Hi, I'm Scott Derrickson,
the director of Doctor Strange.
We're looking here at the new Marvel logo.
It was introduced on Doctor Strange when it first hit theaters.
I'm in a very interesting situation doing this commentary track
because the movie's not come out yet.
It's the day before the premiere here in LA.
So, I'm doing this commentary track, for better or for worse,
without knowing audience reactions or critical reactions
or box office performance.
Which is good in a way, I think,
because my approach to filmmaking, and this wasn't always the case,
but my approach to filmmaking now,
and I think what I've grown and matured into,
is a philosophical perspective about making a movie,
about filmmaking in general.
And that perspective is that, as an artist, as a director,
my goal, my intention, is to pick a good target for a movie,
that I believe people will want to see and will get their money's worth out of.
And that's meaningful to me as a creative person, and to hit that target.
And if I've done that, if I've picked a good target
and I've hit that target, that's the reward.
That's really the only reward that you get as a filmmaker.
It's a huge reward. It's the ultimate reward.
But it's the only one you can count on,
because I've experienced both good and bad,
that movies surprise you in the way that audiences sometimes respond,
the way that critics sometimes respond,
the way the box office performs.
Sometimes it's a good surprise. Sometimes it's a bad surprise.
Sometimes it's a mixture of both.
It's never quite what you expect.
And so, you can't really rely upon
critical reactions or box office
to tell you whether or not you did a good job on a movie,
whether or not making a movie was worthwhile.
You have to depend upon whether or not you hit the target you aimed at.
And I think the one opinion that does matter
is the audience that pays to see the movie.
I think that they're the ones that any movie is made for.
And I take that responsibility seriously. I do want them to like it.
And in this case, we'll find out.
But I have not watched it with an audience yet.
I'll do that for the first time tomorrow night.
So, everything that you're gonna hear from me is a blind perspective
in terms of critical, audience and box office response.
We'll start by talking about London, which we're in right here.
Shooting in London.
It was the primary place that we shot Kathmandu.
I wanted Kamar-Taj, the hub of sorcery,
to be global, and to have a placement all over the world.
And so, Strange travels in the movie all the way to Nepal,
and that's where the movie opened.
And go through a doorway and now you're in London.
So, Kamar-Taj as a compound, technically,
is set in four different cities.
It's in two cities in the east and two cities in the west.
New York and London in the west,
and Hong Kong and Kathmandu in the east.
That was important to me just because of the mythology.
Not for really any other reason than that.
It was not wanting to make the obvious mistake
of having it be too American-centric
when sorcerers are protecting the Earth,
not just the western world and certainly not just America.
This visual effects sequence
is the first big visual effects sequence in the movie.
The term that we use for the fractal work that you see in terms...
That's the technical mathematical formula
of the metal and stone manipulations here.
We call it Mandelbrotting, which I think is a correct term.
But it was a visual effect that I'd seen
on various YouTube videos and GIFs and stuff like that online.
And I was always mesmerized by it when I saw it.
And as we started to work
with this fractal patterning and spatial manipulation,
it became an increasingly important storytelling device.
And that's what that opening scene was meant to do,
is to introduce a visual language
of weirdness and magic that we haven't seen before.
I like stories about magic very much and I love the idea of a magical world.
But I do feel like, in cinema,
magic has grown a little tired and familiar.
And we rely so much on tropes.
But I'll get back to that when we get back to Kamar-Taj.
This sequence here is pretty detailed
in its accuracy of people in position for a surgery like this.
For a brain surgery.
For a doctor doing what a neurosurgeon does.
We had a specialist with us at all times.
We rehearsed with all of the actors
to make sure that everything that they were doing was real and proper.
And no one's gonna know that except for brain surgeons.
(CHUCKLES) Literally, brain surgeons.
No one else will know, so why do it?
I feel that accuracy in professions is something that audiences can feel.
That when you're cheating something technical in a profession,
they may not know it, but somehow they feel it.
And somehow it does not come across as accurate.
And my wife is a nurse also.
So, I get a lot of flak if ever I do anything improper, medically.
So, I suppose that's probably the greater of the two reasons
for so much medical accuracy.
But it's also rooted in the character.
The title is Doctor Strange, here he is. He's a doctor.
And even though he ends the movie by becoming a sorcerer
and he loses the use of his hands and can no longer be a neurosurgeon,
he never stops being a doctor.
And I think that that's a critical aspect of his character
that we're setting up here, that he is very good at his profession.
And doctors take a Hippocratic oath.
They are required, and make a literal oath,
to do no harm.
And so, when you've got a superhero engaging in combat and fighting,
and as we find out later, kills somebody,
it doesn't set well with him.
And he's gonna have a different moral code.
By nature, even though he's a selfish egotistical guy,
he still takes his Hippocratic oath seriously
and still cares very much about being a doctor.
This is another scene where we went out of our way
to keep everything as accurate as possible.
This initial phase of the surgery
would have taken place without surgical masks,
and then when they get the MRI machine into place,
they would put the masks on.
So, if you're wondering why there's no masks, and then they have masks,
it's because of the urgency of getting into the position to remove the bullet,
and then they bring this in.
Again, small things,
but they make a difference in the way something feels.
As far as adapting the comic book Doctor Strange into a movie,
I had a very definite approach
coming into Marvel when I met with them.
(CHUCKLING) I had to go through eight different meetings to get the job.
I remember counting them.
And there were a lot of people vying for the job.
And there were a lot of people who were trying
to become the director of Doctor Strange.
And I'll say, to start with, that to Kevin Feige's great credit,
he hires, oftentimes, unlikely people to do big movies for them.
I don't think another studio
would have hired James Gunn
to do a movie the size of Guardians of the Galaxy.
Certainly no studio was ever considering hiring the Russo brothers,
who'd worked mostly in television, to direct a massive tentpole movie.
And nobody would've considered me to do a movie of this scale.
Especially when the only time I ever made a big budget movie
was The Day the Earth Stood Still.
That was a movie that was, I don't know,
a third of the budget of this, I guess.
Certainly, half or greater.
They respect passion, experience, and talent.
And I had, I think, proven my filmmaking skill
in the horror genre and success in that genre,
and they knew my movies.
And so, I was one of many people that was invited to meet initially.
And I knew the comics, and I loved the comics.
I grew up reading Marvel comics,
and Doctor Strange is my favorite comic book,
and feels uniquely suited to my sensibility,
which is why I always connected with it.
When I met with Marvel,
I had a very strong point of view about Doctor Strange.
What made the comic book great,
what made Doctor Strange an interesting character,
what made the visual nature of every iteration of Doctor Strange
unique and important.
And to my surprise,
my thoughts lined up quite nicely with their thoughts.
And when I knew that that was the case,
it was almost like a switch went off in my brain
and I just decided, "I'm gonna get this job.
"I'm gonna outwork everyone. I'm gonna show them the movie.
"I'm gonna spend a lot of my own money," which I did.
"And I'm gonna write scenes," which I did,
"and really present to them what Doctor Strange is gonna be like."
And it all goes back to those '60s comics.
And speaking of the '60s,
I love the fact that Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive is here.
One of the first great psychedelic albums.
1968, I believe.
In the '60s, in this psychedelic era,
in the cultural revolution that was happening at the time,
Stan Lee's comic books were already very popular coming out of the '50s.
Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk.
These were very popular comic books.
And here comes Doctor Strange in the '60s,
first in a volume called Strange Tales
and then in his own self-titled comic books.
A character who is not like the rest of the MCU,
primarily because he deals with magic
and the supernatural and sorcery and other dimensions.
And I think that at the time,
Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were feeling what was happening in the world,
that people were opening their minds,
people were finding new ways of looking at things.
The psychedelia of art
that was beginning to explode at that time,
in the mid-'60s into the late '60s
They were a part of that.
And the images that Steve Ditko drew
are still progressive and still psychedelic and amazing.
And the origin story always comes down to
what we've seen on the screen so far.
And this is true for every new generation of Doctor Strange comics.
A neurosurgeon who's arrogant,
full of himself, not the nicest guy.
He's charming, but not Tony Stark charming.
He's more materialistic, he's more career-driven.
He's really in need of moral and spiritual enlightenment.
And then he gets into a car crash,
and even though he thinks his life is awesome,
he thinks his life is amazing, he has everything he wants,
little does he know he's actually quite vacant and shallow.
And even though he might be happy or satisfied with his life,
his life is in fact empty.
And this is the event that changes everything.
This car accident that crushes his hands.
And it's obviously not the loss of his hands that's so significant.
It's the loss of his identity as a doctor.
It's the loss of what made him Stephen Strange,
what made him Doctor Strange.
It was the source of his income
and it was the source of his inflated ego.
And it was taken away from him.
And I think that part of what always appealed to me
about the comics of Doctor Strange
was this very idea of a character who is defined
by a certain kind of egocentrism,
and defined by expertise and money and success,
but then encounters
what by any definition is a real tragedy.
It's certainly a real trauma.
And I really believe that tragedy and trauma are just that.
They're tragedies and traumas, and I don't wish them on anyone.
But I think that they also are, oftentimes,
the very things that are necessary in our lives to dislodge us from ourselves
and to reckon with who we really are.
