By Gill Pringle
We’re talking to you right in the middle of the Captain America: Civil War shoot. Being executive producer on this project is a big responsibility. How did you approach this job?
“It’s such a big movie, and the only way that you can approach it is one day at a time. You just have to solve the problems that are in front of you. Whenever you have a movie with this many actors in a bunch of different locations with this much action, if you try to tackle the whole thing at once, it’s overwhelming. For us, it’s very much starting with the story first, and making sure that the story is in a good place. Once you really lock down your script, you can start to prep – and prep the things that are on the page, versus trying to say, ‘Let’s do Captain America: Civil War!” Holy shit, that’s such a big undertaking. Unless you try and figure out how to compartmentalise your work, you’re in trouble. There are more Marvel heroes than ever before in one film.”
Where are you shooting? Germany?
“It’s an international story. So the action – unlike Captain America: Winter Soldier, which all took place in America, mostly in Washington D.C. – this movie has much more of a globetrotting aspect. A good portion of the second act of the film actually takes place in Germany, so it made sense to actually go and shoot where the story takes place.”
What is significant about Germany?
“There’s s a big plot point around that – essentially, Captain America is pulled over to Europe because The Winter Soldier has resurfaced, and he has to figure out what The Winter Soldier remembers. If you remember the end of Captain America: Winter Soldier, we leave it a little bit nebulous that maybe he’s starting to remember some things and why…why now? That’s the big question.”
Can you just do the paragraph synopsis of what Captain America: Civil War is?
“Sure. Essentially, after the events of all the other Marvel films and an event that kicks off this movie, which takes place in Nigeria, there is collateral damage. The countries of the world say, ‘We can no longer have The Avengers operating outside the auspices of anything.’ The Avengers used to be run out of S.H.I.E.L.D, right? S.H.I.E.L.D has obviously collapsed, so now The Avengers have been running autonomously. That can no longer stand. So, The Avengers are asked to sign something that we’re calling The Sokovia Accords, the idea of which is that The Avengers will now report to The United Nations. Some of the Avengers say, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’ Some of The Avengers say, ‘That doesn’t sound like a great idea because we don’t want to be at the behest of a governing body that could send us places that we don’t want to go.’ That fractures the team. And that is complicated because Cap decides not to sign with the return of The Winter Soldier. So now, Cap’s essentially decided not to be an Avenger. So what happens now when he decides to go and grab his shield and go figure out what’s going on with The Winter Soldier? That’s the main thrust of the movie. What happens to these heroes who end up on the opposite sides of this issue and then are forced to confront each other because, unfortunately, The Winter Soldier always makes life more complicated?”
And Cap is the only one who won’t sign?
“There are a couple of other people who join him, and through the course of the movie, some people have a change of heart. So you’re going to see a lot of The Avengers, for very personal reasons, figure out why they may side with Tony or why they may side with Cap.”
With Ant-Man and Spider-Man, you’re starting to bring in other elements of The Marvel Cinematic Universe. How intriguing is that, and how much more complicated is that?
“It makes it more complicated, and we only put in characters that have a really good story reason to be there. So, once you see Ant-Man, it will make a lot more sense why he might end up in this film. The same goes for Black Panther, which is the other big new addition. It’s a character that we’ve loved forever, and we figured out a way to organically insert him into a story which otherwise wouldn’t call for a new hero. It does make it more complicated, but it makes it more fun because you have a lot of different characters with different points of view about both the issue of The Sokovia Accords and The Winter Soldier. Is he good, is he bad, or is he neutral? And that kind of complication can force friends to turn against each other.”
You’re working with big actors and big egos…how do you deal with that?
“The good news with our actors is that they’ve become a family. You do a couple of these movies, and you spend so much time with each other, that while they may have big egos in their personal lives, once they step on set, they are all very professional and very considerate. They could very much say, ‘Hey, I shot my scene, I’m gonna go home and let my partner shoot the rest of the scene without me’, but they have all decided to stick together and perform as a unit. So we’re very lucky. I don’t think we have the troubles that you may have heard on other shows. Our cast has been really good with us, so far.”
Do you have any perspective on interlacing the movies with the TV shows? Or are they going to remain separate?
