Speaking at the SXSW annual film and music festival currently underway, via Leaky News, writer-director Joss Whedon discussed Marvel's The Avengers in-depth. Commenting lengthily on his reaction being approached for the film, the production's overall experience, and jocularly teasing the secondary villains, take a gander below!
“Sheer panic, maybe three times total.” Says it’s better so he doesn’t realize the enormity of what he’s trying to accomplish.
“Limitations are something I latch onto. A novelist…has a blank page. A genre writer never has a blank page. … That’ useful to me. By the same token the restriction of budget or set or location, anything like that, can be really useful. When you can have everything, everybody wants to give you everything and then it’s very hard to make things feel real, to make things feel lived in.”
“We had these amazing sets, really beautifully designed, and epic, and great, but I found that once we got off the sets and started shooting on location…my camera work got a lot more interesting. Because I had to work around these things.”
“Trying sometimes to pull the big budget out of the movie has been part of the creative process.”
“As a producer, it convinced me to just, too much Scrooge is not a good thing.”
“I got a guy in a cape, I got a guy with an A on his head, I got a green guy – it’s a delicate balance. And anything your and to make it feel real, like real filmmaking, even when there are CGI shots and they say, that looks like a bit of a mismatch, I was like keep it. Say it’s from different takes.”
“If everything matches perfectly there’s going to be a disconnect, it’s going to feel too clean. It’s not going to feel like what I’m used to in film, which is a slight dirtiness.”
“I’m a fanboy. I want to see what’s up with Thor and Captain America and what he can do with that shield. All of those things have been in my DNA since I was a tiny child. I love all of that. In terms of how I make it mine, I think that obviously I look at the Avengers and go, this team doesn’t make any sense at all, but I can work with that, because it doesn’t make sense to them either. They’re extraordinarily dysfunctional people. And they’re in their own way very isolated. So just being able to tell that very basic story, isolated people who come together and become more than their parts, is a meaningful story to me.”
“I”m not ready to be post-modern about superheroes yet. The first thing I said to the people at Marvel was, I want to make a war movie.”
“A lot of these movies do a beautiful setup and the hero fights a slightly larger version of himself, and it’s clean. I just wanted to dirty it up, I wanted to really put them through their paces. The feeling you get from a good movie like – oh my god it’s still coming, we’re not going to get out of this alive – that’s the feeling I wanted to make.”
“[The bad guys] are Vulcans. I don’t know a lot about the Marvel universe, and I thought there were Vulcans.”
On the villains not being the Skrull or the Kree, “What’s probably happening is I just said something that Marvel didn’t want me to. It’s weird to be fired so late!”
“The first cut of the Avengers may have been a little long. It may have been endless. Just going off and doing [Much Ado About Nothing] completely for myself that was a good time with my friends but a work of art that was very compressed and had so much heart in it – I went back to the Avengers and said OK, now I can deal with this with just enough distance… and start really editing it through the eyes of the people who are going to watch it.”
“If I couldn’t put my heart and soul into the Avengers I have no business making it. I could never just take a job.”
Marvel Studios presents in association with Paramount Pictures “Marvel’s The Avengers”--the super hero team up of a lifetime, featuring iconic Marvel super heroes Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye and Black Widow. When an unexpected enemy emerges that threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, Director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins.
Starring Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner and Samuel L. Jackson, & directed by Joss Whedon from a screenplay by Joss Whedon, “Marvel’s The Avengers” is based on the ever-popular Marvel comic book series “The Avengers,” first published in 1963 and a comics institution ever since. Prepare yourself for an exciting event movie, packed with action and spectacular special effects, when “Marvel’s The Avengers” assemble on May 4, 2012. The film is distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. In addition to "Marvel's The Avengers," Marvel Studios will release a slate of films based on the Marvel characters including "Iron Man 3" on May 3, 2013!; and “Thor 2” on November 15, 2013.