so she's looking for an emotional connection to someone.
Tony is not necessarily a guy
that engenders emotional connection with people.
McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: We were trying to create a sense of family here.
Because, you know, in our minds this movie was always
very much about a family being torn apart.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm. ANTHONY: A sort of notion of civil war
that we have back from the American Civil War
where families had to fight on either side of the conflict.
Um, and in that scene, we were trying to create...
Again, it's like you can't get more family-like than somebody arguing
about when and how somebody walks into their bedroom.
McFEELY: Right. Exactly. ANTHONY: Yeah.
McFEELY: Right. Well, the setting is important.
JOE: So, another bonus of working in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
is we knew we needed somebody to represent the government in the film.
So, we could've either cast an original part
or we could've used one of the great actors...
- (LAUGHTER) - McFEELY: Of the last 40 years. Yeah.
But also there's a little bit of a, not a reclamation project,
but you wanna age the character up,
you wanna make 'em a little bit more mature.
The tone of Winter Soldier and Civil War
and very likely Infinity War
is, um, a little more grounded, a little more realistic
and so taking the gruff
General Ross from The Hulk and making him more of a statesman
was absolutely by design.
JOE: Mmm-hmm. His character has gone on a journey.
It's off camera, but that's the part of the fun of these movies
is how far can you move the characters off camera,
so that when you sit in the theater,
you're surprised by the choices that have been made.
MARKUS: And yet it's still in line with that character.
He's still trying to control superheroes.
McFEELY: Yes.
MARKUS: He's... JOE: He's being smarter about it.
MARKUS: Yeah, learned a better way to do it.
And here is the other big reason why
this movie sort of wanted to be made,
was because we and everybody else began to notice
the massive amount of destruction at the end of these movies.
And do we just let that fly, or do we say something about it?
And it seemed ripe...
JOE: To examine it. MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: On a real world level.
McFEELY: I mean, it makes sense, you know,
if you put yourself in the position of Marvel,
it makes sense to, to dance with who brung ya, right?
If that movie is working and if the...
if the third act is, we all get together and we...
Somebody's raining crap down from the sky, that's fine.
But I think you say this a lot, Joe,
you know, if you give someone a flavour of ice cream they love every day,
they're gonna eventually learn to hate that ice cream.
JOE: Right.
McFEELY: So, we have to reinvent the structure or take risks structurally.
So this is an examination of the third act, you know.
MARKUS: Well, it's also how you keep this big of a...
If you call all of Marvel a franchise,
how you keep it from feeling like sequel, sequel, sequel, sequel
is, each movie has to be aware of the one that came before it.
It has to evolve because of what happened in the previous movie.
So, you can't keep committing the sins of the prior movie.
ANTHONY: It turns it into serialized storytelling
as opposed to sequelization.
MARKUS: Yeah. McFEELY: Yes.
ANTHONY: Which I think is, obviously, part of the appeal of the Marvel films.
JOE: And I know some people had mentioned
about the number of casualties...
McFEELY: Are we soft pedaling it, or... JOE: Soft pedaling...
Well, no, but actually they're called civilian casualties,
so it is a reference to civilians, which is not inclusive of..
ANTHONY: The bad guys.
JOE: Military personnel or police, you know...
Anybody else who may have been engaged
(STUTTERS) in one of the events
who were not civilians.
But that's... Ross's point here is that,
you know, we're not holding you accountable for the other heroes,
the cops or military who may have given their lives in these situations,
but we're holding you accountable for the civilians who did.
MAN: I jumped the kerb.
JOE: This movie kind of has parallel stories going on in it.
(SNIFFLES) Zemo is off in his own story
because it's not clear to the audience what he's up to
for quite some time in the film.
McFEELY: Do we wanna cop to the re-shoot nature of this one?
MARKUS: Yeah. McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: This was... We had an original scene
where Zemo was at an auction.
A black market auction.
And that's how he got his hands on the book, was at this auction.
And he killed everybody in the auction by gassing the auction.
But we just didn't get enough story out of him.
It was too mysterious of an opening scene. It was...
ANTHONY: It wasn't specific enough,
either to who Zemo was as a villain, you know.
McFEELY: It did not connect him to the opening of the movie, uh, cleanly.
ANTHONY: Yeah. McFEELY: And this one does.
- You'll get the red book, you get... - JOE: Karpov.
McFEELY: You literally get Karpov and perhaps the most important thing.
JOE: Right.
McFEELY: So you know you're not watching a third strand of the movie.
You're going back to something that you already saw.
JOE: And tonally, it just felt more appropriate to us.
This is loosely based on the notion of John Demjanjuk,
who was, um, (SMACKS LIPS) hiding out in Cleveland,
in Parma, Ohio.
Um, um...
McFEELY: And he was a camp... He was a prison...
- He was a concentration camp officer. - ANTHONY: Yeah.
Yeah, he was a retired auto worker that they somehow discovered
had been a former concentration camp guard named Ivan the Terrible.
And it was... There was a big controversy in the late '80s
about whether or not to deport him to Israel for trial
and they did eventually, but it was just this notion of the fact that
when after the war Nazis go into hiding like Boys in Brazil,
whether it be South America
or whatever parts of the world they go into hiding in,
we were always playing with a similar idea with HYDRA.
You know, some of HYDRA shows up here in the States,
some shows up in Russia,
- some in Sokovia, et cetera. - MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: But when you scatter and Karpov is in hiding and...
McFEELY: But, yeah, I mean, you know, I remember doing it.
Chose Cleveland not only as a shout-out to you guys,
but because it's got maybe one of the top 20 Russian populations
- in the United States. - JOE: Right.
McFEELY: So, you hide, but you hide someplace you can still order food.
ANTHONY: That was a cool idea on your part.
MARKUS: Well, it's also, you know...
This is an example of the grounded nature. They don't...
The HYDRA didn't scatter and each form a terrorist cell, you know...
McFEELY: Right. MARKUS: Build ray guns.
This guy's clearly kind of a fat drunk in Cleveland. So, it's... (CHUCKLING)
JOE: Who boarded up his house and has a gun by the door
and clearly doesn't leave a lot. He's probably a hoarder,
you know, who gets his groceries delivered
and doesn't want people to see his face.
He's living out his life in fear now
because there are documents that were released
by Cap and Natasha in Winter Soldier
that include information about him.
And so, he's a wanted man
and there are probably bounty hunters looking for him.
ANTHONY: I mean, this whole plot...
The whole plot of this movie is
in a lot of ways driven by that,
when... That moment at the end of Winter Soldier
where Black Widow uploads all of the HYDRA files onto the internet.
So, presumably, people have been combing over those files
for a couple years now.
And, um, you know, just like the Snowden file,
sometimes you find a needle in a haystack
and you start to put a narrative together
about what's going on and that's really how Zemo is doing what he's doing.
He's paying a lot of attention to those things,
he's very driven on an emotional level and he's finding clues
that other people haven't found yet because of that.
McFEELY: It's the man with experience
meets a man with the desire to do this, right?
So, I mean, in many ways, an everyman could have done this
if he knew how to murder people. (CHUCKLES)
MARKUS: Shout-out to Vision's sweater vest here.
Well, actually not a vest, it's a full sweater.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: The intent with that was that
Vision is trying to discover how he fits in.
He wants to assimilate, he's looking for an identity,
um, he doesn't want to be a singular entity.
He wants to see if he can access humanity in some way.
McFEELY: Now, do you imagine he is creating these
out of his very fiber or is he shopping?
JOE: I think he's creating these outfits. ANTHONY: Creating them. Yeah.
McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: The fact of the matter is, Vision is always naked.
McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: Everything is made from his skin.
- It's a projection. - JOE: Yes.
ANTHONY: Paul Bettany always puts it a way I love it.
He thinks of it as Vision is trying to understand humanity.
That's his sort of mission.
And, like, it's an interesting organizing principle
when you think about the character.
JOE: He was created to protect humanity.
This is great.
We did a lot of work early on with Robert
about the character and our big pitch to him,
because he was not contracted to do this movie...
We had to go to him and pitch him the film
and get him creatively vested in the film,
was that we were gonna take a very different approach with Tony Stark.
That we were gonna make the character off-balance
and emotionally vulnerable
and, uh, insensitive
and that, you know, he's going to be in a real place of confusion.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: He's dealing with emotions that he hasn't had to deal with before.
And that his moral center and his narcissism
are coming into conflict with each other.
And he has to make a choice to submit his ego to the government.
McFEELY: And I think that's being responsible
to the movies that have come before.
I mean, you know, you can't blow off things like Ultron.
If you do, then you are just spinning your wheels.
JOE: Right. You're just making movies...
McFEELY: if he doesn't learn from his mistakes,
we will eventually get sick of him.
MARKUS: Right. And in this exact same scene,
Steve is learning from, not exactly his mistakes,
but he's learning from his last movie.
So, everyone is the product of where you just saw them.
JOE: And what's interesting is they're changing positions.
He and Cap have crossed.
McFEELY: Yes. They've crossed in a way.
JOE: They've do-Si-do'd their arcs,
where the narcissist and the anti-authoritarian
is now willing to submit to government authority
and the chain of command guy...
McFEELY: Team player. Yeah.
JOE: Now wants nothing to do with it.
Because he can't trust power structures.
ANTHONY: You know, one thing that this scene makes me think of,
and many other moments in the movie,
is like, you know, you guys have been responsible for creating
several of these characters and voicing them as writers,
but also, the work that you guys do with inheriting other characters
and cracking their voice as writers is always amazing to Joe and I.
We love how you're able to do that
and I can go through the whole cast about how, you know...
- Well, you guys... - McFEELY: Please do. Would you talk...
ANTHONY: Would you guys just talk for a minute
about like what that process is like,
like the difference between voicing characters you've created,
- and as far as inheriting characters? - McFEELY: Oh, sure.
MARKUS: Well, it was such a pleasure to finally get Tony aka Robert
because he's essentially everything Steve isn't.
Steve doesn't say anything
that he doesn't...
Hasn't thought about and believe.
And Robert/Tony says everything,
and you have to find the nugget in all the jokes
and the constant self-referencing.
So, it was almost like an entirely unused portion
- of the dialog skill set... - McFEELY: Right. Right, we...
MARKUS: that just was cut out of the Cap movies
'cause he doesn't behave that way.
JOE: What about Natasha? She's coming up in a minute here.
McFEELY: Well, I mean, I think we all feel
that perhaps the consummate Natasha is in Winter Soldier,
right, this... But she's part of this arc that's gone from the shadows
and being basically a spy, a person who trades in lies.
And has come out, right?
She sits in front of a national panel
(CHUCKLING) and tells the government to kiss her ass, right?
She's the leader of the Avengers in many ways.
MARKUS: She's tricky to write though,
because she doesn't, and Scarlet's very good at calling us on it, is...
- She doesn't tell jokes, she isn't... - McFEELY: No.
MARKUS: all that deliberately funny or anything,
so, all your writerly ticks of giving somebody a smart remark
or a sarcastic response to something...
She just doesn't do that because she is more of a cipher.
She doesn't want to give... It's double agent training.
She's not gonna give anything away that she doesn't want to be revealed.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: She also, in this movie, I think,
she has the most mature point of view
- of any of the characters. - McFEELY: Right. Yeah.
Right. She can see both sides in a way that not everyone else can
which was the goal of..
We wanted everyone to have a really solid basis
for why they're doing what they're doing
and then for the audience to walk out of there completely split.
And she is sort of that middle ground of maturity.
JOE: Well, what's fascinating about her is she is a reformed villain.
- You know, so, she really... - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: She has an understanding of life
in a way that other characters don't
or she has an empathy, I think.
Um, and it's really illustrated very well in this scene,
which is to me, one of my favourite performance scenes in the movie.
McFEELY: This is the church scene? ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: This is the scene between the two...
McFEELY: So, I have directing questions here.
Because this is great.
It's all from below, I assume because of the windows,
- but also because of.. - JOE: Those were helpful.
McFEELY: Well, yeah, but, I mean, is it, uh...
Can you talk about that?
Is it just you found a window and said, "I'm gonna use it"?
Or how do you justify, um, this angle throughout the whole scene,
you know, 'cause it works great.
But I didn't know it would work great. It looks great.
JOE: It has to do with tone and what you're trying to say with the characters.
- This an off-angle eyeline. - McFEELY: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: So we're off to the left on Cap here.
We're not directly in their eyeline and...
ANTHONY: This is a very off-angle here, which is great.
JOE: Yeah. And it's a... Because we were off-angle and lower,
we knew that when she moved in closer to him
that we would get a tighter two-shot out of it.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: But it would be a more abstract two-shot.
But there's a sense of intimacy here, coming up from the vulnerability,
uh, shooting from underneath a character.
Typically, when you want, you know,
to make people available to you,
you can look up at them.
When you want to diminish them,
you get the camera above them and look down on them.
McFEELY: Are we allowed to be more intimate because it's off-angle?
Like it's not... So, it's not in my face or is...
JOE: Yes, I think so, and it's less...
ANTHONY: I think it does create a little bit of.. Yeah, it gives your eye...
You know, it puts you in a slightly more unconventional space
when you're looking at it.
So, I think you're open to what's happening in a different way
when you just sort of drift off of what the convention is. Yeah.
MARKUS: You're spying on them. McFEELY: I'm spying on them. Okay.
JOE: Yeah, and if they're more a traditional close-up, then...
McFEELY: It'd feel like a soap opera. JOE: It does.
McFEELY: Okay.
JOE: And your expectation is that it will be emotional
because we're on longer lenses and we're right in their face
- and she's... - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: She's dirty in the frame on his side.
Meaning, by dirty, I mean that she's edging the frame with her hair.
And blurry and, you know...
So, it's a more traditional way to execute a scene
which also may make your brain lazier as you watch the scene.
McFEELY: Gotcha.
ANTHONY: I think the central question of that scene is like,
"Are these two characters going to connect?"
McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: It's sort of a way to almost hold back that connection in a way
until they finally make a very unexpected connection
- at the end of the scene. - McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: I should say this is Chadwick Boseman.
ANTHONY: Yes.
MARKUS: The dawn of the Black Panther, which is...
I mean, this is pretty much how Wakanda always entered the movie.
And we weren't even always sure that Panther himself would be in the film.
A nation looking at the Avengers from outside
So, there was a period where we might have only had T'Chaka,
or T'Chaka and T'Challa
Because they fit... Again,
that the plot and the story called for these people to be there
whether or not they were superheroes.
JOE: As we're developing it, the concept of the movie is binary.
'Cause there's Tony's side and there's Cap's side.
And why T'Challa became important is he's a free radical.
Right, so he's a guy who's motivated, extremely, for revenge.
Uh, but it has nothing to do with the main plot of the film.
Because he has a very specific story
that could hopefully stir up the two-faction rut...