To assess our own lives,
and to reconsider the life that we're living
and who we're meant to be.
And that's what happens to Stephen Strange.
He doesn't become reflective about his life quickly,
because he's so entrenched in his own egocentrism
and in his own drive and his own career success.
And yet, this trauma is gonna force him into that reckoning.
It's gonna force him to deal with himself.
And he's fortunate because he doesn't give up on his quest for healing.
He doesn't start to look inside or look for a different way of life.
He doesn't look for a way of becoming a better person or moving on.
He only is driven to return to his old life.
And yet, his old life is completely over.
It will never be the same.
It has been taken from him, and it won't be returned.
And the comic books repeatedly told that origin story over generations.
Every time they rebooted Doctor Strange,
that would always be the story, because it's such a good one.
It's such an interesting story.
And I felt like that was probably the most critical thing
that had to be preserved in making a Doctor Strange movie.
That basic setup.
Then the meeting of the Ancient One, and an introduction to sorcery.
And other than that, there were a lot of different things
that could be taken or left from the comics, in terms of story.
But the one other thing, fundamentally,
that I felt had to remain in a movie adaptation
was the visual ambition of Steve Ditko's artwork.
He was an artist who drew things back in the '60s
that are still progressive, and still unique.
I think some of the greatest comic book panels ever drawn
were in Doctor Strange in those early Lee/Ditko comics.
And the movie is based very uniquely on those comics,
and a lot of the visuals are drawn heavily from the comics.
There are other comic book influences that we'll talk about later.
But it's proper and good to say, first and foremost,
this movie was made out of respect for those Lee/Ditko comics.
Now, this scene is one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
Partly because it's surprising
as a scene within a comic book movie to me.
Every time I would watch the scene out together in the editing room,
I felt like I was looking at some indie film
that we shot in an apartment in New York.
And it just has a quality of performance and drama
that's not typical for comic book movies and event movies.
But again, I think this gets to the heart
of why Kevin Feige picked me to do this movie.
He looked at my background in horror,
and saw a tendency I think that I have,
a creative tendency, and a creative instinct,
which is, number one, I'm drawn to stories
about the fantastical and the supernatural,
and the metaphysical, the paranormal, the magical.
Those are the stories I'm equipped to tell,
and I tell by nature.
I'm drawn to them.
Those are the stories that are in me.
But specifically, I tell those stories through,
to the best of my ability,
grounded characters and realistic characters played by good actors.
I had Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson in an exorcism movie.
And Ethan Hawke, in Sinister.
Eric Bana and Edgar Ramirez in Deliver Us from Evil.
These are all characters who are very realistic
and have heavy dramatic scenes within the movie.
And in this case,
you've got Rachel McAdams and Benedict Cumberbatch,
very serious actors who've been nominated or won Academy Awards.
Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mads Mikkelsen, they're all so good.
And they're not the kind of actors you would immediately associate
with a supernatural movie, or a superhero movie.
And it's the reason I liked getting actors like that into films like this,
because my philosophy of it, my directorial perspective,
my directorial approach is that
the more realistic and the more grounded and the more relatable
in terms of real human drama a character is,
the more powerful and realistic and effective the fantastical is
when it enters into the movie.
And so, by this point in the film, other than the opening teaser,
nothing magical or fantastical or weird
has happened to Stephen Strange,
and it's not going to until he meets the Ancient One.
But what we're doing here is not just setting up the deflation of his ego
through this traumatic accident.
But we're also setting up the realism of the world.
We're setting up a guy in the real world.
In this case, you really feel like this is a...
(CHUCKLES) I think, at least to me, it feels like a guy who's on the outs,
and is tumbling down the landslide of his own ego
and he's in this gritty New York environment,
so desperate, he's reaching out to this stranger
who he knows was healed from
what he considers to be an inoperable injury.
And I think all of this done as realistically as it is,
as opposed to with more, uh, pop sensibility or...
There's just a tone that a lot of event movies have,
where things aren't taken so seriously.
I think that would've been a mistake for Doctor Strange
because we're going to push the unreality of the movie so far.
And we're gonna get into such weirdness later on,
that the more we ground it here,
the more that weirdness will be believable and effective.
And I think that the more the audience feels that fantastical being real,
the more it reflects on the characters,
and it becomes a synergistic relationship
between drama and the metaphysical,
magical, and mystical nature of the movie.
It is a movie about magic, and I didn't want magic to feel familiar.
And I wanted it to be encountered in a way
that we haven't encountered it before.
And all of this is a setup for that.
Now, this is a big break point in the movie,
when we go to Nepal.
Now, why Nepal?
This is a question I've been asked before.
A variety of reasons.
One, I hinted at earlier,
which is I really wanted two cities in the east representing Kamar-Taj,
and I knew Hong Kong was gonna be the final one mostly for visual reasons,
just because of the look of that city and what we do with it,
this putting back together of the city.
But I wanted one that was another eastern city
that was less familiar, that wasn't East Asian.
And we scouted a bunch of places.
But when I went to Kathmandu, I felt like Strange looks here.
(CHUCKLE) This overwhelmed disorientation
at the stimulus of the place,
and the visual power of the place, and the uniqueness of it.
And Kathmandu is a really astonishing place to visit as a white westerner
because of its incredible energy to start with.
Hordes of people walking all the time. Just people everywhere.
It's much more crowded than New York City.
It's just wall-to-wall people and bikes and mopeds.
And yet unlike any American city I've been to,
there is an odd, ineffable peace about it.
And people don't honk their horns. People are patient.
And the visual texture of the city is extraordinarily unique.
And having visited there,
I was surprised that more films haven't been done there
because it is so visually fantastic.
Now, we scouted there and made the decision to shoot there,
but then the earthquake in Nepal happened
between our scout and the beginning of pre-production.
And there were discussions
about whether or not we were gonna go there to shoot because, is it safe?
Is there gonna be another one? That was a devastating earthquake.
(CHUCKLING) It also destroyed a lot of the locations we wanted to shoot in.
There were places that were reduced to rubble.
And when we were shooting there, there were piles of rubble everywhere
because they were still cleaning it out and clearing it out,
and they didn't really have anywhere to take all of this rubble.
Well, Benedict and I had a conversation about it
and we both agreed that the earthquake
was all the more reason to shoot there.
That tourism is such an important
source of income for Kathmandu.
Their economy really depends upon it.
And so, we knew that they had taken a huge hit,
and that people were afraid to go there.
And so, we said,
"Hey, let's go there and shoot it the way that we experienced it
"when I first visited,
"and possibly, help put it back on the map a bit."
And we gave a lot of the Nepalese jobs,
people who were out of work because of the earthquake.
And a lot of extras, crew members, all kinds of positions.
And it was fantastic.
I really loved being there.
I loved the way it smelled, I loved the people that I met,
I think a western film approaching the east
can be guilty of what's called "exoticism."
The tendency to take
a western view of the east,
and commercialize it for consumption.
I tried very hard to stay away from that tendency
and tried very hard to see it clearly through the perspective of a visitor.
Benedict had been there before in the past, but I shot it in such a way
that it felt the way that it felt to me when I first visited,
which was beautiful and overwhelming and unique.
This is obviously a set built in London
by our production designer, Charlie Wood.
The detail in here is extraordinary.
He is in a league of his own in terms of production design.
And here we have the introduction of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One.
Probably the most controversial casting choice
I've ever been involved with in a movie.
A bit unfortunate, I think.
A bit of it is due to the timing of our movie.
Our first trailer came out,
and there was no problem anybody had
with the Ancient One being played by Tilda Swinton.
There is a lot of talk about the term "whitewashing,"
which I don't know really applies here for two reasons.
One, the Ancient One is not always Asian in the comics.
The Sorcerer Supreme is a title that is handed down,
and there were different iterations of it in the comics.
But more significantly,
that's a term that strongly implies or declares a racist intention.
And I certainly didn't have that.
I felt really tortured
by the decision of who to cast in this role. (CHUCKLING)
Because I was up against, what felt like and still feels like,
a bit of a no-win situation.
I had two characters in the comics.
Wong and the Ancient One, who were both pretty bad racial stereotypes.
And I thought Wong was the more offensive one,
being a sidekick, kung fu manservant.
(CHUCKLING) I didn't really know what to do with that character.
I was thinking maybe we just wouldn't have him in the movie.
He wasn't instrumental to the origin story of Doctor Strange,
and we could leave him out like we left Clea out,
and some of the other major characters.
But the Ancient One,
it was not an option to leave the Ancient One out
because there's no story without him meeting her here,
or meeting the Ancient One here.
And I knew that I had to get away
from the stereotypical western view of Asians
that was a stereotype perpetrated
by the Fu Manchu-wearing magical Asian on the hill,
who becomes a magical, mystical mentor to the white hero.
And so, my first decision was to cast a woman.
And I wanted a woman, not just any woman.
I wanted a woman Tilda's age.
A woman who wasn't a 26-year-old, leather-clad, fanboy dream girl,
but had some maturity and interest and intrigue.
And we talked about Asian actresses.
But as I worked on the scripts,
I will confess, I simply could not find a way
to avoid having this character be what she is.
A magical, mystical, martial arts mentor
with some hidden motives and secrets,
and domineering.
