How To Write A Marvel Movie Explained by Marvel Writers | Vanity Fair

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- We had over the course of writing Civil War,
kind of realized the paths that Steve
and Tony were on were crossing.
Captain America who was willing to jump on a grenade
is slowly learning to value things other than sacrifice.
He realizes that maybe there's more to life
than always threatening to lose yours.
And Tony was becoming wider in his view,
right about what he needs to do
and how he needs to save people.
We realized, oh for Steve to become
his best self, he needs to get a life.
And for Tony to become his best self, he needs to lose his.
And we went oh that's pretty good,
everybody should have a milkshake, that's a good day.
I'm Steve McFeely.
- And I'm Chris Markus and this is
how we wrote a Marvel blockbuster.
[dramatic music]
Our relationship with the MCU has been
largely based around Steve Rogers, Captain America.
It's been very satisfying, you rarely get
to take a character through that many changes.
It gave us a lot of windows that
we were able to reach through for Endgame.
It was always going to be Avengers three and four.
It was always intended to be two separate movies.
I mean that was from on high, from Kevin
he did not want to make a two parter.
They're very different structurally and tonally
and that was always our intention.
- I remember no one from Marvel ever
asked us to write these movies.
[laughing]
Kevin never called and said I want you guys to write these.
We just started negotiating.
- I think really all we were handed was Thanos
which necessitated the use of the Infinity Stones
which are this, this and this throughout the MCU
and, if you want to get rid of people you can
but you're under no obligation to just
kill them willy nilly and that was just about all.
- This is not to say we picked people at random to kill.
- Not anymore than we do on a daily basis.
- Good point.
- And there were a bunch of obvious implications from that.
Namely we could bring in the Guardians
because two of Thanos' stepdaughters were on that ship.
It could be anybody from anywhere and, in fact, should be.
The beauty of working for Marvel as compared
to the rest of Hollywood is, when you get a job,
you have, for the most part, a release date.
So you are working on a real concrete movie the whole time
and then that things are staffing up
and people are starting to make drawings
of things you're writing about.
- We spent the last four months of 2015 locked
in a conference room reading everything we could.
- Reviewing all the movies that we knew about.
- And then writing every ridiculous
or not ridiculous idea we had.
We're the ones that are locked in the room
and sort of being fed under the door.
- Some people are afraid to go into the room
and other people don't know how to leave.
- It's a big table where there's usually one representative
from Marvel, in this case it was a woman named Trinh Tran,
then it's Kevin as often as he can get in there
and Joe and Ant as often as they can get in there.
Our collective is really important to how these
last four movies that we've worked on have come out.
That's one of the delightful parts of that room
was they came in and said, "Here's all the baseball cards
"with little magnets on the back."
and we went oh, amazing and so we really did just throw up
every face of alive and dead people in the MCU.
On the back it said whether we had this actor or not.
- There were something like 60 or 70 names up there
and then just staring at them and going,
I've never seen those two people together that would be fun
or they are gonna hate each other let's put them together.
There were big ideas and little ideas.
Really did give them to Marvel and to the Russos
and just said circle things.
Let's start winnowing down the movie that we're all
thinking of in our heads but haven't talked about yet.
- It's research and development sort of that stage.
Once the circle's come back we go,
ah Cap picks up Thor's hammer, obviously
we all agree that should happen somewhere.
- It gives you little mile markers to make
you feel like you're not just in a vast sea.
If you say, when would Cap pick up the hammer?
Well probably pretty late, probably over there,
put that card over there we can work toward it.
- That's why the snap was really helpful.
It was always going to be the marker between the movies
but it's a really nice flag to sort of
plant in the ground and drive towards.
The four months in that room are us slowly getting
to that outline and people coming in and looking at
the sort of serial killer board, post it's everywhere and--
- There's white board and there's three by five cards
and sometimes there's action figures.
You're winnowing down possibilities
and you're killing ideas.
- You have plenty of days where you go,
just nothing happened today--
- What do we do for a living?
- All we did is eliminate possibilities.
Oh you're talking my language man.
- This is like a bedtime story.
- Again we were in grad school writing novels
and short stories so we didn't have a film class or anything
so we just bought a book by Syd Field called Screenplay
and he had sort of chartered out a lot
of blockbuster movies or just films.
Act one, there's a turning point.
Act two is sort of the most important part to get right
and there's usually a mid point.
In between act one and the midpoint there's a little pinch.
