Hi, everybody. I’m Jake Schreier, director of Thunderbolts*.
I’m gonna try to lead us through here and throw credit to as many people as I can
while we’re watching this.
And, also, as a snapshot in time,
this is the day the movie comes out, and I’ve been on a press tour,
and I’m a little tired, so...
I never have much enthusiasm, energy, but I might have even less.
Anyway, this title sequence was created by Imaginary Forces.
We talked about really wanting to do
something that honored the traditional Marvel flip
that announced that this movie was gonna be a little bit different.
And they did a great job with that, of kind of bringing the Void into it,
which we’ll see later.
And here we find Florence,
without whom none of this movie would work.
Um, what an incredible actress.
Obviously, this stunt got talked a lot about.
This was something, when Lee Sung Jin came in, uh,
and did multiple drafts of the script,
we talked about wanting to build our own version
of a kind of Bond or Mission: Impossible opening.
But for our movie, that felt like more of an emotional stunt,
so it was this idea of finding a young woman in a place of...
where you might imagine it was a suicide,
but then actually, it’s disaffection.
And it was like, "Oh, can we go to the tallest building in the world?"
And, you know, I said to Florence in the beginning of this shoot,
"How are you with heights?"
And she was, like, "I love heights. What are we doing?"
Um... And she just took this on,
’cause Disney health and safety said no at least three times, and the whole shoot...
This was one of the... the last sequence we did in the film, this roof.
Uh, she just would not let it go.
And just the amount of planning that went into getting up on that roof
and her embracing actually stepping off on that descender rig,
I’ve never really seen anything like it.
We were up there, every time there’s lightning,
you have to come off of the roof for half an hour.
Uh, I also want to mention Katie, the best BASE jumper in the world,
who did the wide shot of that.
Um, that’s Florence doing her own stunt right there.
Man, there’s too many things to say with this movie as we go.
This shot, again, it was this idea of, like,
"Is there a kind of different way we can approach an opening action sequence?"
You know, our own sort of...
I mean, you know, we can’t approach the Oldboy hallway fight,
but this is our own version. This is Sarah, um,
Florence’s wonderful stunt double, doing this,
and this idea of, like, could we use it
as a way to thematically put shadows into the movie early?
Again, if we’re gonna be a bit of a different sort of action movie,
or an emotional kind of action movie,
is there a way to establish that up front and let you know that?
So, Joanna Calo, who... another one of our wonderful writers,
this is her work here. Talking to the guard.
She wanted a taped guard that wasn’t listening to Florence.
Um...
Well, whatever. You’re useless to me...
Yeah, I just love Florence’s sort of...
her ability to play that humor and that disaffection just so kind of quietly. Um...
And, then, yeah, this was another Sonny add,
the idea of doing a kind of whole opening monologue
that really delivered to a guard that you have tied up and a guinea pig.
I think initially, perhaps, it was a chicken, in one of the early drafts,
and then, yeah, landed on guinea pig.
But it helps you show, again, even in her sort of disaffection and loss,
that, like, she is a caring person.
There are things, especially this adorable animal,
that she cares about.
Also, if you look closely at that maze that the guinea pig is in,
Grace Yun, our wonderful production designer,
you actually find Yelena’s Void rooms in there.
It’s a little Easter egg, if you look closely.
Did Valentina send you?
This research is property of OXE Group.
- You’re gonna tell me I don’t understand. - You don’t understand.
This is Eric Lange, an incredible actor
who I’ve worked with on numerous TV shows,
who was nice enough to come down to Atlanta and work with us on this.
Um...
You know, it’s a part probably...
You know, he’s bigger than this part,
but at the same time, I just felt, like,
it’s the first person that you see Florence interacting with in the movie,
so to have someone of his abilities,
and, you know, he was nice enough to come down and do a day for us
when he was on another show,
it just was a huge lift for the film.
Oh, God.
So, yeah, this was an interesting one,
where we’re trying to do a version of a kind of disaffected action sequence,
which was tricky ’cause, you know, it’s a big movie
and you want to have fun action in it, but at the same time,
we need to sell this idea of a character
kind of on the edge of caring about any of this.
And a little bit of a meta commentary on these films, um,
where, you know, because she’s disaffected with her job,
she’s going through all the things that happen all the time,
but at the same time, obviously, that’s a bit of a wink to how guys, you know...
grunts can never aim well enough.
And you get to have a bit of that commentary,
because of her perspective on her life.
Oh, damn.
I needed that face.
So, this was actually shot on the exact same day
that we did the step off the building.
We did a company move and then, in a oner,
blew up a whole floor of this building.
Adam is a wonderful special effects guy in Malaysia. Um...
And, again, the thing I should say about that, and the opening shot,
is it’s the kind of thing you can only do if you have an actress like Florence,
where you know that she’s going to be totally in character,
and when you only get one take at it, and it is all in one shot,
you have every bit of confidence that she’s gonna pull it off,
and you always do with her.
And here we have the wonderful Sebastian Stan,
uh, uncomfortable as he is as a congressman. Um...
You know, we had to figure out what is a new path to take Bucky on,
and it was something I talked to Sebastian a lot about,
and he had a lot of input in.
This idea that, you know, obviously, in so many of these films,
a lot of his arc has been resolved in terms of where he overlaps
with what our main characters are going through.
So is there a new arc and a new sort of want,
a need or frustration that we can take him on?
And this idea that he’s trying to figure out how to help
in a more kind of conventional way,
and that, obviously through the film, is gonna become frustrated with that.
The great Wendell Pierce, who I’d spend every day thanking for coming and doing this.
I’ve just been such a fan of his for so long.
And then we meet Julia and Geraldine.
And, uh, obviously, for me to get to work with a legend like Julia,
someone who I’ve admired for this long, it was so, so wonderful,
and also just the fact that she’s such a lovely person
and so committed and just trying to make it better.
And her notes throughout were the kind of notes that writers usually give.
She’s so focused on story and how to make things clearer and better.
It was just an absolute pleasure to work with her.
- ...of OXE Group? - Yes.
Although, I have fully divested in OXE since taking office.
This scene has been in the movie
in every iteration of drafts from Eric Pearson’s initial script.
It’s just taken on many forms,
and, you know, the story kind of shifts over time,
but it always felt like a nice way to kind of establish the conflict of this movie,
which is always gonna seem, at first,
potentially smaller than you’re used to in a big, superhero film,
where it is a little more ground-bound in a political context.
Um, but we always liked this idea that we could make a movie
where it wasn’t from the beginning,
you know, the traditional evil villain world stakes,
and that there is no necessary conventional villain.
I mean, you could look at our main characters as villains
in the right context, in that, from Val’s perspective,
she’s just sort of frustrated at having to kind of back-channel
in order to have power,
and this scene is supposed to kind of establish that,
that she’s under investigation, under threat,
and therefore needs to get rid of our main characters.
But, God, would she want just her own,
uh, you know, Golden Guardian of Good
that she could stand behind and just be in control of everything.
That would make things a lot easier for her.
And there is also, again,
this running meta commentary that we try to establish here
about this idea that the Avengers are not in this world anymore,
and that obviously the way that sets on Bucky
and sets for the audience is feeling like
we are a ways away from those films at this point,
and there is this kind of gap left in the world that people can feel.
- ...this investigation? - Oh, of course not.
Shit. We gotta get all of this outta here...
This is all, uh, a real set. None of that is extension.
It’s a very large building in Atlanta, convention center that we shot at.
And that was really something we tried with Grace Yun, our production designer,
to always find places that... either that we build all of
or that we find a location that we can dress and really try--
even if it means, if we did this onstage,
maybe we could make it an even bigger warehouse,
but then it would all be in post, and just that feeling that starts to come in
when everything behind their heads is real and has real texture, um,
felt like we would get an overall lift for that in the movie,
and I thought Grace did such a nice job,
if you actually went to that place, of what it looked like
to make it feel big and like it could belong to OXE.
Uh...
Still remember the day of filming David on blue screen
to put him into this old footage.
It was fun looking through all of this old footage to go through.
This obviously... this is another scene that Sonny really brought to the script,
where, you know, instead of traditionally opening a movie like this
with a big action scene to establish the Red Guardian,
it couldn’t be more opposite.
And I also pushed, even though we probably could’ve built this onstage,
but it’s only one day that we shot in here,
and to go out on location and whatever that odd constraint
of being in a small apartment--
You know, this was shot in Atlanta--
would bring in this strange feeling of reality
and feeling oddly small and a little bit sad,
which is where we’re supposed to find these characters.
And I just thought Sonny did such a beautiful job here,
and then Joanna pushed it even further, of, you know,
this idea that they’ve missed each other over these years.
There-- There’s a loss that they’re not processing,
and they’re kind of talking past each other.
That was something that really came up in rehearsal
that Joanna put in so nicely
of, you know,
Yelena was always kind of talking in this scene
about not really having a purpose or a reason to live,
and Alexei is not in a place to receive that.
Thinks she’s just talking about work.
Can’t understand why she wouldn’t want to pursue the glory
that he misses so much.
And it’s such a lovely bit of acting between these two
of kind of talking past each other and not being able to connect
in the way that they eventually will need to in the film, and it really...
You know, I don’t think we filmed this scene
until maybe five weeks into production.
And it was at night. It was raining.
We had to do it in one night, which is not so hard, but it is more like a TV pace,
where it’s a four-and-a-half-page scene
that goes a lot of different places.
And I... I just remember what a lift it gave us,
even though it is in such a small place and feels kind of almost dingy.
But to see, you know, really the theme of what our movie is about established here
with these two great actors who are really bringing it
and play so well off each other...
You know, sometimes on these action--
I think the biggest learning curve for me making a movie like this was that
the proportion of the shoot is not equal to the proportion of what you watch.
I love directing action, but you spend so long on the action sequences
that, you come to a scene like this,
and it only makes up one day of your, you know, 72-day shoot.
But in the movie, it’s such a huge part
of establishing what the movie is about.
You know, and for Florence right here, look at this moment where,
what is the point of any of this,
to kind of allude to the purposelessness of life,
but not in a way that feels overwrought.
And that actually could be missed by Alexei.
I mean, that takes such deft acting.
And, again, for David here to not overly lean into the humor of it.
I mean, Red Guardian is absolutely very funny,
and David is amazing at that,
but he never goes too far in that direction
so that he can pull back in the moments like this,
where you really feel his loss and what he’s missing out on and the things that he misses.
We always talked about Alexei as sort of doing it for the wrong reasons,
that he was the one that was gonna assemble this team
’cause he believed in the idea of teams.
But he’s invested in this sort of meta idea of superheroes
and forming a team and to be aware of this.
He can say things like, "Scrappy antiheroes," like he does later.
But, of course, what he really needs to learn
is that you’re supposed to be doing it for the sake of it,
not for the glory, as he later says.
Um...
This is a small personal note.
These soccer uniforms are based, uh, on my soccer team growing up,
which is what I pitched as the basis for Thunderbolts*.
We were called the Colossal Cleats. I named the team.
We lost every game. I was the goalie.
Uh... All of that is true.
And Sanja Hays did an incredible job
of recreating those, uh, reversible mesh jerseys from my childhood.
It was strange to see.
Reporting for duty. What’s my next assignment?
Thank you, Ms. Belova. I was starting to worry.
After this though, I--
This is an interesting phone call
in that we always weren’t sure if it was gonna be okay
that our two kind of, you know, our antagonist and our protagonist
never really meet in person in the movie.
There used to be versions where they did, and then it felt like
by getting them together, it was almost gonna cause too many problems,
where, if Val was able to search her out,
she would know that, uh, she wasn’t really in the right place
to do what she needed to do,
and also that Yelena would be too smart to know what Val was gonna do to her,
so the phone call made sense as a separation
and also a way to just propel us into the action with that cut
and use this more as a kind of montage voice-over
to establish the rules of the world.
This, uh... A lot of this is CG, but this is a real helicopter shot
that Jake Morrison, our visual effects supervisor, did out in Utah.
And then this whole plaza, this is real, that entire facade.
This whole plaza, the rocks, Grace built all of this out in Atlanta,
and then, you know, anything beyond that is extension.
But all of this, they shot this entirely in-camera,
except, I think, at the very, very edges there might be some trees painted out.
You’ll have full access.
Probably my favorite shot in the film coming up right here.
This was one I really just wanted for the trailer.
I wasn’t even sure we’d use it.
But we actually ended up... You know, it’s funny.
These little pieces of her going down to the vault,
these got shot over the course of the entire shoot,
’cause we didn’t have time to do it as its own scene,
and the sets were getting built in different pieces. But I really wanted...
I actually didn’t think we would end up using all of them,
but there was something nice about, even though it’s-it’s small,
on a smaller scale of getting to see each piece
of where eventually our characters were gonna have to get themselves out of,
and if you don’t show every piece of that, then you feel disconnected from it.
But you now, just subconsciously,
have seen every single one of the places
that we’re later gonna revisit when they’re stuck down there as a team.
Um, this vault also exists as an entirely built set.
Those side corridors aren’t real,
but that entire corridor that she walks down into this giant vault...
Grace built this incredible set where, again,
it just means that in this whole fight, everything behind their heads,
all the texture that they’re interacting with,
everything that they’re inside of, that’s all real.
And, again, it means that it’s a slightly...
Hilariously, given how big it is, it’s probably a smaller set
than you would ordinarily see in one of these movies,
’cause usually you would use background extension to make a larger space,
but then it also wouldn’t have that same texture of reality,
and that was something that we tried to prioritize as much as we could.
Okay, so here begins the fight. This was one of, you know, Eric Pearson’s...
This was in the very first draft of the script that I read,
this idea of a fight where everyone is sent to kill each other.