“So far, they are going to remain separate. We are always open to great ideas, and if there was a natural way to integrate some of these great TV shows into our cinematic universe, we’re always open to that. But because they operate on such separate timelines, it’s very hard for them to line up. TV requires you to write so much story all the time, so their stories move quite quickly. Whereas ours are a bit more monolithic. It takes about two years to get a production up and running. So it’s hard for those two things to merge in a way that feels organic. So I wouldn’t say never, but there are no plans on the table right now.”
Apart from Captain America, who has the most screen time in this?
“It’s hard to say, because we’re still filming. We’re not even quite half way through our production. So we still have to assemble all that footage and see what happens. But Captain America obviously has a big presence, Iron Man has a huge presence in the film as you would assume. He is on the other side of the civil war. And we try to really showcase as many of the other heroes as evenly as possible. But I would say that Captain America and Iron Man probably share the most screen time.”
Was [Marvel Comics legend] Stan Lee involved?
“Stan Lee is no longer involved in a creative capacity. We always love to find ways to cameo Stan Lee. The only time when people get nervous on set is when Stan Lee comes because that’s the only person that everybody wants an autograph with or a picture with. We’ve already shot his cameo, which is fun. He has such a great energy and a great spirit. But he’s not involved anymore in The Marvel Cinematic Universe. He has his own production company, so he’s not directly involved with Marvel creatively.”
We’ve always been led to believe that these are a series of trilogies. There’s gonna be three Avengers, there were the three Iron Man movies…is this the third and final Captain America movie?
“Not necessarily. It does feel like a trilogy, and we definitely tried to tie up storylines from the first two movies. But it doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be a fourth Captain America, or that we couldn’t keep going. That’s just naturally how the stories have played out thus far. But you never know.”
One of the criticisms of Avengers: Age Of Ultron was that you had so many heroes on the screen at once that it was hard to focus on the storyline. How are you going to keep the focus on the plot with more heroes?
“It’s a challenge. It’s was a real challenge on Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and it’s a real challenge for us. For us, one of the things that we have going for our film is that the storyline directly touches every hero. Every hero has to deal with one issue, which is The Sokovia Accords. There is nobody who gets to sit that issue out. So everyone has a very specific relation to the same thing, and you’re able to carry that through-line through everything. Avengers: Age Of Ultron, weirdly, had a more sprawling narrative, with Ultron and the twins and their creation of Vision. There were a lot of things going on, and characters reacting to different elements, which is really cool. That’s one of the fun things about that movie. Our movie is very much about one thing, and everybody is addressing that one thing.”
Did Paul Bettany know throughout all this that he was finally going to get his moment as Vision?
“I would be lying if I said that on the first Iron Man, Paul Bettany knew anything about this. The transition from Jarvis to Vision was something that we found organically just in writing these films. We were lucky that we cast Bettany as Jarvis in the first place. Because I don’t know if we would have done it if it was another actor who wasn’t of his quality. When you are around Paul and you see him perform, even just as Jarvis on an ADR stage, you realise how great a performer he is. And it makes his transition to Vision an easy one.”
Can you talk a bit about the post-credits scenes? People have come to expect them now…
“A lot of times, those post-credit scenes are things that we find in editorial. We’ve cut the movie together in editorial, and we have a sense of the feeling of the film, and we go, ‘You know what would be a great cherry on top of the sundae? This idea, or another idea.’ So, often times, it’s things that we don’t shoot during principal photography; it’s things that we shoot later. It’s about what is going to make the audience have the best time? What’s that great feeling that we want people to leave the theatre with? We always try to chase those ideas because they’re so much fun. And yes, people have come to expect them, so we want to pay off on that expectation.”
In Avengers: Age Of Ultron, there was only one, while other films have a couple of scenes…
“If we don’t have a great idea, we’re not gonna do something that we don’t think works, or that we don’t think people are gonna enjoy. We’d rather just not have anything than have something that we don’t feel is up to the quality of what we normally do. Sometimes, we just don’t get that great bolt of lightning.”
Why did Marvel kill Quicksilver [Aaron Taylor Johnson] in Avengers: Age Of Ultron?
“[Laughs] Great question. Unfortunately, sometimes heroes fall in battle. We feel that it was the right choice because people have such a strong emotional reaction to his passing, and maybe that’s good storytelling. It’s something that [director] Joss Whedon felt very passionate about, and it plays really well. But it’s sad, and we love Aaron Taylor Johnson more than anybody.”