McFEELY: Right. Yeah. Absolutely.
JOE: That the movie would have fallen into.
McFEELY: I mean, we all knew very early on
that if we had the same argument six times, we failed.
JOE: Right. McFEELY: We've failed the story.
ANTHONY: Yeah, and he's also very...
He complicates things for both sides of the equation, too,
because he is pursuing his own agenda,
but it directly affects Tony's point of view
and Cap's point of view in many ways.
And I think that was also useful in the storytelling
because look, fundamentally we all know Tony and Cap as heroes.
So, to get them to a place where they're really mad at each other
and having problems with one another...
You know, I think having other things going on in the plot
and complicating their situations was helpful to get them to that place.
This was one of them.
JOE: I think we really have to commend Chadwick Boseman
because with very limited screen time in this movie,
he crafted a very emotional, dimensional character
that is very different than anyone else in the Marvel Universe.
It's not dissimilar to the job that Sebastian Stan had
- in the Winter Soldier. - McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: Here we have Peggy's great grandniece
or just grandniece or great niece?
ANTHONY: Great niece... MARKUS: Sharon Carter.
The relationship where some people go, "Ew."
ANTHONY: That's one thing I noticed. MARKUS: But then we went like,
"No, he kissed her once and she's his grandniece."
- It's all perfectly above board. - JOE: Yeah.
JOE: He kissed Peggy once.
ANTHONY: But one thing... JOE: Let's clarify that,
he kissed Peggy once.
ANTHONY: One thing I did notice, she's only...
In our minds, it was always grandniece, right?
- But in the movie... - McFEELY: Yeah, it just says niece.
ANTHONY: There's no... It just says niece.
So, there's nothing that explicitly identifies her as a grandniece.
MARKUS: There had been a conversation
in a cut scene where it
delved more into the exact lines, apparently.
ANTHONY: That's right. JOE: Where she explained the lineage.
JOE: And I think that people have to remember prior to Cap realizing this,
- he had asked her out. - McFEELY: Yes.
JOE: On a date in the Winter Soldier.
So, he clearly is attracted to her.
And, uh...
ANTHONY: Because of her obvious resemblance to Peggy.
- MARKUS: (CHUCKLES) Exactly. - (LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: Why'd you make it weird? ANTHONY: (CHUCKLING) Sorry.
MARKUS: We should say, "Rest in peace, Peggy Carter."
McFEELY: Yeah. That's right.
JOE: Okay, so, this is...
We're gonna talk about the emotional core of the movie.
This is when we knew we could make Civil War
and I don't remember where,
you know, who came up with it or how...
Maybe you guys have a better memory for this,
but when we realised that we could put Winter Soldier
at the center of the conflict between Cap and Tony,
we knew we had a movie,
because as Steve mentioned earlier,
if the movie was about the characters
arguing about a political, you know, plot
over and over again,
the audience would've been bored after 10 minutes.
They would've shut down.
MARKUS: We also knew we had the great revelation
that Bucky had killed Tony's parents.
But if you do that early in the movie,
it's just gonna devastate all the rest of your plot
and you're just gonna be beating each other up about that.
McFEELY: Well, you couldn't do the third act we wanted to do...
MARKUS: Right, so...
JOE: 'Cause the minute he finds out about it...
McFEELY: That's the thing...
MARKUS: Getting Bucky into the plot, but not in...
- But holding off that Tony part... - McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: uh, was very important.
McFEELY: Well, think about what you've seen so far.
Steve says "no" to the Accords.
All right? Let's say, you know, Bucky's story didn't come up.
- Now what is your movie? - MARKUS: Yeah.
McFEELY: It is just a political argument.
Some third person would've undoubtedly done something
and why would Steve get involved?
MARKUS: Well, it's also, can you with just a political argument
come to blows without people going, "Boy, what a bunch of hotheads..."
McFEELY: Right. Steve would have to be invested.
There is no greater investment than Bucky Barnes.
JOE: This was I think, by far...
For us it was, and I don't know if it was for you...
This was by far and away the hardest script we've ever worked on.
And I think it was because of the fact
that there was a precarious balance in the film
between Cap and Tony,
making sure that the audience was conflicted about
who was wrong and who was right.
Because we had to hide the ball on Bucky.
Because we had to hide the ball on Zemo.
Um, so, there are a lot of complicated things that are...
Everything is predicated on everything else in a very, very delicate way...
McFEELY: Mmm-hmm. JOE: Uh, um...
That's much more complex than a traditional structure.
MARKUS: And constantly having to, sort of, calibrate
what we figured the audience would understand at each point,
'cause we, of course, knew much more about the plot
and it was a nicely working, you know, piece of watch work.
But, you know, the audience doesn't see the gears moving,
so when this mysterious guy who's about to appear
blows up UN headquarters...
McFEELY: Are they lost, are they invested...
MARKUS: It's a lot like, l...
Every time I've watched the scene, I know Bucky didn't do that.
- The audience coming into this... - McFEELY: Thinks Bucky did it.
MARKUS: Which is a whole different movie.
It was almost a movie I forget exists.
JOE: And the other key thing that was very difficult about the film
was the shift in tone.
McFEELY: Well, that's... Yeah, I mean, that's you guys.
(McFEELY STAMMERING)
Tone is always difficult for me, to understand the nature of it.
I just assume that if you're true to the characters,
as long as they're being true to themselves,
tone might work itself out.
So, I'm not sure how the magical little tone doughnut
that you guys made actually comes to be about. I can make you something different, if you like.
"Tone doughnut."
McFEELY: Um, but do you guys... May perhaps,
you know, certainly in relationship to Community and Arrested Development
- and things like that... - JOE: Sure.
I mean, there's a, uh...
We knew that the movie had the potential to be too dour.
It's about a very serious subject.
A lot of people die in the movie.
The key revelation in the film is about a murder, of Tony's parents.
None of these are light subjects.
It's about regulation based on collateral damage.
So, uh, we knew it would be important to include
characters like Ant-Man and Spider-Man,
who didn't have an emotional connection to the main story,
because the minute your lead characters
who are involved in an A plot in a serious movie,
start making jokes, you lose the stakes of the film
because the audience no longer believes that they believe
- that the stakes are high. - McFEELY: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: So, we needed characters who were
not tied to the stakes of the movie.
Uh, and Ant-Man and Spider-Man are not.
And it was important to have one on each side
because we knew we were gonna be collecting characters
and you wanted the tone to be able to open up on each side and you'll see...
And I think that's why people are so responsive to
Spider-Man and Ant-Man in the airport battle.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: It's because they are not tied to what's happening
other than on a very superficial level which is...
McFEELY: Yeah. It is no accident that they steal that scene.
JOE: Right. Yeah... McFEELY: (CHUCKLES) Right?
The people with the least investment absolutely get to be funny.
JOE: And they get the biggest, funniest moments in it.
ANTHONY: And Joe and I use a lot of references
when we're preparing a movie to direct.
Not just for ourselves, but for other people.
It's a nice common language for how we can chase certain ideas
of where are the places we can go stylistically.
But one of the stranger ones in this film, I think, is this scene
when we were talking with our cinematographer, Trent Opaloch,
about how this apartment should look,
what it should feel like, how it should be lit, et cetera.
He came up with this, uh, video reference,
Turn Down for What by the Daniels...
A filmmaking team called the Daniels, which is a really great video.
It has an awesome look to it
and that's very much the lighting approach we took to this apartment.
Um...
But it's very... I mean, it couldn't...
The tone of the video couldn't be more different than what's happening here.
But on a visual level, it ended up working perfectly.
JOE: The concept is that Bucky is in hiding, obviously.
He's in very temporary housing.
He knows how he can escape from this building.
He's thought through it a thousand times.
You know, he keeps a go bag in the floorboards.
You know, he knows if they came up the stairwell, he'd go this way,
if they came through the roof, he could go that way.
There's a reason there's newspaper on the window
so they can't see him inside.
And here, he knew this time would probably come...
Which is why when he takes the glove off
and he says, "It always ends in a fight,"
he's prepared for this, uh, emotionally.
JOE: Shout-out to Sebastian's performance
in this scene, which is just amazing.
It's like the way he can...
The way he can portray this character who's, like, so fractured and damaged
and guarded, but, like, has something still that's alive inside him is amazing.
MARKUS: Yeah, well, that was another challenge of
tracking Bucky's consciousness
throughout this movie of.. 'Cause he's about...
He's at least three different people in this movie.
ANTHONY: Right.
MARKUS: There's this Bucky who is not fully aware of his past.
But, you know, somewhere stranded remembering what he's done...
Not quite remembering who he originally was,
trying to put it all together.
JOE: And who's fully powered. MARKUS: Yeah.
There's Terminator Bucky,
once Zemo basically turns him back into the full Winter Soldier in Berlin.
And there is a more wide-open Bucky
once he wakes up with his hand in the vice
because then, I think, he remembers more than he remembers here.
JOE: Another, um, great sequence that Chad and Dave helped us with
We went on a real scout in...
I think we found this apartment building in Germany
that we were gonna use to double for Romania.
I think this was in Berlin.
Is that right? Or did we... No, in fact, it was Halle.
ANTHONY: It was based in Halle. Yeah. JOE: Yeah.
So, we literally copied the stairwell from an apartment building in Halle
and we built this on stage
because when Anthony and I were walking in, we went,
"Wow! There could be an incredible fight in a stairwell like this."
It's so compressed. It was 12 stories up.
And I was like, this is a real high-wire act.
If Bucky had to escape out his door, how would he get out of his apartment?
And a lot of times, the way that we come up with action sequences
is literally just by
sitting in a room and talking it through on a very logical level.
Well, what would you do if..
You know, if you were a super soldier on the run with a metal arm.
Um, he knows that if he can get to the eighth floor,
he can make the jump from one building to the next.
It's why he throws his go bag out the window.
He knows exactly where he's going to go.
Uh, I think he knows that he needs to get to the tunnel.
That would get rid of helicopters.
I think he's thought through all of this.
So it's a very logical escape plan for him,
what he didn't plan on was Black Panther.
(McFEELY CHUCKLING)
ANTHONY: We didn't actually build, um, 12 floors of a stairwell.
We built about four.
And, you know, through green screen, up and down,
we make it look like a much taller building on set.
McFEELY: Yes, that's bullet resistant.
MARKUS: It's Vibranium weave, I believe.
- So, yes, that is the Black Panther. - ANTHONY: Yeah.
MARKUS: People have been waiting for him, worried about how he'd look...
I think he came out pretty well.
ANTHONY: Yeah, came out pretty well.
When I watched the movie with my six-year-old son,
his two favourite characters were Vision and the Black Panther, so...
JOE: And real credit goes to ILM here
who really did a ton of work on that outfit.
- I mean... - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: You know, we had an outfit that we used on set that we just...
It's impossible when you're talking about an otherworldly outfit,
like the one that the Panther wears
which has a certain luminescence to it because it's made of a woven metal.
We could never afford to construct an outfit like that,
that an actor or stunt player could move around in
without sweating to death
or, you know, that would capture the luminescence that we need.
So, what he ended up doing in post
is ILM came in and painted over Chadwick and the stuntman with...
The outfit is completely CG.
McFEELY: This is every frame...
JOE: Every frame of Black Panther is a CG outfit.
ANTHONY: But he did have a costume on, much like that.
ANTHONY: Which looked pretty good. Yeah.
ANTHONY: That they ended up using as a template, but they painted over.
So, incredible work on their part.
But that's how you can realise these characters.
You know, we try things on set
and then we know when we're not getting what we need out of it,
then it goes to VFX.
And, you know, what we really demand of our VFX department which is,
you know, both to their credit
and detrimental to people's awareness of how good they are
is we want hardcore realism out of the movie,
so you very rarely notice the visual effects in the film...
MARKUS: I might add, that's not one of them.
JOE: That was not...
That was... That's not...
MARKUS: That's a real guy, grabbing a real motorcycle...
McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: This sequence was shot by a different
second unit director, Spiro Razatos,
who works with us.
He also shot the Nick Fury car chase in Winter Soldier. He's like...
McFEELY: And is responsible for the great things about Fast and Furious.
ANTHONY: Exactly. He's the best car guy in the world
and we love working with him.
And he really helped make this sequence special.
(JOE STAMMERING)
JOE: Yeah, real applause should go to Spiro
for the work that he's done both on Winter Soldier and this.
Very, very dynamic, very complicated sequences.
- Again, this was... - McFEELY: Right there.
JOE: sitting in a room thinking through,
"Okay, (STUTTERS) if Bucky got rid of Panther at that point,
"you know, what's Panther's next option.
- "If Falcon is flying by, he uses Falcon." - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: if Bucky were to... Bucky, what's the go bag for?
Well, the go bag is because he has bombs in it.
If Bucky were to blow up, um,
you know, part of the roof in order to stop everybody from pursuing him,
then what would happen?
Well, Sam certainly couldn't fly through it.
He would stop. That would send Panther flying forward.
So, it's really like a very logical, painstaking process
of really figuring out, um, these action set pieces.
McFEELY: What is the smartest thing a person can do
or characters can do in these situations?
I mean, action reveals character if you do it right.
JOE: Right.
McFEELY: And you can't have a sequence where one guy gets 17 wins
- and one guy loses... - JOE: Exactly.
McFEELY: seventeen times.
So everyone has to have little turns where they accomplish something
that ultimately, you get where you need to go.
MARKUS: Well, it's also, when you're dealing with this many
marquee characters...
You know, one of my complaints about team-ups in comic books
is that everyone becomes worse at their job
because they need to share screen time.
It's like, how do you maintain their power level and their skill set
and still have them not kill each other?
ANTHONY: Well, you let one of them cook.
MARKUS: Exactly.
McFEELY: That's right. That's a skill set.
JOE: But I do think that you...
And this is a movie that really deals with that issue quite a bit,
because we have a lot of characters in it,
and some of them are extremely powerful
and could end the fight very quickly.
So, I think we tried to...
All of us collectively go at them on a psychological level.
MARKUS: Which explains this scene,
'cause you have probably, physically,
the two most powerful people in this movie,
and it's their burgeoning feelings for each other
that cause them to hold back a little bit in the airport fight,
which is why Vision doesn't just squash everybody like a bug.
No one dislikes you, Wanda.
MARKUS: And also why he screws up and takes out Rhodey...
JOE: Because he's distracted. MARKUS: Yeah.
So it's all character.
JOE: And Wanda made a mistake at the beginning of the movie
that is weighing very heavily on her.
ANTHONY: Now that's why that beat was...
One of the reasons why that beat was so important.
MARKUS: And it's also a tribute to both of these...
There seems nothing unnatural about
flirting with this red-faced man with a jewel in his head.
It just seems... He's charming. He's cute.
JOE: And his face is mesmerizing. MARKUS: It is mesmerizing.
