The Hollywood Reporter has a great new profile up on Eternals director Chloe Zhao with comments from both the filmmaker and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. He describes Zhao's pitch as "fascinating," and reveals that "frankly one of the reasons we moved forward on the movie was because of the vision that she brought to it."
The director would go on to explain that, "I have such deep, strong, manga roots. I brought some of that into Eternals. And I look forward to pushing more of that marriage of East and West." Zhao also had big ambitions for her Marvel movie. "How much further and bigger can we go after [Avengers:] Endgame? Because I’m not just making the film as a director. I’m making the film as a fan."
Despite some filmmakers clashing with Marvel Studios in the past, Zhao tells the trade she got to film Eternals exactly the way she wanted, and credits Feige and company for wanting to take risks and do something different. That obviously include the MCU's first LGBTQ relationship.
That "was always sort of inherent in the story and the makeup of the different types of Eternals," according to Feige. "I think it is extremely well done, and I look forward to that level of inclusion in our future movies being less of a topic." The movie also boasts a diverse cast, and that was important to Zhao for a number of reasons when she decided to tackle this story.
"I wanted it to reflect the world we live in," she says. "But also I wanted to put a cast together that feels like a group of misfits. I didn’t want the jocks. I want you to walk away at the end of the movie not thinking, 'This person is this ethnicity, that person is that nationality.' No. I want you to walk away thinking, 'That’s a family.’ You don’t think about what they represent. You see them as individuals."
With Eternals delayed to 2021, the hope is that we'll get to see a trailer before the end of the year.
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