By Travis Johnson
So, you’ve been in the Marvel family working for the House of Ideas for quite a while now. You were a producer on Ant-Man and you worked on the various Marvel one shot short films. How did you wind up Executive Producer on Thor: Ragnarok?
You know, I grew up in Marvel Studios. Thank my lucky stars that I was there to work under Kevin Feige and Louis D’Esposito and Victoria Alonso. Marvel’s got a great tradition of allowing people to simmer in the creative pot and promote from within. Kevin, over time, would give me slightly bigger and bigger projects. Unbeknownst to me, I was being trusted with slightly larger and larger things until the day came where he was like “Okay, now you’re going to do Ant-Man.” And that was it! And now Thor: Ragnarok is a movie that I’m really proud of and feel very, very fortunate to be a part of.
Are you a comic book guy?
Yeah, yeah, I grew up reading comics. I was a 12-year-old kid in the early ’90s and it was really Image Comics that got me starting to read comics. I remember when it was [Spawn creator Todd] MacFarlane And Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee, and they started this crazy company. I would travel around with my buddy, Rob Goodman, and we would go around to all these conventions trying to get autographs on our books. That was really the beginning.
It wasn’t until we got a little bit older that I started reading more Marvel stuff, more DC, stuff from the ‘70s and ‘80s. That was really the first inception of my love for the genre – these big, larger than life early ‘90s comics.
A lot of comic influences are in the mix for Ragnarok, including original artist Jack Kirby and going right up to current writer Jason Aaron, but what really stands out is the influence of artist and writer Walt Simonson’s ‘80s run.
Walt Simonson’s “Ragnarok” run is incredible. When you sit down and read that voluminous set of books that’s like 1500 pages, it is bright and colorful and wacky and dramatic and the stakes are so high! But the characters are so weird and he just mashes so many different ideas together. People forget that the Ragnarok story was the inception of [popular supporting character] Beta Ray Bill. It was a mixture of demons and Asgard folklore and spaceships and sci fi, and they’re on Earth! I think that was the conceptual throughline for us: Jack [Kirby] and Stan [Lee] to Walt to what I hope is on the screen for Thor: Ragnarok.
And Taika is a huge fan of Jack Kirby’s art, so from the beginning we were just poring over Jack Kirby imagery from throughout his career. When you look at our film our hope is that you see his stylistic touch on Thor: Ragnarok as much as any designer.
How early in the process did Taika Waititi’s name come up?
The original idea with Thor 3 was to highlight Chris Hemsworth as a comedic force. We had recently come out of Age of Ultron and he has the best scenes in the movie, in my opinion. He is able to verbally spar with Downey and he’s hilarious in the scenes with Ruffalo and we just realised: that’s the guy. That’s the fun part of Thor, especially Thor One: he’s hilarious in all those fish out of water situations. And Chris is so funny in real life, and also has such a vivid imagination. You don’t think about it when you’re watching the movie, but when there’s a giant fire monster shooting a beam of fire at him and he’s twirling his hammer, and you feel the heat and you feel the intensity of that moment – that’s just Chris against bluescreen! It’s him! He’s the one selling it! We’ll colour in the visual effects but without that performance… he’s got to see every situation in his imagination and is able to act accordingly.
So anyway, the original idea was to highlight Chris and comedy, and immediately I was thinking about Taika because I had just seen What We Do in the Shadows. That movie was one of my favourite movies of the year. Hunt for the Wilderpeople we still didn’t know about, but we set up a screening for Boy. As soon as Kevin [Feige] and Victoria [Alonso] saw Boy, Kevin especially… there’s a scene in Boy where he’s [Taika’s character] at his son’s window and he got drunk and crazy the night before. He knocks and he’s like, “I’m like the Incredible Hulk. You alright having the Incredible Hulk for a dad?” And Kevin turns in and he’s like, “Yeah, this could work.”
I met with Taika a few times leading up to that and I was really hoping the studio would embrace him, and sure enough he came in and gave a pitch for the film that was amazing. It really was the movie. He created a little clip reel that kind of pulled from shots from different movies together and it was all set to “Immigrant Song”. That reel had the DNA that’s in the film today.
How did he take to working on a film of this scale?
Taika on the one hand is a very experimental director. He gets on set, he knows the scene inside and out, he gets what’s on the page. And then he blows it up and gets like a hundred other things. So when we’re in post-production it’s this amazing situation where he’s found, just being playful on set with the actors, many unexpected ways to tell the story and draw out the conflict in each scene, whether it’s for dramatic or comedic purposes. And for all of his experimentation and play, he knew the movies. He knew the Thor movies, he knew the MCU, and I think that if you watch Ragnarok, down to certain shot choices, you see him playing with ideas that were established in the first two Thors and the Avengers films in a fun way.
Marvel has been criticised in the past for having what’s been described as a “house style”, but Taika’s voice comes through incredibly clearly here. How do you tackle preserving the auteurial voice and balancing that with the requirements of both tentpole filmmaking, and the demands of the overarching Marvel Cinematic Universe storyline?
I think what we look for in filmmakers above all else is the ability to bring a level of humanity to these larger than life characters. And whether you’re the Russo brothers who are looking at the universe through the lens of like a ‘70s espionage movie when they made Winter Soldier, or you’re James Gunn looking at the movie as larger than life space opera in Guardians of the Galaxy, they both are able to draw the humanity of these characters.
I think that’s something that we established at the inception of the studio when we made the first Iron Man movie. Favreau and Downey were able to bring Tony Stark onscreen in a way that set the tone for what these movies needed to be from a character perspective. The characters can be funny but they are funny in the face of real danger and real stakes.
And what’s funny about the shared universe, just like in the comics, is that because there’s a larger narrative and you’re part of that big tapestry and you’re aiming toward something and there’s a big overall story, it actually frees you up to play with tone in a way. You know it’s always going to be driving toward something, so as you open up these windows into the universe you can you can look at them through different lenses – each director kind of brings their own lens to it.
Finally, as we come to the end of Phase Three, where do you see the MCU heading in the future?
I think that it’s all controlled chaos. Any creative endeavour, any movie in and of itself takes on a life of its own and has its own soul. There’s obviously countless people involved in creating this thing and it’s kind of a hive mind, a living entity unto itself.
One of the things that’s so great about Marvel Studios is that there’s a lot of respect for that entity, that big overarching narrative. I remember the writers working on Agent Carter said something that stuck with me: sometimes you’ve got to follow the river of the story; it’s going to tell you where it wants to go. And I think that, with the MCU at large, at our best we’ve done a good job of allowing it to grow in surprising ways and follow where that big overarching story wants to take us. And I I expect it will continue to do that in the future.
Thor: Ragnarok is in cinemas now. read our review here.
