JOE: Hey, everyone. I'm Joe Russo.
ANTHONY: And I'm Anthony Russo.
We're the directors, and we're here with...
MARKUS: Chris Markus. McFEELY: And Steve McFeely.
And we are the screenwriters of Avengers: Infinity War.
JOE: This is the audio commentary for that film.
ANTHONY: We're gonna try to avoid talking about how tired we are.
McFEELY: But we're tired. JOE: This is...
MARKUS: I'm actually... Renewed energy. McFEELY: Nice.
JOE: This was an amazing surprise, by the way.
And we had this idea very late in the editorial
to ask the amazing Sir Kenneth Branagh to come in
and do the opening distress call
over the logo that carries us and sets the stage.
It carries us into the scene
with Thor and Thanos and Loki on the Ark.
McFEELY: This is a movie that starts in medias res, right?
It's so packed. It's so jam-packed with stuff
that you have to use even the opening credits to tell a story.
MARKUS: Yeah. Well, that was the intent.
We had done several iterations of the script
over about a year-and-a-half, two years
very early on, deciding to turn it into
a sort of a smash-and-grab heist movie
told from the point of view of the lead villain, who is Thanos.
And we wanted to keep the plot very simple
with very simple MacGuffins,
because we have so many characters in the movie
that we knew, if the plot was complicated,
it would take too much story real estate to explain the plot.
And that would take away from the character interactions
which we knew would also be the highlight of the film.
McFEELY: It gets complexity by weaving of simple plots.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm. McFEELY: The plot itself is very simple.
MARKUS: Yes. He's got stones, he needs to collect the stones.
ANTHONY: And this... You know, a lot of people would be surprised
to know that this is the ship at the end of Thor: Ragnarok
that the Asgardians escape on.
I think this is a good example of how things change tonally
when you go from movie to movie and story to story.
You know, this ship, in Ragnarok, was very brightly colored.
You know, it had the vibrancy and whimsy of that film
which works so very well there.
We are telling a very different story here,
so we redesigned it
with a different texture and tone to support this story.
MARKUS: Moral of the story being
never have the Russos redecorate your house.
(LAUGHTER)
ANTHONY: We'll burn it down.
McFEELY: It's also an example of, we're starting this script in December,
well, say January of2016.
There's no Ragnarok script.
There's, you know...
They're in various stages of development.
And so the first scene of this movie changed a bunch.
And until we figured out that they were gonna end on a trip,
you know, off of a destroyed Asgard,
we didn't know where Thanos would find Loki.
MARKUS: We did know we wanted Thanos to come to Loki.
McFEELY: Correct. MARKUS: And we would find him in any...
We have drafts of him in any number of places.
McFEELY: (LAUGHING) That's right.
MARKUS: And the concept being, of course, that the movie is told
and we've talked about this,
it's told from the point of view of Thanos.
The movie begins with Thanos, the movie ends with Thanos.
McFEELY: It's his hero's journey. MARKUS: It is his hero's journey.
McFEELY: That's the only way we could figure out
how to put everybody in the movie.
MARKUS: All the major beats of the journey are Thanos beats.
ANTHONY: Including his ultimate sacrifice with Gamora.
MARKUS: Which must be said, would never have worked without Josh Brolin,
without Dan DeLeeuw.
Making Thanos come to life.
JOE: Yes. I mean, we should talk about the VFX department.
And Dan DeLeeuw did an amazing job on this movie.
We knew that we were sunk if we couldn't get Thanos
to be photo-real.
And to get all the nuances of Josh Brolin
into that character.
So I think they literally are playing with technology,
this mapping him to the molecular level.
Which is why I think Thanos is so interesting in the movie
is that all of the subtleties of Josh's performance
are coming through in his face and his body.
McFEELY: And he got the benefit of a lot of work ahead of time.
People are working on how to create Thanos
before there's even an outline.
Because we know that he's going to play a major part in the movie.
And he'd never gotten that attention before.
JOE: I think we probably spent two years working on Thanos.
ANTHONY: This might have been in their very first visual effects test
in the development stage, was Thanos.
Because, again, we knew it was so central
to what the movie needed to be.
And also, its level of difficulty was the highest.
JOE: And here you see the early establishment
of just how fearsome Thanos is
even without...
He's got one stone here, but I don't think he's using it.
MARKUS: He's not using it.
This is to show that Thanos, the Genghis Khan of the universe,
is unbeatable in one-on-one battle.
He's conquered thousands of worlds,
he's a much more polished fighter than the Hulk.
And he dismantles the Hulk fairly quickly.
JOE: And Thor.
ANTHONY: And Loki.
McFEELY: We always say that scenes need to do more than one thing,
and in this movie, more so than any other I think we've done,
the real estate is precious.
So this is a scene that establishes Hulk's journey.
He's been defeated and doesn't particularly want to help Banner
over the course of the movie.
It establishes a vengeance story for Thor
by taking out his brother and, arguably, his best friend.
It establishes the plot for stone collection.
MARKUS: And I will say, just to interrupt,
that we just had a callback to what had once seemed like a bit of a paste job
which was... And, excuse me, to mourn. He just... Oh, my God.
McFEELY: Here's the Heimdall...
MARKUS: In Avengers 1, where Thor comes back
saying that, "Odin used all his dark magic to get me home,"
and people said, "Oh, that was just a cheat,
"'cause you broke the Bifrost,"
and you just saw where the dark magic came from.
Straight out of Heimdall.
My humble personage...
JOE: Now, we should talk about the deaths in this film.
Obviously, I think we're all very committed to stakes.
We've said before that we feel like nothing has value
unless it has an ending.
That this movie represents the final chapter of a book
that's been told over the last 10 years in the Marvel Universe.
Part of what we wanted to do, out of the gate,
was to unsettle you as you're watching the film.
You're sitting in the theater thinking,
"Most characters in the Marvel Universe have been safe for a decade."
And we wanted to knock you off-kilter
and make the audience understand
that the stakes were going to be significant
and the cost was going to be very high in the movie.
MARKUS: Hmm. And in that regard,
this scene does away with a lot of things from the ongoing MCU.
That was... The first MacGuffin from the first Captain America movie
just got crushed and stuck into a glove.
ANTHONY: Bye-bye, Tesseract. McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: And shortly, the villain from the first Avengers movie...
McFEELY: Right. Arguably the best villain in the MCU.
MARKUS: ...will achieve a similar end.
ANTHONY: You know, aside from establishing... Introducing Thanos
as our lead and POV in the movie,
this scene also very heavily kicks off Thor's arc in the film
who, arguably, may have the second-most complete hero's journey in the movie.