And I thought that was such a great flip on what you expect maybe this movie to be,
um, where it’s just a team of antiheroes sent to do bad jobs for the government.
But it became, of course, a very, very complicated sequence to design
with Heidi Moneymaker, our wonderful stunt coordinator, uh,
trying to establish the idea that each of them is going after a different one
was something that took a lot of stuntvis, they call it,
and in the end, Andrew Palermo, my DP, and I went in
and sort of shot our own iPhone version of this fight,
so that each of the shots were what we were gonna shoot on the day.
And had that all edited, and we would reedit it
and add pieces and make it clearer and clearer.
And then on this movie, this wonderful thing about it
was that we had Harry Yoon and Angela Catanzaro, our editors,
on set with us cutting as we went.
So as soon as we would shoot the shot, we’d go throw it into the edit,
and we’d basically be cutting on top of the sequence
that we had edited before as stunt reference.
And then we could see, oh, that works, but actually we need one more piece here.
I mean, even lines like this of, "There you are,"
which seems a little silly for a character to say,
to remind the audience that that’s Yelena’s target.
All of the little pieces of it, you know,
I think it was our first two weeks of shooting.
It felt a little bit like being under water.
It was a tough sequence to start out in,
just ’cause, again, these line pulls and the stunt stuff take so long
that it felt like, okay, when are we gonna get to the more emotional stuff?
But, also, as we put it together, it was a great kind of reference
for how this movie was gonna work and to establish the tone.
And, also, felt a little bit, in this weird way,
like, we, as a movie, we’re doing what the characters were doing,
which was, we were starting in this very contained vault,
and eventually, we’re gonna work our way out of it,
eventually to Utah, towards the end of the shoot,
and then Malaysia at the very end.
So this is where we started the whole thing.
There’s Bob, just a little hint of Bob. I don’t know how many...
Maybe on your third viewing, you’d catch that.
Maybe on the first...
Um, but, again, yeah, even those shots, okay.
So there’s Ghost, that’s my target, I have to throw it.
This is, um... Federico D’Alessandro, one of our main board artists,
who did some of the biggest sequences in this movie.
He and his wife, Coral, she edits the animatics.
It’s almost like watching animated movies.
And yeah, that knife catch was in one of his early boards,
and we just felt like we had to pull that off.
And a lot of discussions of the little camera movements necessary to make that work.
Okay, so, yeah, that’s... that’s a big moment.
I’ve been asked about this a lot obviously.
We felt, coming out of the strike,
when we were, uh, redeveloping the script and spending more months in it,
we really felt like the movie was a little bit bloodless.
Um, and in order to establish this amount of tension that we wanted for it,
it felt like, as sad as it was to not get to work with Olga more,
that there was a value in doing an unexpected thing
and having one of our characters kill another one,
because that’s what they were all sent there to do.
And to really establish that as a possibility in this world,
we thought it was worth it
and that it could hang over the rest of the movie.
And, also, as far as where to do it,
that if we did it later, the emotion of that, while powerful,
would step on the Yelena and Bob relationship,
which was crucial to the movie.
And speaking of Bob, I just talked over his introduction,
but obviously he will become more and more important as we go in here.
We now find, uh, Bucky the spy working the room.
And this benefit, you know, this is fun,
where, you know, again, we’re referencing this history.
Given where the movie is gonna end up and what they’re gonna be announced as,
we felt like it was important to weave in as much as we could,
these kind of tinges of Marvel’s own history.
What’s fun about working in a place like this is that they have those things.
So Grace built that whole "A," the Stark "A" in the background,
but a lot of the items that you see around in this room
come from the actual Marvel vault.
You know, they’ve lovingly protected and curated all of these things,
and we could pull them out for a scene like this to reference that history
of, uh, of the last time the Avengers had to save New York.
You’re scared because your investigation of my office came up clean.
Squeaky clean. Mm-hmm.
I love Wendell so much in this scene.
There was more to this scene that is all very funny
and that we would have liked to keep in, but we really felt like, um,
as we went through the edits and screenings,
that we needed to get out of that vault.
Um, you know, obviously we love a lot of the things that happened down there,
but spending too long in this section of the movie
and being too contained within this benefit,
so there was a lot of kind of editing that went into this section
to streamline things,
even at the expense sometimes of really good moments.
Um, just to keep the overall pace moving forward
and not spend too long away from your perspective characters.
But I do love Sebastian and Geraldine in this scene,
especially her, uh, her business card line.
That was something that the two of them came up with together
that feels like a really fun kind of...
Again, just trying to establish Bucky as this fish out of water
trying to do things a different way,
but it’s not exactly working as well as he would like it to,
and we need to kind of feel that frustration,
and then that’ll buy us the lift of him coming in
on the motorcycle later in the film.
You say you know who I am.
So you know my story
and you know I didn’t have a choice who I worked for.
But you do.
And Geraldine kind of has
this perspective character for, you know,
she says later, "I was in high school when the Avengers came."
You know, establishing her as this kind of moral perspective on the film
of someone just trying to work in a job and not trying to do anything evil,
but having a boss that is, you know, perhaps beyond complicated.
And to navigate those ideas, I think, is an interesting way in,
especially for younger people watching the film.
I’m-I’m Bob. I told you. I’m, uh...
Okay, here’s Lewis doing his Bob thing.
We know that happens in another major franchise from a few years ago.
When I first met with Lewis about doing this part,
he asked, "Does he have to be named Bob? ’Cause I have done that."
And I was like, "Well, it’s pretty important to what we’ve done,"
so it was very nice of him to get past that
and embrace the role in other ways, and, boy, are we lucky that he did.
This was one of the great joys, you know, just when we first started rehearsals,
it’s just with this core four that we spend so long with in the vault.
You know, just how quickly the chemistry seemed to be there.
And I think Hannah does such amazing work here as the glue for this group,
and keeping the rhythm and the pacing up and tying them together.
And then Wyatt, you know, is someone who I worked with on a show called Lodge 49,
and we’ve been friends for a long time.
So I knew that there was this other side of Wyatt
that was deeply affable and charismatic.
And, I mean, John Walker, obviously, we’re meant to have some fun with him here,
but knowing that he had that, even if, you know,
it hadn’t kind of leaned in that direction, you know,
his work in the MCU before that,
it felt exciting knowing that we could get there with him.
And Joanna did such a great job in these scenes,
establishing this kind of dynamic between the girls and him,
and this idea of a guy who just refuses to believe that he’s been thrown away
and left to die, where they’re more able to process it.
And, again, we’re not, you know, leaning into that too hard
other than to give him somewhere to go.
If it’s about, you know, eventually him having to be honest with himself
about what he’s done and what’s happened to his family
that’s starting it in this dishonest place,
you know, it’s not about lying to them as much as it is about lying to himself.
That-That felt like a really fun arc to take him on.
I’m not leaving here without completing my mission.
Valentina gave me a clean slate guarantee, and I’m not screwing that up.
And Lewis is so good here.
We have such little narrative real estate,
that you have to come to care about this guy very quickly
before we go to the other sides of the character.
And, you know, he and I did a lot of work in rehearsal and in prep
and kind of going through the script, really every weekend,
and we would go line by line
and talk about this idea of Bob and The Sentry and the Void,
which even in this early phase, like, which side of the character
each of those lines leans into
and kind of mapping that out so that later when we get there,
it would be... it would feel like it had been established.
That’s the sound barrier.
Yeah, again, all of this... this whole structure,
Eric Pearson had set up so it really remains from that original draft
of them all being locked in there
and where it goes with the fireball.
That they’d be trapped in a vault,
sent to kill each other and trapped,
needing to work together to get out.
And everything that we talked about in that early phase
was about, you know,
people thrown together who could not trust each other,
but were going to need to in order to get out of this.
Holy shit, Bucky.
The assistant, she’s ductile.
Ductile?
Yeah.
Love Sebastian in this scene.
He’s so excited about his spy work, and... Wendell just...
Again, just this idea of having characters that can be in this world
where it doesn’t feel like we’re breaking the fourth wall
or stepping so far outside of it,
but the character themself can comment on this idea
of how Bucky has approached things in the past
and how that’s not the world that he’s living in now,
and when you have Wendell Pierce doing it, then... then it really lands.
...then let the system do its job.
The system that goes on recess every day at 4:00 p.m.?
We are in a good spot, I assure you.
My team is putting together a juicy packet for the next hearing.
I think Joanna added this "juicy" stuff.
And when Wendell says "juicy" and then we do it again later, it really...
I think there are a couple takes
where he said "juicy" twice just to really lean into it,
but I think we landed on a good, solid one. Felt like the right place.
...has been completely sealed off. All right, then.
And, again, yeah, this idea of, you know,
an assistant who wants to prove herself to her boss,
but at the same time, is uncertain about the path that they’re going down,
and Julia just having no patience for that.
Oh, my God.
Hey. Job or not...
And this... Okay, sure, it’s pretty dismissive.
But it feels like, again, this is honest to who these characters are
at the beginning of our film where it is just a job,
and this is what they do.
And, you know, Florence found it very important,
even though her character didn’t know Antonia directly so well,
but was aware of her story.
You know, wanting to have some sense of protectiveness over that idea
that’s still honoring that she’s a character
who is in a dark place and doing these things.
You don’t know that for sure. Could be for anything.
Could be for when they come to pick me up.
Again, yeah, this is more of that dynamic
that Joanna established between the three that I find so fun.
Okay, it’s an incinerator.
Oh, boy. That is no way to go.
Well, how would you like to die today, Bob?
- Okay, ghost lady. - Ava.
Sure. Whatever. Don’t care. We need to get you through the walls...
I remember this line.
Look, in these movies, you’re gonna have to do some exposition.
What?
"They built it just for her.
It’s gotta have an independent power source."
I remember Wyatt and Florence trying to pass this line
back and forth to each other ’cause it was hard to say.
Uh... I think Wyatt was like, "Maybe you could say that,"
and Florence was like, "Nah, I think you’ve got it. I think you’re good."
And Wyatt did very well with that in the end.
Again, just trying to seed the sort of origins of Bob here,
you know, that they don’t pay quite enough attention to
’cause they’re distracted with other things.
Move!
But, yeah, this was sort of the last...
I think the last thing we filmed in this vault area.
Uh... Getting them out and that search during the countdown.
And this was such an important moment in the shoot,
’cause as they go to the door here, they’re waiting for the countdown.
I remember I went up to Florence, and, of course, we hadn’t shot it yet,
and I said, "Just in this moment,
while you’re waiting to see if the door will open or not,
just think about being on that building from the beginning of the film
and how you feel, if there’s anything that you would do
in connecting with that sense of kind of loss or hopelessness,"
and she thought that was so interesting, and she did...
I mean, we did the next take, and it was beautiful.
She did this thing she does here of closing her eyes,
taking a deep breath,
and perhaps there’s a form of acceptance,
and then of course the door opens and she’s out.
But then that became this memetic idea for the rest of the movie,
so she does that four times, the deep breath and open her eyes--
at the beginning,
then when she steps into the Void
and then at the very end of the film.
But that wasn’t written in as exactly what would happen.
It was a thing that she did in this moment
based on that idea that we then took
and translated to the rest of the film.
I think this is one of Grace’s most beautiful sets. Um...
When we talked about doing the surrealism of the Void,
we really wanted to try to find a way to...
in sort of a Gondry or Spike Jonze style, to do it in-camera.
So you can see here that if you actually pay any attention,
that those are just walls in the background from the beginning,
but because you’re so focused on the characters, you don’t.
Those lights in the background of the red room in the distance,
that’s just painted on to the wall,
and those are lights behind the scrim, like, built into the wall.
But you’re so in the moment that you don’t quite process at first
that this is in fact a sort of shame room, as we talk about.
And, yeah, I mean, Grace... All of these are real trees painted black.
There’s black sort of soot underneath the snow.
And the way Andrew lit it,
I mean, everyone just looks so beautiful in this scene.
I feel like it’s the first time our movie really gets to tell you
there’s gonna be more to this, you know, than what you expected.
This is a different... a different sort of story,
and there’s something going on underneath the surface there
and connecting these two characters, Bob and Yelena.
’Cause, also, we’ll see this echo, this idea of, "You okay?"
"Yeah, I’m fine," but, of course, the way he says it, he does not seem fine.
And we’ll revisit that idea at the very end of the film.
Hey. Didn’t think you’d come back. Thanks.
I had to. Someone cut the power to the elevator.
This is a shot I got in DC.
I wanted to really go down there.
We had a crew of about four, getting a few of those exteriors.
Um... And then this scene, this is back in Atlanta,
but something Andrew was really committed to in this film
was really trying to never use green screen or LED,
so this is out on location in Atlanta at night, in a limo,
I think this is, like, 2:00 in the morning.
And poor Julia and Geraldine, they’d had a long day of shooting the, um,
the OXE loading-dock scene before this and a couple other things,
and then had to do this at the end of the night.
And, I think, really only had about three takes,
maybe four, before we got shut down.
And, yeah, pulled it off beautifully.
But, again, I just think it’s so nice to have that real texture
of what’s out the windows.
Um... And as the camera pans around,
like, we’re augmenting those things a little bit
and putting DC into the background.
But to start from a place where the shot has real texture
and then all this in-camera,
I just think that approach really helped the movie out in so many ways,
and it took such hard work from so many people on our crew to make that happen.
It’s also the kind of thing you can only do
when you have actors like this that you can trust.
Even though we’re gonna get fewer takes,
they’re gonna nail this stuff and pull it off.
This is a Sonny idea.
The whole idea of having Alexei as a limo driver was Sonny’s idea.
And this kind of very Ocean’s overheard thing here.
Uh, you know, it’s on the edge of reality, but the lift of how we’ve seen him
and bring him back into the movie felt worth it.