McFEELY: We got, as I remember,
there were a few test audiences who went,
"I don't want him to cook. What's that about?"
(LAUGHTER)
- And so... But, I mean, jeez. - ANTHONY: That might be...
It's interesting because Paul Bettany
wears an enormous amount of makeup when we shoot.
He wears headgear.
It takes him a good two and a half hours
to get into makeup,
and it's really cumbersome and difficult, and he's a champ.
He never complains about it. He always...
He's a very hard worker. He's amazing.
- But he doesn't look like this on set. - McFEELY: Mmm-hmm.
ANTHONY: He looks like, you know, a much less exciting version of this.
MARKUS: Yeah. A cosplay element, too.
ANTHONY: (CHUCKLES) And I think those
test audiences that you're mentioning
are watching how he looked on set
'cause the visual effects aren't done yet.
So, in the back of your head, you always have to wonder, like,
is the fact that we're dealing with incomplete visual effect treatment
compromising the experience of a certain scene for the audience.
VISION: Not yours.
Mr Stark would like to avoid the possibility of another public incident.
Until the Accords are on a more secure foundation.
And what do you want?
For people to see you...
ANTHONY: He's trying to be human.
JOE: This is a key relationship in the movie
and it's gonna be a key relationship moving forward.
(JOE STAMMERING)
On what level can Vision and Wanda connect?
McFEELY: Do you want to talk about those big titles?
JOE: Yes, the big titles.
We knew we needed mile markers in the movie.
We wanted chapters in a way because the movie moves from place to place.
McFEELY: Goes a lot of places.
ANTHONY: And it can be very confusing
as to where you are geographically.
But I also find, too, that when you watch a film
and it's in small print at the bottom of the screen,
you don't really register it.
And it's not like this an exercise in idiot-proofing your titles.
Really, at the end of the day, titles are just a...
They're a sorbet.
They're like a little palate cleanser from what just happened.
Right, they're a mile marker for the audience.
McFEELY: Get ready for a new part. MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: So the fact that we went with these big...
Stylistically big, bold titles was really just for you to reset your brain and go,
"Okay, I'm moving into another chapter now."
And once you understand the language after two or three titles comes up,
then you realise the movie progresses.
"Okay, this is now a little bit of a reset,"
"and we're now moving into the next phase of the movie."
It's less important where they are in the world.
What's more important is you understand that this is a reset.
McFEELY: Well, and this is...
I mean, I learn something new on every movie,
but I could not have predicted,
and I assume you couldn't have either...
By virtue of doing that, when you get to Queens,
your audience, if they're halfway in the know, freaks out.
And that would not happen if it was (TSKING) at the bottom of the screen.
ANTHONY: Yeah, well, that's a good...
I mean, look, the choice wasn't made necessarily to set that moment,
but that's one of the happy things you find as you're moving through.
I also think, because this movie has a sense of fate to it
in the sense that you're moving toward a very ominous, horrible reveal.
And all these characters are kind of
hurling toward that moment unbeknownst to them...
The size of those title cards sort of have...
I think they play to that sense of fate and ominousness.
McFEELY: Even if don't know about a twist coming,
you know that they're gonna fight.
You're expecting a 15-minute sequence.
You might not know when it's coming,
but that inevitability is all over the movie.
MARKUS: Well, that's the challenge and it takes time to get there, is...
There are a lot of disparate scenes that don't necessarily seem connected,
but you want the audience to feel that there is
an intelligence behind it that is showing you these things on purpose.
And trust us, they're all gonna have to do with each other.
I'm not getting that shield back, am I?
JOE: A shout-out goes to Jeff Ford, our editor,
who's been an incredible partner to us...
Creative partner to us on both Winter Soldier and this movie.
It was his idea to go that big with the title.
McFEELY: Oh, is that right? JOE: Yes.
And it was his instinct, is that we needed that...
Just that reset moment.
ANTHONY: Jeff Ford is one of the most important people
in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
He edited the first movie that you guys did, the first Avenger.
MARKUS: He's done all the Cap movies.
ANTHONY: Done all the Cap movies, the Avengers movies...
McFEELY: And both Avengers movies. ANTHONY: Yeah.
I mean, he's an enormous creative figure in the process.
And Joe and I are very, very grateful to be able to work with him.
Felt timely.
FDR signed the Lend-Lease bill with these in 1941.
McFEELY: Uh, I kind of copped to the idea that Robert brought the pens in.
JOE: Yes. McFEELY: Yeah.
- JOE: That was actually... - (LAUGHTER)
So, our process with Robert...
We could talk about the process with Robert a little bit.
Robert is a very, um...
I know the term is thrown around too much, but he's an organic actor.
(JOE STAMMERING)
He likes the mercurial part of the process,
inspirational part of the process.
And he really has to get under the skin of a scene
in order to understand it on an emotional level
for his interpretation of the character.
So, what all of us would do, is every week before Robert would shoot...
And I think he was on the movie for about eight weeks...
We would all go over to his house on a Sunday,
have a very lovely lunch,
and then we would sit for a few hours and talk through the scene with him
and Robert would do some improvisation in character.
And, you know, the guys would write some of the lines down
and then we'd talk through the structure of the scene
and then, you know, they'd restructure the scene.
Without compromising the story in any way.
Which, really...
You know, Robert is incredibly additive, um, certainly in terms of character
'cause he knows Tony Stark better than anybody on the planet.
Um, and extremely inventive in his choices.
And the pens were an idea that he brought to the scene
as a way to represent what was going on between Cap and Tony in the scene.
- And it adds for a very lovely... - McFEELY: Oh, it's great.
They basically...
It gives you a beginning and an end to that scene.
MARKUS: And it reminds you about this weird connection where that...
Which this scene also does,
is that Steve knew Tony's father personally.
McFEELY: Right. Well, that's certainly by design.
We knew we had to bring up Howard
just lightly a couple of times in the movie.
It couldn't just rely on the opening BARF scene.
- (CHUCKLES) - JOE: Right.
McFEELY: And Steve's relationship to Howard
was gonna echo at the very end of the movie,
you know, when he drops his shield.
MARKUS: Which reminds you in the back of your head
that Bucky probably knew Howard,
which is... Makes...
You know, there are layers that we don't even talk about
that just get weirder.
ANTHONY: I mean, look at...
That's a very complicated backstory that you guys figured out a way
to sort of bring into the narrative in a very meaningful way.
I mean, the fact that you can use Cap's relationship with Howard Stark
to further complicate the relationship between Cap and Tony is awesome.
McFEELY: We were doing Agent Carter. It's a very small aside.
But we wanted to make sure in the final episode of Season 1 of Agent Carter
that Howard said something to the effect of,
"Steve Rogers was the greatest thing I ever did." Right?
So, just so that it would, for anybody who's listening,
you know, it would pay off this idea that
maybe he would pursue super soldier serum all the way into the '90s.
MARKUS: But also when that guy went on to raise a child...
McFEELY: (CHUCKLING) Yes. It'd be a problem.
MARKUS: I've already decided that someone else
was the greatest thing I've ever did.
McFEELY: That's right. ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: See, so, there is connection
between the television 'verse and the movie universe.
MARKUS: Mmm.
JOE: Uh, by the way, that is...
I know I talked about the church being
one of my favourite acting scenes in the movie.
That's my second favourite acting scene in the movie.
And I'm not talking in any order,
but there's third one coming up at the end of the film,
which is the, uh... When Tony is watching the...
McFEELY: What's in the box. JOE: The "what's in the box" scene.
"Bird costume"? Come on.
JOE: So, maybe we could talk about our process a little bit.
'Cause now we've done two movies together
and we're in process on two more.
From inception, how we work on these films.
What's the first thing that we... What we do.
MARKUS: (EXHALES) We sit in a room. It's also the last thing we do.
- And we do it a lot in the middle. - McFEELY: (CHUCKLES) That's true.
JOE: There's a lot of talking involved. McFEELY: Buoyed by some panic.
MARKUS: Not unlike this right now.
MARKUS: Exactly. McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: A lot of note cards, a lot of markers...
McFEELY: Yeah, we usually end up in a conference room
somewhere in the bowels of Marvel.
Uh, with...
Eventually it gets to three-by-five cards up on a wall.
Sometimes it's a whiteboard.
And just trying to...
We'll talk blue sky, first, what...
In the case of Civil War, what threads have we left on the ground,
um, after Winter Soldier.
Um, and then, once it got closer to Civil War, as opposed to Cap 3,
well, what does that mean and what plot points are, uh, inherent in that.
MARKUS: (STUTTERS) And that means more characters.
Who do we actually... Who can we actually have?
(McFEELY STAMMERING)
McFEELY: This is just speaking for Chris and myself
Plot points are huge for us as to,
how do we figure out what the end of act two is?
What the midpoint is?
(McFEELY STAMMERING)
Unless we get those pretty early on, we'll feel at sea.
Um, what's been helpful about working with the Russo brothers is, uh,
character tends to trump all in a way, I would say.
Uh, which I think, in Civil War, makes it a rich...
A really rich experience.
You know, if characters aren't right and clicking early,
- then they become chess pieces. - ANTHONY: Mmm-hmm.
McFEELY: And that is the danger if you start with structure first.
MARKUS: Yeah. McFEELY: For sure.
JOE: Then plot is driving the train rather than character.
McFEELY: Yeah. JOE: And look, the...
Frankly, what Marvel is doing here is
creating a universe filled with characters.
I think it's paramount that's the primary motivation
for making these movies is
character-character interaction.
- What do the characters want? - McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: How are they different from the last time we saw them.
McFEELY: People don't walk out of a Marvel movie and go,
"That was so well-structured."
- (McFEELY LAUGHING) - JOE: I loved that plot.
MARKUS: But it's also... I mean, like, it is...
We've certainly gotten to do more character work writing these movies
and writing this many of these movies than we would writing, you know,
one indie film about a guy driving across country.
Which...
What people would think of when you're like,
"Don't you wanna take a break from the action
"and write character movies?" Like, well...
Actually, wouldn't get as much character in
as we've been able to do on this.
JOE: Well, no, and it's something...
I mean, this is a bigger conversation and it's something we talked about
when we were at the...
McFEELY: Fortunately, the movie is two and half hours,
so we got time. (CHUCKLES)
JOE: We had a talk at the Smithsonian a week ago
where we spent 10 minutes talking about the state of film and television.
And TV is of, you know, an incredibly high quality right now.
It is character driven. It is inventive.
It's niche, it's aggressive.
I mean, Breaking Bad, outside of The Godfather,
is one of the great stories that anyone's ever told
Furnace
And it was amazingly well told.
I think I've seen in 20 years was Breaking Bad.
From Fargo to Mr Robot, You know, it's a long list.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: You have a lot more distributors now of television.
The metric is no longer being driven by the Nielsen ratings.
Nielsen ratings were for 30 years, 40 years,
which means you needed a broad appeal.
That's no longer the case now.
The metric is... Netflix brilliantly hides their metric.
- There is no metric, they claim. - MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: Other than, is the show creating...
McFEELY: Right. Be part of the conversation.
JOE: Yeah. McFEELY: That's right.
ANTHONY: Is it part of the cultural conversation or not.
McFEELY: True or false.
Marvel is just a very expensive TV show.
JOE: Uh... ANTHONY: False.
JOE: "False"? Why would you say false?
ANTHONY: Well, it's not...
It doesn't correlate directly to a TV show in the sense that...
Again, you're getting...
I would say an episode, if you will, of a Marvel movie
is more different from an episode...
TV episodes are much more similar to one another.
There's a stronger sense of continuity, of style and...
They're more distinct expressions.
McFEELY: Episode 4 is not wholly dissimilar from Episode 5,
but in the case of the Marvel movies,
Ant-Man is vastly different than Civil War.
ANTHONY: Yeah, exactly.
JOE: Tonal exploration and the reason why is,
I mean, you could make the comparison, I guess,
if there were four or five TV shows
that were being interwoven into a unified narrative.
McFEELY: Yeah. Right.
ANTHONY: Not unlike Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days.
MARKUS: Yes. Or I was thinking more... ANTHONY: Let's not forget that.
- JOE: 90210 and Melrose Place. - MARKUS: The Avengers... I mean...
You have your individual shows
and the Avengers battle of the network stars.
(LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: But because you have multiple, healthy franchises,
which do have different tones,
being interwoven into a unified narrative,
that's something else that was...
We were able to use, I think, all of us to our advantage
in this movie, is that we had a pre-existing tone.
As Ant-Man came out, we all went,
"Huh. That's a wholly different tone"
"that we're gonna be able to bring into this movie."
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: And it was especially helpful
because we were trying to counteract the heaviness of the material.
MARKUS: And you don't wanna betray the established characters.
You don't wanna say, "We're making a dark movie,"
"so suddenly you're going to see dark Ant-Man."
McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: Everybody has to stay true
to the, you know, established parameters of their character.
It's also why Spider-Man has to come in and be a 15-year-old kid.
Not, you know, profound Spider-Man.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
(GRUNTING)
You could at least recognise me.
(GASPING)
(BOTH GRUNTING)
(PEOPLE SCREAMING)
ANTHONY: And this is remarkably similar
to the conversation we had with Anthony Mackie
- before we called action on this shot. - (LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: You're gonna find a piece of clothing...
JOE: Yeah.
MARKUS: And you're not happy about that clothing at all.
McFEELY: Did we exhaust that? Did we explore that?
JOE: I think it was a long-winded way to get to the point that...
In the way that Tony Stark and Steve Rogers have do-Si-do'd,
I think, features and television have do-Si-do'd...
McFEELY: Yeah. No, that's fair.
JOE: quite a bit.
But I also think, too, that what's exciting about
being able to work specifically in the Marvel Universe
is the fact that we do get to focus on character,
because we don't have to...
You know, because the work is being done in long-form storytelling...
ANTHONY: Look at those character arms...
JOE: Yes.
MARKUS: Or did that...
JOE: We were focusing so hard on his character there.
MARKUS: This was filmed early on and I remember Anthony saying, like,
"You would not believe what we just shot."
(ALL LAUGHING)
JOE: His character is literally bulging out of his biceps there.
No, this is a perfect conversation to have over that shot, by the way.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: But, you know, I find that an advantage,
and I find that satisfying as a storyteller, uh,
to not have to worry about more traditional structure.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: To not have to build everybody's backstory
or, you know, catch the audience up on every single character.
This is a very unique movie.
It doesn't exist outside the Marvel Universe.
McFEELY: No.
I would love everyone to enjoy it equally.
I assume that if you have missed a few Marvel movies,
you will enjoy it slightly differently
than the person who is all in and invested
and will gasp when Howard and Maria Stark
are murdered at the end or...
JOE: Well, serialized storytelling.
So, if somebody came to me and I said, "Hey, did you see Breaking Bad?"