JOE: I would argue that it correlates, right?
- And that if Thor actually had put... - ANTHONY: Mmm-hmm. Very much.
JOE: The axe in Thanos' head,
that the movie would have belonged to Thor.
But he did not, so the movie goes to Thanos.
ANTHONY: The one thing that's wonderful...
One thing I think we all really responded to about Thor is
where he's left at the end of Ragnarok with the destruction of Asgard.
And we all have a history, obviously, with the Captain America character.
And I think there's an interesting connection
in that Cap was also a character who lost everything.
And there's something fascinating about exploring these people
as you strip away who they are
and their built-out identities, and find out what's left.
I think we are going through a very similar process with Thor in this movie.
Especially with this scene, we're sort of completing
the experience that Ragnarok brought to Thor
in the sense that we're taking the rest of everything away from him.
Everything that remains.
And it's a very... He's starting with nothing after that point.
And trying to climb his way back is a very underdog arc,
a very rousing arc, I think, that he...
Road that he follows... Very empathetic.
MARKUS: And here, the great Tom Hiddleston.
JOE: Yeah, Tom did an amazing job with this scene.
It's heartbreaking to watch.
Thanos is violent and cruel.
It's interesting because,
as Thanos moves forward in the film from this moment,
once he disposes of his armor,
he almost becomes a holy warrior
where he doesn't spend a lot of energy intentionally trying to murder people,
unless they're in some way a threat to his agenda.
But almost no one ends up being a threat to the agenda except for Tony,
who I think feels he has this sort of existential connection to Thanos.
And we'll get to that when we get to that scene,
but it's the one moment where he is actively...
Since brutally murdering Loki for disobedience,
where he actively is going to murder someone for standing in his way.
Of course, he sacrifices Gamora, but that is to obtain the Soul Stone.
McFEELY: And remember, he had a relationship with Loki,
even if it was off-screen,
where he entrusted him with a duty
in Avengers 1 and Loki failed, so...
JOE: He's making him pay. McFEELY: Yeah.
Thanos has a long memory.
ANTHONY: Yep. Fair enough.
JOE: And then the tragic journey that begins for Thor starts here.
McFEELY: And we should say, several Asgardians have escaped.
JOE: Several Asgardians have escaped.
I have gone on record saying that Valkyrie
has escaped with some of the Asgardians.
MARKUS: All I can say is pray for Korg.
(LAUGHTER)
JOE: The arc that...
Thor's hero's journey started in all of his previous films.
It includes the death of his mother, death of his father,
death of his sister, and now the death of his brother
and the death of his best friend, Heimdall.
That is what motivates his arc in this movie.
He's on a revenge arc
and his job is to create the weapon
that the audience hopefully believes will ultimately defeat Thanos.
I wouldn't say no to a tuna melt.
MARKUS: There's an immense amount of architecture and heavy building.
There are certain small lines that appear in the first draft
that stay throughout.
And, "I wouldn't say no to a tuna melt," has been there since the beginning.
- (LAUGHTER) - McFEELY: Inexplicably.
But that's an example of, and we've said this before
that this is not a movie that does five and 10 minutes
of what the Avengers are doing before the story comes to them.
So, I can only think of these two beats really early on
where we catch Tony and Pepper in the park,
and we catch Strange and Wong
about to get a sandwich. And that's it.
And everybody else comes into the story when the story has asked for them.
We tried versions where we got a lot of people
in their daily lives, catching up on people,
and this movie couldn't support that.
ANTHONY: Thanos is moving too fast. McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: Relentless pacing. Viscera.
ANTHONY: Yeah. McFEELY: Yeah.
- Right. - Morgan! Morgan.
JOE: You know, it's interesting, we had a phrase in the room
that we would call "strange alchemy."
And that is not in reference to Doctor Strange
but in reference to the word, "strange." So, call it "weird alchemy,"
"peculiar alchemy," "interesting alchemy."
We knew that this movie, in particular, being a crossover event
that what would be some of the most entertaining stuff
in the movie is how these characters who have never interacted before
would interact.
And this is, in fact, the first scene where you get to see
a cross-pollination of characters.
So, a lot of the work that we would do, the four of us in the room together,
we would be talking about,
what are the interesting combinations between characters?
Well, Tony Stark is a man of science and a narcissist.
Doctor Strange is a man of magic and a narcissist.
There seems to be a very compelling conflict of personalities there.
ANTHONY: And it's in contrast to perhaps the oldest relationship in the MCU.
McFEELY: Right. ANTHONY: Tony-Pepper.
McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: And two out of three of those have amazing goatees.
I'm sorry, you giving out tickets to something?
We need your help.
It's not overselling it to say that the fate of the universe is at stake.
And who's "we"?
JOE: They should say, "No shit, Sherlock."
ANTHONY: Oh, my God. JOE: Everybody's really want...
- Everyone really wants that joke. - MARKUS: Why didn't you reference it?
McFEELY: It's a meta-joke that requires you to be a fan of other movies.
JOE: It's also a very obvious joke.
Not that we can't be accused of having made obvious jokes before.
McFEELY: Oh, sure.
JOE: But I guess it is our movie,
so we can pick and choose the obvious jokes we wanna put in it.
McFEELY: So, we have exposition now and again, right?
This is a movie that rewards your investment.
If you know the other movies, I think you'll have a greater chance
of being delighted by it.
If you're fresh to these movies,
we need to hold your hand a little bit early on,
and tell you about the stones
and what they might do, and how valuable they are to the story.
JOE: And what better way to do that than through magic?
McFEELY: Right, right.
JOE: Now, what's interesting also in the film
is that two of the characters
that the audience ostensibly cares a lot about
are carrying around stones. So, they're MacGuffins.
Doctor Strange being one, Vision being the other.
McFEELY: Had we invented the idea of Infinity Stones in a vacuum,
I'm sure we would not have decided there were six of them.
JOE: Yes.
McFEELY: Six MacGuffins is a lot for a story.
JOE: Well, we should talk about why did we decide
- to push Xandar off-screen. - McFEELY: Oh, yeah.
MARKUS: We wrote versions of Thanos attacking Xandar
and it had a similar purpose in the script
to what Knowhere does now.
It was a place where Thanos and Gamora encountered each other.
But the fact of the matter is
you know exactly what...
If Thanos went to Xandar to get that Stone,
you know what happened.
There was a big battle and he got it.
JOE: It was an attempt to not be repetitive.
We decided to cut it from the script,
and as you said, start in the middle of the story.
McFEELY: And make every stone collection an emotional moment.