Less talking to yourself, more talking to us.
And, again, this is this very limited narrative real estate
to establish those different corners of Bob,
that there is this kind of darker, more inward side that you see for a moment,
but, you know, still very eager to please when he presents to other people.
He’s really not trying to be a bother, but there being an inner darkness
and then within that same scene, also needing to show a little bit more
of the hubristic side that comes out when Walker is being such a dick to him.
- Choke hold? Nerve pinch? - No.
I think he’s just a civilian.
If he’s a civilian, he knows too much. If he’s an agent, he sucks.
Either way, I say we throw him back into the fire.
This is so good on Wyatt’s part.
It’s hard sometimes, ’cause sometimes actors
won’t want to play, uh, "assholes," as Bob calls him here,
but I think Wyatt and I have that trust and knew where the character was going
and was really willing to embrace this stuff,
knowing that there would be a redemptive arc for Walker in the film.
And he plays it with such subtlety here
where it’s not just a cartoon asshole.
And here, just a little glimmer, just a glint in the eyes,
we see, okay, there’s something a little bit more going on with Bob,
and there is a bit of that hubris where he’s not afraid of this,
and he’s not just docile and depressed.
And we’re-- again, we’re trying to get each of those sides of the character
into the film with as little room as we have.
This scene, of course, is crucially important
for establishing that idea of Bob, but also his connection to Yelena,
and really this idea of them connecting over this thing that they both feel.
And it’s very hard, um...
You know, it’s a scene Sonny wrote multiple times,
and then Joanna, I think, wrote the final version
of how we got this there, and it was a lot of rehearsal
with Florence and Lewis to see if we could...
Again, it’s so quick to get to this idea of feeling,
you know, borderline suicidal or feeling this idea of the Void,
but we need it. We need it to happen here
so that she’ll feel that connection for later.
And so we’ll get these hints of what eventually allows her to step into the Void.
And this concept of, you know, that the movie hinges on, of,
"Are we all alone? Or are we not?"
And, you know, as simple as an idea as that sounds,
that’s gonna become the crux of the ending,
and we have to establish it here.
This was shot at hour 12 of a Friday, I think.
The week that Florence had come back
from the Oscars on Monday for Oppenheimer.
We were all so tired and running out of time.
And I don’t think I knew until we got into the edit
for sure whether we had it,
but for them to do that, you know, in just, I think, three takes...
Uh, actually, maybe really two takes with a close-up on his side was all we had.
And maybe three or four on her side.
And then getting into the edit,
just really carefully peeling apart the layers,
and it was there, you know, that connection,
and it’s so important to what the film becomes.
Look, we’re all alone.
All of us.
Yeah, so there it is, that thesis of the movie.
That’s how she views things.
That’s what she’s sort of come to accept or believes,
and that’s something that he accepts as well
and why he’s willing to trust her
is he finds someone that connects over that,
so they’re kind of connecting over the idea of an absence of connection.
But, eventually, they’re gonna have to confront that.
Okay, so the arm. This little piece of this, this...
I think we got an additional of showing why he had to put the arm in the dishwasher.
Um... But, yeah, the arm in the dishwasher was an Eric Pearson beat
from very, very early on in the script,
from a totally different structure,
but, uh, just such a funny thing to think about for Bucky,
and, I think for our movie, felt right,
that, you know, we’re trying to honor, you know,
and live up to a lot of these great Marvel movies,
but definitely taking a slightly more irreverent approach,
and it felt like such a funny beat to get in there.
- ...network. - Mm-hmm.
And, again, here you have this meta between, you know...
uh, between Bucky and Mel about, you know,
and Geraldine has talked about this,
she was in high school when Avengers came out,
and that’s what she says in this scene.
And the sense of distance from that time and how it feels
and how things feel murkier.
You know, Sebastian has this great line, you know,
"I think we could be the people that are coming."
You know, that... You don’t necessarily...
He’s appealing to this idea that you don’t necessarily imagine
that’s going to be you, but sometimes in the right circumstance,
that’s who it has to be,
and that’s what Mel is really grappling with here.
You must really not know my boss.
We can protect you.
But also, it’s important for Bucky’s character
to find himself in this position of saying,
"I don’t do that anymore. I’m trying to do things in a different way."
And, you know, Mel really pokes at that.
"Is that coming from the freshman congressman
who can’t get a bill passed or the Winter Soldier?"
So really trying to build up all of this,
even if it feels like a slow burn for Bucky,
is to buy you that moment where he comes back on that bike later,
and it feels so triumphant because he felt the frustration
of trying to do it a different way.
Okay, so the elevator shaft.
This was one of the earliest sequences that we talked about
when I was pitching on the film.
There was an elevator shaft sequence
that they got up in a very different way.
And something I talked about in that first pitch
is that we really wanted in this movie to feel like these are action scenes
that maybe they could accomplish if they could work together well,
but they can’t, so it doesn’t happen,
and needing to really rely on each other
and trust each other, or they’re gonna die.
So, I think Brian Chapek, our executive producer,
had this idea in that early pitch
about what if they’re just back-to-back?
And they really, like... They would fall without each other.
And it’s just... It’s so funny to think about,
and I think we used to refer to it as the, uh,
least dynamic action sequence in Marvel history,
that they’re just crawling up this thing together.
But it also gives us a way, you know...
Obviously you want to spend time building connections with characters,
understanding backstories, having them share things,
but in this way, you get to do that as part of, again, a action scene,
used liberally, perhaps, because, uh, it’s not very active,
but, uh, it is at least part of an action of where they’re going
where you’re not just pausing to talk and expose things.
Like, it’s all happening as part of the trajectory and the journey up.
And, again, this is where we start to feel we’ve seen all of these things.
We’ve seen her go down that elevator shaft.
We know each piece of the journey that they’re gonna have to take up.
That we-- You know, she said "a mile down" when we look up here at the end.
Maybe we didn’t realize quite exactly how far that was gonna be for them.
And this, again, is filmed predominantly practically.
Any of these close-ups. We built two 64-foot elevator shafts.
The lighting is all real.
Obviously, it’s set extension when we look at something like that,
but even the foreground of those shots is real
and an in-camera set that Grace built, uh,
just so that everything is based on, uh, real textures and real sets.
Oh, God.
I love this Joanna line.
"Please don’t gasp at work."
I don’t know where she came up with that,
but I love it so much.
Um, if you wanna look under the hood, this is actually...
Later, you’ll see a helicopter in this film,
and I know it’s a Marvel movie and we have a lot of resources,
but there are always budgets to adhere to
and coming out of the strikes, we had to trim here and there,
so part of the way we did that was this interior of Val’s special airplane
is actually also just the helicopter set that we reconfigured for this.
Maybe, uh... Maybe I shouldn’t tell you guys that, but it’s still filmmaking.
At any level, at some point, you have to find ways to be creative
and, uh-- and use what you’ve got.
Um... And this, you know, yes, there’s a lot of exposition here,
but this scene we leaned on a lot to kind of establish Val’s plan
because it is a sort of unusual thing for a movie like this
where it’s not that she starts with a dastardly plan.
She had a plan. It failed. She’s getting rid of the evidence,
and then, all of a sudden, when it seems like it might work,
she’s gonna pivot in the middle of the movie
to try and go on a different path, and that’s unusual,
but, I thought, interesting for a character like Val
who’s complicated and gray and not necessarily your typical villain.
Then the other three immediately fall.
Shit.
Sorry. Yeah, I guess I didn’t...
I didn’t really think this far ahead.
Genius plan, Bobby.
Always making things worse.
"Always making things worse."
Maybe on your sixth viewing, you notice he says that,
and that connects to his ending.
I don’t know. I wanted to leave it in because I liked it.
Uh, so coming up, this cucumber idea.
This is a Eric Pearson original,
and there’s a funny story to this ’cause it’s, uh...
His girlfriend Ashley would always say "cucumber,"
and then we were at the premiere,
and I said, "We got your cucumber thing in there."
She looked at me like she didn’t understand what I was talking about.
And then I talked to Eric who said, apparently,
she genuinely believed that everyone in the Western world
said "cucumber" to avoid a sneeze
and didn’t realize it was only her.
She asked her mom, and her mom didn’t know
what she was talking about, so, uh...
And then this was a really great Joanna add here at the end,
to have the, uh, the sneeze punctuate this action sequence.
You selfish prick.
So, again, finding ourselves in these sets that,
you know, even if it seems small,
just seeing Yelena walk through this in the beginning,
and now we’re back here again really trying to understand the space
and understand this world that we’re grounded in.
And then again it’s this idea because Bob just came near death
and is angry at Walker, that puts him into this Void space
where it’s not just anytime you touch Bob, you go into a Void,
but it’s when he’s at his darkest, and you connect to that.
Um, and this is another one where we probably could’ve built the set.
We filmed this on location.
Um, if you want a very small Easter egg,
that little silver mug on the shelves over there is a mug from Lodge 49
for the 11 to 15 Lodge fans that are watching this for me and Wyatt.
Um...
But yeah, just that thought... You know, this was such a nice...
You know, Sonny had written a kind of domestic scene,
and Joanna took it further of just this very small idea
of not watching the kid, uh, because you’re lost in your own shame.
You know, and this way of kind of addressing Walker’s past
and this terrible thing that he’s done,
but not in the expected way of going back to that moment
or something more active, but in this sort of...
the way that it reverberates within his life
and, you know, what he’s gonna end up losing because of that.
And that was actually Wyatt’s addition, um, to have Walker have a kid.
’Cause, at first, it was just about losing that relationship with Olivia,
but he felt like people would care and invest more deeply,
and I thought that was a really great add on his part.
And also the first time you kind of see inside the humanity of that character,
which we’re eventually gonna connect with much more.
So now we’ve finally connected all of those spaces back to the front.
Um, again, this whole plaza was built for real.
It’s obviously extended in CG,
um, but always trying to combine those elements.
Um, Framestore did a great job building this whole sequence
folding that CG in a very integrated way.
...I might just surrender, probably.
Okay, fine. Every man for himself.
Uh, this is one of the more fun conversations
in the film.
Well, let’s see.
Wyatt just leans into this so great,
the "Back-to-back-to-back. Go Bears."
But, of course, this is our way of getting
the Thunderbolts name into this movie.
Um, and, again,
that soccer team of mine that-- that never won a game.
Um, but it-it does establish this nice idea of, you know,
Yelena trying to push this past away,
but eventually Alexei will allude to that and show how,
even within that context, that was a way in which she cared for others.
And this, of course, is us trying to plant
that sign-twirling meth chicken...
...if we can get that into the movie so that you’ll remember it later.
Uh, but, again, just this idea of a team
that is the last team you would want to try to break out of anything with.
Um, exceptionally ragtag.
- It will only work if you wait. - Terrible plan.
This is very small here, but, uh, "What about me?"
Um, we’re really trying to establish this idea, again,
of Bob as this d--
You know, duality between hubris and despair,
but, uh, this is the sweet version of him.
He wants to help, but it’s not just that he wants to help
’cause he’s a sweet guy. It’s--
Bob wants to matter.
He wants to mean something. He wants to be something.
That’s gonna feed, even if it’s very subtle when you see it there,
that’s gonna feed later into this idea of The Sentry.
Uh, very, very kind of Chris Bauer to come and do this for us.
He’s another actor that I’ve loved for a long time.
Obviously, I love The Wire, uh, with both him and Wendell.
Um, and Kevin said to us,
you know, I think when we first had Holt in the script...
He was a little bit more just a military guy, and he said,
"I always love in, you know, in Die Hard,
the FBI guys, there’s a thing with them.
Can you give it anything?"
And Sonny-- It’s a very Sonny line, this, uh,
"I spend a lot of time planning for lethal..."
Just, you know, even amidst all of this tension,
that there’s just a guy frustrated at the bureaucracy
and the way he would like to do his job
versus the way Val is telling him to do it.
George Cottle, uh, Chris Nolan’s longtime stunt coordinator,
uh, worked on Spider-Man as well,
was our second unit director on this along with Paul Hughen,
whose, uh, second unit DP filmed all of those, uh, laser shots
which are so cool.
Um, and if you want me to really pull... just...
...remove some of the magic to this world,
so all of these hallways, everything inside this building,
that’s the same, uh, kinda... same hallway set, every one of these.
Grace did a great job putting these machines into it
and putting things on the back walls to make it feel different.
But, again, I know it seems hard to believe on a movie like this,
but you do have to make budget concessions and find places to tighten your belt
so that you can do some of the other crazy things like own a whole road in Utah
or be on the top of the second tallest building in the world in Malaysia.
So it is funny to go through all the Marvel films and see the hallways.
Y-You always end up in a hallway somewhere or another.
Um, but this scene which Joanna wrote is another lovely example.
We have, again, this very little narrative real estate
to establish these two characters,
and their connection is gonna be the crux of the film.
And also this neat little idea in here where, you know,
Yelena could’ve heard what he’s talking about and really connected,
but she’s in her own world and not paying attention
or how she just kind of doesn’t pick up on what Bob is saying
even though he’s talking about establishing that past
and the memory loss and the highs and the lows and what he’s been through.
But still, if we get any hint of connection between the two of them here,
it’s gonna pay dividends down the road in this film.
Give me that. Follow me.
I hate to say it, but I think Walter was right on this one.
I love Lewis’s little hop there
and then the way he bounces out of frame.
Small things.
Turn on the lights, Yelena.
Again, same hallway.
Same sets. And, uh, very hard.
You know, Andrew did such a beautiful job here.
It’s a tough situation to give a DP when the lights are off,
but you have to see things and how you approach lighting that.