Quicksilver also belongs to 20th Century Fox’s X-Men universe [in the comic books, Quicksilver is the son of the X-Men foe, Magneto, and appeared in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, as well as the upcoming X-Men: Apocalypse, played by Evan Peters]…
“He does indeed. So, there you go.”
Did that factor into the decision at all?
“It didn’t. We had already written Avengers: Age Of Ultron by the time that we had seen that film, so we had already made these decisions. We’re all fans of that film, and that version of Quicksilver, and we thought that ours was different enough, but we also didn’t want to over correct and say, ‘Oh, they did that, so now we should totally change what we are already doing.’ We were really concentrating on what was the best storytelling.”
There’s a lot going on in Marvel comic books right now. Universes are colliding, and will we see something where Dr. Doom is the main character and he’s a god…
“No plans for that. Though again, never say never. Everyone who works on these films loves those kinds of ideas. Those big cross overs. I don’t know how that would work though, and we have no plans for it.”
No Thor as a woman?
“No Thor as a woman yet. No plans so far.”
Are the twins – Wanda and Pietro Maximoff alias Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver – Inhumans?
“They are not Inhumans. I can say definitively that they are not Inhumans. They actually got their powers, and maybe it’s a little hard to follow in Avengers: Age Of Ultron, from Loki’s sceptre. Baron Von Strucker was experimenting on Loki’s sceptre, which helped to give them these powers, so they’re not Inhumans. [The TV series] Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D is dealing with Inhumans now, and Wanda and Pietro are not part of that.”
Is it possible in the future that Captain America will not be Chris Evans, or that you could have Iron Man without Robert Downey Jr.?
“You know, I’m honest. We haven’t looked that far down the road. We would love to have our heroes be our heroes for as long as they’ll have us. Part of what makes Marvel fun is the continuity of seeing Chris Evans as Captain America through all of the films. So as long as we can figure out how to make it work, we want to keep our actors.”
But would it be possible?
“I don’t know. Anything’s possible, again. But we definitely wouldn’t plan it that way.”
Will you be introducing new characters in their own movies, or through other movies, like you do with Black Panther and Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War?
“It will be both. Doctor Strange will be very much a new character in his own universe, who really only deals with characters in that universe. When we get Captain Marvel up and running, it will be the same thing; it will be a character by themselves without having other Avengers or other characters within them. But, at the same time, you look at things like our Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 or Thor: Ragnarok, and you never know who will pop up in those films. So we’re gonna try and do it both ways. Sometimes it will be completely stand alone, and sometimes there will be a lot of connective tissue.”
Will these universes from Fox and Marvel ever collide somehow?
“Not in the near future. It’s all in the lawyers’ hands, so it’s hard for us to do anything about it.”
But you got Spider-Man back…
“So you never know.”
A lot of work was done on the script for the third Captain America movie before it became Captain America: Civil War. How much do you find some of the work that maybe begins as part of one film is transported to another film?
“A good deal. Our early Captain America discussions, thematically, are still relevant to the film that we’re making now. Whenever you have a big idea like Captain America: Civil War, it obviously shifts narratives. But it doesn’t mean that the work that you’ve done before hand is invalid. It just means that you cherry pick the best versions of what you’ve been talking about, and you integrate them into this other thing, because Captain America: Civil War is a great idea, but it only works if it is a Captain America movie. If we just said, ‘Oh great, so forget about Steve’s journey, forget about what happens with The Winter Soldier, let’s do Civil War’, audiences would feel cheated. We set up an expectation at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier to pay off the rest of the story. So a lot of the ground that we were laying, we were able to go, ‘Here are the pieces that are still completely valid and actually really interesting. Let’s figure out how to use the civil war as a mechanism to still tell that story without losing what makes it a Captain America movie, without losing what happens with The Winter Soldier, and what happens with Cap’s relationship with the Falcon. We were playing with these pieces anyway, and it would have been cheating to just throw those all away and go, ‘You know what, guys? It’s just sort of an Avengers movie.’ To us, that is not that interesting.”
Captain America: Civil War is released in cinemas on April 28.
I watched in hd this is outstanding movie. Next is more !!