And in between the mid point and the end
of act two, there's a second pinch.
And then the third act is whatever it's gonna be.
And when I say pinches and mid points,
those are plot points where the movie turns.
Good examples are in Winter Soldier,
Cap is on the run and he doesn't
quite know who's chasing him.
And a number of clues lead him to Camp Lehigh
and he goes down in the basement and he turns on
a computer and it turns out to be his nemesis from 1945,
only now in computer form.
And he tells him that the entire time,
what he thinks he knows, he doesn't know
and that Hydra has existed this entire time
and has been shaping the century.
The movie now flips and the audience is like,
holy crap I didn't realize that
but I guess that makes sense.
- You know, there'll be somebody out there watching this
going like of course it's a formula.
It's a framework so you don't dive in to despair--
- Or waste people's
time. - Basically.
Its something you can hang things on so that
you can actually spend more time on the character work
and on the really interesting details.
- [Steve] A card might just say, Cap picks up Mjolnir.
Well that's not enough of a scene but we know that's
gonna be over there and that gets a thumb tac on the wall.
But then another scene might be
Gamora and Nebula hug it out.
That's sort of cheeky code for they're gonna have
a meaningful scene where they reconcile.
- And there are frequently cards that are entirely subtext
where it's just like Cap needs to find
a life, Tony needs to sacrifice his.
To remind us there is a through line for these people.
The cards come off and first you
literally type up the cards.
- It's like transcribing the collective
thought of the last four months.
We'll have talked about that scene a lot
but it still only says, Gamora and Nebula hug it out.
So that one of us has to describe that scene.
- It can have dialogue, it can
have jokes, it can have sound effects.
The outline and all the scripts after it,
we write them to be read.
- Yeah it's meant to be a pretty good read.
- So that you are getting at least a nominal
sense of the excitement or sadness,
the dynamics that we're trying to build.
- We revise the heck out of it and then it's numbered,
in this case probably one through 80 or 90
and then we send it off to be blessed
by Marvel and Joe and Anthony.
- There is what is called the Marvel Parliament,
I didn't name it, which is all their
primary producers from various projects.
They know what their characters are up to.
- So you know, we killed that guy.
- We have a scene in Black Panther
that literally says he doesn't do that.
- Remember we have a villain who has the power of a God,
he's omnipotent and omniscient.
So we're faced with telling a story where,
even if we don't defeat him, how do you even start
trying to solve the problem with a guy
who can kill you with a thought and can
see it coming from a million miles away?
And it was Trinh Tran, I think mostly because she was just
frustrated said, "I wish we could just freaking kill him."
And we stopped and went oh, 'cause he was serious
about what he said and all he wanted to do was balance
the universe and so he then got rid of them.
And that one frustrated comment went us down a road
that we probably should have been down before
if were honest with Thanos' character.
And then we jump five years and we still
can't solve the problem because the Stones are gone.
And yet Scott Lang, we just requested,
can you leave him in the Quantum Realm?
And with fresh eyes, look at our problem and go,
- Have either of you guys studied quantum physics?
- Only to make conversation.
- [Steve] Quantum Realm might have a solution
for you and it's time travel.
- In real quantum physics, the Quantum Realm
does have completely different time qualities
than out here in our world.
- Yeah how did you even figure that out?
- Google.
- No we had actual
physicists-- - Oh that's right
we had physicists.
We had experts come in and say,
"If it could happen, that's
one of the ways it could happen."
- No they said Back to the Future's [bleep]
- They did.
- And I went, "Oh how dare you."
- No offense to the makers of Back to the Future.
- And that was really helpful to us, clearly.
The holy grail of nerddom.
- First we shyed away from that.
We said, "Okay we're gonna time travel
"but we're gonna go to places we haven't been before
"because we don't want it to seem
"like we're patting ourselves on the back."
But then wiser heads prevail and go,
well there's a very satisfying thing to do
which is glance off what you already know
and go down a different direction.
Which allows Steve to say, "Hail Hydra"
in an elevator that vaguely resembles the elevator
from Winter Soldier so you're getting
all these different little tweaks of satisfaction
as it goes along yet it's progressing the primary plot.
That sequence where they're figuring it out in the movie
is patterned after all of us sitting in the room going,
"Wait you know who else is alive during that time period?
"The Ancient One."
- And use them to bring everyone back.
- [Warmachine] Just like that?
- Yeah, just like that.