Um, Andrew had such a great rapport with, uh, Chuck and Rafi Sánchez,
uh, our key grip and our gaffer on this film.
And Andrew and Rafi really building that together
and did a great job in a very difficult circumstance.
- Where is he? - He’s gone.
If I’m allowed to say this on a commentary track,
I would say, you know, I’m proud of a lot of the work in this film.
I’m so proud of everyone else who made it.
Uh, this is not a sequence that I am the proudest of.
Um, sometimes, you know, you’re focusing on things,
and I think it ends up working. I like the concept of it.
This idea of a sequence in which the action is that Yelena has to protect Bob
while also taking out a set of guards,
but we just didn’t end up with quite the amount of time to focus on it
that I was hoping to.
And I think in the end, like, once the effects are in,
and you add all the smoke, like, it works out.
And the concept sells, which is much more important
as to whether it’s breathtaking or not,
but I think if we’re really getting into it,
this is a place where I feel like if I had to do it again, I think...
...maybe we could-- could’ve done it a little better, but...
Sliding into director brain there.
But I-I think what’s nice is that throughout post
and with some of the additions that Base FX added to it
as well as when you have that smoke in there and the effects on top, it sells.
Also, it’s a lot of ADR lines to carry you through it.
And then when you get to this, it’s funny
’cause it’s just such a small scene in a dingy hallway,
but that kind of brother-sister- yelling-at-each-other feeling.
The...
How-- How frayed this team-- Uh, if it-- if it even is that-- uh, is.
Like, it’s what you’re really trying to get towards.
...what she was supposed to, maybe we’ll all get out of here alive.
Another shot that George got for us. Great overhead.
And, again, this is, you know, a moment
that maybe isn’t really narratively important, and we did consider cutting,
but I just thought that since they don’t confront Val until so late in the movie,
that it was important to see these characters
who thought that they were destined for better things
have one moment like a brush past the person who did this to them
and unable to really, in this context, do anything about it.
But just to sit in that moment and feel it.
You never know with these things.
Pace is important, but I just felt like that was a beat
that we wanted to keep in the edit that I tried to keep in till the end.
Get in.
This was a tough four nights shooting this.
I think it was raining half the time,
which maybe sometimes you can see in the background, but, uh... Yeah.
Andrew and Jason Tamez, our wonderful line producer,
Jeff Okabayashi, our AD, really pulled me through on this sequence
’cause I started with saying, "It’s raining. We can’t do it."
And they were like, "We shoot. If we can shoot, we shoot."
Uh, and over the course of those four nights,
got all of this predominantly in-camera.
We’re just extending the skies and the background.
We didn’t end up adding anything to this sequence.
There were never any pickups for it. Like, it all worked in the edit.
And, again, that’s credit to Harry being there on set for this sequence.
And Angela just cutting the stuff in as we went,
making sure that it worked, checking in about what else we needed
so that by the time we got through those four nights,
we had every piece of this sequence.
Now what?
That’s a very funny Joanna add.
Again, Walker’s sort of self-confidence
and sometimes lack of skills in the areas that he thinks he’s great at.
Um, but, again,
having planted this earlier about Bob’s desire to help,
you know, we’re gonna see that come into play here
where he really wants to be of use, he wants to be important.
And there’s a good side to that.
He’s doing a very selfless thing here.
But also we’ll see later in the film,
there’s a desire to matter that, you know,
in the wrong context, if appealed to, can lead to dangerous things.
And, again, at night. Middle of the night. Raining.
But, you know, when you’re on Florence, even if it’s two takes
in a truck that’s making too much noise and smells like gas,
the emotion on her face, you know, it sells so much.
- What the hell are you doing? - This has gone far--
When I first talked to Julia about the film, she said,
"I wanna punch someone. I wanna beat someone up in the movie."
Uh, so we got that in there for her.
I knew there was someplace we could put it.
Come on. Let’s go.
And, again, seems a little cold, but that is why he did it,
and in their circumstances, if he’s dead, as they assume he is,
it’s time to go.
And this is, I think, Andrew’s favorite shot in the film.
One of my favorites of knowing Bob was gonna step up into this.
Uh, and really that moment where you finally... We’ve teased it, you know,
that this guy that you think is the least valuable member of the team
might actually be the most powerful and exactly what Val needs for her plan.
And his sort of anger at being discarded.
Like, seeing these other sides of him come out
amidst this action sequence, seeing that he can fly.
You know, it’s-- it’s kind of in our--
in our world, an origin story for The Sentry.
So it’s always teasing these little bits of powers and flying up into the sky.
This is another, I’ll just say it-- I’ll let you in on--
I think Framestore did a beautiful job on this sequence,
but, uh, in general, I would not advise putting yourself in a position
where you have no motivated lighting whatsoever
except the moon and a full night sky.
Um... See, even when you have just those lights
that you can see down below, those shots work better,
but it’s very tough when you’re putting yourself in a position like this.
Jake Morrison calls it AB, where it’s just your character against,
uh, you know... We didn’t do blue screen. We did gray screen for this,
but just against a background that’s being replaced,
and it’s something that I think we did a great job of avoiding so much in this movie.
Like that whole wall behind them there,
that entire building, 40 foot high, that’s real.
Their heads being against that allows you to do sky extension, and it looks right.
Or having that motivated lighting on the ground.
That shot is actually real, out in Utah, of the truck,
but in just a couple of these shots,
we put ourselves in a situation where we are reliant on CG.
This looks better ’cause of the lights,
and it looks great, this explosion.
So, it’s-it’s nothing on...
You know, I think sometimes visual effects companies
get judged on how things look, and it has-- it has much more to do
with the concept and execution of how you gathered those elements
’cause in the right position, Framestore did incredible work on this sequence,
and it’s more on me to--
to concept things in a way that puts us in the best chance, uh, to succeed.
This is now out entirely in Utah.
I mean, the amount of cabling and lights that Rafi and Andrew had to bring in
for that shot and this whole sequence was enormous.
And, you know, it’s subtle.
Like, could you do it on a gray screen
back in Atlanta and comp this in?
You could, but we just felt like
this was where we wanted to put our resources.
We wanted to really have this film feel like it was out there
as much as possible.
And whether you notice it or not,
in every moment where you could’ve gotten away with something else,
over the course of time,
I think that that texture really gets into the work.
"Golden Guardian of Good."
This was something, you know, obviously
we love those-- that initial run
of Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee of The Sentry,
and Kevin was always pushing us to see if there was a way to get some
of those meta ideas that are in that comic into the movie.
It’s hard to do. We can’t do the strange erasing everyone’s memory thing,
or put Sentry throughout history.
I mean, that would be an amazing story,
but for obvious reasons,
different things have owned that corner of the MCU.
But even that, th-- a lot of that stuff
came from our own concept art for designing The Sentry.
And the idea that they would be looking at those as marketing materials
that Val would have for The Sentry
became our way of getting into that
kind of sense of the meta in The Sentry creation.
This scene is also just very important for tying their fates together
and, again, paying off as they talk about it here,
what happened to Antonia and the idea that that could be any of them,
and that’s likely where they’re headed if they don’t find a bond
or a way out of this life.
And then I think Wyatt does such beautiful work here
of, uh-- of covering, you know, the story that he’s been telling them
and telling himself.
But you can see underneath, uh, for a moment,
you know, he sort of forgets himself
and admits to how he really feels.
Uh, and we’ll see that paid off later.
...just keep working at it every day.
But, yeah, Sonny always felt we need some kind of campfire scene.
We need a pause here at the end of all that action
just to bind these characters together and start building those ties.
And then this...
I think Joanna wrote the Dr. Phil thing,
and then this whole run here, this was just Wyatt
and, uh, his true understanding of Dr. Phil
and whether he’s on air or not anymore.
I love let-- just letting this trail off. That’s just for me.
But it does get laughs in the theater.
Well, it isn’t great.
This was a tough shot to get.
This is actually on this mountain in Utah
and so hard to get the technocrane out there.
And for Grace and her team to build at least a version of that crater.
That’s a real helicopter. Uh-- I mean, that,
what you see is CG laid over an actual helicopter
and an actual box that it’s tethered to on the ground,
and we did a real airlift to get this in here.
But, again, you don’t have to,
but, uh, we’re trying to really kind of put a stake in the ground
that, you know, we were making this Marvel movie differently.
And really out there. God, the vistas are just so beautiful.
I mean, Grace really fought to get us out to Utah
’cause of the rock textures and the tonality.
The sort of cyan in the shadows and the more beige textures
as opposed to the reds in New Mexico which, again,
seems like a... a funny thing to be able to consider, but if you have the resources,
putting it towards that and really being out in this incredible vista
at magic hour with a real helicopter.
This airlift is entirely in-camera except for, you know...
They don’t make OXE-designed helicopters, so we’re laying over that,
but the entire rest of the shot is real.
And this too. Just another great vista,
and having them actually in this environment, this texture.
And you really feel like, you know,
we’ve been, you know, hemmed in so much with the movie,
and in this, you know, intentionally contained space
that it’s nice for the movie to feel like it’s opening up here.
All right, Walker, we get it. You were in the military.
Five or ten clicks to the bird. Da-da-da-da-da!
And then this very funny... This, again, part of the limo.
The Sonny addition of... ...Yelena’s dad showing up
and exactly how you would feel if you were...
...you know, just with your friends leaving soccer,
and your dad showed up in his ridiculous car,
and how embarrassed you’d be,
but to do that in the middle of an action movie
is a very funny thing to tie together.
And of course, David just... ...leans into it so hard
and, you know, never shies away from that and brings every bit of it.
But I love also that you’re doing that kind of comedy
but with these beautiful vistas,
and you really feel the texture of just actually being out there
and shooting that wide shot and having all of these mesas in the distance.
You know, it’s this weird intersection of our movie
where it is a very kind of silly humor sometimes
that is married with visuals that treat it a little bit more seriously,
and if that works for you, then that is this kind of tone that we’re going after.
I got this shot myself.
I was on the tripod, found this spot down the road.
This is this road that we owned for this whole sequence.
Uh, and I actually went back and reshot it ’cause it turned out...
You know, we waited for magic hour,
and, uh, you actually want those mesas to be a bit more front lit
so you get the shadows to show up a little more.
It gives more shape to the mesas.
I felt like, "Oh, we came all the way out here and got the timing wrong."
So went back out and got it one more time before we left Utah.
Um, I have a picture of me and just a silly little set of baby stick tripod legs,
uh, and a little crew out there getting the shot, which was fun.
And this whole sequence, I mean, this was something Andrew really pushed for,
was, again, this is out on the road in a hundred-degree heat.
The AC in this car is breaking down.
We had, I think, three red limos. Or two. I can’t remember now.
They all broke. Everything broke.
Uh, but they’re in there and, you know, a lot of the sound we didn’t replace.
I love the sound of kind of the rig on the...
the shading rig on top of the car
and the way it rattled and the noises in this car.
It meant, you know... It means the actors get fewer takes,
but when you have actors like this, like David, you know,
we had a long run of road, and we would stop, give notes
and then keep going down the road.
But once you turned around, it took so long to turn this thing around
and to put on the new camera mounts
that you really had to get it in that run.
They had four takes each for each of these setups.
Uh, but, yeah, Andrew was just committed to this idea
that it’ll just look better if it’s out there.
It’s hard to do LED or green screen
for a car this big and have it feel real.
And, again, just the texture for the actors
and the way they’re talking and speaking over that environment.
Just trying to put our resources into really going out there and doing it.
It was crazy. I was yelling at the ref.
Great improv by David here.
Uh... "A girl who pooped."
And this-- this whole...
The Shane and Dmitri was a Sonny addition.
And the Shane, "He didn’t have that kind of money,"
that’s a great Sonny add.
What about this Bob you mentioned? What’s the plan?
There is also this moment
that I sort of skipped over in there that’s very important,
where, again, you have such little real estate where Alexei says,
"The light inside... Whatever it is..."
Or, "Whatever they are, the light inside you is brighter."
So we have to establish in her performance,
and it’s so subtle on Florence’s part,
that she gives Walker a little bit of credence.
And, again, there’s nothing to be so happy about at this point in the movie,
but just that there’s a little bit of lightness
in the performance for him to pick up on,
so that you can establish that and go into that kind of extreme close-up
where you can see that, where she’s trying to process
that he sees that in her even if she doesn’t want to admit it about herself.
Those are the kind of things we talked about in building this scene
as well as all of the comedy.
- Do you understand? You don’t understand. - I do. You don’t.
I love that read from David. It’s so childish.
...is going to use the power of this Sentry Project...
Yes... to take over and kill us all.
And then here our action sequence begins.
So we-- we were out there for, I think, two weeks in Utah.
Um, this sequence, maybe, I think we shot in seven days, I wanna say.
We didn’t really have a second unit,
but George was out there with the splinter unit
down the road with a camera car.
And at some point, after we got kind of the actors’ parts of it,
it was just both of us just shooting action shots,
and he would text me what he was getting on an iPhone,
and we’d make notes, and just building this piece by piece.
Again, we had this boarded out. Vinny Dellay, one of our, uh, great storyboard artists,
we worked on this a lot, uh, before we went out there,
and it was in the edit.
Uh, and Harry was in a... You know, there’s no tent out there,
but we were in a kind of camera van that we had the editing rig built into.
And just each shot, just cutting it in
over the course of seven shooting days.
Just building this piece by piece along with the boards
and, you know, seeing that it worked.
You know, figuring out what we needed to add in, but it really...
It’s fun watching back and knowing that you were there for each of these pieces.
You know, it was-- it was all-- it was all of us just making this happen.
Okay, not really appropriate.
That, uh-- The pony thing was a Jon Watts joke suggestion.
He was nice enough to lend us that one.