And they said, "Yeah, I liked it. I started on Season 3."
McFEELY: Yeah, that's right.
JOE: You'd say, "You should've watched Season 1 and 2."
"You would've had a better experience of that show."
McFEELY: I mean, it's the difference between Law & Order and The Wire.
JOE: Right. MARKUS: Well, it's also...
McFEELY: I can just show up for any Law & Order
and probably know what's going on.
JOE: Right. McFEELY: And if I came in
halfway through a season of The Wire, I'm completely lost.
MARKUS: And yet, the last Harry Potter escaped custody today.
McFEELY: Culmination. You were told this is it.
- You... - MARKUS: Yeah.
McFEELY: Your neighbour said, "I read all the books."
"This is the last book."
MARKUS: They also rented them as well.
ANTHONY: Also more people saw it in the theater.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: Meaning that, you know, over the life of those movies,
they were viewed many, many times on DVD, and Apple TV and Kindle...
ANTHONY: But I do think it's like Steve said, too.
I do think there...
You can watch this movie and enjoy it coming in as fresh eyes.
It's possible.
You're never gonna maybe enjoy it as much,
but you can definitely enjoy the film without a history with the MCU.
MARKUS: Lying on my couch on a Saturday afternoon,
which I don't get to do any more,
but when I did,
you could come upon a movie
you knew nothing about. Twenty minutes in...
ANTHONY: Right.
MARKUS: Storytelling being storytelling,
"you go," Okay, that's the hero, that's the bad guy.
"You know, I understand enough to now watch this movie..."
ANTHONY: Yeah, that's a good example.
MARKUS: "...and be entertained."
ANTHONY: Yeah.
MARKUS: It's a certain kind of movie.
I don't know if you could come into, you know, Schindler's List and go...
McFEELY: You can tell the bad guys in Schindler's List. (CHUCKLES)
MARKUS: Really? No.
Now this scene is interesting 'cause it also appeared in Ant-Man.
ANTHONY: Right. A portion of it.
MARKUS: In that, we...
It was written and shot for this movie, but then when Kevin saw it,
it occurred to him that it would make a nice little tag for Ant-Man
and didn't give anything away for ours.
JOE: Other than that there was going to be an industrial vice...
ANTHONY: There's a phrase in movie making...
- "The camera loves his face." - MARKUS: Mmm.
ANTHONY: That shot of Sebastian is always...
With that angle, rakey shot.
JOE: Well, again, this is Sebastian playing
yet another version of the character in this movie.
Slightly more emotionally available,
slightly, you know, different than the guy who was in the apartment.
McFEELY: Right. MARKUS: Do we see...
JOE: And different than the guy that's on this motorcycle.
ANTHONY: Every time that we wrecked that Cadillac it...
- There's a part of me that died. - (McFEELY LAUGHING)
MARKUS: On a rural road in Georgia. McFEELY: In Georgia. Yeah.
ANTHONY: We actually only wrecked that Cadillac once.
We shot it from several angles.
McFEELY: Do we see any more in this flashback than we did at the beginning?
- Or is it, uh... - ANTHONY: Yeah, we... 'Cause...
Well, we go into this sequence.
MARKUS: Oh, yeah. You're right. Right, right, right.
McFEELY: This is Heidi Moneymaker. JOE: Yep, that's Heidi.
A cameo by a lot of our stunt doubles.
ANTHONY: Heidi is Scarlet's stunt double.
MARKUS: Real life superheroes. JOE: That's Jackson.
- That is, um... - ANTHONY: He doubles Cap a lot.
JOE: Doubles Cap.
Uh, Heidi doubles Natasha/Scarlet.
- Aaron Toney is coming up... - ANTHONY: Doubles Falcon.
JOE: Doubles Falcon.
This is Karpov who was previously in the movie
drowned in his sink in the basement of his house.
McFEELY: That's right. Don't get attached to Karpov.
JOE: But again, this was...
The intention... The way we directed this sequence
was to try to bring a level of visceral horror to it.
It's almost like a horror movie.
Because we wanted the audience to believe
that these characters were powerful enough
to give our heroes a run for their money in a third act fight.
McFEELY: Now, this is one big, fat misdirect, all right.
You need to know about these people
because they're the third act.
JOE: And you needed to feel their violence
and the threat of them in this sequence,
so that you would be tricked in your own brain that,
"Oh, this is obviously where the movie is heading,"
"is a showdown between these characters."
Especially 'cause one of them beats Bucky up in the sequence.
MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: So, then your mind is going,
"Oh, wow. Hmm. Yeah, they're even stronger than the Winter Soldier."
But none of it has anything to do with the film.
The twist obviously is that they're all dead when the heroes get there.
JOE: Which is what we're looking for on an emotional level is to confuse you.
So that when the reveal happens with Tony Stark,
you're more off-balance.
Not dissimilar to the way that Tony Stark feels.
McFEELY: Right.
I mean, and again, put yourself in all of our positions, right?
We're saying that the third acts of the Marvel movies
have been similar and have caused a certain sort of collateral damage.
This third act will not be the same thing.
So, if you think this is gonna be another punch-'em-up,
we would be hypocritical if we gave you that.
So, in that sense, you should've seen this comin'.
JOE: That's right. ANTHONY: Right.
Which is, you know, like all good tragedies.
MARKUS: That's right.
JOE: So, this, uh...
The scene is, you know, to touch base again with the government,
that they're slowly squeezing Tony.
They're pressuring him to bring in the other Avengers,
which forces him to make a decision
because he and Natasha, as they say in the scene,
- are feeling particularly outgunned. - ANTHONY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: They're ratcheting toward...
McFEELY: Toward the airport. Yeah. ANTHONY: Toward the airport.
McFEELY: So that Tony has a...
Tony is the best alternative that Steve has.
And so, Ross is a bit of the villain for this section, yeah.
ANTHONY: There's a lot of hard work.
This is... It was making it very organic
that our guys needed to go out and recruit new people.
McFEELY: Mmm-hmm.
ANTHONY: Ross gives them such a difficult task here.
To go clash with those two guys.
MARKUS: And I will say, you guys and Jeff..
This scene went all the way through to Tony saying the word "Queens."
McFEELY: (CHUCKLING) That's right.
MARKUS: And now, there's this amazing cut
to seeing the word "Queens"
and it's a thousand times better.
McFEELY: Yep. ANTHONY: Yeah.
Well, you wait a whole career for a cut like that.
McFEELY: (CHUCKLING) It is really good.
Where'd you get the song, by the way?
'Cause every cut was always that song. I forgot the...
JOE: It's a song I've been listening to a lot and Joe brought it up
- and it just worked so perfectly. - McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: I was playing it on set.
I like to have music in my head for the movie
- 'cause it helps me with tone. - McFEELY: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: So, I was playing it on set just
for the energy...
To understand the energy that we wanted from...
McFEELY: The appearance of Peter. Yeah.
ANTHONY: Peter Parker.
We wanted a currency to him.
An immediacy. We wanted him to feel current.
McFEELY: Mmm-hmm. JOE: Um...
And, uh, you know...
ANTHONY: Have a different... JOE: And I've got a...
Have a completely different energy.
I've got a 19-year-old daughter...
MARKUS: I just want to say, that girl down the hall is a star!
JOE: Exactly.
JOE: I've got a 19-year-old kid
who actually was sitting down the hall there on the phone.
But I wanted this character to be of the moment.
He was one of my favourite characters growing up.
The energy that we wanted to project was of a real kid,
living in Queens on a single parent income,
who is a bit of a tech genius.
What would it be like when, you know, a star, a celebrity like Tony Stark
shows up in your house...
ANTHONY: Well, not just a celebrity, but a guy who's a veritable hero to you,
in the sense that you are very much cut from the same cloth as him.
But he's in a completely rarefied stratosphere from where you are.
JOE: But it's the way both he and May react to him
that makes this scene funny.
Is that they are living this normal existence.
Or she believes they're living this normal existence in Queens,
in this small apartment and a billionaire shows up on her couch.
MARKUS: And it's also nice to have an Aunt May
who's age-appropriate to an aunt,
- not a grandmother. - McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: Yeah. That's a good point.
MARKUS: It just, again, makes it feel more
like something you might actually encounter in real life.
McFEELY: Right. Not ripped from a comic.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
As walnut date loaves go, that wasn't bad.
Whoa, what have we here? Retro tech, huh?
Thrift store? Salvation Army?
- Uh, the garbage, actually. - You're a dumpster diver?
MARKUS: What I love about this scene is,
you know, Tom has been in movies, but not that many.
He's 18, 19 when this was shot.
So, the nerves of Tom Holland being in a room with Robert Downey Jr.
Are 50% of the scene,
and the rest of it is acting like you're nervous Peter Parker
being with, uh, Tony Stark.
So, it's just jazzed up by the fact that...
McFEELY: The dynamic is the same in life.
MARKUS: This kid is in the room with this huge actor.
ANTHONY: (STAMMERING) Also, this scene is
so interesting, too, because it is...
We used a version... You guys wrote a version of this scene...
MARKUS: Yeah. ANTHONY: to audition the actor.
And we did screen tests with several actors
with Robert Downey Jr. of this scene.
A different version of it.
But the thing is,
we got to really work the hell out of this scene,
both with the actors and you guys
in terms of what the structure of the scene would be.
And I think, this scene is one of my favourite in the film.
But it's interesting that it was a product of a lot of..
We had several runs at the scene, so to speak,
before we actually had to commit to it.
MARKUS: A... JOE: Sorry, go ahead.
MARKUS: Yeah. No, I was just saying I love...
Speaking of set design,
how crappy in the best possible way this room looks.
This looks like a kid's with not a lot of money's room.
Queens...
ANTHONY: As we were trying to sort of just dirty it up
and junk it up and make it feel real...
What's real to us (STUTTERS) on a texture level,
I remember at one point, Kevin saying to Joe and I,
"Guys..." You know, they're like,
- "Don't go too crazy." And I was like... - (ALL LAUGHING)
And I was like, "I get it, Kevin. Aunt May is not a junkie, okay?"
MARKUS: They don't even have a working toilet, Kevin.
ANTHONY: Oh, my God.
JOE: But we refused to put posters on the wall,
which seemed too clichéd.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: You know, that's what a kid's room is like.
There are some...
That's what I was like when I was younger.
It was temp hangers and crap everywhere.
You know, if you move into a room that doesn't have a closet,
they're not gonna spend the money to build a closet.
They, you know, get a handyman over and he puts up some, uh...
McFEELY: That's a great point. What's to say that...
Why do we think they've been here 15 years?
- If there's no reason to... - JOE: Well, look, it could...
He refers to Uncle Ben's death here in a speech in the most subtle way.
How long ago did he die? Were they in a house?
Did they have to give the house up because of the mortgage?
Are they now in this apartment?
You know, he's got milk crates to keep his junk on.
He collects crap. He's a dumpster diver.
You know, so, this is not... (STAMMERS)
And he's like any 16-year-old kid, he's not organized.
- His bed isn't made. He... - McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: Uh...
So, I think it...
Everything in there is about his personality
and hopefully giving a window into who he is.
ANTHONY: Well, also, for a young actor, it's like...
One of the things I was always struck by in this scene is,
to be able to act with Robert Downey Jr.
When he's giving...
Like, Downey gave this scene his all.
He knew how important this scene was.
He knew how important
Tom's performance in this scene would be, as well as his own.
And he gave this scene so much and he helped...
You know, it's like, you're never gonna be a better actor
than when you're acting across from Robert Downey Jr.
- It's an amazing thing. - McFEELY: You better be on your toes.
ANTHONY: He does something here, this line right here about the leg.
McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: So, Tom, you know, forgot the blocking of the scene.
And of course, (CHUCKLES) that's Robert staying in character,
telling him you're supposed to move now, so I can sit on the bed.
McFEELY: (CHUCKLING) Fabulous. ANTHONY: But he's...
Not only does he use it,
but he uses it in a way that's really entertaining and fun.
JOE: And becomes one of the better moments in this.
McFEELY: He really is great.
ANTHONY: With him totally in character.
I mean, that's such a dexterous and inventive move on an actor's part.
JOE: I will say that...
ANTHONY: You don't see that very often.
JOE: To pick up what you were talking about, Anth, this...
There's been many, many, many a moment where I went,
"That's why Robert Downey is Robert Downey."
But no moment more so
than when we blocked this scene with him and with Tom Holland.
You know, we knew how important the scene was.
And we showed up to start blocking the scene.
And, you know, we knew we had about an hour and a half, two hours to do it
because we were gonna take the time to get it right.
It was a very small space,
so there's not a lot you can do in this scene.
But if you notice, they move quite a bit in the scene.
And after about 15 minutes of blocking, I saw Downey and I...
And this was where I went,
"This guy is an absolute genius."
"He really understands movement and spatial relationship to camera."
He started moving around the space
and Anth and I just kinda stepped back,
and we watched as he encouraged Tom's blocking
throughout the whole sequence and...
And, you know, making suggestions.
"What would... If you went over to the bed at this point."
Or, "What if you..."
And the whole scene developed between he and Tom.
Uh, and it is...
We've seen the movie with a lot of audiences now, at the premieres.
It's always regarded as one of the favourite scenes in the film.
McFEELY: It is charming.
JOE: Uh, and it's really...
A lot of credit goes to Robert
for helping Tom craft a star-making performance in the scene.
I've caused enough problems.
MARKUS: This is Hawkeye's first appearance in the movie.
Again, being brought in when the...
- When the plot demands rather than... - McFEELY: That's right.
MARKUS: wanting to remind you
that he's got a home life or anything like that.
McFEELY: But that said,
even his first line reminds you he has a home life.
MARKUS: Yeah.
I knew I should've stretched.
VISION: Clint, you can't overpower me.
I know I can't.
JOE: He knows he's in trouble here.
You know, his intent was to ambush Vision
and get out of there as quickly as possible.
And I'm sure he had in the back of his head...
He's banking on his emotional connection
to, uh, Scarlet Witch through their...
The debt that he owes to her brother, that she would help him if he needed it.
I mean, she really, she dismantles Vision in this scene.
And I think she's being gentle with him.
MARKUS: But I will say, something that's probably lost on most people
is that she's not forcing him through the floor...
McFEELY: No, she's just...
MARKUS: She has made him unbelievably heavy.
McFEELY: Right.
Come on. We got one more stop.
ATTACHE: It's just a matter of time.
Our satellites are running facial, biometric...
JOE: One of the best moments in the movie,
which is the showdown between Natasha and T'Challa's bodyguard...
McFEELY: It's one of the few light moments for T'Challa.
MARKUS: As entertaining as that would be...
JOE: It is, but I...
Somebody actually, I think, wrote an article saying how they thought
that that was the best moment in the movie.
MARKUS: Really? JOE: Was...