Sometimes it's because there's a person who's either wearing one
or has one in his head.
And sometimes it's because of who Thanos encounters there.
JOE: What you need to do to get it.
McFEELY: What you have to do to get it,
who you might have to sacrifice, etcetera.
So, it was always, as I said earlier,
scenes need to do more than one thing
and every stone collection scene is gonna be plot-based,
but we wanted them to be deeply character-based, too.
MARKUS: And speaking of character, we are about to get to
a long-standing character conflict
built from another little movie we did called Civil War
which is, Tony is about to realize
that the one person who could help him is the one person
he least wants to talk to.
JOE: And he luckily carries around the burner phone.
McFEELY: It is convenient that he... MARKUS: A flip phone.
McFEELY: Keeps it charged, you know.
JOE: Fully charged.
McFEELY: (LAUGHS) That's right.
JOE: Well, to be fair, we did have another scene
between Pepper and Tony that illustrated where the phone came from.
McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: But it was a reshoot scene that we then opted to revert back
to the park scene with, so...
ANTHONY: Also, to be fair,
if Captain America had given any of us a burner phone to call him, I'm sure...
McFEELY: Yeah, it's not going in my sock drawer.
And just to underline between lines here
when he says Steve might be able to help,
it's because Tony knows that Wanda is on the run with Steve.
And he knows that Vision has been stepping out
and maybe having a relationship with Wanda.
And he has been cool with that
and probably not called Vision to task for it.
So, yeah, Tony knows a lot here
even if we don't make that clear to the audience.
JOE: Yeah, Tony's too intelligent, and has too big of an ego
to be a stooge to the government.
He will take whatever by-product came out of Civil War
and use it to his own advantage
and to keep the Avengers alive in a way that he feels like is,
the less the compromise, the better for him.
So, I think he has not been actively pursuing
bringing Steve Rogers and Natasha
and Sam and Wanda to justice.
He has, in fact, been turning the other way.
McFEELY: Yeah.
Not at the moment, no.
(RUMBLING CONTINUES)
(MUFFLED SCREAMING)
ANTHONY: So this may be hard to believe,
but we shot this whole long one-er shot on the lot
- at Pinewood Studios in Atlanta. - JOE: With green screen.
McFEELY: Do you want to talk about some of your influences here
in designing this?
JOE: Yeah, it was a...
The idea here was to embed you with the characters
to heighten the tension as they move up the street.
Also, to ground the film
and present this really giant spaceship in a way
that came from your point of view
and the characters' point of view, collectively.
I would not deny that Spielberg was a big influence
on this sequence.
MARKUS: He's pretty good.
And here we have...
JOE: We get asked about this all the time.
- How did we get the hair... - ANTHONY: We finally reveal...
JOE: ...on Tom Holland's arm to stand up?
McFEELY: Oh, you know, I never asked. (LAUGHING)
ANTHONY: In our New York Times' anatomy of this scene, we finally revealed...
A lot of people think it's a CG shot,
but it was actually achieved by a very gentle blowing on Tom's ear.
(LAUGHTER)
JOE: Here, we see Peter Parker upgrading his web shooter.
It's got a Stark Tech appeal to it.
Wraps onto his wrists.
And again, here we go. We're adding characters to the story.
Thanos is the glue that binds them.
And he's pulling all of the characters towards the stones.
Friday, evac anyone south of 43rd Street. Notify first responders.
FRIDAY: Will do.
JOE: Doctor Strange's power level, we could talk about.
And from the books, as a kid, what I loved about Doctor Strange
is that he always had a mystical, spiritual side to him
that seemed to know more than all the other characters.
And I found that very entertaining,
and we wanted to advance his power levels
since the end of Doctor Strange, 'cause it has been a few years.
And that he's been doing his work and he's a diligent study
and he is now one of the more powerful characters
in the Marvel Universe.
McFEELY: I'm surprised at the reaction. I shouldn't be,
but he generally comes off as the adult in the room.
Very reassuring in that,
regardless of what happens over the course of the movie,
I think, Strange might know how this is gonna work out.
I think... I have faith in him.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: Well, you need that kind of character in a movie like this
where there's a lot of spinning plates.
And a lot of the spinning plates are off balance.
He exhausts me.
- (SPEAKS ALIEN LANGUAGE) - Bring me the stone.
(SPEAKS ALIEN LANGUAGE)
Banner, you want a piece?
MARKUS: We have now moved from the soundstage
to an actual street in Atlanta,
which they were gracious enough to let us light on fire.
And here we see the beginnings of Bruce's issues.
- (GROWLS) - BANNER: God!
Where's your guy?
(SIGHS)
I don't know. We've sorta been having a thing.
- It's no time for a thing. - I know.
JOE: This was an interesting journey that we went on with Banner
trying to decide how to move him forward in the Marvel Universe.
What makes him unique as a character is that
there's a host body that is being fought over
by two distinct personalities who hate each other.
And both want control of the host body.
And so we thought, an interesting direction
to take him in is, well, what if Banner, who typically uses the Hulk
to solve crisis situations,
what if the Hulk were no longer interested
in solving those problems for Banner?
So that the relationship is becoming increasingly dysfunctional.
And that's what's going on here.
People speculated whether there was some fear
on the Hulk's part, about having to face Thanos again.
But I think, ultimately, what it is, is that
he's tired of playing hero to Bruce Banner.
McFEELY: And again, with a movie with 23 named heroes
that you know from other movies,
one of the challenges is to give people the briefest complete arc.
And so that's... Banner has to rely on himself is essentially
the one-line, brief arc for him in this movie.
JOE: Yeah.
BANNER: Tony, you okay?
How we doing? Good? Bad?
Really, really good. Really good. Do you plan on helping out?
I'm trying. He won't come out.
JOE: Talk about Maw a little bit. He is a...
Inspired a little bit by Mephistopheles from the original Starlin books.
McFEELY: Mmm-hmm. Right, we did pull a couple of lines.
JOE: Yeah. McFEELY: Right.
JOE: There are some directly quoted lines from the book
that we put in his mouth.
Black Order, in particular, we worked hard
to adjust them to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In the Hickman run, I thought the characters were too powerful.
And nobody wants the sub-villain to outshine the villain.
And we adjusted their power sets so that they lined up in a way
that was more interesting with our heroes.
Which is why Maw's a wizard.
McFEELY: I think we decided he's a techno mage.
JOE: Yes. McFEELY: So he can move...
MARKUS: He can control things at a molecular level.
And he's also a fantastic performance, too.
McFEELY: That's right.
MARKUS: Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.