Uh, I think-- I think the song "Pony," I think, was my pick.
It was gonna be that or Exile, uh, "Kiss You All Over."
Even that shot, we shot for-- I mean the bottle is CG,
but, you know, tracking in its trajectory,
we threw a real bottle out of there
that obviously didn’t stay up as long as that.
But really, you know,
the bullet hits and some things in the sequence are added,
but almost every single thing you see in frame is practical.
The dust, you know, being along these Humvees.
You know... ...Jake Morrison, again,
it was that-- that precept of everything in-camera,
and if it does not-- if nothing else, it’s incredible reference
so that the CG has direct reference
of what that thing’s supposed to look like out there.
But there’s very few shots with any real major CG in this.
Sometimes it’s the-- the firing or the gun turrets.
Those will get added, but there’s a ref--
You know, we’re shooting with a real one on location.
It’s Florence right out of the window. No rigging.
And that explosion is real. That flip.
I mean... it was tough getting those flips.
We didn’t have any backup Humvees.
Again, that was part of being a little bit more frugal.
So I think that, if I’m not wrong, was Shane Habberstad’s, uh, Humvee,
and he had to get it of into that dirt and make sure those tires caught
so that he’d get a proper flip.
And I think this one is Noon Orsatti.
Incredible stuntman. Longtime stuntman.
Uh, that one flipped a little bit easier,
not that it’s easy to be in that thing.
And then here comes Bucky.
And, again, that’s real dust blowing across the road.
You know, everything out there, you’re just in this incredible playground
where it’s really hard, it’s really hot, but, you know...
I think what was nice about it is the "hard" goes on screen,
and everything that was difficult about it is also what makes it breathtaking
and shooting it in full IMAX.
Uh, Joe, what-- Maybe the best, uh, motorcycle stunt rider in the world
doing all of these. That wide shot looks like it’s CG. It’s not.
That’s just how fast he was going on that bike.
Uh, and, yeah, I think this ending piece was a George suggestion
about using the winch and shooting that off.
And this, I think, maybe right here, the flip,
I mean, that’s not sky replacement.
Uh, it really looked like this when this-- this Humvee flipped.
It was the last thing we shot out on that road and got it with a drone.
Uh, all of this stuff in-camera.
Um, and just to be out there getting stuff like that
and, you know, being on the edge of whether you can get it or not,
it’s just such a great feeling.
Oh, sh--
Another one of my little DC pickups.
We didn’t bring balls and charts for this, so, uh, I had to bring...
I got, uh, Christmas ornaments... ...for lighting reference.
And then this was, uh...
This was... This did come in additional with Wendell,
and we just felt like we needed to sort of keep the stakes
and the pressure up on Val in the movie,
and it’s another chance for Wendell to say, "Juicy,"
so that’s always worth it.
Um, and this is, you know, again,
when you talk about AB with effects, you know...
Sure, they’re against gray. They’re not up on this roof.
But they’re outside, something Jake Morrison always insisted on,
and we have that real helicopter behind their heads for enough of it,
so at least you have the foreground and the mid-ground
if not the background that gets added,
and even just that little element helps it sit in much better.
Or choices like this where, you know, as opposed to building a set,
you know, that’s an actual abandoned floor in Atlanta with a real city outside
that isn’t New York, but the value of it being real and then adding some things
out the windows as opposed to creating it all with a set
and green screen out the windows is worth it for that sense of texture.
I would love for this to be my bedroom.
I’ve told Grace this multiple times.
I love this design of hers. I would sleep here, in this recovery room.
I would be Bob.
This scene was in many, many drafts of the script,
and, ultimately, Joanna, you know, really brought
this really interesting dynamic to the scene
that I thought was so interesting of the way that someone like Val
can play upon the sort of insecurities and desires
of a character like Bob,
who really does just wanna matter and wants to be important
and wants to do the right thing,
but, you know, that can very easily get confused
with the sense of, you know, validation, or importance, or feeling left out,
and, you know, this idea that that can really lead you down the wrong path
if you meet up with the wrong people or if you’re in the wrong hands.
And you know, we see a little bit of that in Alexei,
and all of them are grappling with their own versions of that.
But of course, Bob is so powerful
that you’re really playing with fire here,
which is what Mel keeps suggesting to Val,
and Val, of course, thinks that she always can gain the upper hand,
but she-- she’s not exactly aware of what she’s dealing with in Bob.
And, you know, just watching the way they play off of each other
and the way that, kind of, Val massages him into this.
And I was there with Joanna on set.
She was there this day, and I was at the monitor,
and she’s like, "You’re doing such a good job."
I was like, "Are you... Are you Valling me right now?"
"Is that what’s happening?" I said.
And I could see it. She had written it and she was doing it to me
at the same time.
And so, that was fun to watch.
But yeah, again, just such subtlety in Lewis
of needing to now portray some of that darkness in there
along with the desire of this-- you know, seeing this belt,
which is a symbol of meaning something, of being important,
of being what other people couldn’t see.
Because Yelena truly has come to care for him,
even in this limited time,
but it’s in this way that Val will later describe as pity,
you know, as opposed to someone seeing him, you know...
Yelena says, "Stay behind me. I have it. I’ll take care of you."
And Val is coming to him and saying, "You could be something much more than that."
We actually-- This was part of a-- an additional photography, uh, piece,
where I initially thought because we were talking about, uh, Bob’s backstory
that you would expect to go into his past,
and we had a preview of his addict scene
that Val went into.
In testing, it was nice, ’cause people did understand
the concept of the Void, but they got very frustrated at that sequence
and said, "Why isn’t it Val’s? It’s always someone else’s."
And so we got to add this, uh, really nice scene
that Joanna wrote, you know.
And, I mean it’s just a testament... I mean, these are...
Uh, Chiara, who plays the little girl, these are great actors,
’cause a scene like this being dropped in the melodrama like this is so delicate.
And you have some leeway in a comic book movie to do that, I think,
to have these kind of heightened backstories.
I mean, who’s to say? We had a lot of discussion.
I mean, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
Is that Italian? Is that French? You know, we went with Italian.
Um, and it gives you a little bit of that distance.
Um, and, you know, tries to show you a window
into how Val has become what she’s become,
which is this idea that, you know, if it’s a story about isolation
and, you know, the damage that that can cause,
you know, if Val is just sort of someone like them,
but who never found anyone else to lift her out of that place,
she has hardened into what she has become.
But she’s starting from a similar place,
that there is a point of connection
even between your antagonist and your protagonists,
that they all share.
All right, let’s get the press here in the morning.
It’s time to show everyone what I’ve been working on.
Val, you put a serum into someone like Steve Rogers...
I do think we added a number of things.
We came back to this scene ’cause it was where we
really needed to establish that concept of,
you know, that you’re playing with fire here.
And, you know, that-- Yeah, that Bob and The Sentry,
and it’s about an internal conflict that he has
that is exacerbated by the serum
and turned into world stakes and, you know, superhero levels by the serum.
That-That concept that it starts with what’s inside of you,
which I think a lot of people watching will understand implicitly
from watching a lot of these movies,
but that we maybe needed to define for more of the audience.
This was a beautiful gas station in Green River, Utah,
and this is not a set on the inside,
even though we probably could’ve done it that way.
But everything that’s outside those windows were really there.
Uh, and Grace did such a great job of dressing this, uh, for this scene,
and this scene was a very complicated one.
And this is towards the end of our shoot.
It’s one of the last things we shot with our principals in Utah.
And it needs to do such heavy lifting
to kinda have all of your characters get together by the end of it
when they start on opposite places.
And I thought what Joanna did...
You know, there are these little deft turns
in the way that they’re trying to convince Bucky about Bob,
you know, that they believe that there’s a threat,
but they themselves do not see themselves as worthy
of going after it and are just trying to escape it.
But he doesn’t even believe in the thing that they’re telling him.
And using this kind of humor of the repetition of "Bob" to establish that
is such a neat way to get you, ’cause it has to do so much
in such a compressed amount of time to keep the story moving,
and it was so impressive how she did that.
I know it’s been hard since Olivia left you and took your kid,
but still, this is on you.
And this is such a nice moment of acting between...
between Wyatt and Florence here.
And we didn’t want to lean into the music for it.
Just this recognition, on her part,
that he, of course, is struggling with the same thing
that she has struggled with, in his own way,
and that all of that bravado and bluster is really masking
feeling very similar to the way that she feels,
and, you know, the way they share that with just such tiny looks.
When you have actors like this, you can... you can accomplish a lot,
but, you know, we’re so...
They’re the magic that makes any of this stuff work,
and I was lucky to have some of the very best in every single role.
I mean, Project Sentry is not just a failure. It’s dangerous.
And, yeah, that’s our movie.
To do that and have that really nicely observed character moment
and then the kind of near silliness of this "Bob" repetition.
And, again, if it doesn’t work for you, I understand.
You know, it’s an--
It’s an interesting tonal set of things to hold,
but, uh, yeah, that’s our movie.
The press are set to come tomorrow morning.
Someone has to do something.
Shit. Okay, I have to go. But come now, please.
Bring anyone. Everyone you can.
I love this, uh, "How many times?" from David here.
Bob.
- Bob. - How many times?
But sometimes, it gets--
The first "Bob" gets a big enough laugh,
then you don’t get to hear it, but you at home,
uh, with just your friends, will get to-- will get to hear that one.
And then, yeah, this big shift where Bucky has to take this turn
and bring these folks along with him,
and needing to establish there’s enough time pressure that that makes sense.
And then Sebastian really worked very hard
and essentially wrote this speech himself
to make it honest to the way that Bucky speaks
and kind of appealing to the sense of, you know, shared past and emptiness.
And this really becomes Bucky’s role in our movie, is he has--
You know, he’s gone through that therapy in Falcon and Winter Soldier.
He has processed the things, you know, that they haven’t yet,
and he knows where it leads if you don’t,
and just that idea of you have the wrong people,
but no, actually, you are the right people,
if you can overcome it.
So you can either do something about it now,
or live with it forever.
I haven’t mentioned Son Lux yet,
but this beautiful theme, you know, to their score,
with kind of a hint of the Thunderbolts* theme
and uniting these characters,
but just played very gently in the background
where we’re not leaning into it too much.
And you get room for how subtle they’re being in that,
and then, of course, uh,
Alexei is not a subtle man.
Yes!
Yeah!
This is a scene that used to be much longer and was very fun.
Then again, there are a lot of these parts of the movie where...
There’s very, very few scenes that were cut whole cloth from the film.
The movie that you’re watching, you know, is essentially...
Those are the scenes that we shot,
but we definitely pared things down for time and pace.
And this used to be a longer exploration of this kind of idea
about youthful idealism and the way that power actually functions in the world.
And just for overall time
and needing to spend a little bit more time with Bob learning his powers,
we did trim this down, but I still love, uh, what Joanna wrote here
about a bad guy and a worse guy and nothing else,
and that really is Val’s ethos,
which is not that she aspires to be a bad guy,
but she just believes that she sees the truth in the world,
which is that it’s all just a set of grays and people aspiring for power,
and if that’s how the world works,
then you wanna be the one with the most power,
and that’s something that Mel just hasn’t come to terms with yet.
This was another place where we wanted to have fun
with the meta of Sentry.
Um, all of those things that you see in the background there,
um, those are the actual... ...costume pieces and, uh, concepts
for the development of The Sentry costume,
and it felt like what Val was doing in our movie
is the same thing Marvel does so well, which is build superheroes,
and you would need to make a costume for one,
so we thought it would be fun to kind of wink at that
by having the actual development.
Those are-- Russell Bobbitt, our wonderful prop master,
longtime Marvel prop master, those are his 3D printers to the side
that he uses to make all of these props and to form them,
and we tried to just kind of lean into that connection point
between what the movie was doing and what Val was doing as a character.
And then really lean into, again, you know,
there’s still an innocence to this, of Lewis is not turning evil.
It’s that Bob is having someone appeal to his importance
in a way that no one else has maybe ever in his life.
And you see the kind of excitement of what that could mean
to someone like that
and this idea of the hint in his eyes at that Sentry side.
I was in this helicopter. I got that shot. It’s morning.
This was also a very funny Easter egg of...
That’s a C.C. Rentals truck that we painted.
When I was in film school, there was one rental service in New York
that would rent you a truck to film students
who consistently ding it and scratch it as much as possible, um...
And when we needed a vehicle for them to come in on,
I just thought it would be funny
cause that is who would rent to them on short notice in New York.
This whole scene, I think this is two takes of improv in the back of that truck.
And at this point in the shoot,
they had just figured out these characters so well and their dynamic,
you could just let them go and you would get great things like that.
You know, about Walker’s insecurity
and maybe a little hat tip to how he felt about his, uh, his helmet
in Falcon and Winter Soldier.
But just, yeah, the interplay felt so nice.
This is actually out on a set.
Th-That was onstage, and this is, again, never any green screen.
This is out on our 45th Street set, with a camera mount.
Again, just two takes of improv.
Sorry. Joanna wrote a lot of these lines,
but just letting these two guys go
with each other to establish this.
...I drive.
I don’t get tired.
No, I mean metaphorically.
I don’t actually want to drive.
Are we there yet?
- Almost! - Almost!
Okay. Mr. Soldier, what is secret plan, huh?
The plan?
Yeah.
Okay, so this whole set, I mean,
is one of the craziest sets I’ve ever seen built.
Grace built an entire recreation of 45th Street in New York,
three stories up, with this lobby inside.
Some of the background of the lobby is extended by ILM,
but it all connects, it all exists.
The overpasses are real.
I mean, I’ve really never seen anything like it,
and then Chuck built this incredible rig with silks over the top of that street,
so that you could play it as this consistently cloudy day the whole time,
and then ILM did a beautiful job extending that set.