- Changing the past doesn't change the future.
- Look we go back, we get
the Stones before Thanos gets them.
Thanos doesn't have the Stones.
Problem solved.
- Bingo.
- That's not how it works.
- Being able to sort of weave these
threads together, yeah it was a lot of fun.
- Once we got the okay to write the script,
what we then do is we assign a page count to each scene.
So Chris'll take number one through seven,
I'll take you know, eight through 14
and we will go away for a week.
- It's generally in our individual houses.
Done at our own pace.
- Your pages are due on Friday or Monday say,
and then we swap and usually there's a text in the morning,
ready?
Almost.
And then we put them together and then we read them out loud
and then assign the next week's work.
- I did a fight scene last week, you're doing it.
- That's right.
And they'll change a lot you know,
big action set pieces so we really do try to dole those out
equally because you just have to get the raw material down.
- If you're uninspired you can wind up just writing
everything in all caps and going bam, he throws a bam.
It's about how our characters are progressing
through that action sequence and what does it mean
for their character and what does it cost to go through it?
- And we work that way, checking in every week
until we have what we call the Frankenstein draft
and that is long, repetitive, some
gold in there, a lot of chuffa.
- Once the Frankenstein is on it's feet,
then we're largely together trying to hack it into shape.
Functional is the best thing you could
ask for from a first draft.
We sit together for however many weeks
it takes and read through it and edit it
as we go and write new scenes.
That's when it goes from semi failed
experiment to functional script.
- We meet our deadlines and then that's first draft.
- It was almost like the draft was a progress report
on where we are now and where do
we wanna get to, let's all work on that.
Thanos was delightful.
It's a strangely a breath of fresh air
to be handed a 12 foot tall purple man.
- He's a character who controls every scene basically
and then when he does not control the scene,
say on Vormir, he's thrown for a loop,
it becomes incredibly dramatic
because he's faced with this really
big choice and then he ends up controlling
the scene again and at great cost.
Not every character always is that sort of,
like a rhinoceros you know?
2016, May first is both drafts are in
and then we're in prep all the way through the rest of 2016
so that's at least five or six real drafts of each one.
- We're getting notes back
and we're having new ideas about how to fix it.
Winnowing down and really focusing
on what these movies are about.
- Lila let's go.
Lila?
Honey?
- [Chris] That was originally written for Infinity War.
- Hey babe!
- To illustrate that people weren't just
snapping off on the battlefield, it wasn't
just Thanos getting rid of his enemies.
That it was happening on a more global scale.
So that when Thanos snapped his fingers,
suddenly you saw Hawkeye who you hadn't seen for the rest
of the movie and it didn't work in the pacing of it.
It forced a reset of tone
and I think it was Joe Russo and Anthony
who said, "Let's put it at the top of Endgame."
- [Steve] It lasted one cut and think about what
it does now as the first scene of Endgame.
It shows you a character you didn't see a year ago,
the audience is ahead of the character
and now they're watching going,
oh no, you're not really gonna, you bastards
are you really gonna do this in front of me?
- Reinforces what you felt at the end of Infinity War
so that you were relaunching--
- Right back into it.
- The draft process particalizes once the cameras turn on
so that you're doing 15 drafts of one scene.
- Joe and Anthony are now sitting across the table from us
and we've put it up on the screen and we're reading it
out loud and we're, you know, everyone's weighing in like,
we can beat that or we can cut that or what have you.
- As the departments come on it's becoming more interactive.
It's all part of the character building storytelling process
and you're just getting more tools
as the movie solidifies around you.
- Oh my god.
Oh my god it's so good to see you.
- Remember we had to, we were inheriting
a Thor from Ragnarok who was very well
and radically re toned from the previous Avengers movies.
So we had to fly in Hemsworth and Taika Waititi.
Well word was getting out from Australia,
"Do you guys understand what we're doing with this movie?"
No I don't know what you mean.
- On another continent.
- Are you making him an idiot?
I don't understand.
- In Ragnarok, he loses his kingdom,
his father, his sister and his eye ball.
We just thought about what would happen if any one of us
sustained that much loss and failure
and you would get incredibly depressed
and probably retreat from the world.
That is a comedic performance with a lot of
pain behind it.
- At the beginning of every day,
Chris and I are there for rehearsal
and if anything were to come out of rehearsal,
like somebody doesn't like a line
or the door is now a window, we will tweak
or provide alts, that's a big one
where we just, eight or nine different
jokes that somebody could say.