And everything I just described in a woman,
if that woman is Asian, it's a dragon lady.
And I spoke with numerous Asian-American friends,
Asian-American film critics,
and they agreed that I was probably best off
not perpetrating that dragon lady stereotype
that we saw in past movies going back to Anna May Wong
and a stereotype perpetrated
throughout movie and television history.
And so, I looked for an actress
who could embody what was great about the Ancient One,
this intrigue and this mysterious quality.
And Tilda seemed perfect, and when I thought of her,
I was able to write the role in a unique and fresh way.
And I think she did an amazing job.
Now, here is the beginning of the psychedelia of the movie.
And I loved the idea of Doctor Strange
really being thrown into the world of mystery,
mysticism, magic, and psychedelia in a most mind-bending fashion,
and a shock to the system because he is so narcissistic,
and so self-absorbed,
that the only way he's gonna be reached
is for his skeptical, materialistic,
materialist, narrow-minded view of the world
was gonna have to be snapped like a spell.
And the Ancient One understands that, so she sends him on this mind trip.
And this is at the heart of Doctor Strange, the comic, I think.
These kind of mind-bending visuals
and this kind of psychedelic aesthetic,
where you've got characters in environments
that you haven't seen before.
This, so far, right here, this little section,
is probably the one that's been most commented on
by people I do know have seen the movie.
That this is a little bit of the horror director coming out,
this bit with the hands.
For people who don't watch horror, it's pretty horrific, I guess.
So, I got a touch of it in here.
This image here, obviously, is a nod to Ant-Man and the Quantum Realm,
acknowledging that as one of the mysterious realms of existence.
And this is straight Steve Ditko right here.
That's like right out of the comic books.
That's right off of my 1971 black light poster,
which I think was Jack Kirby, if I'm not mistaken.
And the first hint of Dormammu, our villain.
Now, this next line is one of the most important lines in the movie.
"Who are you in this vast Multiverse, Mr. Strange?"
And here's a guy who's been stripped of his identity,
has nothing in his heart but anger
that his identity has been taken from him,
and his money, and his ego is so bruised.
And she breaks him down and asks him that question,
and he is humbled by it.
Which I think is very realistic.
I think if you actually had that experience,
and knew that you had just encountered something that was real,
you would want to be taught by this person.
You would want to know what she knows.
(CHUCKLING) And she throws him out, which I think is great.
And we come to find out that she's nervous about Kaecilius.
She's nervous that this guy hasn't...
She can sense that he's adept,
that he could probably become a great sorcerer,
that he has what it takes and has a mindset that is unique.
Which is why Mordo brought him into Kamar-Taj,
because he sensed the same thing.
But she does not want to make the same mistake
that she made with Kaecilius.
And here begins the kind of family drama of the movie.
I always thought of the movie...
Not always. It was really more of a discovery.
But I came to think of the movie as this mother figure and her three sons.
She's got the good son in Mordo,
she's got the bad, wayward son in Kaecilius,
and then she's got this new son in Strange.
And that part of her motive in letting him in,
and I think part of Mordo's motive in bringing Strange in,
is a search for redemption on their own part
of wanting to find somebody who they know
has the capacity that Strange has,
as Kaecilius did, and to do it right,
and to make up for that mistake.
And Mordo and his sense of justice, and his sense of balance,
and his sense of things being made right,
and the rules being kept,
I think he feels that there's an absence in Kamar-Taj that needs to be filled.
And it's one of the reasons he advocates Strange being brought in.
This next bit leads up to the Wi-Fi password joke,
which is probably the biggest laugh in the movie,
at least at the screenings that I attended and the test screenings.
And it's because we're taking the piss out of it,
as we say here, occasionally.
We're setting up this very magical place and it all feels very serious,
and "shamballa" looks like a serious word.
(CHUCKLING) And then he's like, "It's a Wi-Fi password."
We're not beyond technology here. We're not below technology, either.
This is still a real place in the real modern world.
I want to talk a little bit about Benedict
as we move into this training sequence.
I've said it in a lot of interviews,
but those of you listening may not have ever heard about this.
He was absolutely my first choice for the movie,
and Marvel's first choice for the movie.
We talked about who should play him.
We concluded that it should be Benedict Cumberbatch,
and we decided to meet with him and offer him the movie.
I flew to London. Talked him through the whole movie.
We didn't even have a script at that point.
And he wanted to do it. He was game for doing it.
He understood what we were trying to make.
But he was unavailable because he was doing Hamlet in the summer.
And we were not gonna be able to finish the movie
in time for our summer release date.
So, I went and met with a lot of other actors, and good actors,
and I just did not feel that anyone was the right actor for Stephen Strange,
and so, I went back to Kevin and said, "It's gotta be Benedict," and he agreed.
And to his credit, he pushed the release date for an actor,
which is an expensive thing to do
'cause we were already in pre-production,
but it was certainly the right thing to do
because he does have qualities that are so uniquely Doctor Strange.
I certainly can't picture anybody else doing it at this point.
And I think that the qualities specifically are high intelligence,
high education, enough to believe him as a neurosurgeon.
He certainly carries himself
with enough sophistication and experience
to believe that he's part of New York elite high society,
and an expert at something as difficult as brain surgery.
But he's also got incredible depth of emotional range
and tremendous depth of emotion and incredible range of emotion
that he can access at any time.
And Doctor Strange goes through so much in this movie.
He goes through so many emotional iterations,
that I just needed Benedict to be able to play all of them.
Like this scene right here, I love this scene,
and it's another scene that usually gets a good laugh.
And I think it gets a laugh because...
Well, it is funny and it's Benedict's comedic timing,
but he's humble.
We see a humility here and in the previous scene
that is the result of him being broken by the Ancient One.
And I really love that because, again,
that's what trauma and pain and suffering do. (SOFT CHUCKLE)
They humble you and they break you down.
And eventually, they force you to reckon with things
you otherwise would never reckon with.
And all of us have it.
All of us in this life endure trauma at some point and to some degree.
All of us have to deal with our own kinds of pain and suffering.
No one is without it.
Some people have much worse trauma and pain and suffering than others.
But every one of us has to learn how we're going to respond to it.
And I've just become a big believer that
you don't want it, you don't wish it on anybody,
but when it's in your life, when you experience something traumatic,
or any kind of personal pain or suffering, don't waste it, you know?
Let it transform you into something better than you are.
Because it will force you to reckon with yourself
in ways you otherwise wouldn't.
And it's one of the deeper explorations of this movie.
I didn't set out to try to say that.
I didn't really set out to try to say anything with this movie.
I took a very different approach to this movie
than any film I've done before.
I set out to explore things and to listen to what the movie had to teach me.
And I read a lot of books, and listened to a lot of people,
and thought a lot about different things.
And some of the themes,
and some of the mysticism, some of the ideas,
some of the basic truths about human life that come out in this movie
weren't necessarily things that I thought about much
prior to making this movie.
They were the result of relationships I was in while I was making it,
people I knew while I was making it,
books I was reading while I was making it.
All a deliberate search for more truth and meaning in my own life,
and trying to translate that into some kind of good creative story
that's a Marvel movie. (CHUCKLES)
And here we have Mads Mikkelsen, the great Mads Mikkelsen.
What can I say about Mads?
He is one of the most positive actors I've ever worked with.
Just constantly, perpetually positive in the best way.
So fun to work with and very focused.
Always focused on the work.
He's usually not standing around, talking about this or that.
He's usually pacing, thinking about the scene.
And he was like a kid in a candy shop on this movie
because he always wanted to be in a kung fu movie.
(LAUGHS) When I first talked to him about the role,
I was telling him about his motivation, and he's this disenfranchised sorcerer,
and he's obsessed with eternal life and death and betrayal
and the hypocrisy of the Ancient One, and he was very interested in all that.
But then when I told him he was gonna have to train for the fight scenes,
he said, "You mean I get to fight like a kung fu movie?"
I said, "Well, yeah. A lot of it. There's a lot of fighting."
He said, "Oh, that's all you had to say. I'm in. I'll do it."
(CHUCKLING) Like, he said that right on the phone,
and I thought that was so fantastic.
I told him, I said, "I think I should hang up right now."
More of the kind of fractal, weird,
matter manipulation in the church there.
That was one of the first images that we experimented with
in our visual effects design,
how to move matter around.
And it worked so well, we built more of the story around it
and made that a really special power that Strange had.
Now, this section of the movie, this training section,
is longer than I expected it to be.
I didn't think that I was gonna make a long movie
because I tend to gravitate toward simple plots with complex characters,
because I think most bad movies
are complex plots with simple characters.
And we've all seen those,
and we all know how long they can feel.
But a relatively simple story, which this is,
with complicated characters, is very engaging.
And so, I was relying on the characters and that drama
and Strange's growth and origin to make the movie interesting,
and the visual effects sequences,
the big event sequences as well, of course.
But the audience, when we tested the movie, just wanted more training.
They just wanted more than I had initially shot.
So, we shot some more of this
and added it to the movie because they just loved it.
(CHUCKLING) I love that Hamir character, by the way.
We set him up deliberately at the beginning
as kind of a nod to the stereotype
or the cliché that we were trying to avoid,
and that Strange himself falls prey to.