ANTHONY: Some people were...
McFEELY: Just 'cause it's a showdown...
Just 'cause it's powerful women sort of facing off?
JOE: Facing off And implying what's to come and that the...
That that is, um...
- And the world of Wakanda. - McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: T'Challa's got a deep team.
McFEELY: He does.
Good, because this stuff tends to draw a crowd.
ANTHONY: Oh, yeah, "Can you move your seat up?"
McFEELY: "Can you move your seat up?"
JOE: Yeah. That's the value of the Marvel Universe.
- That's character interaction. - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: And I think that, like Vision cooking,
when you see these powerful characters in very human situations,
it can be very funny.
MCFEELY: You have to let these things breathe.
ANTHONY: Yeah, as...
McFEELY: You have to let people be people.
MARKUS: Here we have Steve's second kiss
in the entire span of his career as Captain America.
McFEELY: This is not to say... JOE: On-screen kiss. Yeah.
MARKUS: No. Yeah, on-screen, on-screen.
I'm sure he's been up to no good.
- That was... - Late.
Damn right.
- I should go. - Okay.
McFEELY: I ruined a take by walking in the background there once.
MARKUS: Very nice. McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: We'll say this is Chris Evans actually operating that vehicle.
- JOE: I was a little nervous. - (OTHERS CHUCKLING)
Was driving a little fast.
Cap.
MARKUS: And now, we're coming to our
"next appearing as the plot demands it" appearance...
JOE: Yeah. Mr... McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: Mr Paul Rudd.
McFEELY: And we certainly tried versions
where someone went to San Francisco
and interrupted a soccer game and that kind of stuff
MARKUS: Sure.
JOE: Just didn't feel necessary. McFEELY: Didn't feel necessary.
MARKUS: Yeah. Particularly as Ant-Man came out last year.
It's the most recent origin story of any of these people.
If anything's gonna be in the public consciousness, it's him.
JOE: So, Paul Rudd is a wonderful performer and he's...
He's very inventive. He's up for trying things all the time.
Joe and I have worked with that type of actor quite a bit in our comedy years.
And, anyway, he...
The amount of good material we had for this scene was crazy.
In this meeting with Captain America.
JOE: And I think we readjusted his intro on the day,
just based on the way that Paul was reacting to being on set.
McFEELY: Well... Assume...
You can assume that Paul Rudd,
his entire dialog is half-scripted and half Rudd.
MARKUS: (CHUCKLES) Right. JOE: He... But it was really...
What was cute was that morning on set, he said,
"Wow! I feel like a kid in a candy store. I can't actually believe I'm here."
"I know I was making a Marvel movie, but I was all by myself"
"and now here I am and there's Chris Evans who plays Captain America"
"and, um, Sebastian Stan who plays the Winter Soldier"
"and I... Jeremy Renner."
And so, that energy made its way into his introduction in the scene.
And it started to inform his arc as a character.
MARKUS: And here begins the... McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: The ice cream sundae, the reason you make this movie.
JOE: (CHUCKLING) That's right.
This sequence took so much work, it was unbelievable.
McFEELY: Yeah, do you want to start the list of shout-outs
of people who we owe this scene to? (CHUCKLING)
JOE: Yes. A lot of people.
I mean, first and foremost is our VFX team.
We can never give enough praise to that team.
You know, what's weird is that we garnered
a reputation after Winter Soldier
that we like to do things as practically as possible.
McFEELY: (CHUCKLING) That's right.
JOE: However, there still were 2, 600 or 2, 700
visual effects shots in that movie.
Um, and the same applies for this film.
They're just so good at their job
that they hide a lot of the work that they do.
Ninety percent of this scene was shot on green screen in Atlanta.
So, most of the backgrounds you're looking at were put in later.
They're real backgrounds.
ANTHONY: None of that is there that you're seeing right now.
McFEELY: They're based on the Leipzig Airport, but...
ANTHONY: They are. So, some are... MARKUS: Or I should say...
JOE: Some are real backgrounds, others are wholly created,
like the parking garage behind Spider-Man doesn't exist.
ANTHONY: So, many of the vehicles that you're seeing are...
We did have on our backlot at Atlanta.
So, the vehicles are real.
Mostly. But everything beyond the vehicles.
MARKUS: And I will say, when you say backlot in Atlanta,
you're neglecting to say 100 degree backlot.
JOE: Yes, backlot.
ANTHONY: I've suppressed the memory.
MARKUS: Where these guys in rubber costumes...
McFEELY: That's the heat stroke.
MARKUS: out in the direct sunlight in 100 degrees, is astonishing.
JOE: Well, we took the temperature of the blacktop
one of the days we were out there and it was 120.
So, standing there in these rubber boots,
and with your feet burning on the blacktop...
And this is... These scenes take hours to shoot.
So, you know, when we're doing Chris's dialog,
he may be standing on that spot for two hours,
uh, baking in 110-degree heat in a suit that doesn't breathe.
ANTHONY: And the same for the actors and the stunt people.
I mean, they're fighting, so, it's like,
the level of physical exertion that's going on
combined with the heat is staggering.
And again, you're wrapped up in a suit.
JOE: Uh, to talk about Spider-Man's outfit for a little bit, I do...
I think there were... I don't know, we probably...
We looked at quite a number of outfits.
But ultimately I think that the thinking
was that he should be the iconic version of the...
He should feel different from the other movies,
but be the iconic version of Spider-Man.
So, that when he shows up on-screen, your heart goes...
McFEELY: That's what I was waiting for. This is Ryan Meinerding.
JOE: "That's Spider-Man." Yep. Ryan Meinerding...
ANTHONY: Right. Designed... JOE: designed that outfit.
An amazing job. He designs a lot.
He and his team designed every outfit. Or a lot of the outfits.
JOE: Many of the outfits.
And then, Judianna, our costume designer,
designs many as well.
And she also figures out how to build all these outfits, which is...
There's usually... There's a huge evolution that...
You can design something on paper in a picture.
But to figure out how do you make a version of that
that actually moves, is functional, looks good in reality,
it's a completely different process you have to go through, so...
JOE: We had experimented with much more radical Spider-Man outfits,
but ultimately decided against it for that reason.
- Um, another shout-out goes to ILM. - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: Who did all of the visual effects work on this sequence
and they're geniuses.
I mean, this was not...
This is as complicated as a scene gets in respect to CG.
ANTHONY: And I will say this, look, we all...
The four of us here have a great working relationship.
And one of the things that has always struck me about the process,
both on the Winter Soldier and this movie is,
if you look at the final version of the draft that we went...
The script that we went into production with,
it's remarkably similar to the final cut of the movie, right?
MARKUS: Yeah.
ANTHONY: In both movies. But the big...
I would say this scene is probably the biggest exception from that dynamic
in the sense that this scene was so hard.
And much of this scene was made throughout the post process.
Like Joe was saying earlier,
and you guys were writing new lines, new dialog
several times throughout the post process
as we continued to evolve and shape, shape this sequence.
It was really the kind of thing that was... It took the entire...
From the time you guys started with...
From the time we were all developing the story
until the time the movie was locked.
This sequence was basically being made that entire period.
MARKUS: And you essentially shot it throughout the entire shoot, too.
McFEELY: Right. We keep coming back to it.
MARKUS: In little chunks, little bits. JOE: That's right.
The other great thing is because a lot of the characters are CG,
you can alter takes, performance, dialog, shots.
MARKUS: And thank God for helmets and masks.
JOE: Yeah. McFEELY: That's right.
MARKUS: They can say anything. ANTHONY: Oh, yeah.
ANTHONY: That's right.
JOE: I think we rewrote a lot of Panther's dialog.
- As well as a lot of Scott Lang's dialog. - MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
McFEELY: Some of the best jokes are late in the process.
ANTHONY: And Peter Parker's. Yeah. Yes.
(SCREAMING)
You couldn't have done that earlier?
I hate you.
Great.
Hey, Cap, heads-up!
Throw it at this.
Now!
Oh, come on!
Oh, man, I thought it was a water truck.
Uh, sorry.
All right, now I'm pissed.
Is this part of the plan?
Well, my plan was go easy on them. You wanna switch it up?
There's our ride.
Come on!
Captain Rogers...
I know you believe what you're doing is right.
But for the collective good...
you must surrender now.
(SPIDER-MAN GRUNTS)
ANTHONY: One of the reasons why I love this sequence so much
is not only...
Okay, on a surface level you've got two objectives in this scene.
Cap's team needs to get out of there
and get to Siberia to stop the super soldiers.
Tony's side needs to stop... Capture Cap's side
and bring 'em in so Ross doesn't send something worse after them.
I mean, very clear.
But every single character in this scene
has an individual story that's unfolding,
that sometimes dovetails with those overarching objectives
that they're involved with,
and sometimes runs against it, counter to it.
And it's like,
I think that was one of the most fun things about working with all of us.
Crafting this sequence.
It was figuring out how do we make the most of those individual stories
that each character has, as the movie...
McFEELY: Yeah. I will say that's good advice for, uh, future storytellers.
Is that, you know, this could easily have been just a mess.
- Right? - JOE: And for a while it was.
McFEELY: Well, and the desire to have cool stuff happen.
But unless you keep reminding people, we have to get there.
We need to stop them without murdering them.
You'll just be...
You'll just get this muddy, mucky mess of CGI.
MARKUS: And you can't... JOE: Yeah.
MARKUS: You can't have people behave out of character
just because it leads to an exciting sequence.
If they wouldn't commit that act, they can't commit that act.
JOE: Well, that I think throws an audience
out of a movie faster than anything.
When a character...
Well, when a character makes a choice out of character
in order to get to a joke...
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: Or a bit that... McFEELY: Right.
JOE: that the director or writers wanted in the film.
McFEELY: You need to be willing to cut your favourite stuff
- Yeah. - ANTHONY: But that...
Look, at the end of the day,
we had these really good things to hang our hats on in this sequence.
You know, it's like Black Panther just wants to kill the Winter Soldier.
Spider-Man just wants to impress Mr Stark.
The Vision is melting down over the complication...
His deteriorating relationship with Scarlet Witch.
There are these very specific things that we were able to use
to turn the action and anchor the action in this sequence and it's...
MARKUS: And I will say, it wouldn't work at all
if there wasn't more plot to come.
- If this was the third act battle... - JOE: Right.
MARKUS: that would mean that no one had anywhere to go after this.
And the only way it would end
is if somebody just beat somebody into unconsciousness. So...
Having Steve's team need to get somewhere else,
to have a plot that's powering them past this moment,
uh, justifies its existence.
'Cause otherwise, it would just feel like,
"Hey we have all the toys. We're gonna throw 'em all on the floor."
McFEELY: I mean, this is a little insider baseball,
but this is essentially the end of act two.
And usually the end of act two is,
"What's the worst thing that could possibly happen to your heroes?"
And it is, in that Rhodey is crippled
and the Avengers are de facto broken up at this moment.
But it's also an exciting 15 minutes of everything
every comic book fan wants to see.
In part, we could do that
because we knew we were going dark at the end of the movie.
I mean, it's different if you're gonna have a happy ending.
Dark moment is the end of act two.
We were all trying to figure out whether or not,
how dark do you go at the end of act two
when your movie's gonna go a little dark.
ANTHONY: Well, also, in this sequence...
You know, one reason I think we could all have so much fun with it
was these people don't want...
This is not a life or death fight.
They don't want to kill each other.
They wanna win, they wanna defeat each other,
- but nobody wants to kill each other. - McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: So, it changes the tonal, the tenor of the fight.
Well, there are a couple...
You know, with the exception of Panther wanting to kill Bucky.
But, with that exception everyone can...
MARKUS: And also, as they punch each other, they get angrier.
McFEELY: Right. This should grow.
MARKUS: People are willing to do things near the end of the fight
that they wouldn't have done at the beginning of it.
JOE: Now, no pun intended, this was a big moment in the, um...
In the development process, was the inclusion of Giant-Man...
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: in the movie.
Now, admittedly, anybody would look at this and see the...
(STUTTERS) And you could easily make
the argument that it was over-stuffed.
McFEELY: Sure.
JOE: So, you know, if someone were to say to you,
maybe we should not have as many characters in this sequence,
it's not an illogical argument.
However, we felt, I think, that we had a handle on every character
and we knew that we needed progression of storytelling.
That each character was motivated in the sequence.
That we could potentially get away
with having this many characters in the sequence.
And we knew we needed... And if you look at...
We talk about a three act structure.
If you look at this sequence, it has a three act structure.
McFEELY: It does. MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: And, you know, this is the third act of the sequence.
(STAMMERING) Or, yeah, I don't know, would you call it the midpoint?
McFEELY: Oh, would this be the midpoint? Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba.
JOE: It could be 'cause it changes the direction of the sequence.
MARKUS: Well, it sort of feels like the midpoint is the...
McFEELY: Oh, I guess, maybe end of act two.
MARKUS: is when they were running at each other...
JOE: End of act two. McFEELY: It might be. Right.
But is the end of act two Natasha letting 'em go?
JOE: Could be. (STAMMERING)
McFEELY: 'Cause it's not... I don't think it's...
The end is Vision, you know, knocking...
JOE: Zapping War Machine out of the sky, but...
ANTHONY: That was... JOE: In either case...
ANTHONY: That, by the way, was very much
a typical day in the life of the four of us.
- That conversation right there. - JOE: In either case...
McFEELY: We're halfway to something smart, but not really. (CHUCKLING)
JOE: We knew we needed something big to happen in order for team...
Again, I just keep throwing big out there.
But we needed something
that would turn the events of the storytelling, in a way
Tony's team would be shocked. It was a big revelation.
It was a big distraction that would allow those two to get in that Quinjet.
We had discussed other things.
I think, one other... 'Cause we were asked to take...
McFEELY: There was, yeah, I mean...
JOE: Giant-Man off the table at one point.
And I think Wanda had blown up all the...
McFEELY: I think she lit a fuel line at one point.
JOE: Yeah, and blew up half the airport.
McFEELY: Yeah, it wasn't that...
JOE: And we thought,
well, as far as collateral damage goes, that's really not...
JOE: It's, you know... McFEELY: Yeah, it's hypocritical.
ANTHONY: We just... Here's the thing. We did try hard.
We tried hard to come up with another idea.
What could turn the fight? That was our need.
How do you turn the fight to allow for, oh, you know, Cap's escape?
MARKUS: And how do you escalate
when your fight started with 12 superheroes running at each other.
You're starting at a 10. Where are you gonna go?
McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: And it's also, without it...
We talk about giving every character,
no matter how small, an arc.
Without it...
McFEELY: Scott doesn't have much of a...
MARKUS: Scott Lang wouldn't have any character movement.
ANTHONY: Oh, my gosh, he might be my favourite arc
in this whole sequence.