McFEELY: Remember again, in the story structure
and the design of the thing,
we did not want to have Thanos himself
going to six different places,
punching six different people in the face,
getting six stones, movie over.
MARKUS: Well, we also...
Not only for repetition, but you don't want...
You don't want people to fight Thanos until the very end.
JOE: By the way, there's a little wink to Raiders of the Lost Ark right there.
McFEELY: Yes, exactly.
Wanted to show that the Time Stone... This is very big for Kevin Feige.
Make sure that his greatest weapon was certainly on his mind
and he tried to use it, but Maw was one step ahead of him.
JOE: Yeah, you know, these characters,
the Black Order can certainly find the stones.
And if they can find the stones,
the assumption is that they know an awful lot about the stones.
And they're prepared, Maw in particular,
to not be undone by the Time Stone.
The relationship between Peter Parker and Tony Stark
is integral to the emotional core of the film.
And it's one that was set up in Civil War,
continued in Homecoming, and is furthered here.
And it is a father-son relationship,
and one that will ultimately end up being exceedingly painful for Tony.
ANTHONY: Circumstances sort of forced them to move forward
into a more complex place with one another.
McFEELY: Tony tries to save him, tries to protect him,
and actually he does save him, sends him home.
Kid's too much of a hero for that.
ANTHONY: Speaking of loyalty...
McFEELY: Ew.
JOE: Now the big question is, "Whatever happened to that hand?"
It's still in Washington Square Park.
MARKUS: Exactly. McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: So, this was a big moment for all of us...
MARKUS: Tune into Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
JOE: All the comic book fans who work on the movie
to send Peter Parker to space.
Have him crawling up the side of a spaceship.
Another big moment, obviously, is giving him the Iron Spider outfit.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: Which you see here.
So, clearly something Tony had tucked away for a rainy day.
Pete, you gotta let go. I'm gonna catch you.
SPIDER-MAN: But you said save the wizard!
McFEELY: Again, we're trying to design
four or five, six different small stories
based around the stones that can be woven together.
These various groups coming together, breaking apart.
So this is the, perhaps, first one.
MARKUS: Everything happening for a reason.
Peter just doesn't get a suit because we want him to look cool
and sell more toys in this one.
He needs a different suit.
- For a different purpose. - JOE: He needs to go to space
in something different, something that he can breathe in.
Something that will let him function
in the environment he's about to encounter.
The idea behind the movie, too, and we talked about this earlier,
is this smash-and-grab concept.
Nobody gets to rest in this film.
They literally get...
Strange, Tony, Banner, and Wong get about two minutes of exposition out
before the story comes to them.
And now, they're in motion.
Inciting incidents happened and characters are in motion.
And you'll watch each sequence, as we introduce characters...
Each one has his own inciting incident
that sets them off on the path towards Thanos.
FRIDAY: Boss, we're losing her.
(VOICE BREAKING) I'm going too.
MARKUS: I'm not even sure exactly
what the amount of elapsed time in this movie is.
It can't be more than, maybe, two days.
JOE: Yeah, at most.
As you mentioned, Peter is... Won't give up.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: And now inserts himself in the story in a way
that's going to have a very tragic ending for him.
He should have stayed on the bus.
This is really unique here, coming up. The way that we introduced the cue.
It's smashing these worlds together
in a way that you haven't seen before.
Somebody put their chocolate in my peanut butter.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: It's really bizarre to see,
and every time I see it, it's very strange to see this cue
starting over Banner here.
MARKUS: 'Cause it's almost like...
McFEELY: The traditional cut would be to go to Steve.
MARKUS: It's almost like Rubberband Man signifies Steve Rogers
'cause it starts playing when you look at him.
You go like, "That doesn't seem right. Who would it signify?"
ALL: Oh!
JOE: And it's a tease to anybody who's paying attention.
They're going to pick it up before we even cut to space.
Obviously, that is a joke...
ANTHONY: Here's our rock star.
JOE: On our part of that Space title.
Making fun of our penchant for title cards.
(McFEELY CHUCKLES)
JOE: We knew we needed a big intro for the Guardians.
We wanted something that was very different, tonally,
from everyone else in the film.
And I think we bandied about this idea
that they were singing along to a song from Quill's Zune.
And it's been a couple of years between Guardians 2 and this movie.
So they're a very polished quote-unquote superhero group
who's been traveling the galaxy on many adventures.
And, obviously, have all picked up a little bit of Groot by this point.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: And know a lot of the songs on Quill's Zune.
We are arriving.
ANTHONY: I mean, having them in the same film was just...
Seeing the contrast between the Guardians and the Avengers
is really delightful.
They're like the gang that couldn't shoot straight
in contrast to the dream team.
But yet, equally heroic in their own way.
MARKUS: And actually, closer to the tragic center of the story.
McFEELY: Right. That was one of the things we really wanted to...
It was an advantage, right?
Thanos has a couple of daughters.
JOE: Who are members.
McFEELY: Yeah. So we...
If we could tie them to one of the stones,
it'd be all the better.
JOE: The plot always works best
when the characters are emotionally connected to the plot in some way.
Obviously, with a movie with 23 heroes, you can't...
That might not even be an accurate count.
I don't think we've actually counted...
McFEELY: It's... Yeah, I mean...
JOE: Somewhere in that ball park.
MARKUS: Depends on your definition of "heroes."
JOE: But not all of them can be emotionally tied to the plot.
But we knew certainly that Gamora could.
And she becomes the core character of the film, emotionally.
One of the core characters of the film, emotionally.
ANTHONY: This and the following scene
are two of my favorite scenes in the film.
- They were... - MARKUS: They were shot very early on.
ANTHONY: They were shot early on and even when we were on set,
you could tell how special they were.
The performances were just really alive
and very unpredictable and kinetic and surprising.
MARKUS: And an opportunity to keep Thor and Chris Hemsworth
in the more comedic zone he'd gotten into from Ragnarok.
So that he didn't go back to being the grave Thor,
but got to maintain a little bit of that whimsy,
despite his tragedy.
ANTHONY: Yeah. It's almost like a third version of him now.
(GRUNTS)
(PANTING HEAVILY)
JOE: We can talk about the chemistry
between Hemsworth and Pratt in the scenes.
McFEELY: Ridiculous. JOE: Yeah.
These guys love the point of view and the energy
and were pretty fearless, comedic ally.
And it's great when you take two very funny actors
and you put them in a room together because they push each other.
McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: There is a natural competition
when the lead from two different franchises get together.
And it plays right into the competition of two heroes getting together.
So, it is delightful.