He walks in and sees the old Asian man with the beard,
and assumes, "Oh, that's the Ancient One."
And it's not, it's actually this bald woman.
And then when he does have a moment in the movie,
we know that he's a master sorcerer,
and when we have a moment in the movie,
we find out that he has a disability.
And I'm not talking about how progressive my movie is.
But I am saying that diversity is the responsibility of directors.
And directors gotta take responsibility for diversity,
and do the best that they can.
I don't know that I could've done a better job on this movie with diversity.
But I'll say one more thing,
just going back to seeing Tilda there, and addressing this subject.
I will say that the movie, I'm sure, even after its release,
will still have critics
for whitewashing the role of the Ancient One and casting Tilda.
And I don't fault anybody for being critical of that.
I think it's really important that activists,
Asian-American activists, continue to be loud and angry
about the subject of whitewashing,
about the subject of the erasure of Asian roles, about stereotyping.
And they have to be loud and angry and dogged and relentless
because otherwise no one will listen to them.
And representation of Asian-Americans
throughout Hollywood cinema is abysmal.
It's so bad and always has been bad.
At least if you're African-American,
you've had some movie stars over the last 30 years to relate to.
Will Smith and Denzel and Eddie Murphy in the '80s .
And if you're Asian-American,
you're as American as me if you grew up here.
And you're racially 5% of the US population,
but you sure don't get 5% of the movie stars.
So, it's something that's gonna have to change,
and it was an issue I took very seriously in this movie.
Which is why after making the decision to cast Tilda,
because I really felt that was best for the movie
and for the issue of diversity,
it was my best shot at making the right choice there.
Whether you agree with it or not,
I certainly did it with the best possible motives.
But because I was losing what could've been
an Asian role in the movie,
I made this character, Wong, a major character.
I didn't just bring him into the movie,
but I made sure that he was substantial.
(CHUCKLES) And the trick was to, essentially, invert him from the comics.
Instead of a man servant, he's a librarian.
Instead of a sidekick, he's Strange's intellectual mentor.
Instead of him being somebody
who takes care of Strange inside of Kamar-Taj,
he's a master of the Mystic Arts.
And Strange and he have this great relationship
that develops through the movie
because Wong is as hard on him or harder than even the Ancient One,
and is instrumental to his growth.
And I love that at the end of the movie, it's the two of them together.
They're the two survivors of this whole drama within Kamar-Taj.
Kaecilius is taken into the Dark Dimension,
the Ancient One has been killed, and Mordo has left.
And by the end tag of the movie,
we know that he is heading off to the dark side in a bad way,
and it's just Wong and Strange left.
And Wong is still his master.
Wong is still schooling him
about how little he really knows.
This Mirror Dimension idea
was an idea based on a desire
to create a kind of magic that the audience hadn't seen before.
The manipulation of matter
in a dimension that's ever-present but invisible.
A mirrored reflection of our reality.
I like this idea quite a bit
and I like how it's visually represented with these shards,
and this manipulation of matter, which we see
all through what we call the Mirror Dimension chase that comes later on.
This was a starting point for me in making Doctor Strange.
Wanting to have visual set-pieces that were brand new
and not like other things we've seen before.
I remember saying to Kevin, when I was meeting with him,
that every major visual effects sequence in Doctor Strange
should feel like the weirdest scene in any other movie.
And if all of our scenes would be the weirdest scene in any other movie,
then we have something worthy of the comic book title Doctor Strange.
And the Mirror Dimension was set up.
We just showed the astral plane
that was set up by seeing Strange studying there
and what we call the astral push,
when she knocked him out of his body.
Here, we're getting backstory on Kaecilius,
and how he stole the ritual in the opening scene, and why he stole it.
All of these, including the upcoming scene with the apple,
are serving two purposes.
Well, three purposes.
Number one, they're entertaining in their own right,
because this is a new world we're introducing,
this world of magic.
Number two, they're showing Strange's growth.
His arrogance is starting to return a little bit
and his confidence is starting to return
as he becomes better at the Mystic Arts.
But probably more than anything,
we're setting up the second half of the movie.
Because in a movie about magic,
you've got to understand a little bit of how it works.
I'm a big believer in not explaining away magic,
not giving magic too much of a scientific explanation,
because if it has too much of a scientific explanation,
it's not magic anymore.
Magic, by definition, is ineffable and beyond our understanding.
It's channeling something mysterious,
something bigger than ourselves,
something more powerful than ourselves.
And that's what makes it fun.
The whole idea of spells, incantations, and all of that
is about the use of power bigger than ourselves.
And this whole section of the movie,
this training section, is both showing Strange growing,
and we learn how he became able
to do the things he does in the second half.
But we're also setting up the world of magic.
Mordo's Vaulting Boots. We just set those up.
We just set up Strange's whip,
and where it came from and how he uses it,
and why he uses it the way that he uses it.
And the trick is to do all of that
in a way that feels fluid and seamless and keeps you engaged.
And that, hopefully, is the case here
because we're with Strange as a character.
We're watching him transform and change.
We're watching him grow.
Even though we're not even halfway through the movie,
he's already a different guy than he used to be.
Tagging the word "time" there after he looks at the watch,
obviously a major theme throughout the movie.
Time.
And I think trauma and time, healing,
these are all thematic things that are dealt with
recurrently throughout the movie.
But again, I don't believe in reducing a movie to a simple theme
or a simple idea or a series of ideas,
because if you could just say what the movie's about,
and if you could just say all of what makes it significant,
you wouldn't need to make the movie.
Flannery O'Connor said, "If you can easily state the theme of a movie..."
I'm sorry. "If you can easily state the theme of a story,
"you can be sure it's not a good one."
So, at least on this movie,
I've resisted trying to hit any particular theme hard.
I just let themes and ideas emerge
in the storytelling while I was writing.
And it certainly deals in subjects that matter to me
and I think are integral to the character.
This scene turned out pretty good, I think.
I really love this moment of the apple
moving because it's such a small thing.
I needed to have an example of magic
to help usher the audience into real experiences
in real time of how magic works.
And my first idea was to do it with gestures
rather than spoken spells.
And in this case, it's the manipulation of time
using the Infinity Stone around his neck,
what we'll find out is an Infinity Stone.
But I like this manipulation,
just the cinematic quality of this camera move,
moving with Strange's gesture.
And it goes from left to right,
and then from right to left like a timeline.
If you ever drew a timeline on a board,
it moves forward, from left to right, and backwards from right to left.
And so, I think, intuitively, with a single shot,
the feeling of that apple moving through time feels effortless.
And those kind of things are surprisingly hard to achieve.
They look simple when they're done, but getting that right was not easy.
I'll say a word here about our visual effects vendors.
Looking at some of these shots, that was a particularly tricky one.
Sometimes the shots that you think are gonna be really hard are very easy.
And some shots you think will be very easy are very hard.
But ILM, I think, was the biggest vendor on this movie.
Luma did the Dark Dimension.
Framestore did a big section of the movie.
Method did a big section of the movie.
And there's other vendors that I'm leaving out.
And lots of smaller vendors.
And we have so many vendors on the movie,
not just because the movie's so big,
but because we had a short post-production schedule.
And because we moved the movie for Benedict,
we didn't have as much time for post as we needed.
And so, we had a lot more visual effects people
working on this movie than normal,
because we had to get it done so quickly.
And I think that all of the vendors did a really good job.
I'm quite satisfied with the visual effects in this movie.
I think that they worked pretty well.
Visual effects are obviously critical to this movie,
and they're critical to any big budget movie of this size.
But as George Lucas once said,
"The best visual effect in the world,
"if it doesn't contribute to the story or to the character, is boring."
And I've always remembered him saying that.
I ascribe to the exact same philosophy.
And in this movie,
as much of a unique attempt as we were making,
trying to create some spellbinding images and some new things,
I was also trying to write those sequences
in a way that was connected to the story
and more specifically, connected to the character.
This scene here is surprisingly watchable for me.
Again, I can't speak for an audience at this point,
but it's surprisingly watchable, even though it's straight exposition.
And it's exposition that's interesting
because it's unique and it is storytelling.
We're getting a backstory of a place.
Kamar-Taj and these Sanctums and Agamotto,
and where the Eye of Agamotto came from,
where that name came from.
And most significantly,
it's watchable because of Benedict Wong.
I think that guy could read the phone book,
and I would be compelled.
Boy, I just dated myself by referencing the phone book.
Do they even have those anymore?
But he is an actor who
consistently makes things interesting.
(CHUCKLING) He can take any bit of dialogue
and give it gravity and weight and make it compelling.
He's so good.
And I was just unbelievably fortunate
to have the caliber of actors in this movie that I do.
And not only the caliber of actors,
but the caliber of human beings that they were.
Benedict, Tilda, Rachel, Benedict Wong, Chiwetel,
all of them are spectacular actors.
Like, five-star actors. As good as they get.
They loved working with each other.
They all worked really well together,
and they are all tremendous human beings.
And I'm not just saying that. We all really loved working together.
And they're all really unique, too.
Chiwetel is probably the person I spoke to the most on set.
Mads is great, too, but I already gave him some props.