The fact that he shows up, who's the rookie,
who's just star-struck to be called up to the team unexpectedly.
And he's the guy who comes in for the big win,
is just hilarious, you know?
McFEELY: And allows them to get away. Yes.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
MARKUS: With a skill no one even knew he had.
ANTHONY: It was so perfect for his character.
JOE: So, I think there's real value,
and we do get challenged a lot, which is good.
And I think it's a healthy part of the creative process,
because you have to think long and hard
- about why you do need what you need. - McFEELY: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: And it allows you to make better and stronger decisions.
And I do think that
because it was a process of getting Giant-Man in the movie,
that we really made sure he was substantiated when he did appear.
McFEELY: No, I mean, I... If you go...
You go to the store and you have a budget,
you're gonna buy the things that you need.
If you have a... You win a shopping spree
you're gonna run through there in two minutes
and have 17 frozen turkeys. Right?
JOE: Yeah, and then how do you get it home?
McFEELY: (CHUCKLES) Exactly.
JOE: And some, uh, Skinny Cows.
McFEELY: (LAUGHS) That's right.
JOE: A couple of boxes. Uh...
WAR MACHINE: Jesus, Tony, how old is this guy?
McFEELY: And I will cop to,
we didn't think this should be in there. We were wrong.
(LAUGHS)
ANTHONY: Well, again, it's like the same process Joe was talking about.
You just go, these are all...
Part of the fun of these movies
is the process you go through of vetting each beat
and banging it up and...
JOE: Well, we...
Do you remember how this came down...
So, Anth and I had got on a plane, had to come back to...
We were in Atlanta at that time prepping the movie.
Came back to Los Angeles
to convince everybody why we needed Giant-Man in the film
'cause he wasn't cheap either
'cause we knew he'd be very expensive in visual effects.
"Uh, and then when we landed, we were like, "Okay, we've got him.
"How do we get him out of the fight?" That was the key.
And so, we were talking through, as we always do,
a logical progression of ways that they, Tony's team, could do in Giant-Man.
Uh, and one of which was,
"Well, what do we do with Spider-Man? He's so good in this sequence."
"Can the kid bring down..."
And again... So, it's like rookie on rookie...
Uh, "Can the kid bring down Giant-Man?"
We said, "All right, well, what could he do to him?
"Well, he could certainly swing around his legs and tie him up.
- "Just like the..." - ANTHONY: AT-AT style.
JOE: "...the AT-AT in The Empire Strikes Back."
And then we went, "Well, why don't we just own that."
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: "Why don't we have the kid reference it?"
McFEELY: Right. And make everyone feel ancient.
JOE: Yes.
ANTHONY: But I remember I heard one criticism of this beat
where someone was like,
"Oh, come on, uh, how could he..."
"With that really old movie and the ice planet,"
"he wouldn't know all of this stuff"
McFEELY: (SCOFFS) That's an old man talking.
- (McFEELY LAUGHS) - ANTHONY: "How would he know..."
That is such an old man because in truth,
in truth, Tom Holland has never seen The Empire Strikes Back.
McFEELY: Why would he? It was in 1980.
ANTHONY: Yeah. Exactly. So...
MARKUS: Oddly enough, he's seen Kramer vs. Kramer 12 times.
ANTHONY: Kramer vs. Kramer.
- McFEELY: That's right. - (LAUGHTER)
JOE: So, here's where the Vision...
His head has been this entire fight as, you know, his focus is on Wanda.
Uh, which really allows us to... Again, it's a character beat.
McFEELY: Yeah. No, that's the thing. It's always...
We always knew that, uh...
You wanted this to end. You didn't want necessarily...
Friendly fire was always the way we wanted to go. Right?
Because then you couldn't directly hold someone accountable
in the same way as if Steve had broken Tony...
Uh, Rhodey's legs.
JOE: Yeah. And he didn't know that, uh, Falcon was there.
McFEELY: That's the thing. So, there's a little...
We play a little bit here, right?
So, Steve is not looking in his rear-view mirror.
Does not know that Rhodey has been hurt in this way.
JOE: Yeah, he's only thinking
that, uh, Falcon has probably assisted in his escape.
McFEELY: Yeah.
Even in the previs,
people would gasp and just sort of get emotional when this happened.
When it just looked like a video game.
JOE: There was a reconstruction we did
very late in the editorial process that was...
This is where Kevin,
who's probably one of the most value-add producers
in the history of the business,
was sitting in with us in the edit room and he just said,
"I think there's another way we can get more impact out of that."
And we literally, I think,
changed the construction of two shots at the end there.
And, uh, you know, people gasped in the next
- test screening that we did. - ANTHONY: It was better.
McFEELY: Just going to the wide or something? Or...
JOE: No, it was, um... I think it was the...
ANTHONY: It was changing the shot sequence.
McFEELY: So, stuff you already had, but just in a different order.
JOE: Yeah, and it was definitely...
We changed the part where he screams, "Rhodes."
Um, but also, I think, that last shot...
Because you're not anticipating,
Hello? Your breakfast is here.
So, it becomes more of a surprise when he hits all of a sudden.
JOE: So, that last shot...
He's still in the sky,
and you don't reveal the ground till literally he hits.
McFEELY: Gotcha.
JOE: Which is when it creates a surprise for the audience.
McFEELY: Ah, I see the trick.
MARKUS: Now, there's an extraordinary actor in this scene.
McFEELY: Yeah, can we talk about how all our cameos were cut?
MARKUS: Well, let's talk about Gozie Agbo for a second.
JOE: By the way, that is not me. ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: That is an on-set P.A.,
so that I could stand at the monitor and shoot the shot.
ANTHONY: Sure.
Even though Joe does play that character, he's...
Yeah, that is not him in that shot.
JOE: That was, uh, an homage to the Coen brothers.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: Very Blood Simple-esque shot.
ANTHONY: Which might, again... (STUTTERS)
Part of the problem with the Marvel Universe,
some movies are more kid-friendly than others
because part of the fun of the films
is that there's a tonal range in terms of what the movies are.
Some play to a more mature set, and some play to...
Ant-Man, I think, is more accessible to a younger audience, you know?
So, it's complicated and, um...
So, it's hard to...
People always ask,
"Well, how old does my kid have to be to watch the movie?"
It's such a hard question to answer but...
For some reason, my six-year-old didn't want to watch the movie.
I was telling these guys the other day. And he...
The only thing he was disturbed by in the whole movie
was that shot of the body in the bathtub,
the Coen brothers shot.
MARKUS: Well, it's also his uncle.
McFEELY: Did he know it was Uncle Joe?
- (McFEELY LAUGHS) - ANTHONY: No, he couldn't even...
He didn't put it together that that was Joe
in that tub in the shot there because you don't see it.
McFEELY: Sure, of course, you don't really...
ANTHONY: So, he... I couldn't tell him that
'cause didn't want him to associate...
He was so disturbed by it. He demanded to know...
- He was like, "Why did you do that?" - MARKUS: Wow!
ANTHONY: And then he was like, "Who's idea was that?"
McFEELY: Aw. (LAUGHS) ANTHONY: He was...
MARKUS: Zemo's.
- ANTHONY: Yeah, yes. - (LAUGHTER)
JOE: Uh, this was something that I remember we all reworked on the day.
McFEELY: There was a little scramble on the day.
JOE: But it came out very well
and it's really just going at the essence of the relationship
between these two characters
who have known each other for many movies now.
McFEELY: And I think it's good that someone calls, uh, Tony Stark out.
JOE: Mmm. Absolutely. McFEELY: Right to his face.
MARKUS: But he also calls her on her double agent thing...
McFEELY: Yes. That's true.
MARKUS: Which is valid in that
A, that was how he first met her in Iron Man 2.
But also, she did just switch sides.
ANTHONY: Yeah. MARKUS: Emotionally. You know?
MARKUS: What's the deal?
ANTHONY: I love it. It's like a very shrewd game of chess here,
where both people get hurt emotionally.
McFEELY: Oh, and I'm just noticing, uh, we're at the up angle.
JOE: Well, what's interesting is,
we've been asked a question a couple of times
from people about why Tony would recruit
a 16-year-old kid
or 15-year-old kid to go fight with him.
And, you know, I say, "Look at..."
"The thing that is interesting to the four of us on a creative level"
"is examining what the word 'hero' means."
And these are very human characters.
And they are very flawed, and Tony, perhaps the most flawed of all of them.
McFEELY: Sure.
JOE: Uh, because of his constant battle
between his moral center and his narcissism.
And I think there is a side of Tony that did not want to lose that fight.
Um, there's a very valid reason in that the kid is a walking non-lethal weapon,
uh, who is as strong as anybody in the Marvel canon.
Uh, he's not as strong as the Hulk or Thor, but he's up there.
Uh, so, he's not bringing a defenseless individual into the fight.
He's actually bringing a ringer.
Uh, who can web everybody up.
McFEELY: Well, that's thing. His weapon of choice is...
The web doesn't go through your sternum.
JOE: It's like, Vision is not very handy in a fight like that.
Because if Vision were to laser you,
as is evidenced by what happens in the sequence,
he could kill you if it goes wrong.
Uh, and his strength is so significant that he could hurt you. Um...
So, there's a very conscious choice on his part
to insert himself very strategically, uh, in that fight.
Uh, but I think it's interesting to note
that Tony's narcissism does get the better of him quite often.
And I think that's what makes him
such an interesting and unpredictable character.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: Uh, Daniel Brühl is amazing in this part as Zemo.
- Very restrained, um, and very likeable. - MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
McFEELY: Right, he's getting a lot of "best Marvel villains ever."
JOE: Yeah. Very empathetic portrayal of a character.
I actually like Zemo quite a bit in the movie. Had he not, um...
ANTHONY: Been a psychopath and...
McFEELY: Murdered several hundred people in Vienna.
JOE: Been a psychopath that bombed the UN.
ANTHONY: He just slips up a little.
JOE: He does play the character.
He does not play him like a sociopath.
He plays him like an everyman.
Uh, which makes it very unsettling.
And when he finally gives his speech at the end, um, very sad.
McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: And that speech, of course, is...
The setting is the Siberian Tundra,
but we shot that, of course, in Atlanta in the middle of the summer.
MARKUS: Very early on.
McFEELY: Maybe day one for Chadwick or early on...
ANTHONY: Yeah, it was day one for Chadwick.
McFEELY: Yeah, yeah.
- It was a really hard scene to start with. - McFEELY: For sure.
JOE: Yeah, by the way, that's great to note that the...
I think, Chadwick's best scene in the movie
was his first day on set.
ANTHONY: It's amazing. Yeah.
But, he also...
Part of Brühl's brilliance
is that he can play freezing in 90-degree weather.
McFEELY: That's right. (CHUCKLES) MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: With, uh, what were they? What were the snowflakes made of?
ANTHONY: I don't even remember.
JOE: They were... Are they potato flakes or...
ANTHONY: Yeah, maybe, I don't know. MARKUS: Something like that, yeah.
ANTHONY: But also, again, kudos to our visual effects team
because that looks beautiful and brilliant and not...
McFEELY: And the location department
for finding this underground helicopter pad.
- (McFEELY LAUGHS) - JOE: Right.
JOE: What's fascinating about that, is that we could, again,
spend a lot of money to fly everybody to Iceland,
drive two hours outside of Reykjavik,
uh, stay in a base camp at the bottom of a mountain,
go up the mountain which would take two hours,
uh, shoot for two hours,
have the cameras freeze up on us four times,
uh, have two people get frostbite, go back down the mountain,
um, and gotten that scene even though
that you could see the actors shivering during their takes.
Or could've executed it the way that we executed it,
uh, and relied on our amazing visual effects team
to pull us through, and they did.
ANTHONY: And our amazing actors. JOE: Yes.
McFEELY: More people calling Tony out for his behaviour.
ANTHONY: I love this. This is... I love this beat with, um, Hawkeye.
McFEELY: La, la, la.
JOE: Uh, it is all... By the way, all deserved.
Which is, part of, again, as I was saying earlier,
what's so fun about his character is his flaws.
But if you were in a relationship with Tony Stark,
or he was a friend or a co-worker of yours,
it would certainly be something that would irritate you.
McFEELY: Yes, I mean,
Tony should not be let off the hook time and time again, you know?
ANTHONY: Oh, yeah.
JOE: And this to me,
this is my favourite Hawkeye scene in all of the movies, is this scene.
MCFEELY: Yeah, 'cause he's right and wrong.
JOE: Yeah.
McFEELY: You know? He did put his family at risk
by coming to the aid of Wanda.
JOE: Well, there is a recklessness to Clint that is interesting.
There is somebody... A soldier of fortune like him,
there is an adrenaline rush that he is addicted to as a character.
McFEELY: That's fair. JOE: Uh...
And I think that, uh, he does pay for that.
JOE: He did disappoint his kids. ANTHONY: He did.
McFEELY: They are not going water skiing.
MARKUS: Now, had a lot of questions about this next line from Sam.
JOE: Yeah. ANTHONY: Which one?
JOE: The Mark Fuhrman? McFEELY: The Mark Fuhrman one.
ANTHONY: Did you really get questions about it?
JOE: Was that an... I can't... Was that an improv?
McFEELY: No.
ANTHONY: No, it was on a... We had a list of responses...
JOE: Oh, that's right. McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: He had... There was a couple alts there.
McFEELY: The one they... I mean, you know, our worry with...
ANTHONY: And that was the one that Mackie loved, yeah.
McFEELY: I believe so. Yeah. ANTHONY: Yeah.
McFEELY: Uh, I think it's a dated reference, generally.
And so that was the worry.
Um, but because People v. O.J. Simpson
has just aired, um, within the last few months,
somehow now it was a much more timely reference.
And so, particularly in places like D.C., the entire crowd went... "Wow!"
(JOE AND MARKUS CHUCKLE)
ANTHONY: This beat here is again, one of my favourite from Mackie.
It might be my favourite moment of his in the whole movie.
McFEELY: The awkward decision to trust Tony?
JOE: He knows what... I mean, he heard the story, you know?
He saw what we saw,
which is this extremely violent group of super soldiers
who are certainly more powerful than Cap and Winter Soldier individually,
as one of them beat up the Winter Soldier. Um...
The two of them are headed up there, they think,
to take on this team on their own.
So, Sam is acutely aware
that they are headed for potential massacre.
McFEELY: Oh, right.
There were supposed to be five of them going up there, right?
MARKUS: And now they're down to two. So, Sam knows Steve's in trouble.
ANTHONY: That's what's so cool about the beat is, again,
it makes Sam a hero.
It's like he's in a prison cell, but yet, he still figures out a way to help Cap.
Even in the very narrow, uh, options that he has.
JOE: As part of our misdirect, we told Henry Jackman, we go,
"We want you to make this the most blatantly commercial, heroic
- "piece of score in the movie." - McFEELY: Oh. (LAUGHS)
McFEELY: Great. Great.