ANTHONY: It is, and it's fun because the deck is so stacked
in this scene, and it's like Thor is privy
to so much more information about our story
than Quill is at this moment that he can basically trump him.
Over and over again.
JOE: That's right. A very compelling element of crossovers is
who has primacy. These are all leaders. Right?
They all are used to leading their own worlds and universes
and once you put them in the same room together,
who gets to call the shots?
And that is a notion that we revisit several times in the movie
as different configurations of characters run into each other.
Probably even harder than having to kill a sister.
Plus, I came out with both my eyes, which was...
I need a hammer, not a spoon.
ANTHONY: There's a spoon that was clearly caught
in the washing machine.
McFEELY: I mean, there's a 15-minute version of the scene if you want it.
I mean, this is an embarrassment of riches in this scene.
MARKUS: It might be elsewhere on your DVD.
ANTHONY: Although this is another example of a scene
where Jeff Ford cut the scene,
our editor, very early on
and it didn't evolve too much from the very early cut, surprisingly.
JOE: Okay, talk about the Guardians' roles in the movie for a minute.
Quill is a very interesting character to us.
He's sort of like a Peter Pan character.
His mother was dying of cancer, he was kidnapped at the age of 10,
raised by pirates.
He's unique, and what's fun about him is he's very flawed
and he's emotionally damaged.
His mother's been murdered...
MARKUS: Murdered his own father. JOE: That's right.
His girlfriend's about to die in the movie.
So this is a guy who has incredible catharsis in his life.
Gamora is the bravest character in the film, without question.
She, at two separate moments in the movie, is willing to die
in order to protect the universe,
and doesn't hesitate in either circumstance.
Drax obviously provides a lot of comic relief.
He does have an emotional connection to Thanos
which he tries to act upon.
It doesn't go well for him.
Rocket, I think, is a really interesting character,
reminds us a lot of Louie De Palma
from my favorite show, growing up, Taxi,
is this sort of...
McFEELY: Puts up a big front, but really underneath there's...
JOE: Cynical A-hole. ANTHONY: Relentless.
JOE: Who ultimately if you were to dig, dig very, very, very deep,
there's a teeny, little heart beating in there.
And Groot, who we wanted on a very simple arc.
We thought it was very funny
what James did with him at the end of Guardians 2.
And so we left him in the space of being a belligerent teenager
who makes one choice, one important choice in the movie.
McFEELY: That's a good example of proper sized arcs for these characters.
MARKUS: And Mantis is just funny every time she...
McFEELY: And yet gets a couple of big moments.
MARKUS: Yeah.
But that said, we also wanted to split the Guardians up,
because much like the strange alchemy
of putting different Avengers with different people,
we couldn't have them just functioning as a unit throughout the movie.
McFEELY: Yeah. MARKUS: So this is the first division
where Rocket and Groot go off with Thor.
And then later Gamora will leave the other three.
- Yeah. I'll go. - Wonderful!
- Uh, except for that I'm the captain. - THOR: Quiet.
- That's my backpack. - ROCKET: Go sit down.
PETER: Look, this is my ship.
And I'm not goin' to...
Wait, what kinda weapon are we talkin' about here?
The Thanos-killing kind.
Don't you think that we should all have a weapon like that?
No. You simply lack the strength to wield them.
JOE: I thought the Rocket-Thor pairing would be interesting
because Rocket is so hardened and cynical
and Thor is in this very vulnerable emotional state.
I think we'd all agree that, collectively,
one of our favorites scenes in the movie
is Rocket and Thor in the pod
having a heart-to-heart conversation with each other.
And the morons will go to Knowhere to try to stop Thanos.
- Cool? Cool. - So cool.
PETER: For the record...
JOE: And this is a perfect example of heroes with opposing agendas.
McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: And keeping it in motion.
I mean, Thor is only with them for a very short period of time
before he is blasting off in another direction.
So the movie is always pressing forward.
McFEELY: Remember, you as an audience member
have watched many, many, many movies
and television shows over the course of your life,
and so when Thor says
"I'm going to go get the thing that's gonna defeat the bad guy,"
you are predicting, whether you know it or not, 90 minutes ahead,
"Well, he's going to get that thing, he's going to defeat that bad guy."
JOE: Because commercial movies absolutely...
McFEELY: Yes, we absolutely take advantage of that.
JOE: I mean, it's similar to what we did in Civil War.
Collectively, we all like to deconstruct narrative, I think.
And part of how we deconstruct the mythology of these movies
is by playing into predictive elements and then turning them on their head.
So when we show you two minutes of a backstory of super soldiers,
evil super soldiers in Civil War,
the intent is that you will think that...
McFEELY: This must be important. (CHUCKLES)
JOE: We've spent that story space for a reason.
And now there's going to be a big fight in the third act.
Tony and Cap are going to solve their differences
and have to overcome a bigger problem.
That was, in fact, not the case.
Same in this film. We are setting Thor up in a way of,
as I said earlier, correlating hero's journey with Thanos.
One of those two is going to win the movie.
Typically, commercial movies do not end this way.
So the expectation is that Thor will solve the problem.
ANTHONY: So remember our fondness for misdirection
as you ask us questions about Avengers 4
over the course of the next year.
McFEELY: This isn't live, Anthony.
They're not on the phone right now or anything.
MARKUS: May I also say, this is Edinburgh
and we did go to Edinburgh.
McFEELY: They could be in Hawaii, but no one took me up on that.
JOE: I love Edinburgh. MARKUS: It's gorgeous.
JOE: It's one of my favorite cities on the planet.
ANTHONY: Did you enjoy it, Steve? McFEELY: I did, it was five degrees.
I enjoyed everything when it was five degrees.
I also liked that they could deep-fry my kebab.
MARKUS: Yes. They can deep-fry anything you want, really.
ANTHONY: But this city had a beautiful texture to it.
You know, we were looking for some private moment for Wanda and Vision
to engage in their relationship.
A romantic place,
but also a place that can go from something so romantic
to scary and gothic quickly.
And that was basically what we are driving at here
is their experience.
McFEELY: And again, one of the few intro scenes, right?
Tony and Pepper had one, Strange and Wong had one,
they have one, but again, it's about the stone.
Let me remind you he's got a stone in his head,
and then someone comes for it.
- It's not... - MARKUS: Wait.
JOE: Oh! ANTHONY: Ouch.
JOE: Again, we're not waiting. The story isn't waiting.
The story is coming to the characters.
They're all on their heels.
They're a very important relationship to the movie, Vision and Wanda.
One of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film is between the two of them.
We knew that to get to that point, we had to cement their relationship.