But Chiwetel was probably the person I spoke to the most on set,
just because he knows everything.
(LAUGHS)
He is one of the most educated people you will ever meet.
And, when it comes to history,
he might be the most educated person I know when it comes to history.
He knows history so incredibly well.
He was a history student in school.
I think he has a master's in some kind of historical study.
But you can bring up
almost any socioeconomic, political, historical subject,
and he will have incredible insights into it.
And he speaks perfect paragraphs.
He's very eloquent.
And I learned a lot from him just by general conversation.
Because he was always surprising me with his knowledge of things.
And it's so odd that a guy that is that intellectually driven...
I mean, he still reads history voraciously.
That a guy like that is so emotional on camera.
That he is so brainy and so emotional at the same time,
and he can get so much depth of nuance
out of any moment.
He's a very specific actor.
I made the mistake of watching 12 Years a Slave the day I met him.
I hadn't seen it.
It had won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
And I still hadn't seen it,
mainly because I was working on this movie.
And stupidly, I watched it the morning that I was meeting with him,
and I knew how much I loved him as an actor from previous work.
I wanted to hire him based on things I had seen him do before.
I'd been a fan of his since Dirty Pretty Things.
(CHUCKLING) But I watched that movie and...
And he came in and I just couldn't speak.
I couldn't speak without talking about 12 Years A Slave.
I felt like it was one of the most important movies I'd ever seen,
and I was so emotionally affected by it,
and I kept apologizing to him because I was shaken by that movie
and I was so overwhelmed by it,
and I think he was appreciative that I was being honest.
But I really didn't have any choice
because it's one of those movies that rattles you to your core.
And he deserves all the accolades he's gotten for it.
This is really the moment where
the unrelenting action of the movie kicks in.
Basically, from this point forward, it's a straight-up action film,
and we only break for moments of dramatic tension.
There is no stopping from here to the end of the movie.
And I like the structure of this movie.
And it's something that a lot of Marvel movies do.
I find myself, oftentimes, watching their movies,
thinking at the beginning,
"Boy, this is taking its time to get going."
But the fact of the matter is
Marvel movies take their time to get to know the characters.
I felt that way in Captain America,
I felt that way in Civil War this summer.
I remember feeling that way when I saw Ant-Man.
And yet, if you do that,
then when the action starts, you're so invested in the character,
the action is so much better.
This sequence was shot mostly practically.
There's obviously visual effects in the space shards,
which is what we call the weapons that Mads and the Zealots carry,
and in the whip,
the light whip and the shields,
the mandala shields, that Strange conjures here.
But otherwise,
most of the surrounding environment here is physical.
This was a real set that we built. A real hallway.
That was a real wire stunt that Mads did right there.
He sure loved the wire work, Mads.
And he was good at it.
Fifty years old, and he did almost all of his own stunts
during this extended fight sequence.
Katrina, our stunt gal, and the great Scott Adkins
did their own stunts.
They were cast because they are great stunt people.
Katrina's the blonde Zealot in the back.
And Scott Adkins, if you don't know him,
is a movie star in his own right.
Starred in a lot of martial arts movies in a leading role
and was gracious enough
to be in this movie as the Zealot.
And I don't know how we could have done the movie
without an actor as good as him doing these on-camera stunts.
If you watch this right here,
he's about to do a kick, Scott Adkins, that only he does.
That one right there.
That's his signature kick that,
I believe, you won't see other martial artists do, because they can't.
It's unique to him.
I think he may have made that move up.
This was a part of
the idea of these kind of mind-bending action sequences,
infusing fight scenes with magic.
We've got these gateway portals through these doors.
Look at this stunt right here, Mads really did that.
He was pulled up on a wire. That was him kicking.
He's just so agile.
And that's why he was so glad to do a movie where he got to fight.
Maybe it's because he can and he's good at it.
But Benedict and Mads
did a lot of their own stunts, most of their own stunts in here,
so this is mostly, almost all them.
Not face replacement. Not stunt doubles.
And as a result,
this was a very physically demanding scene,
especially on Benedict.
He got kicked, punched, thrown against things.
But he kept going.
This is a big surprise,
was a big surprise for our test audience.
The personality of the cloak emerging here.
And it was a real unexpected delight for fans of the comics
because the cloak had some character in the comics,
a little bit like a magic carpet.
But I don't think as extensive as what you see here,
where it really becomes Strange's sidekick.
And it has a sentience and a personality.
And it chooses Strange,
chooses to help him out and save him,
and even seems to have a sense of humor
as we'll see later on.
But this scene is, in my opinion,
really made to work by this cloak.
It's great fighting,
and great stunt choreography and stunt design
by our stunt directors
and some great second unit stuff shot here by Jeff Habberstad.
But for the most part,
this is watching Strange in over his head,
barely surviving,
getting beaten up mostly, and the cloak saving him.
And then these, which are the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak
in the movie, by the way.
We just took the name out as we edited the scene down.
This begins the primary villain scene.
This begins the scene
which will define Kaecilius in the movie,
define Mads Mikkelsen's character.
One of the challenges that you have in making an origin story
superhero movie is a problem of real estate.
And again, I didn't feel like the origin story of Doctor Strange
merited a two-and-a-half hour or three-hour movie.
Some movies do. Some Marvel movies do.
This wasn't one of them, I didn't think.
And the main reason being that I don't think,
given the mind trip nature of the visuals,
I don't think you could bear it.
I think that the sequences are shorter than most Marvel movies,
because the audience kept telling us they were too long,
even though length-wise, they were shorter
than most action movies in most Marvel pictures.
The audience kept saying they were great,
but they were too long when we would test the movie,
because it was demanding to see some of this stuff.
It was something that was taxing.
They loved it, but it was taking something out of them,
and as we shortened it down to its fighting weight,
they began to love it even more.
But one of the problems you have in making an origin story like this
is the problem of real estate for the various characters.
That's why I left Clea out of the movie.
A critical character in the comic books.
We didn't have time to introduce her.
I thought about using Nightmare as the primary villain.
But it would've taken too much time to develop him.
And so, Kaecilius becomes this kind of Saruman to Dormammu's Sauron.
This avatar for Dormammu's ideas.
And I love this scene so much.
And I love Mads' performance here
because everything that he says here actually makes sense.
His point of view is very cogent.
He is basically saying
if we can put an end to time itself and therefore end death,
that is a victory not just for me, but for everyone.
And the Ancient One can do it. She's proven it.
And the secret is let out
that she's been siphoning off power from the Dark Dimension
to keep herself alive for centuries.
And that makes her duplicitous. That makes her a hypocrite.
That makes her a fraud in his mind.
And not only does it discredit her and her teachings,
not only does it discredit Kamar-Taj and everything it stands for,
but it sent him into a downward spiral
and into an investigation, just like Strange,
into the nature of time and time manipulation,
and what he found was,
"Hey, this Dormammu guy, he's not the Devil.
"He's God."
He's the "intent of all evolution," as he says.
Dormammu is gonna take this world into its Dark Dimension,
and none of us will die.
He's like a cult leader who's a true believer
in his crazy Zealot point of view.
So, there was something about religious zealotry
going on in this movie with Kaecilius.
His point of view is a legitimate one,
and yet, even if he is right,
even if what he says is true,
can it ever be a good thing, as Strange says,
for that passion and that intention to drive you to kill people.
(CHUCKLES) You know?
And a lot of religious people over the centuries
have taken the perspective of collateral damage
in the name of religion.
Some people have to die to further the cause.
And that's obviously so inherently problematic.
(CHUCKLES) This beat always makes me laugh.
I hope audiences laugh at it, because I think it's hysterical
that this cloak grabs him by the head
and just starts tossing him around and banging him so relentlessly
against this big guy, Scott Adkins, this awesome fighter
just getting completely hammered by this piece of cloth behind him.
So, I want to go back to the comic books for a moment
as we venture back into the hospital with Christine Palmer.
This upcoming sequence here,
we always called this the astral battle.
And this sequence was drawn heavily
from a graphic novel of Doctor Strange called The Oath.
I don't remember what year it was published.
But it was a standalone graphic novel,
and they had a sequence in that comic,
in that graphic novel, that was a lot like this,
of Christine Palmer, who becomes the Night Nurse,
saving Strange's life while he is in the astral plane.
I don't believe there was fighting in that scene.
I don't think there was conflict between him and another character.
I think it was just that his astral form
came out and was observing his own surgery.
(STAMMERS) It was so long ago now, I don't even remember.
But this sequence was the sequence
that I wrote to get the job directing Doctor Strange.
As I said earlier, I did a massive presentation,
it was like a 90-minute presentation, to get the movie.
And I wrote a 12—page scene,
which was this scene from the beginning to the end.
It was, in some ways, very different,
and some ways exactly the same as what you see now.
But it became this set-piece, and it stayed.
(CHUCKLES) Her reaction always makes me laugh.
And it's stayed in the movie ever since then.
Her reaction there,
and her reaction all through this scene
is why I wanted Rachel McAdams in this movie.
No, Christine. But I am dying.
DERRICKSON: She's a big movie star.
And last year was in the Oscar-winning film.
And she was nominated for an Oscar.