But again, when 60 to 70% of what you’re looking at is entirely in-camera,
when you extend things in the background,
you’re giving everyone a much, much better chance of success.
And it was just such a, you know... You’re in this weird position
where shooting on location wouldn’t make any sense,
’cause Avengers Tower doesn’t exist in New York,
so you’d be adding that, so it makes sense to have the control,
especially given all the action that we’re gonna do there.
But then to have this level of detail,
Michael Hersey, longtime art director,
who we worked with on Beef, supervised this over months of building that thing.
And then we just tried to set as much as we could there
to make it pay off for how much effort went into it.
How crazy is it to think of all the monumental fights...
It was really fun when we got to this part of the shoot.
I think we’d been making this movie that felt very different
um, and almost felt like it wasn’t a Marvel movie,
and then I remember getting to this scene and this sequence
and being in our remodeled Avengers Tower,
and it felt like, "Okay, no, it is a Marvel movie."
I mean, this is a villain face-off with a team of heroes.
Just in our context, with a little bit of dryness underneath,
but knowing that the movie was gonna exist in both of those worlds,
that it was gonna feel different,
but also in the end, hopefully, if it works,
aspire to live up to the legacy of the great movies
that this studio has made.
And there was a comfort being in this scene
and feeling the familiarity of that.
It’s tropey for sure,
but done in our own style, and that was always the hope
was to kind of get to have the fun of those tropes
and what these movies can be
and then also undercut it a little bit
and hopefully have all of those things
live in harmony together.
And it was also just fun to get them together with Julia finally
and have that interplay with her.
She was so great with the team in this.
The Santa line, uh, which was Joanna’s add,
and the way Alexei plays this, uh...
or the way David plays this is just so fun.
What?
- Where’s Mel? - Mel?
Oh, Mel. Yeah.
Uh, Mel is having a little loyalty issue.
But I’m just so grateful...
And then, we finally get to our big Sentry reveal,
which, you know, again,
it’s so many different places that this character needs to go
in so little time,
and leaning into this idea
that it’s not necessarily the most comfortable fit.
And, you know, I think what’s so great about having Lewis is that
he has the stature and he can physically embody
this Golden Guardian of Good, and at the same time,
bring a level of insecurity underneath that.
And, God, yeah, Florence’s face there.
I mean, obviously the most important part about this scene
is this idea that, you know, if you’re with Yelena on this journey
and you believe that nothing really matters at the beginning,
and then you meet this guy who’s going through a similar thing,
and you form some sense of connection with him,
and then you feel like you’ve lost him, but you’re there to rescue him,
to see him in this other context,
you know, this is what drives her to the rest of where the story is going
and her true low point, which is to find
that person that she met lost to her,
and you know, this sort of fight for his soul and his purpose
between her and Val that they’ll play out here.
The fact that she loses it is really what drives the rest of the story.
Oh, no.
No, I’m not gonna hurt people.
And meanwhile, of course, we get to hear Val’s plan
and that she does want to be in charge of everything,
you know, with this, uh-- you know, the idea that in this world of the MCU,
you can’t really have that without one of these heroes at your side,
especially in this case, the most powerful one of all, um...
And I love the way Alexei sort of engages in that meta, you know.
Thinks the name is cool and is impressed at the same time as he wishes...
I think all of them, at some point, wished
that they were standing in that position.
And now, to see this guy who they, you know, not dismissed, I mean,
in Walker’s case, perhaps, in a pretty negative way,
but just not imagining that this is what he could be.
But to see him standing opposite in this role
has personal resonance for each of them
and thinking about what they didn’t become.
Please, don’t do this.
And, again, these lines are very delicate
with Lewis, you know, to make clear
that he doesn’t want to hurt them,
that if it feels like a quick turn for the audience,
we understand where it’s coming from,
and he really just does wanna be important,
but it’s not that he bears them any necessary ill will.
But, again, yeah, that close-up is where
Yelena really realizes that he’s lost,
and to see that sinking feeling,
I mean, it’s just so great on her part in just a little close-up.
Thunderbolts?
And then here we go! We finally get to see him work.
But the idea here in this sequence was also
that he hasn’t trained very much,
so it’s not only establishing for the audience--
for the Thunderbolts, what his powers are,
but also for himself to see, "Oh, I can stop bullets,"
and become more comfortable as the sequence goes on.
You know, and obviously, Sentry’s power set is limitless,
so if the sequence went on further, if he had more people to fight,
we could go even further, but it felt like we could contain it
to a level that still fit within our movie,
where obviously we’re stepping outside of the fully practical thing now.
There’s more CG in this.
But we’ve been yearning for that.
We wanna see.
This is where it becomes more of a superhero movie,
if we’ve been something different.
You wanna see what The Sentry can do
that we thought still balanced with...
This is shot with a lot of our first unit as a oner,
with a motion control rig and a TechnoDolly.
And then there’s CG in between, obviously,
’cause he’s doing things that humans can’t do,
but it is real performance amidst all of that.
And still feels, within that context, like our movie,
but expanding into that more kind of traditional superhero territory.
This is also a shot with a lot of design from Rico,
our board artist who I mentioned before,
who does such great stuff with action like this.
And you land again, just continuing to lock in on Yelena
and how she feels about losing Bob,
and then playing into this very kind of, you know, Bucky’s moment,
where in a normal movie you might expect...
You know, we want this to be Bucky’s moment.
We want him to succeed here, but really, you know, it’s interesting.
Unlike normal fights in normal movies,
these are kind of overall scene arcs
where they have all wins downstairs with the guards
and then all losses in this sequence to bring them to a low point.
They get nothing in on Sentry.
And that’s when you really feel it.
It’s pretty rough
having your arm tossed towards you
after being knocked unconscious with it.
I’m so glad you were able to catch a glimpse before your, uh...
retirement.
This is gonna sound very silly,
but there is a children’s book called Cookie Monster and The Cookie Tree,
um, which involves a witch and a magic cookie tree
that she puts a spell on so that it won’t share any cookies with Cookie Monster,
but then it won’t share any cookies with her
’cause it only gives cookies to people who share.
That was her spell, and she’s sort of hoisted by her own petard.
And I would think about that a lot when thinking about Val in this moment.
I think I even gave Julia that book.
And she laughed and said, "You’re very strange, you know that?"
And she’s not wrong.
Okay.
Hannah told me this is an actual moment
where she forgot to give Sebastian his arm back
and then had to remember it.
And we kept that in, which was fun.
In this scene, which Joanna wrote,
I just thought it’s an interesting one
where I was worried about having Yelena go this far.
I was worried that the audience would lose touch with her if she was this harsh.
I mean, it’s obviously the point of the scene
is to bring your characters to a low point
and have your protagonists, you know--
because she feels those bonds broken--
tear apart the team.
But how far she went,
I think I, you know-- my mistake was cautious
in how far we would let her go, and everyone else really spoke up for...
Joanna spoke up for, and the actors spoke up for the idea that it was...
Not only was it okay to go there,
but it was important to go to this place.
And it really added so much to this scene.
See?
Slow down. Um-nichka.
Alexei, I am not your um-nichka.
I haven’t heard from you or seen you in a year.
And here we start to delve more into that thing
that’ll become the crux of the next scene, of how they’re processing...
Again, you may just know it in this movie as Yelena’s sister,
but obviously, if you’ve seen these films,
you know, hinting at this sense of loss
after Natasha is gone and how they’re processing it.
Yelena!
Meanwhile, back in the tower,
not going so great.
And, again, it’s a tricky balance, you know.
I mean, when you have Julia Louis-Dreyfus,
you want to lean into this humor,
but I felt like we never pushed it too far
to come at the expense of the stakes that are starting to emerge.
But again, Lewis has such little real estate here
to play this more sort of, you know, manic side
of the duality of this sense of hubris
and the way it’s frustrating to feel limited in that.
And this is the side Val didn’t get to see
before she put him into this position,
because she’s so rushed and trying to get out of her circumstances.
But, you know, again, Lewis is doing so much here with so little time
to show that it’s not just a sort of traditional
villain drunk on power, but someone who wanted to matter
but is also uncomfortable with that position,
and again, we were always trying to get at this idea,
based on a friend of mine, of the hubristic side
actually bringing about the self-destructive side
and that sense of despair.
And this was something that we really drilled in on in this moment of the scene,
to show that hubris but in an unstable sort of way,
which I thought he did so beautifully.
You were gonna turn on me...
And this idea of feeling like everyone always abandons him,
which is something that’s true, or doesn’t see him this way,
or is willing to cast him aside,
which has been true his whole life,
which he now sees in her, which brings about this darker side,
so that when he is killed by Mel,
we then transfer him to that Void side of The Sentry character.
And this is sort of completing Mel’s arc of deciding,
"Okay, between the two, I would rather not be on the outside.
Even if there are compromises to it,
I would rather be closer to power."
I want a raise.
Okay, fine. Get cleanup on the body.
And tell Holt it’s finally time to go lethal on these losers.
This took a lot of development here
of how to turn Sentry dark, you know,
and how to kind of do a version of creating this character of the Void.
This is ILM’s work of kind of drawing the shadows to him
to establish the beginning of that.
And adding that eye flip.
Yelena!
And this is probably...
well, one of my favorite scenes in the movie for sure.
This is another scene that Sonny really wrote,
paired with that scene in Alexei’s apartment from the beginning.
And, you know, really trying to push this movie
to a different corner than you might expect
for a young woman who’s really going through something.
Uh...
And I think this was always one of my favorite scenes
from the moment I read it.
I don’t think we shot it till about eight weeks in,
and I think we had half a day for it, um...
But you just were so excited, knowing how good David and Florence are together
and were gonna be.
And I remember there actually...
Yeah, there was a lightning storm that day.
We had to wait on stuff.
There was this tension
of just wanting to see this scene happen.
And I think after the first take on her,
David turned to me and he was like,
"I mean, that’s it. I don’t know that
you’re gonna get any better than that."
And we did more takes, of course,
but they were just so ready to perform this, um,
and I don’t know,
there are just times when, you know,
I care a lot about camerawork,
but in a scene like this,
sometimes you wanna just be as simple as you possibly can.
And it’s just two lens sizes, you know, one at a time,
so you’re on the eyeline on each of them, and you just let them go.
There’s a wide shot to lead you into it,
but there’s no fancy camerawork.
We’re not pushing in.
The last thing you wanna do is get in the way
of performances like that.
There are times to do fancy things
and there are times to just let it go.
My first...
And it’s interesting, you edit this movie,
and you watch this stuff over and over.
I remember the first time I saw this in the assembly,
and, you know, I choked up a little bit just ’cause of that performance.
And it’s hard to remember that that’s a thing that’s out there for you
as you edit it over and over again.
When you see it with an audience again for the first time,
you can feel it in the room.
Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me, I think,
just, again, as someone who appreciates great acting.
You know, to be able to be in this movie
and with the scale and scope of everything that’s going on around you,
but to get to this place that feels so small and relatable
and how much she commits to it.
I mean, you don’t really...
This is the thing about making these movies.
You’re on so much stuff,
and you’re doing all the action and all these things,
but the movie only works if this thing that you get in half a day
with two setups, with two actors, if it sings.
And, you know, the...
I mean, she’s actual magic.
I mean, if you ever get a chance to work with her, you should take it.
And David, you know, to do that performance,
to be as big and as funny as Alexei can be
but bring it in the way that he does in this scene,
I mean, I’m just so in awe of both of them.
This scene actually used to, and I think you see it in some of the posters--
used to end in a hug, and the hug was beautiful.
I loved that moment.
But we actually felt like she was arcing a little bit too soon,
like we were letting her learn too clearly the message in the movie too early,
and we needed to leave room for it to go,
so we cut around that and had him look up here
and moved around the hug before she can entirely process
what she’s learned here.
Little Easter egg, some posters for bands I’ve done music videos for on the wall:
Haim, and Francis and the Lights, that I was in for a bit,
and Cashmere Cat.
I think also that perfume ad on the bus station behind it
we made Watts Perfume, in Jon’s honor.
And now the movie gets a little bit bigger and we get the scope.
And this is... Obviously, there’s a lot of CG going on here.
ILM did such beautiful work building New York City
and also just the design of what the Void looks like,
which, you know, Kevin encouraged us to make...
He asked if there was any photographic, in-camera way we could do it,
which there wasn’t really, but embracing that concept,
just trying to make it as simple as it could be,
where we did shoot Lewis and then it is sort of...
You know, it’s not an overall mask on him,
but it is kind of these adjustable, like...
just allowing a little bit of light in certain parts
and turning the rest into a nearly 2D silhouette.
And then the eyes are not animated.
I mean, those come from his actual eye movements,
and it really doesn’t work if they stay on the whole time.
It starts to feel a little bit like Terminator,
like they come from the specular highlights,
you know, in his eye light that they animated.
And then, of course, these shadows...
Grace brought in a ton of references for these,
a lot of, like, the way burns spread.
We went to that.
And, again, just trying to figure out, like, what’s something simpler?
You know, when you work on effects... This is not simple.
This is incredible CGI work from ILM.
There’s no other way to do this.
But when it comes to the shadows, you know,
we would get wedges--
and some of that shadow development
happened with Framestore and Rising Sun Pictures as well--
of, "Here’s six ways we could do it. Here’s the simplest."
And we would often say, "Actually, start from the simplest,
and then do a wedge of six ways even simpler than that."
You know, that we really didn’t want this to feel like CG,
even if we were using some of the best CG companies in the world to do it.
We wanted it to have a bit of a different texture.
This sequence... You know what I think is funny about this
is Kevin actually asked,
"Do we have to do another crane falling? We do that so much."