Also, what I love about this scene is that this is Wanda
doing everything she can to protect a broken Vision.
I would say that we have difficulty with characters that are too powerful.
Because if they can solve the problem
on page one, where are you going?
So, we have a tendency, all of us, to look for ways
to cripple powerful characters, either physically or psychologically.
And in this case, Vision gets skewered by a very powerful weapon
and he is damaged throughout the rest of the movie.
Systems are failing.
ANTHONY: I think Lizzie's performance is really good,
and our stunt team as well
in that you feel the desperation in her
in terms of how her fighting style, her efforts
trying to get back to Vision and save him.
(GRUNTING)
(GROANS)
JOE: There were earlier drafts of the script,
I think, with the Black Order
in a more stylized draft where we did backstories for each of them.
McFEELY: We did, yeah. (CHUCKLES)
JOE: Ultimately, the movie was getting too crowded, too hard to follow.
In the books, there's a backstory between Proxima and Corvus
that they're married.
Only hinted at in the slightest way here
by the fact that they are paired up to retrieve a stone
and the way that she responds.
The way that Proxima responds when Corvus gets stabbed by Natasha.
Hey. We have to go.
(SIGHS)
Please. Please leave.
JOE: This was really all of us working hard to figure out a way
to give Steve Rogers a great entrance into the film.
We knew that we were delaying his entrance.
McFEELY: We had drafts where we really delayed it.
JOE: Yeah.
And we wanted him to have a powerful entrance back into the movie
and one that also spoke to this edgier version of Cap.
When you're on the run for two years, no matter who you are, it changes you.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: And he's certainly more hardened.
ANTHONY: Living in the shadows.
McFEELY: He's always been a man of few words.
He has very few words here.
JOE: Obviously, the Black Order are very powerful.
They've got Vision on his heels,
they're giving Wanda a run for her money.
But what we wanted to illustrate here
is that this core group of Avengers, quote, unquote "secret Avengers"
in Falcon, Widow and Cap
are hardened, tough, and work very well as a unit...
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: And surprise the Black Order here.
Get the upper hand.
(YELLING)
McFEELY: You know, this is...
Every theater I go to, this is rousing.
(ALL GRUNTING)
MARKUS: How many theaters do you go to?
McFEELY: Constantly going to theaters, man.
MARKUS: That's odd. Give it up, get a life.
ANTHONY: We should mention Alan Silvestri's theme here...
JOE: Oh, yeah.
ANTHONY: ...that we use.
It's very Pavlovian for many of us
in terms of the emotional reaction we get from it.
JOE: I think it's, without question the most emotional
- piece of music that exists. - McFEELY: Cue in the MCU.
JOE: Yeah, cue that exists in the MCU.
Used sparingly in this movie for two very big moments.
One here and one with Thor.
It's hinted at, in other places
but doesn't get into its full-blown presentation.
McFEELY: And was that Silvestri or you guys?
JOE: It was... I think Alan recommended this.
We were sitting in a room with him and we pulled out an iPhone
and started playing it from the original Avengers soundtrack
just over the cut, and everybody in the room went crazy.
So we said, "All right, that's a great idea."
And then, we knew we needed a big piece of score for Thor
so, we thought, early on, when we're conceiving the film
it was very important to us, as directors,
to identify two or three key moments where that theme could come in.
As I said, I think it's the best thing that we have
for music in the Marvel Universe
just for recognizability and connection to the audience.
MARKUS: Now, here we get to
something that has been hinted at
but never shown
which is Gamora is Thanos' adopted daughter.
How does a man like Thanos go about adopting anyone?
Does he go to an agency?
- Does he fill out a form? - (LAUGHTER)
No, he kills everybody else.
Well, half of everybody else on the planet
and then, you're his.
McFEELY: With this, we always had this scene from the very first draft.
So, it changed slightly, but it was always
"He destroys her world, and he takes her as an orphan."
MARKUS: But it was also very important not for him to just grab her,
stick her under his arm and drag her off.
JOE: Something he sees in her.
MARKUS: There's something he sees in her
and there is something she sees in him.
He is a protector.
Even if he created the danger,
he is providing a way forward for her that does speak to her inherent nature.
McFEELY: It's an abusive relationship in that way.
JOE: Visually, it's a tragic...
It implies what is about to happen to her.
He steps her outside of his rule of law.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: Which is...
One side randomly survives and the other side randomly gets killed.
She's in between the two.
McFEELY: Right. Scenes do more than one thing, right?
This is, here's how he used to work.
This is reminding you this is his philosophy, balance.
This is how he got her.
This is the planting of a MacGuffin that's gonna be helpful later.
JOE: It's unfortunately a trajectory she can't escape.
'Cause it does ultimately end up in her demise.
ANTHONY: I love the tension in her performance there.
JOE: Yes, this young actress was really fantastic to work with.
MARKUS: And here she is.
ANTHONY: Zoe approached this role with a lot of bravery.
You know, like, an intimate collaboration
with all these actors is necessary to pull off these
very wonderful characters and wonderful arcs,
but Zoe had, perhaps, the most difficult one in the film.
McFEELY: For sure. MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
ANTHONY: And she was...
We spent a lot of time working with her on that,
talking through the character arc with her.
She approached it very... With a lot of integrity
and a lot of bravery, I thought.
I just really, really respect her performance in this film.
JOE: And she carries the movie emotionally.
What?
I know something he doesn't.
JOE: Characters... At several points in the movie,
characters in relationships are put into situations
where one is asked to kill the other.
McFEELY: It's by design, yeah.
- The script... - JOE: To protect the universe.
McFEELY: ...does that three or four times.
Are you gonna make choices?
What does it mean to be a hero?
So, a lot of people have a very similar choice,
"Will I lose my loved one or not?"
MARKUS: Because it's almost, I mean,
we are used to heroes sacrificing themselves.
It's almost a given.
But what's the next step?
What are you willing to give up?
McFEELY: I know all these people will jump on the grenade.
Will they throw somebody else on that grenade? (LAUGHS)
ANTHONY: And it's really fun how Gamora basically...
You know, generally, our heroes in the film
refuse to compromise on life.
But Gamora very cleverly
traps Quill into a promise here.
McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: She knows something that's coming that he doesn't.
McFEELY: And that was... There was a lot of speculation
as to where the Soul Stone was, right?
We never wanted to give that chip away.
We didn't want it to be somewhere you already knew.
We didn't want some other movie to plant it.
We wanted to use it as a story point.
MARKUS: We didn't want it to be random either.
McFEELY: The search for it.
MARKUS: Like it's on planet X... McFEELY: Exactly.