JOE: Because the idea, you should believe,
is that you are watching the traditional structure of these films.
Tony is now putting on the suit...
ANTHONY: The strength of the Avengers is gonna prevail.
JOE: Yes. Yes.
Again, your brain is convinced,
um, on a storytelling level, that you're in for a super soldier fight.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
ANTHONY: And you know, Steve...
JOE: That's a little Romanoff Easter egg there.
McFEELY: That's right. She's got a lot of guns.
ANTHONY: Talking about this idea of..
You brought up earlier with fresh eyes
and people watching the movie for the first time.
And this is an interesting example
of why we kept a beat like this in the movie is,
just so some people
who don't know the history of the characters
understand that these guys have a...
Grew up together, have a friendship with one another that's deep. And...
MARKUS: And are 100 years old. McFEELY: And 100 years old.
MARKUS: Exactly. Are 100 years old. McFEELY: We don't stress that a lot.
JOE: Well, it's also important to remind the audience
before they go into what they're about to go into,
which is not a fight against super soldiers,
but a fight with Tony Stark, why Cap would defend Bucky...
McFEELY: Yes. When you get to that.
JOE: in those circumstances.
ANTHONY: Because they shared a ride in a refrigerator truck.
McFEELY: That's right. MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: By the way, speaking of Easter eggs, I forgot to mention
that people should keep their eyes open
if you’re an Arrested Development fan. In the...
ANTHONY: So, that is the Bluth stair car?
JOE: That is the Bluth stair car.
- (MARKUS CHUCKLES) - ANTHONY: But it's painted.
JOE: It's the same colours as the Bluth stair car.
McFEELY: Okay. Was it, uh... Is it VFX or is it there?
ANTHONY: It was actually made by the art department.
McFEELY: Okay, I didn't even notice.
JOE: Yes. We drove around and put it in the back of shots.
ANTHONY: 'Cause we would have people visit set sometimes
and they would drive by some of the vehicles and be like,
"Is that the Bluth stair car?"
McFEELY: I really should watch that show.
(LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: Uh, this I remember. That was...
Uh, that staging was very important to Joe and Anth. Of..
ANTHONY: The way he comes out there or...
McFEELY: Well, no, the Winter Soldier behind the shield, right?
ANTHONY: Oh, yeah.
McFEELY: Sort of this is how we would have done it in 1944.
ANTHONY: It was great. Exactly. McFEELY: Pretty cool.
ANTHONY: Like Joe was saying earlier, just to play to their...
The friendship and the connection these two guys have,
and to see them operate as a unit.
McFEELY: There's muscle memory. This is...
ANTHONY: Yeah, exactly.
That sounds like a lot of paperwork.
(SCOFFS)
It's good to see you, Tony.
You too, Cap.
JOE: That was a Robert. Or was that you guys?
McFEELY: Manchurian Candidate's a Robert.
McFEELY: Yeah. MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
ANTHONY: Poor Bucky's confused.
MARKUS: "I didn't see that..."
JOE: He doesn't get the reference.
MARKUS: Right. ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: So, this was a big conversation that we had
about how to work T'Challa into the third act,
because we knew that his arc wasn't complete.
Um, and what was the storytelling going into the third act with him.
And, how could we include him in something that was so personal
between Cap, Bucky and Tony.
JOE: And he ultimately ends up
making the most heroic choice of anybody in the movie,
uh, which is to forgo murdering Zemo.
McFEELY: Well, that's the thing is that it's...
We were given the leeway to,
and had the confidence to not have
either Steve or Tony confront the bad guy
in any physical way.
That it was okay for, one, nobody to beat him up. Right? (CHUCKLES)
Uh, and for his just deserts to simply be surviving.
That's the thing he didn't want.
MARKUS: But what's nice is
the guy who does get to confront him
is the guy whose father he murdered.
McFEELY: Who's most wronged him, yeah.
ANTHONY: Which is awesome. Yeah.
But that's... As far as thickening the storytelling
is there's a lot of people
who have it out for the Avengers in this movie.
From Alfre Woodard when she confronts Tony,
to Zemo, to Ross, to T'Challa.
MCFEELY: The American media. Right.
ANTHONY: T'Challa. Exactly.
ANTHONY: I mean, there's...
And the unifying theme among all those people
is revenge and vengeance.
It's like everybody is trying to correct a wrong
that they've endured.
MARKUS: Within five minutes,
we were talking about the death of Tony's father,
the death of Zemo's father,
and the death of T'Challa's father.
- We just waste a lot of fathers. - (LAUGHTER)
JOE: This is, uh...
We've referred to the movie several times as a psychological thriller,
and this is really where it becomes evident
why we refer to it that way.
When they walk in and you see the super soldiers are murdered,
um, it is unsettling.
And, you know, the key moments in this movie
turn on the psychology of the characters,
the choices that they make.
Winter Soldier is a political thriller.
You know, it's turning on plot
until Steve catches up to the plot at the end of act two.
Uh, this movie is turning on their psychology.
Uh, and, um...
And certainly it's a thriller because you don't know...
You have no idea what the villain is up to in this movie
until this moment.
MARKUS: Yeah. And it's all...
His entire plan was to press play on a videotape.
- Which is kinda fantastic. - McFEELY: Now, that said...
You know, I do see it's one of the few...
Uh, few criticisms of the movie is that somehow it's very convenient
that Tony showed up here, at the time, so he could see this tape.
MARKUS: But then I think he... McFEELY: I posture... (LAUGHS)
MARKUS: He would've played it elsewhere.
McFEELY: Well, that's the thing. He had the tape.
So, he would've sent it to him or he would've come...
At some point he was gonna tell him that Steve Rogers lied to him
and that his best friend killed his parents.
JOE: Had Tony not showed up, he could've...
McFEELY: Yeah. This is...
JOE: Snuck out the back door and disappeared with the tape
and he would've found a new day to execute his plan, but...
- Yes, everything... - MARKUS: He's a patient man.
JOE: He is on a suicide mission, Zemo.
ANTHONY: Thankfully movies are judged on their high points.
McFEELY: Well, that's thing.
We shrink time all the time in order to get what we want.
JOE: But, you know, Zemo is on a suicide mission.
He is committed to, uh, ending his life, uh,
in order to service the goal that he has.
ANTHONY: This is the kind of scene where, as directors,
you have to be very sensitive with actors,
'cause what Downey was doing in this performance
while he was watching the tape
is so complicated. It's sensitive and raw.
You have to be very, uh, specific about your shots.
You know, you can't ask an actor to shred themselves emotionally like that.
McFEELY: So, literally, you planned on only doing this a few times?
ANTHONY: Exactly. 'Cause you know,
you can't dial something up like that over and over.
JOE: And he wasn't watching anything.
We hadn't shot this yet. I was literally standing off camera with the script
just reading what he was saying.
McFEELY: Well, yes, and I remember you gilding the lily at times. You know...
JOE: Yes. I was trying to...
McFEELY: And now they're pleading! JOE: Yes.
McFEELY: They're screaming! JOE: She's begging for her life!
McFEELY: Exactly. (LAUGHS)
JOE: I did try to goose him emotionally, yes.
McFEELY: There's something...
McFEELY: No. It worked great. JOE: Yeah.
MARKUS: Something very brutal about the fact
that Bucky strangled the mom with his human hand, you know?
JOE: We were very intentionally graphic with that sequence.
Obviously, because we wanted the audience
to feel what Tony was feeling when he saw the tape.
And to realise that this character whom a lot of people love,
the Winter Soldier, uh, has a very, very dark and bloody history.
Uh, and, you know, who will pay for those crimes.
McFEELY: Right. Whether he's a victim or not, and I would submit that he is,
but he's also the one who did it.
And so, I cannot blame Tony for snapping here.
And it would take a very strong man to listen to the argument,
"But he didn't do... He wasn't in his right mind."
That's tough to swallow right now.
ANTHONY: This beat, "Did you know," was also...
McFEELY: Well, this is a...
ANTHONY: Controversial moment in the movie.
McFEELY: I'm so glad it landed the way it did.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
McFEELY: But, uh, you know, I wasn't sure
everyone was gonna go for it. (LAUGHS)
JOE: It was a long process and a long fight
to just include the fact in the movie
that the one time that Steve Rogers...
He doesn't lie, but he withholds the truth...
Willingly withholds the truth,
is because his gut told him that this would be the end result.
McFEELY: Right. It is the most complicated thing
he's done in five movies...
ANTHONY: And the most flawed... Yeah, I think,
arguably, the most flawed thing in that
'cause you can... You know,
Tony interprets it as a betrayal of their relationship.
JOE: Betrayal of trust, which he should. ANTHONY: And it certainly is.
ANTHONY: You know? It certainly is and that's...
It's so great to take this guy
and find such a human, vulnerable moment
out of Steve Rogers, you know?
McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: Well, it was also Steve's...
You know, he does have a willful blind spot about Bucky, you know?
ANTHONY: Yeah, it's true.
MARKUS: It's like, I don't want to look at the fact that he probably did this.
JOE: Well, as everyone does about family.
McFEELY: Yeah. JOE: You know, it's that they...
There are emotional bonds that you have
that supersede logic.
Now this is, the... We sit around the room and talk about,
"Well, how could the Winter Soldier and Cap take on..."
"Iron Man."
Well, you know, the one thing about Cap
is he is by far and away the most tactical of all of the characters.
So, you see before Tony even got away from him,
the first thing he made sure to do was to disable Tony's boot,
uh, which would destabilize his ability...
McFEELY: It's the only way this silo sequence works.
And again, you're using the setting, right?
It's an old, uh, Russian military...
Soviet military base that's been taken over by HYDRA.
So, then you have this big silo.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: You know, Tony is a mechanized hero.
Uh, so, you can degrade his equipment
and at the same time degrade his ability.
ANTHONY: But he can still go analogue when he needs to.
McFEELY: Right. You know, he's gonna use the Force on that one.
(LAUGHTER)
(BUCKY GRUNTS)
JOE: I mean, he really wants to murder Bucky
with his own hands in this scene.
And that's really the thought process we were following.
Why he kept trying to get close to Bucky. Was he really...
He wanted to hear him
admit that he did it, and he wanted to see him suffer.
Make him suffer. Yeah.
McFEELY: That's the thing, you know,
the goal was stakes without,
you know, millions and millions of people being at risk.
People you've invested in are at risk.
And the hope is that it works
because you've had 12 movies of investment.
MARKUS: I mean, there are so many layers to it
because he also wants to hurt Bucky to hurt Steve at this point.
- Because, you know... - McFEELY: Steve's failed him.
MARKUS: Yeah. You love this thing so much,
I'm gonna take it away from you.
JOE: This is a... I mean, this is
about as brutal a sequence as there is in the movie. Um...
And it is. It's very complicated
because if I'm a fan of Cap and Bucky, then it's a rousing moment for me.
- This moment... - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: And if I'm a fan of Iron Man, then it's horrifying.
ANTHONY: Winter Soldier's gonna save them both.
McFEELY: Right.
McFEELY: The music gets operatic. It's great.
JOE: A nice Russian influence in the music.
It's like a Prokofiev, um...
Quality to it, tone to it.
McFEELY: This is straight out of the comics, right?
JOE: Yeah. That's a...
You know, part of what we do when we all sit in a room together
is we pull key pieces of art and have them printed up,
and blow 'em up and stick them on the wall,
you know, just as archetypes or archetypal moments
or, you know, big story moments that we want to drive at.
And that was on the wall since day one.
That great piece of art from the books.
ANTHONY: Brühl's very witty and the woman in... The voice of his...
That he keeps listening to of his wife is voiced by my wife, Ann.
MARKUS: Oh, really? ANTHONY: Yeah.
And then, Joe, of course, plays the doctor
that he has to dispatch with.
So, I remember Brühl said to me at one point, he goes,
"So, I've killed your brother and married your wife." He goes...
(LAUGHTER)
MARKUS: But it also means that in this movie,
you've gotten to kill your brother and your wife.
McFEELY: That's right. ANTHONY: It's too complicated.
MARKUS: You're a disturbing man. McFEELY: Yeah.
When the dust cleared...
JOE: We like complex villains. We like villains that, um,
that are unsettling. And they're unsettling
because, you know, they're...
Either something that they say has a truth to it.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: But they're sociopathic...
Or, you know, like in the case of Zemo,
his family was murdered, you know?
So, you know, the Avengers...
The movie being about collateral damage,
the collateral damage happened to the wrong guy.
A guy who was trained with a specific skill set,
who knew, uh, how to get where he needed to go
in order to create this problem, this internal problem.
ANTHONY: But also being conscious of, like, the past movies.
That's the other thing I love about this is, Brühl, like us...
Or not Brühl, but Zemo,
has seen what the Avengers have done, like the audiences.
Like we've seen the Avengers defeat everybody.
- Zemo's seen them... - McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: Defeat everybody as a human in this world.
McFEELY: Yes, he's been a human on Earth. (LAUGHS)
ANTHONY: Yeah. So, he's smart enough, to move the story forward,
he knows he has to go at them in a different way.
McFEELY: It's one big web, right? And so, part of the story design is,
it's all the same theme, right?
I mean, when you have 15 different players,
if they're coming in with 15 different stories,
this is gonna be a mess.
But they're all coming in
with similar, um, thematic needs. Right?
It's all based on the same idea,
which is that these heroes have gone too far.
JOE: Part of T'Challa's growth arc is that he understands that, you know...
McFEELY: What's going on downstairs. JOE: No, what's going on downstairs,
but also
that Zemo went down a very dark path, out of a need for revenge.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: indulge that part of yourself
McFEELY: We play Panther's arc in very few notes...
ANTHONY: Yeah. McFEELY: You know,
and it's not that easy to do.
And Chadwick is part of the reason you can do it.
JOE: Yeah.
MARKUS: And we couldn't resist bringing back this line.
McFEELY: It was a little self-indulgent. ANTHONY: Yeah, well, you guys...
Well, that's another thing that I love you guys do is just your knowledge of..
The history of the whole MCU, but also the...
Specifically, the large part of it that you guys wrote is just, it's so...
It's always alive in everything you're executing that's new,
which is really fun.
JOE: We wanted this to be a brutal grudge match
between these characters.
And obviously, in that moment, just for the smallest
fraction of a second, to make you believe
that that shield might go into Tony's face.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: Um, but Cap is not that kinda person.
Cap is the kinda person, no matter how much he loses control,
who at the end of the day is purely trying to end the fight.
Uh, which is when, if you go back and look at the sequence,
just about everything that Cap does,
- every move he makes... - McFEELY: ls to disable, yeah.
JOE: ls to disable. McFEELY: Right.
McFEELY: But that just, really, it's very well-directed,
because I have heard more than once people saying,
"I really thought he was gonna kill him." And then I realised I had gone too far.