(CHUCKLING) Let me tell you exactly why it needs to be Rachel McAdams.
Who else are you gonna cast that you'd believe being
a former love interest of Doctor Strange,
that you'd believe is a medical doctor,
and who's gonna be able to react to this crazy magic
for the first time in a completely believable way?
If she doesn't respond to it all as though it's really happening,
we're not gonna believe this scene.
And her reactions in here
are so believable and they're so priceless.
And I said, "She's got strength to her."
She's sweet and she's strong,
and that's exactly what we need from this character.
(CHUCKLES) And these moments like this,
she's got great physical and comedic timing.
Okay.
Uh-huh.
(BOTH GRUNTING)
(GASPS)
Oh, shit.
(MAN CHATTERING ON PA)
(BOTH GRUNT)
DERRICKSON: We were so fortunate because I got my first choice
for every role.
Rachel was my first role for Christine.
Chiwetel was my first role... Choice for the role of Mordo.
Mads was my first choice. Tilda was my first choice.
And Benedict was my first choice.
So, we were really fortunate to get the people in this that we wanted.
This scene was a lot of wire work for Benedict,
because all this astral stuff, we actually shot him.
This is really Benedict on a wire,
and sometimes, it's what we call a digi-double.
A digital double that looks like Strange, texturally,
but isn't actually his body, and sometimes, it's physically him.
But I remember shooting some of the stuff,
him going through a lot of agony
because of the speed and motion of some of the movements
being just physically hard, physically painful.
But again, he was a trouper.
It's hard to be an action star, honestly.
It's physically difficult.
Here we have a little jump scare,
showing my horror roots.
It's effective in the test screenings,
because a lot of people who come to see movies like this
don't go to horror films, so they're not used to
the kind of cheap, easy scare that that was.
But it's also pretty obvious and fun.
I really love the humanity of Strange in this moment.
This apology is great.
I like the fact that Christine is not mean.
She's not bitter.
But I love her response there
when he says, "You didn't return my e-mails."
And she just says, "Why would I?"
And then he cops to it.
He was such an asshole, he says.
And it's a sincere apology.
And I think that in the modern world,
I don't know, man, I feel like
sincere apologies are becoming a lost art,
both giving them and accepting them.
That people don't apologize properly much anymore,
and when you do apologize,
or when somebody does apologize,
it seems like it's almost a sign of weakness
to either apologize or accept an apology,
when I think just the opposite is true.
I think it takes strength to admit when you're wrong,
to apologize to make something right with somebody.
It's not easy.
And it takes a lot of strength to accept an apology,
especially when you've been genuinely wronged, like Christine.
And she clearly has let it go.
She's not bitter or resentful.
But I just think that that's a really nice human moment there
between the two of them,
where there's a kind of acknowledgment and a reconciliation,
but it's not like she's gonna run back into his arms anytime soon.
And she never does in the movie.
I felt strongly about that and so did Rachel.
That she needed to be a good feminine character,
and by that, meaning good at what she does,
strong, smart,
and not just defined by her relationship with Doctor Strange.
She's really defined by her own work
and her own point of view,
and by her experience of this fantastical stuff that's happening to her.
(SOFT LAUGH)
Everybody's done it.
Everybody's startled themselves like that.
So, yeah, she becomes the audience's eyes
into the magical world from a normal perspective,
which would be very unnerving, I would imagine.
It would be scary
and leave one with frayed nerves,
and hence, that little last jump scare.
It wasn't really a jump scare.
It's really more about just seeing her be startled by a broomstick.
I love that shot of the cloak going on.
It feels iconic to me.
The cloak designed by Alex Byrne is, I think, awesome.
I really think she nailed that design.
His whole wardrobe, Doctor Strange's wardrobe
is very unique,
and I never got tired of looking at it
and how cool he looked wearing it.
Now this scene is
one of three dramatic scenes in the movie,
four dramatic scenes in the movie, that I really love.
Two of them we've seen,
which was Tilda and the Ancient One first meeting.
I love the debate nature of that conversation,
and how unflappable the Ancient One is
and how arrogant Strange is before she shatters him.
The second is Strange's dialogue with Kaecilius,
because I think Kaecilius' point of view is so compelling.
I'm in agreement with him in theory but not in practice.
And this is the third scene,
and I like this scene because
all three of these relationships completely change in this scene.
They fundamentally change.
Strange has been given this information about the Ancient One,
and he is angry now.
He's angry because he's found out about her duplicity.
That she borrows from the Dark Dimension,
a practice which she forbids, to keep herself alive.
And it's such a violation,
such a hypocritical thing to do
that Mordo just straight up doesn't believe it.
And when the scene is over,
everybody feels differently about everybody else.
Strange is angry with the Ancient One.
Mordo is, I think, frightened that Strange may be telling the truth.
And that makes him angry.
Anger is, more often than not,
a mask for fear.
Behind most anger is fear.
And behind most fear is a fear of loss.
And Mordo, as he hears this,
fears the loss of security that he feels around the Ancient One.
He fears the loss of her,
of the purity of the Kamar-Taj idea,
and the purity of sorcery as it's been taught to him.
The moral code of this place.
So, I love that expression.
He doesn't accept it.
He doesn't even really consider it
because it would be too big of a thing for him.
And then, in here, we see the first inkling of, "Could it be true?"
She knows that he's right,
and she is inscrutable, as usual.
And now the conflict starts
because Strange believes that her secret is a serious one
and they get right into it.
And Strange is being driven, I think,
as we talked about this with the actors,
Strange is less bothered by the fact
that the Ancient One was borrowing power from the Dark Dimension.
He's bothered by the fact that he just joined a battle.
That he had to fight to defend his life and he killed a guy.
He's upset at this whole thing.
And he's been thrown into it before he's ready.
And Mordo objects to what he thinks
is the sanctimony of saying, you can't be taking people's lives.
And Mordo's position is of course you can
if it's kill or be killed.
If it's them or us.
If it's take them out, or they're gonna destroy everything.
And here they are, if they bring down the Sanctum,
we know that the protection of the Sanctums
that keep Dormammu away from this world will fall.
So, this battle gets it on,
and here we go into the Mirror Dimension.
This is where we start to pay off those earlier scenes
where we took time to explain what it was.
And it was always tricky, with things like the Mirror Dimension,
to explain the rules, but not over-explain them.
We have all the logic worked out completely,
but there's a limit to what an audience wants to hear.
And I find that to be a mistake a lot of times in movies,
where you can feel the filmmakers
going out of their way to explain every possible objection.
And it's like, "Hey, it's a superhero, I get it."
In this case, "It's magic. I get it."
You want to know enough not to be confused
by what's going on,
but you don't have to have every rule,
every possible exception to the rule explained
because you would spend your whole movie doing that.
And that makes for bad drama.
So, here, Mordo says they're like gods in here.
They are much more powerful in here
because they're drawing on the Dark Dimension.
It gives them incredible power,
power that Mordo and Strange don't have
the way that Kaecilius has.
And all of that being a setup...
(LAUGHING) Well, first of all, for the Stan Lee cameo,
I love that cameo.
Just laughing at Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, just is funny.
I think it's a really great cameo.
I also want to give a shout-out to James Gunn
because he shot that cameo.
It was my idea to put him on the bus,
and the Doors of Perception and all that.
But Stan Lee did four cameos at one time
in Atlanta on the Guardians 2 set.
And so, James shot four different cameos
for four different movies, including Guardians 2
and including mine.
He was texting me through the day to let me know what he was doing.
I've spoken to Stan Lee on the phone, but I've yet to meet him in person.
This is ILM's masterful work here.
A lot of people, when they would see stuff like this in the trailers,
they would claim that we are ripping off Inception.
I want to run toward that comment and say we weren't ripping it off.
I certainly was drawing on it.
I thought Inception was one of
the most visually interesting movies of the last six or seven years.
But it was seven years ago, now, that it came out.
And I felt like it was the tip of an interesting visual effects iceberg.
And I wanted to go crazy
with the idea of spatial manipulation like that.
And we looked at Escher and Dali and German Expressionism,
and all these different things.
Just really went hog wild trying to build upon
what Chris Nolan was starting in Inception.
I guess in the same way that Chris Nolan was building on
On Her Majesty's Secret Service for the climactic snow fight at the end.
That's what we filmmakers do.
We borrow from other sources and from each other.
But hopefully, it's just standing on the shoulders of that movie
rather than, in any way, ripping it off or repeating it.
That was certainly the idea.
This sequence here, I like very much,
because it is so visually unique,
and more so because of the character dialogue here
between the Ancient One and Kaecilius.
Again, all this spectacle, all this visual power,
is only as meaningful or only as good
or only as significant as the characters.
And in this case, you feel the humanity of Kaecilius coming through
and you realize his real motive is he feels betrayed.
He feels that she was duplicitous and hypocritical,
and when he learned what he learned
about the Dark Dimension, he coveted that eternal life.
He wanted to not die.
And again, we're getting religious themes here
and themes of religious zealotry.
And how much damage has been done in the world
because of people believing
that they had the only right point of view
about what lies beyond our senses,
and want to live forever.
(CHUCKLES) You know?
And that can be a very dangerous thing.
I'm a religious person,
but I also recognize the dangers of religion.
