SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: As we near the release date, what’s your feeling about the film?
JOE JOHNSTON: I feel good about it – you know, it's gotten a lot bigger than it started out – we just kept adding things – and some of the practical effects we tried to do didn't work out, so we just said we have to fix it in post, shoot an element and do a green screen so we can fix it later. We added a lot of visual effects –I think we started off with something like 1200 visual effects and ended up with 1700, so we added basically another third. We literally just finished the last visual effect yesterday.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: But you never hit me as someone who gets crazy about the pressure.
JOE JOHNSTON: No, I don't get too crazy. When I was working on one of my early films, The Rocketeer, and really stressing out about dealing with the studio, George Lucas said to me, “What's the worse that can happen?” And I thought for a minute and I said, “I don't know, I guess they could fire me.” And he said, “What's wrong with that? You’ll just get another job, so don't worry about it.” I just try to keep that in mind.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: Does it bother you that Captain America is the fourth superhero film this summer? Are you worried about audience burn-out?
JOE JOHNSTON: Well, I think Captain America is different enough from the rest in that it's period, it's an origin story, the first in a series. I think that we're going to do fine. And the awareness is very high, the trailers are testing great, so, again, I don't get too worried about that stuff either – it's really beyond my control. I worry about things that I can do something about, but I can't do anything about this.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: What would you describe as the “heart” of Captain America?
JOE JOHNSTON: Well it’s the spirit of the underdog and this guy who just wants to do the right thing. All he wants to do is serve his country, he gets turned into the perfect human specimen overnight, and his thought is, “I’ve got everything I wanted,” and of course he DIDN’T get everything he wanted. He's still rejected, they still think of him as a lab rat, but it's about overcoming and his refusal to give up. I think more than anything it's about not giving up – it's simple.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: I assume that every filmmaking experience is a revelation of some kind, and I wonder what that revelation may have been on Captain America.
JOE JOHNSTON: I think every film you do, there are things that happen that make you go “Wow!” Either I didn't know I had it in me, or I didn't know he had it in him – there's always a pleasant surprise about stuff like that. What I try to do is keep learning from every show I do, I just try to identify, “Hey, that's something I didn't know before and now I know it, and I’m going to use it for the next one.” But you can't over prepare for these things – something is always going to go wrong. Every time someone asks me this question, I tell them that of course I have a vision of what I want to movie to be, but you have to factor in the cast, the egos of all the characters, and the physical limitations of production and what you can do, and what's going to happen on location, is it going to rain? And in England it could snow, you could have a drought – but you have to say “OK, this is what I intend to do, but when I get there, I'm going to be presented with all new limitations or opportunities, even, so let's be flexible enough to think on our feet a little bit, shoot from the hip and come up with something better. Marvel has a phrase they call “plussing” – we always try to plus it, always try to make it better than what’s on the page. I think it’s just about being flexible, not having such a death grip on your vision and that you’re going to go for it no matter what, because the elements and the factors and the acts of God are going to prevent you from getting exactly what’s on the page, so get something better.
SCIFI MEDIA ZONE: In this movie, is it tough walking the balance between larger than life superheroics and maintaining a sense of realism?
JOE JOHNSTON: I think if you're going to create this world believably where you really had a guy who had a red skull, and you really had an organization called HYDRA and you wanted to make a movie about it, how would you handle it? You would have to think of it, that all these things are in some kind of reality and if you treat it like it is fantasy, and these are fictional characters and superheroes, I think you lose something. That's what happens with some of these movies, when you think you know what the audience wants to see and you give them something sort of outlandish and way beyond, and all they REALLY wanted to see was a great story about all these different characters told like you'd tell any other story. I try to keep that in mind – all of this is real, this guy does have a red skull, and gigantic sub-orbital bombers that's he's going to attack the US with. You have to believe it. I think it's more fun when you do.
Look for more from Joe Johnston tomorrow as this exclusive interview continues.