- Exactly. - ANTHONY: That's cool.
JOE: And look, that was the hardest thing to do in the film,
without question, was to balance the characters.
Uh, and constantly recalibrate through the writing,
through the acting, through editorial,
to make sure that you could walk out of the movie and really be conflicted
and I think when we had our last test screening,
we had 30 people who stayed after.
We asked them some questions. The last question we asked them was,
"How many believe Cap did the right thing?"
And 15 people raised their hand.
"How many believe Tony did the right..."
- And 15 people raised their hand. - MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: So, when we had the split, we went,
"That's it. We're done. Lock the movie."
We got to that place where, you know, this is...
The ending is controversial,
which we believe is the best storytelling.
- Um, you know, had we... - McFEELY: It's the most honest.
JOE: Yes. Had we committed to a point of view as storytellers,
it makes it too simple.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: It makes the story too simple.
McFEELY: We would've created a straw man somewhere along the line.
JOE: Yeah. And what's the point of having two heroes fight each other
unless you want to...
You should confuse the audience's sympathies.
MARKUS: They've both been dirtied up a little bit.
ANTHONY: But we could've mind-controlled one of them.
MARKUS: Yes... ANTHONY: Turned them evil.
McFEELY: Possible. Yes...
- MARKUS: Just you wait. - (LAUGHTER)
So how does it feel?
To spend all that time, all that effort...
ANTHONY: Again, simple scene... MARKUS: I like simple selection.
ANTHONY: Two great actors. McFEELY: That's right.
To see it fail so spectacularly?
Did it?
JOE: Is it over? Could it ever be over now?
I mean, sometimes things happen on an emotional level
between friends that can never be repaired.
I don't know if this can ever be repaired.
ANTHONY: It's hard to imagine how it would be.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: Vision.
ANTHONY: Lonely Vision.
TONY: It's just the first pass. JAMES RHODES: Yeah.
MARKUS: And I will say Rhodey is recovering
very quickly from spinal injuries.
McFEELY: He's got a little tech. ANTHONY: Stark tech.
McFEELY: This is not to say that we want to wipe that away.
I think it's a very interesting thing for Don Cheadle to play going forward.
ANTHONY: Right. And not just the physical part of it
but the emotional part of it, right?
JOE: Well, look, it's the, you know...
Um, there's been some...
People gripe about the fact that the Marvel Universe
never does away with their characters
or kills anybody, and so, that diminishes stakes.
And Rhodey is definitely dealing with this moving forward.
ANTHONY: This is the kind of experience that changes a person.
JOE: The thing about this movie, though, was it was not...
This a film about divorce.
It's a family getting divorced from one another.
If you then were to kill a character, it becomes a movie
about a family getting divorced
and then somebody dies while they're getting divorced.
Those are two different stories that you're telling.
What we wanted people to walk out of the theater with, all of us, was...
ANTHONY: The tragedy.
JOE: The tragedy of a family falling apart.
- Not the tragedy of, somebody's dead. - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: Uh, which would've overshadowed
the tragedy of them falling apart.
McFEELY: I'm not saying that you can't have stakes when people die,
but it is, I think, often a shorthand for stakes.
JOE: It is. ANTHONY: Right.
JOE: It's a way to cheat stakes.
MARKUS: It also means they almost...
if they have any redeeming qualities, they have to come together...
McFEELY: Right. It's much more likely they'd come together.
MARKUS: After that death. JOE: Yeah.
ANTHONY: Exactly. It's a different story.
JOE: It alters the whole intent of the movie, again,
which is for you to walk out and go,
"I don't know who was right and who was wrong in that movie."
They both did some good things
and they both did some really bad things.
This is on-character for Cap.
He is certainly the kind of guy
no matter how bad something gets, who will always own
um, his participation in that issue, that mistake.
Uh, you know, he is good at processing his emotions.
They never get the better of him.
McFEELY: And he's not apologizing for backing Bucky.
He's apologizing for lying to Tony.
JOE: Yeah, for withholding that information.
ANTHONY: Right. It's very specific.
JOE: He's very specific about that.
ANTHONY: I love that distinction, though.
JOE: And it does not imply repair with these characters.
It's purely Cap being Cap, which is, you know, like I said,
- stating his culpability in the situation. - MARKUS: Yeah.
ANTHONY: "Here's where I failed. But only here."
McFEELY: I mean, it's a sliver of hope. MARKUS: "Well, if you need me..."
ANTHONY: On Cap's part it is. McFEELY: Right. Yes.
ANTHONY: You know, certainly we can't read much out of Tony.
McFEELY: I guess it depends on what I think.
Does he smile here? Does he...
JOE: Tony. No. I think... ANTHONY: Not really.
ANTHONY: Maybe he's less tense. But I don't know.
I don't know.
JOE: I mean, you know, the thing is, when somebody who is a, you know...
And I'm not implying that again this is...
'Cause Cap may have done worse things in the movie
than Tony did,
but when somebody who is better than you
or of greater moral character than you,
uh, then, you know, apologizes, it's difficult for you not
to have a moment of self-realization.
Uh, and I think Tony certainly has that, which is why
he then puts Ross on hold.
It's his way of rejecting, if just momentarily,
the deal that he's made with the government.
And trying to gain control back.
JOE: Where's this gonna go?
(McFEELY CHUCKLES)
JOE: Uh, all I can say is I really...
I cannot wait to put Chris Evans in the Nomad outfit.
- (McFEELY LAUGHS) - I really, I just... I can't wait.
McFEELY: He just got back from his fitting, right?
MARKUS: Yeah, you cut it all the way down to the belly button.
JOE: Yeah. No, went past the navel.
JOE: Past it.
Past it.
MARKUS: Just a hint of things to come down there.
JOE: That's a lot of character in that chest of Chris's.
McFEELY: (LAUGHS) That's right.
Uh, so, this credit sequence was done by a dear friend of ours.
Who also did the credits for Community.
ANTHONY: Yeah, Erin Sarofsky. We've been working with her for years.
She runs an incredible design company in Chicago.
JOE: But she did the Community credits.
ANTHONY: Yeah, Community.
ANTHONY: Happy Endings.
JOE: She did the Happy Endings credits,
she did the Winter Soldier credits, and she did these credits.
Uh, and what we love about her work is it's always very thematic.
And striking visually.
ANTHONY: Yeah, the thing is, I mean that's...
Joe and I, in all of our collaborations,
no matter what position it is in the filmmaking process,
we love to find people who are filmmakers.
You know, who understand the craft of storytelling
and are using whatever specific craft they do in the service of storytelling.
And that's you know, it's...
I mean, it makes our job a lot easier as directors
when all our collaborators are doing that. So...
JOE: Also, this is a little bit darker tone,
these credits, than the other Marvel credits.
So, it's in line with the movie.
We wanted a complex ending at the movie.
We didn't want to tell you everything was right
by suddenly having a colorful credit sequence.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
You sure about this?
I can't trust my own mind.
JOE: Your first peek into Wakanda.
We were very careful here because we wanted to make sure...
And this is, I think, you know...
Marvel Studios is starting to feel a lot like United Artists.
And, um, you know, we are very close to a lot of the other directors,
uh, writers, you know?
Everybody knows each other, has a history with each other.
E-mails, texts. Um...
And, you know, it was important to us
that even though we were giving a glimpse into Wakanda,
that Ryan Coogler, who is going to be spending a lot of thought
and time and energy
thinking about Wakanda with his creative team,
that he really be afforded the opportunity to put that on film.
McFEELY: As clean a slate as you could give him.
JOE: Absolutely.
So, we knew we needed this storytelling,
but we also didn't want to make any of those creative decisions.
Especially because, again, we're only giving it to you in a minute.
And he's gonna be spending an entire film doing it. So...
McFEELY: And that storytelling is a button on T'Challa's,
you know, metanoia. His change of heart.
ANTHONY: That's important, yeah.
Again, this is one of my favourite beats, to be honest with you.
The fact that he's trying to right the wrongs
that he's done in the movie.
The guy he's been trying to kill the whole movie,
he's gonna harbor him.
You know, the guy who he's been fighting the whole movie,
he now offers to fight alongside him. You know, that's pretty amazing.
JOE: Well, and he expresses, the first time we meet him,
a distaste for politics.
- And then when Cap says, well... - McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: "The politics may come for you," he says, "Let them try. "So...
He is a man of integrity.
Uh, and his own
internal code is what is most important to him.
Uh, against all odds or against everything else,
he will support his own internal code.
And even more so now because he realised he had made a mistake.
And that life sometimes can trick you.
ANTHONY: The length of the credits in these movies
is always so amazing to me.
McFEELY: That's a testament to how these things get made.
ANTHONY: It's so true.
MARKUS: And also, you're just trying to torture people.
'Cause they know they've gotta sit through the whole damn thing.
McFEELY: They know there's... That's right. (LAUGHS)
ANTHONY: (LAUGHS) Yeah.
McFEELY: But it shows you how collaborative an art form it is.
ANTHONY: Exactly. McFEELY: I mean, it's...
McFEELY: There's a lot ways movies can get, uh, mitigated, right?
I mean, there's a lot of reasons they work,
and there's a lot of reasons they don't work.
JOE: Yeah.
McFEELY: Wanna spoil Infinity War?
MARKUS: Yeah. JOE: Let's do it.
ANTHONY: Go on. Do it.
JOE: Should we talk about...
ANTHONY: Dare ya. McFEELY: I dare ya. (LAUGHS)
McFEELY: I think Doc could cut us off pretty quickly. (LAUGHS)
- MARKUS: They just lost it at the end. - (McFEELY LAUGHS)
JOE: Uh, coming up, we do have a Peter Parker tag.
Maybe we could talk about the process with tags.
You know, because everything's evolving always at Marvel.
There are other movies being shot while we're shooting or in post.
Um, it's really, you know,
the tags are probably the one thing on both
Winter Soldier and this movie
that we shot in, um...
McFEELY: In pickups. Yeah. JOE: Pickups.
Because it's really...
It's the hardest thing to know
where you want to go at the end of the story.
McFEELY: Right. MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: And it gives you the opportunity to do two different things.
Our first one is about closure,
uh, and our second one is comedic, but also pointing towards, uh,
another franchise. So, the end...
MARKUS: They both point towards franchises.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: interconnected... Well, they're about the interconnected universe.
And, um, that the stories will continue in these other movies.
McFEELY: And Marvel always bakes in, uh, resources for re-shoots.
And I will say on both Winter Soldier and Civil War,
very little in terms of re-shoots, right?
JOE: But very targeted and it's something we used to do
on Arrested and Community, as well.
You're constantly re-shooting
because you have to deliver the episode.
You always have a set running
and you're usually on the same sets.
So, it's very easy for you to run downstairs
and fix a scene on a television show,
uh, and edit it and still get it on the air the next day,
um, because you want to be working towards
the best version of that episode.
Are there story holes? Great, let's fix 'em.
Did that scene not turn out the way that we wanted to? Great, let's fix it.
Are we off on tone here? Great, let's fix that.
And so, I think that, um, you know,
one of the reasons that Marvel is so successful
is that the process is always evolving.
They are never finished with the movie.
You don't edit it and then lock it and say you're done.
What you do is you edit it,
you keep thinking about it,
you massage it, you massage it through the VFX,
you can make alterations to the story that way.
All of us sit around and we talk about where we may have missed.
We collect information from the test audiences
and think about where story points that are confusing,
that we thought weren't confusing, but now are confusing.
Because when you keep hearing...
And you have to know how to read an audience like tea leaves.
You can't take their literal notes 'cause it'll destroy your film.
But what you can do is
if you keep hearing the same thing over and over again,
know that there might be a problem in that area.
McFEELY: They give you the symptom,
and then you have to come up with the diagnosis.
If they give you the diagnosis, that's trouble.
JOE: And having re-shoots available to you, allows you to fix the problem,
uh, in a very targeted way. And frankly, I think on both... Both movies
took a big leap forward
even with just two or three days of re-shoots.
McFEELY: It was not very much.
And I shouldn't say that Marvel doesn't give you...
Marvel will give you the resources required.
I'm just saying that because of all the work the four of us did in prep,
not a lot on the cutting room floor,
which means you had a little chance to turn C scenes into A scenes.
JOE: Right. You don't wanna waste resources on a movie like this.
It was too expensive, it's too difficult, it's too hard to get these actors back.
You gotta get it as right as you can the first time out.
But invariably, there are thousands of choices that get made.
And even if you're off on about 4%
or 5% of those choices, you're still...
That's still 5% of the movie you can make better.
Uh, and that's what those re-shoots are about.
And sometimes you're off on 50% and you know...
McFEELY: Well, that's a bigger problem.
JOE: And you're in for 30 days of re-shoots.
But the fact that their motive and their goal is
to put out the best piece of content that they can
is why they are as successful as they are.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
WOMAN: (SINGING) Well, my left hand's free
(VOCALIZING)
Hey, shady baby, I'm hot
Like the prodigal son
JOE: And I think here we're leading in.
ANTHONY: Yeah, we sort of return to Spider-Man's signature song.
JOE: I think this scene was reworked more than any scene in the movie.
MARKUS: It was several different ones. JOE: This tag. Yeah.
JOE: Trying to light on what it is that, you know,
how we wanted to advance the story.
And ultimately, it becomes about the fact that,
what makes Spider-Man different in the Marvel Universe
was that his suit was created by Tony Stark,
which means that there might be
- some technical enhancements that... - McFEELY: Extra doodads. Yeah.
MARKUS: I love Marisa Tomei in this scene 'cause she's...
It gives me an idea of a totally different dynamic than I've seen before.
She's almost pleased that he was in a fight.
As opposed to Aunt May who's, you know...
ANTHONY: I also think there's a little bit of..
Yeah, it's not quite the same naivety and...
McFEELY: Right. ANTHONY: There's a savviness to her.
JOE: Well, she has his number. McFEELY: Yeah.
You know?
Yeah, I got quite a few in, actually.
JOE: And it's a kid. He's not a great liar.
ANTHONY: His friend was huge. That, by the way, was Tom Holland.
McFEELY: Is that right? Yeah. ANTHONY: Yeah.
That's what happens when you rub up against Robert Downey Jr.
- Can pull... - McFEELY: (LAUGHS) Suddenly...
ANTHONY: He can pull one of those out of you.
McFEELY: I gotta talk to Holland.
(LAUGHTER)
(SOFT CHUCKLE)
McFEELY: So, boy, I really hope they use this in the Spider-Man movie.
- (McFEELY LAUGHS) - JOE: Yeah. Right?
McFEELY: We're gonna look pretty stupid.
(LAUGHTER)
JOE: Thanks for watching and thanks for listening.
McFEELY: Thanks very much. MARKUS: Thanks, everybody.
ANTHONY: Ciao.