I mean, he kept pushing me more than I even expected
to try to do things differently, and I stood up for that one.
I wanted the crane falling. I felt like the trailers were gonna need that scope,
and really this entire sequence...
You know, Alexei references it in the beginning, you know,
saving civilians in the streets, you know,
it’s this kind of time-honored thing.
And even if there is a little bit of, you know, near hokeyness to some of it,
you know, especially when they’re lifting the slab,
it all exists because this is a thing they can solve,
and then there’s going to be a problem that they can’t,
so I used to talk about how all of this money and all of this shooting time
and all of the CG was really only going into it
for that one moment of the little girl getting voided,
which we’re gonna come to in a moment
and is maybe my favorite moment to watch in the theater of this film.
But, again, so much more of this than you would think was in-camera, like this slab.
Dan Sudick and his special effects team built an actual cement slab
that was on a hoist that we filmed for this.
This shot is in-camera, everything that they’re lifting up.
That is an actual, gigantically heavy slab that they’re lifting.
And, sure, okay, what is Ghost really gonna do?
What is Yelena gonna do? They’re not super soldiers.
But we just struggled to come up with an image that would work as well
for establishing them finally coming together as a team
in that very classic hero way before we undercut that.
This came from Phil Langone boards for this sequence,
and we were never able to beat it.
So that’s an actual fall. All that dust is real.
We put a little too much dust on the thing,
and then we went with it as a transition.
And this moment was very important, as Kevin pointed out--
Yeah, Alexei soaking it up, what he wanted--
of Val processing her idea for what she’s gonna do at the end of the film.
Mom?
And here we go. Here’s our little girl.
So edging on cheese, saving the most classic little girl in the street,
which is all, again, this entire sequence is just building up
to get this moment to land, which it didn’t in our earliest test screenings.
We didn’t get the gasp that we now get in theaters,
which I think really had to fine-tune the music with Son Lux,
of building up to this borderline cheesy moment
before it’s undercut and then we finally start to...
Maybe it’s also just getting all the VFX finished
and buying into that sequence.
But now you get to see more of that shadow spread that ILM built.
You know, and there’s a lot of nice texture in those shadows.
It is a very simple effect with no flash.
It’s a one-and-a-half frame animation from being upright to becoming a shadow,
and anything more than that, you started to feel the CG creep into it,
so it really took some confidence to feel...
It feels a little exposed to do such a simple...
It’s almost just a cut to them being gone.
But, you know, it just felt like
a different way to approach this.
And it’s nice to see how effective that is in theaters.
And this is one of my favorite moments in the film.
You know, really Yelena processing that, and maybe that little feeling inside,
that is she drawn to that same thing
she was drawn to in the beginning?
Is this it for her?
You know, is she not along for this ride given what she’s gone through?
But also she’s had that experience with Alexei,
and, of course, really what’s happening is
she understands maybe even a little bit of guilt
for having expressed this idea to Bob of "We’re all alone" to him
that he’s now processing and knowing that she needs to take a leap of faith,
and again, that same memetic, eyes closed, breath in and step.
And we matched that frame.
I mean, it’s not exact, but we actually had to shoot
on a different side of the building in Malaysia
to match the angle that she’s stepping into the shadow here,
so it’s meant to truly mirror that image of her stepping off the building
at the beginning of the film.
And now we’re back in one of my favorite sets.
Yelena!
And this is where we really come to understand the idea of the Void
and these loops, ’cause we haven’t looped these things before,
and I think we kept adding to that,
I felt like, in the edit, as we were cutting it on set.
You would need to do three of these
to really understand the looping nature of this.
Something Kevin thought was very important, which was nice,
is that she’s calling out to Bob so there’s an urgency to this,
like she’s in here to find him
but then is also almost unable to look away from her prior shame.
And again, that wall’s just been there the whole time, and this is a very...
You know, again, sometimes you feel exposed
and you’re, like, everyone’s just gonna notice,
but I think most people don’t until this moment
when she hits it and you see the loop extend,
which then draws her back in, attempting to stop this from happening.
But of course, the sort of rule of the Void,
you know, that we learned through the course of making this
is that you cannot interfere with it.
That only through some sort of acceptance and distance can you get out of this loop.
As she tries to fight it, it makes it even worse,
and the Void fights back against her.
This is the "sentient tree" that Sonny added, we used to call it.
Looked a little silly on set, but Florence really sold that thing,
and then the little additions in post made it work.
These kids are so good.
Uh...
Alexa plays Anya,
and of course, Violet McGraw who played a young Yelena Belova in Black Widow
is back to play Young Yelena here,
and they both did just such a great job.
Bob?
These scenes, that scene of Yelena’s childhood
and having a friend killed,
that was a Sonny addition as well as this scene,
and going through to the bathroom in the attic,
all the details of that sequence
were something he really brought to the movie
in such a beautiful way.
He really felt it was important that this not just be about trauma
but focusing more on a sense of shame and one’s own culpability
for the darkness that one finds oneself in.
And I thought that was such an interesting distinction,
so that you see each of that in these scenes, you know,
that it’s not just a terrible memory
but one’s own culpability within it.
Florence is just so good here playing both sides of herself, you know.
And this is in a very recent dark place she felt.
Incredible VFX work here.
You know, we didn’t do motion control for any of this,
but just filmed Florence with the double
and filmed both sides of it, got it as close as we could,
and then used face replacement and compositing
to bring those two shots together.
And then, again, it’s just an editing transition of the loop.
And this is where I think you really start to feel the weight
of there being no way out of here if you try to disturb it.
This scene was a later add and a Kevin idea
about wanting to find...
to track our heroes on their journey into this Void after her and showing...
It’s nice to see some of--
despite the last time we saw them together--
Ava’s faith in Yelena’s decision to go in
and the idea that that would be worth following.
And of course, Alexei in his sadness,
is grateful for any idea that he might be able to find her.
And here we find where she just says, "Enough,"
and it’s a simple thing,
but it just means she’s not gonna fight it anymore,
and in not fighting it, that brings her closer to Bob.
This was actually all built...
So that wall with that mirror, we built onto the attic set.
This is all in-camera. There’s no compositing in those mirrors.
And these sets are built just for that shot.
Obviously here, we’re in the normal bathroom set.
But as we begin this transition...
You know, after she says, "What we talked about in the vault,"
this is all in-camera,
where the lights go down here and we pan her through.
And it’s just two joined sets
that brings her into the attic and to the center of the Void
because he’s allowed her in.
And then, of course, we establish now that’s not there anymore.
But, again, just very, very simple editing tricks for this.
It felt like, in a funny way, by doing smaller, simpler things,
that was the way to take things in a newer, different direction for Marvel
and honor that instruction from Kevin to make it different.
And then, you know, when you have an actress like Florence,
when you can establish, uh, with humor, what this is,
these interconnected shame rooms,
but even amidst all this darkness,
that always gets a laugh in the theater.
Some beautiful sound work here too from Paul Hsu.
Skywalker did the sound for this movie and did an incredible job.
Paul is someone I’ve known since my first movie, Robot & Frank,
where, you know, we tried to design the sound of the Void.
And we tried a lot of things and this idea of voices poking in from the other rooms,
which was too much of a cacophony,
but it ended up this very simple thing he built
where building this infinity reverb tail on the lines of the Void,
processing that and then doing a detune on that
and mixing that in so there’s this constant spooky, detuned reverb wash
that is built on the lines that are being said above it.
So yeah, this was a beautiful scene that Sonny wrote.
Then what’s happening down below,
Joanna wrote beautifully, this sense of...
You know, there’s so much to establish in this moment
of Bob trying to be the hero, which his dad alludes to,
and protect his mother.
But then the heartbreak comes from his mother saying,
"In doing that, you only made it worse."
And in such a few amount of lines
to establish both sides of that duality
of Bob’s desire for heroism and his sense that, in fact,
that aspiration is what brought about the worst thing,
to have all of those things in such a tiny scene
to establish The Sentry side and the Void side,
I thought that was such beautiful writing on her part.
And this scene...
We filmed this, I think, in the third week of filming,
and I was so excited to have these two actors and do this scene
and have it build to this conversation.
But it’s one of those things
where I think all of us would say if we were asked,
I don’t know that any of us felt for sure that we had it when we left set,
and it was only really when we got in the edit
where I was able to find those moments,
and it’s like, "Oh, no, it was there."
But it’s a risky thing to build a movie like this
up to a conversation with no movement in an attic.
And just her sense of confidence
and how nuanced and small her performance is,
and just that moment of Lewis being unable to hold her gaze.
And then this idea that things are shaking
because he’s beginning to be won over
and that he thinks he might leave,
that’s when the Void begins to fight him, that it begins to wake up.
And the other side of himself is gonna fight them to not let them out.
And so much of this was done practically.
There’s a bunch of excellent CG in here from Framestore, but this...
I’m one shot early, but this footstool that flies at them,
these were all Pyrocell pieces that Dan Sudick and his team built
that are actually flying at them
and look like they have weight.
This is an actual guy in the wall...
Just trying to really honor that kind of handmade sense
of how some of these more horror ideas were done.
And the papers that are flying around are real,
but then, yeah, we do have some added CG pieces,
but again, that idea that if you get enough of it in-camera,
you’re putting yourself in such a position of success.
I mean, even the way this curtain strangles them,
that almost is an in-camera edit,
you know, that we add a little bit of CG to.
Again, you’re just dependent on these incredible actors
being able to sell that a magic evil curtain is strangling them.
But when it’s these actors and when they built up to that moment,
you go with it, you buy it.
And then we get our...
Maybe the strangest triumphant save
in one of these movies where you’re...
breaking furniture and ripping apart a pillow.
But, you know, within the context of what we’ve established,
we were always a little... wondering if people would go with this.
But then when you get to Bucky’s line and he says,
"It’s okay. I have a great past so I’m totally fine,"
that’s one of the biggest laughs that we get in the movie,
and you would only get that laugh if people were with you
on that journey of understanding what it means to go through this Void.
And believe me, in another version of this movie,
I would’ve loved to see inside all of their Void rooms.
And there were different drafts of the script where we tried to do that.
But in the end, it felt like going through Bob’s was the most important
as far as how to get out of here.
Okay, okay. Just h-how do we get out of here?
I mean, as far as I know, it’s just endless rooms.
From this point on, this was really something that Joanna pushed for,
which was the idea of getting back to a big bad
and finding the worst room and finding the Void at the heart of this thing
and needing to confront him.
And then this is about establishing the external stakes
if they don’t solve this.
And, you know, I thought, at first we had kind of ominous music over this,
but in the end it felt more spooky to just let it play.
That’s actually my old commercial production company office
in New York, Park Pictures.
They were nice enough to let us shoot there
when I did all the New York aerials and exteriors.
Um, and then we find ourselves back in the Void
and back in this very kind of Spike Jonze, Gondry escape, uh,
through Bob’s rooms.
And here we have... this was added later.
This is the meth chicken room, which is definitely on the edge.
Probably the only time you’re gonna see "meth chicken"
on a strip board or a schedule board at Marvel.
But I just felt... Both for the dynamics of them falling through...
And it felt like in the Pixar version of this movie,
you would have a bit of humor before you got to the lowest point,
even if it’s a very dark form of humor,
and it’s atypical to say..."I was on meth," in a Marvel movie.
Or to have Bucky Barnes save the day by punching a chicken,
but it felt like we really wanted to push the concept to its furthest extensions
before we got to the lowest point.
So hopefully, you go with us on that one.
Love that shot. Great shot by Andrew.
And it’s nice where you actually have...
I mean, obviously the Void, that’s an effect to make him a silhouette,
but by putting him against the backlight, it doesn’t feel as incongruous,
like it feels like it fits
with how the photography actually would be for a moment like that,
so that’s a really nice...
You know, between Framestore, who did this sequence,
and Andrew and Rafi and Chuck and all the lighting,
that’s a nice way to watch those two things dovetail.
Felt like a miracle.
And here Bob finally defines, you know,
this idea of what would the worst room for someone like Bob be,
and it’s not actually, in some ways, the trauma of his childhood, but more...
you know, is there something more heartbreaking
about it being the place where he tried to be a hero,
where he tried to become something bigger than himself
and, in his own estimation...
You know, he says it here, "The most shameful thing of all
was thinking you could be anything more than nothing."
And for the way that Bob feels about himself in this moment,
this is the biggest shame,
is to imagine that he could be anything better.
And that feels like the lowest feeling.
No.
It’s quite a thing when you ask a bunch of the greatest actors on Earth
to be locked up against a wall by furniture.
Requires a lot of faith on their part and a lot of faith on our part
to know that Framestore was gonna come through eventually,
and even though we had practical versions of these things on set, for sure,
obviously they’ve augmented them to make them look better.
And then just to watch Lewis, you know, have to play both of these parts,
have to learn both sides of this fight
and still appeal to this sense of him trying to protect people
and, you know, have his darker side laugh at himself
for wanting to do that.
Robert, the hero.
That’s a real glass explosion that we did.
And then there’s candy glass on their faces.
I’m stronger than you.
And this idea that you’re expecting to
want to fight the Void and beat him,
but that, in fact, this is what the Void wants.
He’s goading Bob into doing this.
And, again, Lewis learning both sides of this fight and having to perform it,
switch costumes, do it for each of these shots,
and do both sides of it before he becomes a silhouette
’cause even as a silhouette, even though sometimes this is Alec or Ben,
his wonderful stunt doubles,
you really want Lewis, even in silhouette form, embodying that character.
And so we really did it both ways as much as we possibly could.
And then here’s the idea of the movie: "We will always be alone."
And then this was something we added later, after principal photography,
this idea of the room expanding
and physically carrying our protagonists away from him
and establishing that sense of isolation.
