As part of the marketing campaign for the release of
Captain America: The First Avenger The HD Room had a chance to sit down to chat with the writers of
CA: TFA. They talk about crafting the story and the restrictions in the Marvel universe.
Be sure to check the full interview by clicking through to
The HD Rooms website using the source link below.
Obviously next year's The Avengers has been in the works for years now, and all the other pieces to the puzzle (Iron Man, Hulk, Thor) were going to be released ahead of Cap. While writing Captain America, were there parameters regarding what you could and couldn't do with Cap so as not to disturb the grand scheme of things, or were you guys kind of given a blank slate?
SM - Well, The Avengers sort of determined the movie we could tell. We knew that we had to get Cap to the modern day by the end. You know, we realized we have to make this guy more-or-less die and then wake up 70 years later; we knew he'd have to sacrifice himself at the end, so we sort of created a narrative that's perfect for Cap and freed us up to do a story about who this guy is.
CM - We were also freed up quite a bit, because we're set 70 years before the other movies, so it wasn't like, "We can't put Cap here, because this is happening over there." And those things are concerns when you're dealing with Iron Man or the Hulk, because those movies are all kind of operating within six months of each other, so it was all pretty wide open from that standpoint.
Talk a little bit about what your thought process was in crafting Steve Rogers, because on the surface, he's a pretty archetypal hero, and yet this story infused him with some great humanity.
SM - That was something we really tried to do. It took us awhile to sort of be okay with the idea of making Cap very genuine and earnest. There's a tendency in modern superhero movies that they all have to have these dark centers.
CM - (laughs) "Can Captain America CONTROL HIS RAGE?!"
SM - We actually thought about dirtying him up a little bit at one point, but in the end that's not Cap. Gary Cooper didn't have a lot of angst, so it's okay to make the guy a hero before he actually becomes the hero.
CM - It also allowed us to make the other characters not necessarily darker but a little quirkier. We were able to make Bucky a little more altered by his experiences to make Cap stand out as a good guy. You don't want to make a 100% 40s movie where everybody's pure of heart and where America's the most wonderful nation in the world - it is, of course - but you still have to have Cap remain very noble. You want to give him a sort of realistically colored background to play against so the suit pops out a little bit more.
One of the guys we kept coming back to in terms of characterizing Steve Rogers is Eliot Ness in The Untouchables who for some reason - this is a guy you should find absolutely irritating because he's so upright and moral and plays by all the rules, and yet you cheer for him. It could be that we're at a point where that kind of character is such a rarity, but that's kind of where we were working from.
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