Once they start shooting that, they're gonna
shoot that all day so, our job is kind of done.
So at that point, we're either revising things
we need to do on Infinity War, if that's where we are
or we're looking ahead and trying to shine up Endgame.
- The footage was going directly to Jeff Ford the editor
who is assembling the movie as it is shot
and really clarifying what we've got, what we don't have
because the set is still there.
If we can get these actors back in the room
and have them say, "We have to go there,"
you know, sometimes a much better line than that,
this will all tie together in a much more organic way.
- And if you don't mind my asking,
where the hell have you been all this time?
- She was always going to be in it
but we didn't have much to go on.
They had cast her and that was it.
It is a tough to balance to strike when
you have a character that powerful,
who you're going to bring in and you don't
want it to seem like well we just brought in this person
who can clean the house that we
couldn't clean in the previous movie.
So we had to decide on a balance between
not making it feel like a cameo
but not having her around so much that
she solved all the problems for everybody.
- It also wasn't the point of the movie.
The point of the second movie was
saying goodbye to the original six Avengers.
So their stories were gonna be way up here.
We had the same issue a little bit with Black Panther
in Infinity War because people were going,
"Oh Black Panther he's coming back two months from now,
"all right I'm gonna get a lot of Black Panther."
and he got some and we went to Wakanda
but he wasn't the lead character.
It was not fair to the other six Avengers to
have Captain Marvel come in and solve all their problems.
It didn't seem like good storytelling.
We probably wrote the last thing for Endgame
January or February of 2019.
We knew we'd have about a month of reshoots,
particularly final battle stuff.
It was just so ambitious.
- It is more correctly entitled additional photography.
It wasn't stuff we got wrong,
it was stuff that we didn't know we needed or
we knew we needed but could never get.
Yeah we did a few tweaks early this year.
- [Steve] The end of the movie was always
on the board from say October of 2015.
- It was a big responsibility.
I mean you don't want to
arbitrarily kill him.
- Nor would we be able to.
- But it has to be the right end to that arc
and god knows how many movies now as, Tony Stark.
To get him to that point where that was the only thing
left for him to do was sacrifice himself.
Boy it made me happy when people responded
in the movie theater and got what that meant.
- It's straight out of a splash panel.
When ever a hero dies in the comics,
you get these sort of big two page spreads where
everybody's there and they're sad
and they're in various versions of their costume.
We called it the wedding for production
so that if something was lying around,
it didn't say Tony's funeral.
- [Chris] And it was a bit of a tour through the MCU
through what has happened before.
Saying goodbye to the person who
started this cinematic sequence.
- It's not when people die that is sad for the audience.
It's when the people left behind have to react to it.
I get choked up when we move through
all those people at the end of Endgame.
I get choked up at the end of Infinity War
when people like Okoye are so devastated
because T'Challa's just disappeared in front of her.
I'm not devastated because T'Challa disappeared,
I'm watching her reaction.
I'm watching Rocket's reaction to seeing Groot disappear.
- And it's almost something Tony
would've been uncomfortable with in life.
He would've made a joke about it.
He would've brought ACDC out to play.
- Which would've been
awesome. - Well it would've been cool
but they were busy.
And he is very much not there.
- But that's why we set up his giving of his own eulogy
in the very beginning of the movie with this device
where he could record into his own helmet
because we knew we wanted his to comment
on his own demise at the end.
We always thought it was incredibly apropo
that Tony Stark give his own eulogy.
Usually your good guys lose and they lose
for five minutes and now we're, you know,
they find a new way to get around it and movie ends.
What happens when they lose at the end of the movie?
And then you gotta wait a year
and then we wrap it in surround wrap
because we cut the bad guy's head off
and we take the Stones away.
- And that really is how you keep
this unprecedented thing like the MCU alive.
Most of these movies have ended with a win.
We wanted to see what happens
to their personalities when they don't.
When they you know, very, very definitively lose.
- These are confusing times.
- When we tested this with various secret audiences,
they always said, "First part's the slowest."
and we went, well we know that
but I guarantee you if we cut it in half,
even if we could, when Cap picks up the hammer,
when he says, "On your left."
it wouldn't resonate as much because
you hadn't gone so dark before.
- We really want to make them feel
that we value these characters as much as they do.
- The watch word was stick the landing.
Right that's why the code name for these was Mary Lou.
Just goes name for Mary Lou Retton.