MARKUS: Which happens to have lots of, you know,
spiders on it. That would be difficult.
McFEELY: It becomes a secret for one of our characters
and, therefore, it becomes emotional.
This is perhaps Drax's funniest moment.
MARKUS: Dave Bautista is an extraordinary human being.
ANTHONY: Yeah, and his performance,
he is so disciplined and controlled.
- It's amazing to me. He's so funny. - JOE: Yeah.
His joke delivery is as sly and subtle as anyone we've ever worked with.
MANTIS: Hi, Drax.
Damn it.
MARKUS: And here we go back to a setting from the first Guardians movie.
McFEELY: Again, this movie rewards investment.
ANTHONY: We run into a nice contrast here. If you remember the...
When they enter Knowhere in the Guardians,
it's like they're driving into Vegas on a Friday night.
And something's amiss now.
MARKUS: Again, this is Thanos' effect on the universe.
JOE: There are two shots in the movie where Zoe silently absorbs
the presence of Thanos.
One is over her shoulder when they first arrive at the Ark
and they see all the dead bodies floating in space.
It's a very subtle shot of her twisting her head
knowing there's very few people in the universe
who could enact that kind of destruction.
And then again, here, feeling it
as she's landing, that they may be too late.
- And for eagle-eyed viewers... - (LAUGHTER)
Tobias Fünke is part of the MCU.
THE COLLECTOR: (STRAINED) I told you.
MARKUS: The Collector returns.
ANTHONY: Yes, the Magnificent.
McFEELY: Yeah, one of the charms of this, right.
Did you see? We didn't even mention it
but Ned Leeds, from Homecoming, has about 10 seconds in the movie.
Benicio del Toro is gonna have another 60.
Hopefully, the delightful things about this all-star mashup is that
you'll get these little sprinkles.
MARKUS: But for a reason. There would be an actor in those places,
but we have the opportunity to bring in
this magnificent supporting cast.
Drax.
JOE: Here's a callback to
Drax's history with Thanos, here.
McFEELY: Every scene does more than one thing.
JOE: His planet was treated the same way as Gamora's planet.
Drax was put on one side, his family was put on the other.
(THUD)
(GROANS)
(WHISPERING) Okay.
ANTHONY: This scene is... This is the beginning
of the relationship between Gamora and Thanos in the film.
McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: And right away, you're thrown into
whatever their very complex history with one another is.
I love how Zoe reacts to this moment
where she believes that she's killed him.
- It's really powerful. - JOE: And murdered her abuser.
McFEELY: We should point out that one of the challenges
when you have six MacGuffins, and every stone does a different thing,
it's incumbent upon us to remind people what that stone does
and to show it visually.
So, you'll notice that pretty much every time he gets a stone,
he uses it in the next scene.
This takes a while because
it's essentially an illusion that he takes away.
And here he uses this whole thing as a test
to see if she still cares for him
and that reaction tells him that she does.
ANTHONY: I mean, this is one of the most interesting things that Thanos does
and you realize that he has an inner life,
an emotional life that's important to him.
McFEELY: Twisted but, yes, 100%.
I mean, this is so manipulative.
MARKUS: Well, it's a taste of the relationship he's had with Gamora.
It hasn't just been physical manipulation.
He has emotionally...
JOE: He's an extreme sociopath with a Messianic complex.
ANTHONY: But from his point of view
he's trying to salvage his relationship with her.
They have had a falling out. He loves her.
He's trying to find a way
to help her realize that they have a bond between them,
that they share love.
JOE: People have asked us why Thanos didn't just use the stones
to double the resources in the universe, since clearly, he has not.
McFEELY: No, it's about free will.
- That doesn't solve their problem. - JOE: He's not interested in...
McFEELY: We're just gonna get there millions of years from now.
And this is an opportunity for people to get it right.
JOE: Well, he was told no... McFEELY: And he trusts them.
JOE: To an idea that he had that he felt was the only solution.
And then was proved right to himself
when that solution was not acted upon.
So, his Messianic complex.
He is now committed to following through
on the idea he had many, many years ago.
He's not a stable, although he appears stable at times,
he's not a stable individual.
No!
MARKUS: And here, a nod to the original Starlin comics
where Thanos does some very strange things with the stones.
JOE: Cubes and ribbons. MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
- Ah, the boyfriend. - (GROANS)
JOE: Again, another fantastic performance by Zoe and by Chris, here.
ANTHONY: You know, it's like
in treating Gamora's friends playfully,
I think, again, it's Thanos stepping very lightly
around his relationship with her.
McFEELY: Another character has to make a painful choice, right?
You promised. You promised.
THANOS: Oh, daughter.
You expect too much from him.
McFEELY: And it's as if Thanos thinks he knows him.
MARKUS: And on a certain level, it is
the girlfriend's dad meeting the boyfriend for the first time.
- (LAUGHTER) - McFEELY: Twisted.
I love that when he rolls his head.
ANTHONY: Yeah, just great.
This is where you see the depth
of when these actors get to work with one another over multiple films
it's like the connection these two characters,
that Zoe and Chris share here,
it's really intense.
JOE: And bubbles, obviously a function of the Reality Stone.
Thanos has the ability to manipulate.
McFEELY: And helpful for later.
I mean, by reusing them, you sort of know immediately what's happened.
JOE: We were asked by a 12-year-old in D.C. at a Q and A
why Thanos needed all six stones
and why didn't he just use the Reality Stone to alter reality.
The idea being that only something so dramatic
as disposing of life in half the universe
could be accomplished with the power of all six stones.
McFEELY: Yeah, I think the Reality Stone,
we sort of use it as an impermanent solution to things.
ANTHONY: Right. Not real.
JOE: It's illusory, it creates illusions.
MARKUS: And here you see one of the most extraordinary actors in the film.
Of course, I'm referring to William Hurt.
McFEELY: Right. No, stop it. This is an amazing piece of work.
ANTHONY: We have a little... Look there.
McFEELY: Look at him on his phone.
MARKUS: There's something coming out of his shoulder.
McFEELY: He's texting like crazy.
JOE: Yeah, that guy is really
- committed to texting. - McFEELY: Look at that, look at that.
It's just an eyebrow.
JOE: He's inquisitive there, curious, maybe.
- It's hard to say what's going on. - (LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: Thank God we signed him to a 10-picture deal.
ANTHONY: You don't hear his voice in the movie
but you hear his voice now.
MARKUS: Two words, Phase Five.
JOE: Now, what's interesting about these characters
is that they are all heroes.