In the world right now,
I'm seeing those dangers play out in pretty awful ways.
And I guess that found its way into the movie.
Here we've got
a break point in the movie,
which is this injury for the Ancient One
that leads to probably my favorite scene in the film,
which is this balcony chat
that's coming up between Strange and the Ancient One.
And I suppose this is probably the best place in the commentary
to talk about the greater meaning of the movie.
And again, like I said before,
I don't like being reductive about what a movie means,
because it means a lot of things.
There's a lot of things in here, hopefully, to pull out of it
if you want to.
And if you don't, I hope it's just entertaining. (CHUCKLES)
A lot of times, I'll watch movies where I know there's interesting themes,
but I don't think much about them
because I just want to be entertained by them
and this movie is intended to function on that level.
If you want a good popcorn movie, this is a good popcorn movie.
But there are some deeper themes and emotions and ideas in it.
And in this case,
it's really a movie that gets to the heart of
time, death, meaning.
Why we're here, what we do.
And Strange demonstrates,
in the beginning of the movie, a lot of what we're told.
At least in my country, in America,
a lot of what we're told is supposed to be the goal.
Your own happiness. Your own success.
Live your dream.
And I'm not disparaging any of those things.
Those are good things, not bad things.
But they don't make life purposeful.
Love makes life purposeful.
Becoming devoted to something bigger than yourself
is what makes life purposeful.
And being willing to commit yourself to something larger than yourself,
even in a self-sacrificial way, is very meaningful.
And I think the signature line of the movie is coming up right here,
when she tells him that
in all your learning and everything you've done,
you still failed to learn the simplest and most significant lesson of all.
And that is it's not about you.
And I felt that that was so at the heart of Doctor Strange
and so at the heart of what the movie was about.
I designed this specific camera move for it.
I shot everything on this side of the line,
and this shot is visually Strange's realization.
That shot was to demonstrate him coming around to the other side.
Him coming around, literally.
(CHUCKLING) I never thought about it as literally as I just spoke it.
But that's what it is.
And I think that the camera is a storyteller.
And there's a good example of how a camera angle,
the movement of a shot,
is seminal to the most significant moment
of our character's development.
And then she goes to lay on to him the fact that he has a choice in life.
He can go back to everything that he wants,
everything that's about him.
Or he can move on to something bigger than himself.
He can evolve.
And I love the fact that this movie is about
mysticism and spirituality and growth,
because I think that those are the important things.
I think life is about growth.
That's how I feel, and it's my belief
And I think the world is a mystical place.
It's innate in me.
I wasn't raised in a particularly religious home.
But from my earliest memories,
I remember thinking and feeling that the material world
was not only not all there is,
it's not even most of what there is.
The real world is much bigger than what I could sense with my senses.
I always felt that way about life.
And it gave a magical feeling to the world.
I was also really frightened as a child.
(CHUCKLING) And I think that's one of the reasons why,
because the world was a dangerous place
and very unknown to me. Still is.
But I don't feel afraid of it.
I feel inspired by it and awe-inspired by it.
And I think every artist feels that way to some degree.
I think every scientist feels that way to some degree.
People who explore and venture into discovery,
we all feel that way.
And I think people who don't do that for a living
feel that way and need things like art and science
to show them what they don't understand,
or to give them a sense
that the world is a wondrous and magical place.
But that scene, it's pretty impressive
that that's my favorite scene given how much work...
Not impressive, but it's like the movie is impressing me.
That's my favorite scene.
It's impressive that the actors
delivered a scene that was that touching.
Because that scene's better than I thought it was gonna be.
I knew it was important. I knew it was significant.
I didn't know it was as significant
as I think it is in the movie until I shot it.
But I remember meeting James Cameron on the set of Avatar.
When he was shooting it, I went down to the set at Playa del Rey
to talk to him about the cameras and to see...
He was showing filmmakers the 3-D technology,
the performance capture technology,
and how it all worked.
And I went down, and he took a lot of time with me.
I was really interested in the technology.
I was asking a lot of questions,
and he was taking time to answer those questions.
And I remember him saying
that one of the lessons that he learned in doing The Abyss
was that he had focused so much
on all these big giant visual effects sequences,
and what he was surprised by
was that the best scene in the movie was two people in an air tank.
And that's why when he went to make Titanic,
(CHUCKLES) as he put it,
by the time the iceberg hit the ship, most movies had ended
because he was doing
so much character development in that scene.
And it all gets back to characters.
You've got to become invested in these characters.
This gag, by the way, gets a great laugh in our test screenings.
We'll see how it does in public theaters,
this bit with the cloak wiping the tears.
And that was Benedict's idea.
I wish I could take credit for the idea,
but he had come up with the idea, and I thought it was great.
So, we did it.
Filmmaking is like that,
especially filmmaking at this size.
You've gotta be egoless about it.
You can't have a big ego
and be a good filmmaker at this level
because it's too big.
You need everybody's input.
You need everybody's feedback.
And I think that the Marvel process is great
because these guys are artists.
Kevin Feige, Stephen Broussard, my producer,
Victoria Alonso who runs post-production here,
and Louis D'Esposito, who's the co-head with Kevin Feige.
The four of them are filmmakers first. They're artists.
And they represent
an attitude that's unlike other studios.
Walt Disney once said,
"We don't make movies to make money.
"We make money to make more movies."
And that's definitely the way it is here at Marvel.
They're not motivated by how much money they make.
They want to make money so they can keep making movies.
They're motivated by movies. They love cinema.
They love movies.
And the commitment to that process and the lack of ego that they have,
creatively, is why their movies tend to turn out good.
Because they are always fighting for the best idea,
and they work pretty intimately with filmmakers.
I've had a great experience working with them.
And Kevin, in particular,
is a true genius at knowing when something's not working
and helping you make it work,
and helping you see how it can be better.
This is the scene when Mordo really starts to break.
And I think it's important to draw attention
to the fact that I think he's right here.
Essentially, they're both right.
But he is right that the Ancient One was duplicitous.
The Ancient One was hypocritical.
She taught something was forbidden, but she practiced it herself
And she didn't entrust that to anybody else,
and that's what led Kaecilius to Dormammu and created all this chaos.
He is right about that. But he's so rigid.
He, as the Ancient One said, he is...
To me, he's almost like a fundamentalist.
He has the rules, the fixed ways that things should be.
And when the beliefs of a fundamentalist are broken,
it's sometimes a really violent breaking.
And we see the beginnings of that breaking now.
Now, he's still gotta try to save the world here.
Literally.
But we're gonna see by the end tag,
that he's really starting to crack and go off the deep end.
But Strange is also right.
And the Ancient One is also right.
And in the end, I sided with Strange and the Ancient One
that sometimes you have to break the rules for the greater good.
But the moral dilemma of that
is something that's not simple to break down.
I didn't want to be reductive about it.
I like the complexity of it,
and I wanted them to both have a good point of view.
This is the most difficult sequence in the movie, technically.
By far.
I started with this idea,
I think while we were outlining the movie,
to end it as a kind of play on the trope of Marvel movies
ending with the characters tearing up a city and a portal closing
and keeping out something from another world.
So, in this case, instead of tearing up a city,
I wanted to put a city back together.
And the idea was to have a fight scene running forwards in time,
while an entire cityscape is coming back together in reverse time,
and it was impossible.
When I thought about it, I thought, "Well, wait, you can't do that.
"I wouldn't even know how to do that."
And then I thought, "No, that's the reason to do it.
"Because it's unshootable, let's do it and let's figure out how to do it."
And the result was an incredibly complex scene, technically.
A lot of motion control,
which is a repeatable camera
that runs on track and can repeat the identical move.
A lot of different layers of elements.
Explosions, dust,
material being dropped into frame so it can be played backwards.
And the actors having to react to things
that were designed to be shot in reverse.
It was all just very complicated.
But I think it comes together really nicely,
and it's sewn together really nicely
by Michael Giacchino's very creepy, weird, surreal score here.
And the result is a sequence that just doesn't...
To me, it doesn't feel like the climax
of any other superhero movie that I've seen.
Um...
Every time I say "um,"
I always hear my old high school English teacher,
Mrs. Cannon, saying, "No ums, please."
She would always say that.
And I've heard her voice in my head
about 10 times during this commentary track,
because you say "um" as a pause to gather your thoughts.
So, my apologies to my high school English teacher for the "ums."
So, instead of ending the movie with this big battle scene,
destroying a city, we put a city back together.
And instead of closing the portal,
we've got this opening to the Dark Dimension that's remaining.
(CHUCKLING) And I love the idea that
instead of closing it, Strange goes into it.
And we're gonna go into another dimension.
And that was also an idea from the very beginning of the movie.
And we were looking for a final beat for the final scene.
I knew that I wanted to do this forwards-backwards thing.
And I knew that I wanted to have some kind of a solution
that didn't feel typical.
It wasn't just saving the city and closing off the Dark Dimension
and ending there.
And so, as we were brainstorming with Jon Spaihts,
who wrote the first draft,
I remember saying, "Well, you know, we've got time."
And I remember saying, "What if there was a time loop?"
And I'd never heard the phrase before.
This Tim Burton movie that just came out,
apparently uses that term
and I wasn't familiar with that property or anything.
