Zak Penn Talks 'The Avengers' and Working Directly for Marvel Studios!

Here's an excerpt (to read the FULL interview click the link below):

CraveOnline: How is working for autonomous Marvel different from working under the studio collaborations?

Zak Penn: Pretty much night and day. Marvel, everyone there has read every comic. They’re big fans of it. We’ve kind of moved past the normal fights that you have and just talk about what would make a cool movie. Here’s the thing though. Once you get into the process of making a movie, compromise is like your life. Everything is a compromise. Even if everyone has the best intentions setting out on a movie, you can make a total piece of sh*t. I’ve learned this the hard way. It is really damn hard to make a good movie. If you ever manage it, be proud of yourself. It’s so damn hard. Even though we all have the best intentions, it still might suck but it is at least a relief to not be fighting with people as much. We’re all kind of on the same page.

CraveOnline: How do you start writing The Avengers before Captain America and Thor are done?

Zak Penn: My job is to kind of shuttle between the different movies and make sure that finally we’re mimicking that comic book structure where all of these movies are connected. It used to drive me crazy at Fox not being able to interweave. Why couldn’t we have Fantastic Four in this movie? Why couldn’t we do this? Now we will. Thor and Captain America will lead right into the Avengers movie, and Iron Man 2 as well.

CraveOnline: Do they give you a place to start or do you have to wait to find out where you pick up?

Zak Penn: We are learning it as we go and it’s pretty complicated. I have a meeting at Marvel this week to catch up on continuity. There’s just a board that tracks “Here’s where everything that happens in this movie overlaps with that movie.” It’s just what they do in the comic books. Think how complicated it is when you’ve got all the titles those companies do. Someone’s got to keep track of all that. What’s Wolverine wearing this week? Are his claws bone or adamantium? Yeah, it’s going to be really difficult. The only thing I can say is I’m pushing them to do as many animatics as possible to animate the movie, to draw boards so that we’re all working off the same visual ideas. But the exigencies of production take first priority.

CraveOnline: Should Wolverine have been R?

Zak Penn: That was our frustration. He’s got razor sharp claws and you can’t show blood. So what does he do? In every scene, he’s running around blocking, hitting you with the claws and not cutting you. Where do you go with that? There’s no way to do it.

So, sounds like Penn is actually pretty excited about writing the script for this movie and connecting the character together! Do you think he's the right guy for the job and would Wolverine have been a better film with a higher rating?