That first shot is actually done in-camera,
where we just had Lewis on a piece of Lexan attached to a camera car
and pulled him back.
So even though there’s a lot of wonderful CG in this sequence,
a lot of it is practical and in-camera.
Again, always trying to find that balance.
And then, again, this is this thing you root for,
as you see a near smile on Walker’s face.
You’re used to rooting that you should beat up the bad guy.
You should beat the big bad, but in our movie, there is no winning that way.
You know, there’s no version of this that ever could’ve ended
in just a punch solving it,
and you see that, in fact, in trying to fight himself
and destroy that side of himself,
he’s becoming the darkness that he’s trying to avoid
and that our characters and everyone watching needs to learn
that there is no kind of physical solution to this.
Bob, stop!
This is what he wants!
And, of course, in a superhero movie,
maybe that feels like an odd resolution,
you know, or it feels too small.
We added this sequence of Yelena so that there was, you know,
for our protagonist who’s been inactive on the sidelines,
a very active role in solving this in a sort of action context
in which she needs to get to him to save him
and thus save the world,
which will be plunged into darkness
if she doesn’t succeed.
That’s actually Heidi Moneymaker.
So to have Scarlett’s longtime stunt double
and now stunt coordinator performing that
felt like a real... something really coming full circle.
I’m here.
It will always be just us.
Okay, yes, if you want to be frustrated with us
’cause it ends in a hug,
I mean, we always said it’s not truly a hug.
They’re trying to pull him back from himself,
but, of course, that’s how it functions.
And this idea of her answering, "You’re not alone,"
this idea that she’s expressed to him in the beginning now being answered.
Okay, it’s a hug, but how else were you gonna solve this?
And it’s a hug that we try to frame in an action context.
You know, as much as it can, we’ve tried to externalize
these very internal ideas of the Void and also just...
I mean, Son Lux’s score in this moment, I think,
with these actors and with those ideas,
we did everything we could to have you come along that ride with us.
And, you know, it was always gonna end in some version of that.
And I feel like where Lewis got to, I’m just so proud of him
and amazed by Florence and all of them
for executing such a resonant version of that moment.
It was very fun being in this helicopter.
That’s all I’ll say. That’s a treat.
This was something we also talked a lot about,
about the ending and how it would resolve,
and there’s a reason in the comics why Sentry always loses his memory,
’cause you can’t really have someone as powerful like that in the world.
Um, and in this case... Yes. Don’t worry.
We’re not gonna kill a little girl. She comes back.
That was one of the earliest shadow tests we did, uh, was rejoining that shadow
as a means of getting us out of this
without having to do tons of shots of people waking up around New York.
But we played around with a lot of different versions of...
You know, there were times when Bob did remember
but had learned this lesson that he can’t be The Sentry without the Void,
so he can’t be on the team,
but then he would have to walk away
’cause they have to go confront Val,
and that just felt sad.
So the memory loss felt like the best way
that we could kind of keep them together
but still be true to the story of Sentry that we were telling, um,
and kind of reserve that payoff for later, but also find this way...
You know, we had tried a version where he didn’t remember anything at all,
and then that felt like you hadn’t really, you know...
People didn’t feel like it had honored the journey that they had gone on enough,
so we landed on this version where he remembers who they are,
but he doesn’t remember the most recent events of what’s happened
and his episode.
Okay. Come on.
And in this very simple way, it’s like, "Yep.
We stick together from now on,"
and not in a kind of cheesy way, but just, you gotta...
you don’t want someone like Bob out there.
You gotta keep that connection alive. You gotta keep him with you.
And then this was in the very first draft of the script that I read,
that everything that we did, whatever changed, it always ended here
with Val, you know, kind of...
This very classic thing that Kevin and Marvel are so good at
about, you know, this kind of flip and reveal that we go into.
Um, and knowing that this whole movie was building up to this announcement,
you know, it needs to work as a fun twist for the audience,
but also on a character level where...
You know, it’s interesting, you’re not... if you’re doing that,
then you’re not traditionally beating your bad guy.
You’re not killing Val. You’re not arresting her.
But that line of, "We own you now," becomes very important.
We had to send all the extras away on set this day
when she said that, just to make sure no one heard about it first.
Love that shot of Lewis clapping.
The most powerful one unaware that he’s even on the team.
And what I love is that even amidst all of that,
and, you know, this fun sort of positioning for where the story will go,
there is a character moment that we need to complete here,
and we need to push back into that close-up that we start the movie with.
And, again, it just came from a moment that Florence did instinctively on set
that we then built into the rest of the movie,
of that same eyes closed, breath in, look up, but now with a smile.
Uh, this is once again Imaginary Forces. Um, this sequence...
We felt like when we showed the movie, you know, we maybe expected at first
that people would cheer on this New Avengers thing a little more,
and people needed a moment with it,
and so we wanted to kind of acknowledge the way the real world works
and how snarky everything is at first
and how people might not be so certain about this partnership,
so this was this fun sequence
that Imaginary Forces did such a great job of painting,
of kind of starting in that skepticism--
I love the New York Post headline--
um, and then bringing you around by the end of it to some sense that,
hey, maybe this could work out, maybe you could buy into this.
I’ll just say, I love all these people who made this movie.
Everyone worked so hard, so incredibly hard
um, and cared about it and took it seriously.
I mean Florence, I can’t say any more.
I mean, like I said, actual magic.
Sebastian, to have him as part of this. Wyatt, who’s a friend.
Olga, who was such a good sport to show up for this.
Lewis, who, I mean, I think really, you know, is the find of this movie.
Geraldine, who did such a great job. Chris for showing up.
Wendell. I’ve been a fan forever.
David, one of the most committed actors you’ll ever meet.
And Hannah, really the glue of that group.
Julia, who’s a legend that I just feel lucky that I got to work with.
I just, you know, as a director,
if you can ever get a cast like that,
it just makes the whole job incredibly easy.
And then, yeah, there’s our flip.
Like I said, this is release day,
so it’s almost hard to speak on this until
we see how that plays out in the world,
but I think that’s a fun one to try and an example of how open, you know,
everyone at Marvel was to try new ideas on this project.
And this was a fun one we did during additional...
We didn’t shoot any of our post credit scenes during principal photography.
We sort of wanted to see where the whole thing was gonna go
and what we would need,
but, again, it felt like paying off
that kind of meta idea of the Wheaties box
and Alexei’s investment in it, but then undercutting it a bit,
uh, felt right for where we ended our story.
And then because it’s Alexei, and we start with Muzak in a supermarket,
you get into kind of...
You know, he’s the kind of guy who would love to have
a classic post credits song.
And so we get to give that to him
and therefore give it to our viewers.
I’ll just say that, you know, I’m struck when I sit in a theater.
Um... And I look at this credit sequence, and it’s a long one.
You know, I’ve sat through credits before.
I like to kind of let a movie sink in, you know,
but going through this experience, I know all of these people.
Um, and I know what they did and how much...
You know, I could talk for an hour about each of their contributions,
and it’s just one name on the list that’s scrolling by that you won’t notice,
whether it’s, uh, Onnalee and Michael, our incredible mixers,
or Alex Levy, our music editor, who...
so instrumental in creating this score with Son Lux.
You know, the stunts on this movie were incredible.
Every single one of those people worked so hard.
You know, Michael Huggins, who was our... who did the rigging, and...
I mean, if you’re Florence Pugh and you’re stepping off the roof
of the second tallest story building in the world,
you have to have a lot of faith in that rigging.
Um, I could single out any one of them,
and I think I’m just struck by how many people it takes,
working so hard and caring so much,
uh, just to make a good movie.
It’s just hard to make a good movie,
and, you know, I guess, if you got this far, hopefully you feel like
this one was all right.
Um, and I am just so grateful to all of those people
and for all of the work that they put in,
and, really, when I look back on this process...
something that Grace and I would talk about, she would say,
"You know, we’re going to grad school. We’re gonna learn so much."
And I think, you know, it’s wonderful to put a movie out in the world,
and it’s wonderful to have it connect with people,
but also what I mainly look back on is the experience of making it
and how much I learned and how much you have to lean on this incredible team.
Um... And I’ll never forget that.
So, um, thank you guys for watching.
Um...
Obviously, uh... Oh, yeah, I gotta call out Samara Handelsman,
my assistant, who had to put up with so, so much.
Um, what else can I say here?
’Cause I do wanna get to the VFX houses
and explain kind of more specifically what they did, but, uh...
Sean, who drove me every day.
Not an easy job. Definitely going through it.
Our wonderful second unit.
Um, really, there were days where I would start there
and then come over to first unit,
and it was always great working with those guys.
Getting out to Utah, obviously.
I feel like that’s when the movie really opened up for me,
just feeling like we were out there.
And Malaysia. You know, they don’t have the entire crew in Malaysia listed,
but it really was a wonderful crew.
Adam in special effects, particularly for blowing up that building,
one take to do it.
Did such a great job.
New York. We actually did shoot in DC as well,
but it was such a small shoot I don’t think they have it listed here.
Believe it or not, as long as these credits are,
there are even more people that work on these movies.
All the wonderful people at Marvel.
And of course it was great to see Paul Jenkins at the, uh, premiere for this
and just talk a little bit about his view of Robert Reynolds
and the way we treated him.
And I think he was very happy, which was nice.
Everyone in marketing, they did such a great job with this movie
and really embracing doing something different.
Okay, our visual effects houses.
Third Floor for all of the previs.
Digital Domain and their previs department,
we worked on earlier, as well as Framestore.
It’s really such an important part of the process.
OPSIS did a lot of work for us in that area as well.
Then ILM... Really, the whole New York street sequence
and all of the voiding and the crane falling, all of the heavy lifting.
And Chad and everyone over there did just such an amazing job.
Framestore, uh, did the vault exterior environment,
Bob’s flight, all of the stuff in Bob’s attic and that ending lab fight,
which, really, I mean, we were finishing right to the very end,
and the movie doesn’t work without it.
They just did such an incredible job.
Digital Domain, that was a lot of the early vault sequence,
a lot of that fighting, Ghost phasing,
uh, just every part of that fight they worked on,
and that stuff came in great.
Rising Sun, a lot of the face replacement stuff in the film.
Base, really, just a company that saved us on Beef as well
and just a workhorse on this.
A lot of the Bucky arms and Void shadow growth, things like that.
Raynault did the airplane.
Val’s drop-off, the crater design. Some of the penthouse stuff.
And then a lot of fill-in work by these other houses.
I mean, it just takes so many people doing so much.
Imaginary Forces, who worked so incredibly hard on that opening Marvel logo
and our ending credits sequence,
um, which really is such a narrative lift for the film.
Tom Poole did such a great job of coloring this movie with Andrew.
Looks beautiful.
Uh, yeah.
Again, at every line, there are people working so incredibly hard
to make what you see here.
Doc, who also helped record this, uh, commentary track.
And Son Lux again.
What an incredible job they did.
And it was so fun to go out to Abbey Road,
be in that room and record this score.
I wasn’t there the whole time, but just to see it for a few days was amazing.
And special thanks to the Merdeka,
Jon Watts, who helped me out so much on this film,
and my friend Francis.
Atlanta Metro Studios. Green River, Utah. Filmed all over.
Malaysia.
A lot of these places you see here,
a lot of this is, you know, where the effects are finished,
not necessarily where we shot.
And I’m just... I’m killing time here
’cause we do have one more scene to talk about.
Okay, so this scene got filmed maybe a month before the movie came out.
Out in London, on the set of Avengers,
and really it is also meant to be really, like, a hand-off of these characters
into the world going forward
and trying to bring back that sense of connection between these movies
and bringing in the Fantastic Four.
Um, you know, for our movie, what we always talked about is that
because of the way the movie ends on the street and has an immediacy to it
and Bob’s just lost his memory,
you can’t really get into, you know, the future of Bob in that moment,
and so for us, on a narrative level,
what was really important about this scene
is knowing that, you know,
Bob is with them, but had sort of processed the lesson of the movie,
which is that, you know, you can’t be The Sentry
without the other side coming underneath,
and, you know, the real task is to learn how to just be Bob.
And, of course, I expect, you know, the tension between those things
to play out in the future, though I have no insight into that.
I don’t know anything.
And then, of course,
if you have David Harbour, you gotta use him.
He carries it all.
He’s dumb, litigious man, but I am smart.
I am smart man. I have smart solve.
Avengerz.
Avengerz. With a "Z," there is no copyright.
- No. - So soft too.
But, yeah, it just, you know, it looks different,
and we talked about embracing that.
You know, it sounds different. It has the music that feels...
You know, it’s Avengers music, not our music.
And really seeing this team kind of step into a new light
and, you know, see how that feels.
And for you, Bob, in the corner hiding, pretending to read the book.
And this is, yeah.
You just get to see that Bob is there with them,
and for our movie, you know, if this has any narrative import on it,
that was the most important thing for us about this scene.
- Get a satellite image. - And fire up--
And fire... I was gonna say that.
And, yeah, just a really interesting day to be out there
when they were filming this,
and they were filming some stuff for Fantastic Four
on an adjoining stage in London, and just seeing that whole...
You know, something Lou was always excited about for Marvel
was the idea of, you know, having a lot where all these things were getting made
and getting to go around and feeling the connectedness between them,
and it really felt like I was there on that day
where, in theory, we were finishing our movie and starting another,
and another Marvel movie was being made, you know, at a stage next door.
And it was just a really, really nice day.
Extradimensional? What does that mean?
It’s a... It’s a cool ship.
And there we go. It is very fun to watch people applaud for this.
And there we go. The New Avengers, not the Thunderbolts*. And Bob.
Thank you guys so much for watching, and sorry it was just me,
but we got through it.