But I loved the idea of Strange going into a dimension without time,
and bringing time into it.
It seemed important that the ending deal with time,
because time was so thematically present in the movie.
The idea that the watch represents time and love
and time heals all wounds, and in some cases, it doesn't.
And Kaecilius' entire philosophy, that time is the true enemy.
Time kills everything.
The Dark Dimension being a timeless place.
Strange manipulating time with the Eye of Agamotto,
and then reversing time.
We had to deal with time itself as a final way of ending the movie.
(CHUCKLING) And for everybody who's ever played video games growing up,
which is almost everybody probably watching this movie by this point,
the idea is this is a boss fight.
This all leads to a big boss fight at the end,
and this is a section where I wanted to get this black light kind of look
from the psychedelic black light poster that I loved so much
that it's a banner on my Twitter feed or at least is at this point.
I'm sure I'll take it down after the movie releases.
For Strange to go into this completely psychedelic environment
that's different than anything we've seen before and unique
and to meet Dormammu,
this other-dimensional entity beyond time,
and to use time as a way of defeating him was the goal.
It was the idea.
And it's one of the only scenes that started in the first draft,
and remained almost identical all the way through the script.
It was never changed much.
Jon Spaihts wrote this scene pretty much as you're seeing it here,
with a few lines adjusted, a few lines added or subtracted,
and some editorial work.
But fundamentally, the scene that he wrote was this scene.
And I just thought it was really cool
that Strange goes up there to confront Dormammu and gets killed.
And then comes back because he's created a time loop,
and he's using time itself to defeat this other-dimensional being.
This little move right here was not in the script,
and it was not a directorial idea.
And not Wyatt Smith, our primary editor,
but Jeff Ford, who did some additional editing for us toward the end.
He came up with that, and it really helped
explain visually what we were doing with this scene.
But I loved just the '60s psychedelia making its way into this movie.
(CHUCKLING) And this is obviously the scene where it does this,
and there's this big lumbering, God-like being
that is trapped by time.
And at this point, he doesn't even get it.
He doesn't even really understand what's happening to him,
because he doesn't understand the concept of time.
Doesn't exist in a place where things age.
And of course, the psychedelic trippy-ness of it, the score,
the visual effects of the world, the visual effect of Dormammu himself,
is all in the service of not just ending the plot
but concluding the character arc.
Concluding the character arc of Doctor Strange.
And the completion of it is that
he finally demonstrates, by what he says here,
that he does understand that it's not about him.
He does understand
that he has to make a self-sacrifice,
that people in the world are more important than him,
that he is accepting a position, and it's a painful position,
a position of difficulty and struggle to service the world
and to protect the world.
And it's what I always loved
about Doctor Strange, the comic book character,
was that he was this kind of lonely, heroic figure.
It's part of what makes some superheroes great.
Some of them are more social and connected
and have love interests and all that.
And Strange certainly gets that with Clea, who's Dormammu's daughter,
if you don't know the comics.
But at this point in the story,
he says he's willing to do this forever.
He's willing to suffer...
And suffer in this moment endlessly if he has to.
And that shows the ultimate,
I think, pinnacle of his emotional and spiritual growth.
That he has evolved beyond the person that he was completely.
And he has evolved into a superhero.
He's evolved into somebody who represents the best of humanity.
And because the best of humanity is precisely that.
It is love, it is self-sacrifice,
it is willingness to put the needs of others ahead of oneself.
And that's what he does here.
And that's so far from the guy that he was at the beginning.
And the challenge of the movie, fundamentally, was to tell that story.
To tell the story of that character arc in less than two hours,
because I didn't want the movie to be long.
And to do it with these big mind-bending
psychedelic visual effects sequences.
And I think that we did that.
Again, getting back to the thing I started this commentary with,
about hitting your target.
I don't know how the movie's gonna do critically.
I don't even know how audiences are gonna respond to it.
I know how the test audiences responded to it,
which is they love Benedict, they love the movie.
It all seemed very positive.
Um...
I don't know how it's gonna do financially in the States or globally.
All I know is that I did hit the target I was aiming for.
This is the movie I set out to make.
And as long as I've done that, it's very satisfying.
The last movie that I made, Deliver Us from Evil,
I hit the target on that movie, too. I actually liked that movie.
And it was the movie I wanted it to be.
(CHUCKLING) It didn't do well financially,
and it definitely didn't do well critically,
and it never particularly bothered me
because the audiences that I knew saw it, did respond to it.
I watched audiences watch it.
And they really dug it. They got what they paid for.
And I liked it.
But in this case, this is a much bigger audience,
much broader audience.
I want everybody who pays to see the movie to like it.
(CHUCKLING) I love this laugh from Benny Wong.
Benedict Wong goes by Benny in person.
And every time I watch this scene, his laugh is so infectious,
and it just kills me every time.
Benny's a very noble, dignified kind of guy,
and there's just something about that,
the gregarious nature of that laugh, every time I hear it,
both for the character of Wong and for Benny himself,
it cracks me up.
But what a great actor he is,
and thank goodness he agreed to do the movie.
Now, this last little bit,
again, it really shows the difference between Mordo and Strange.
And again, I don't think Mordo's wrong here.
I do think there's a price to pay.
I've used the reference actually
in regards to changing the race of the Ancient One.
I feel like I chose the lesser evil by not casting an Asian.
But choosing the lesser evil is still choosing an evil.
(CHUCKLING) Which is why some people have legitimate reasons
to be upset by it.
And the criticism has some validity to it.
And Mordo's point here at the end of,
"You think there'll be no price to pay for breaking the rules here?
"There's always a reckoning."
I think there's some truth to his point of view.
But it's too rigid.
Mordo's point. Mordo's point of view is too rigid.
Too inflexible.
And that's the nature of fundamentalism.
That's the nature of close-mindedness.
And in the end, I believe in rules.
I believe in truth versus falsehood.
I believe in right and wrong.
But I also believe that all things are relative to varying degrees,
depending on the circumstances.
This is the scene I was talking about earlier.
Just really loving seeing the two of them together at the end,
it seems so right.
And as a Doctor Strange fan, um...
(CHUCKLES) It's pretty great
that we're ending the movie with just Wong and Strange.
That feels very much like the comics.
That after the story's been told,
going back to the Sanctum is Wong and Strange.
But again, the roles are inverted, in that Wong is still the teacher.
Wong is still the master.
And Strange is not a Sorcerer Supreme.
He's a guy who's got a lot to learn and has a long way to go.
I love this next image,
which we shot in slow motion,
specifically thinking that it was a trailer shot.
I remember just kinda seeing this image
as I walked up the stairs one day.
And I told Ben Davis, "I think we need to do
"a slow-motion shot of Strange going up these stairs,"
which we ended up using twice in the movie.
And it doesn't feel overplayed.
It was in the trailer, and it's in the movie twice,
and yet, it still works.
This metaphor of the watch, this symbolism of the watch,
it's a little heavy, but it works for me.
Sometimes, symbols work with their directness,
rather than their indirectness.
Just the broken watch. That Strange is still scarred.
He's still broken. His hands still tremble.
He still carries the brokenness that is himself with him.
But that's part of what makes him
humble enough to become a great sorcerer,
and channel magic.
These end credits are pretty impressive
given the short amount of time that Sarofsky, the visual effects house,
had to do them.
They had very little time to do these end credits.
What I like about it is that they're interesting
and they're visually cool to watch, but they keep you looking at the credits.
They're not so distracting that you don't read the names
or don't want to read the names.
They're intended to put attention on the various credits.
Michael Giacchino wrote the score for the opening theme, by the way.
That's worth mentioning that the Marvel logo theme
has its own theme,
which was written by Michael Giacchino,
and that'll be the continuing Marvel theme throughout other movies.
I'm gonna sign off now.
I'll just say two things about the last two tags.
One is that the Thor sequence was not shot by me,
so I'm not gonna do commentary track for it,
because that was shot by Taika, the director of Thor: Ragnarok.
And the last scene with Mordo, I think speaks for itself.
And that's it from me and Doctor Strange.
Thanks very much for listening.
THOR: So Earth has wizards now, huh?
Tea?
I don't drink tea.
What do you drink?
Not tea.
So, I keep a watch list...
of individuals and beings from other realms
that may be a threat to this world.
Your adopted brother, Loki, is one of those beings.
Worthy inclusion.
Yeah.
SO why bring him here to New York?
It's a bit of a long story.
Family drama, that kind of thing.
But we're looking for my father.
Oh, okay. So if you found Odin...
you'd all return to Asgard promptly?
Oh, yes. Promptly.
Great!
Allow me to help you.
Can I help you?
They carried you into Kamar-Taj on a stretcher.
Look at you now, Pangborn.
Mordo.
So what can I do for you, man?
MORDO: I've been away for many months now,
and I've had a revelation.
The true purpose of a sorcerer...
is to twist things out of their proper shape...
stealing power...
perverting nature.
Like you.
I've stolen nothing. This is my power.
Mine.
Power...
has a purpose.
(PANGBORN GROANING)
Why are you doing this?
Because I see, at long last, what's wrong with the world.
(PANTING)
Too many sorcerers.