And that, irrespective of the events of Civil War
and the fact that they caused physical damage to Rhodey,
when aliens show up with the intent to destroy the Earth
he does not hesitate, as a hero, to invite in other heroes
who can help him defend the planet.
And I think it will be a much different situation
if Tony were here.
If Tony and Steve had to see each other for the first time,
it would be much more complicated.
McFEELY: Right. Which is why we didn't do it.
We tried in a few drafts and it ground things to a halt.
JOE: Yep. Rhodey is once removed from that conflict.
He's also an extremely heroic character, a military man
and understands that his sacrifice needs to be put aside
for the greater good of the universe.
McFEELY: He's a pragmatist.
MARKUS: And I might add, Vision...
McFEELY: Is the one... MARKUS: Shot his suit.
McFEELY: That's right. MARKUS: Which broke his back.
ANTHONY: But off-camera, since Civil War,
he and Vision obviously had been working together
until Vision went off the grid and disappeared.
So, they must have made amends.
BANNER: Uh, I think you look great.
MARKUS: And here we have just a taste
of a reunion.
Hi, Bruce.
ANTHONY: Movie's moving too fast for love.
- JOE: Yeah. - (LAUGHTER)
MARKUS: I should also say to the...
The designers and builders of this set,
it's the biggest and most extraordinary set I've ever seen.
JOE: Yeah, Charlie Woods did an amazing job.
McFEELY: This must be 2,000 square feet.
JOE: The production design on this movie is incredible.
MARKUS: Yeah, I would pay good rent to live in the Avengers' compound.
JOE: It's obviously shot very differently
than Civil War and Winter Soldier.
The colors are very different.
Those two movies were intentionally desaturated, brutalist.
We're trying to take the comic book out of Captain America.
We're intentionally pulling it as close as we could to the real world
and to make it less colorful than more colorful.
We're integrating a lot of different franchises here.
We're dealing with very cosmic fantastical locations.
We knew that we were gonna embrace color very early on in Infinity War.
And the cameras are in what we call studio mode.
You know they're on dollies, Steadicam, cranes.
It's more of a presentational image, a more steady image.
We do do handheld at various points in the movie
but it's instinctual moments for us, it's not a mandate like it was
in Civil War and Winter Soldier.
Thanos threatens half the universe.
McFEELY: Would you say this color, though,
and say the earthbound scenes
is closer to Civil War versus the space scenes?
Or do you see a particular difference
between a similar scene in Civil War and this?
JOE: The only thing that's close
is the fact that these are the same outfits
that Steve Rogers...
We redesigned his outfit to desaturate it.
He's ripped most of the labels off of it.
You know, this Vision is same outfit that he was in Civil War.
So, yes, earthbound you could say but still even in New York
or at the Sanctum, there's still... There's still an element of color.
And the set was designed for more warmth than we traditionally...
ANTHONY: Yeah, we combined more color temperatures in this scene I think
than we would have in those other films even on Earth.
JOE: There's a modern edge to both of those movies
that again, also is about smashing Captain America into the modern world
in a way that creates conflict.
Talked right through one of the biggest reveals in the movie.
- (LAUGHTER) - ANTHONY: Where are we?
McFEELY: Yeah. You know, we tested this movie a few times.
And when we got to this scene,
most of the audiences, say in January or in early February
went, "Oh, this is an interesting place. I've never been here before."
And after mid-February once Black Panther had come out,
this scene gets a huge cheer.
It just rewards you investing in these characters.
I shouldn't have been surprised, but, boy, I was really pleased.
MARKUS: And here you see several more threads coming together.
ANTHONY: Bucky Barnes' long road
that you guys began so many years ago.
McFEELY: So many years ago. MARKUS: Oh, Bucky.
McFEELY: So many years ago!
JOE: It was a big conversation early on.
We're gonna set a lot of the third act in Wakanda.
Because if you're gonna go anywhere in the world
to protect a MacGuffin from an evil alien,
it's going to be Wakanda.
McFEELY: And that's not an easy decision.
We've certainly talked about it a lot.
I mean, Marvel knew that they were two months...
It would be two months from having a third act in Wakanda.
JOE: That's right. McFEELY: Is that the smartest thing?
But if you're gonna take a stone out, you need the best scientist.
And if you're gonna protect yourself,
you need the most secure country in the world.
And, you know, where else are you gonna go?
JOE: Yeah, you make your last stand. McFEELY: Yeah.
So, it ended up... We looked pretty smart
because people loved that movie, and it was delightful to go back,
but it wasn't a slam dunk that would be the case.
ANTHONY: I think it was also a payoff of the relationship that began
between T'Challa and Cap in Civil War.
There's a really interesting arc journey
those two characters have traveled together
in the development of a mutual respect, and a bond kind of blossoms
into this moment where Cap can actually go to him
- and make an ask like this. - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: This is the Marathon Man.
McFEELY: Yes. "Is it safe?"
ANTHONY: Kudos to our VFX team.
Maw's face is magnificent.
McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: The movement, his expression.
JOE: Something that took a lot of work in the script phase,
how to reintroduce Peter Parker back into the story
on the ship and at what moment.
- I was gonna go home. - I don't wanna hear it.
JOE: And we may have shot this scene twice
trying to get it correct.
MARKUS: All sorts of versions.
McFEELY: We tried to give every character,
maybe main character, say
a bit of a topic sentence, right? "Why am I in this movie?"
"Why am I going to the great lengths I'm going to?"
And so, Peter Parker says because,
"I can't be the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man
"if there's no neighborhood, right?"
Tony will, in a couple minutes,
tell Doctor Strange that Thanos has been rolling around in his head
and "I gotta do something about it. He's been the cause of all my anxiety."
Steve just said it to Colonel Ross. To Director Ross.
MARKUS: Secretary of State.
McFEELY: Secretary. Forgive me. Yeah. MARKUS: Strange. Strange says it to Tony
that his job is to protect the Time Stone at all cost.
McFEELY: That's right. Everyone gets...
If you're doing your three-paragraph paper at home,
everyone gets a topic sentence at one point.
MARKUS: Including the Cloak. McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: A lot of discussion about...
MARKUS: His very loyal piece of outerwear.
JOE: How to dispatch of Maw here.
It's one of the most talked-about things in the movie.
Eventually we decided that, you know, like Indy with the gun...
McFEELY: He's facing the saber swordsman.
JOE: Exactly. McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: He puts the whip down and pulls out his gun.
That something quick and efficient will be more surprising
than something belabored.
Because there's an incredible amount of action in the movie.
It felt like we did not need another five minute action sequence.
MARKUS: We also just saw a fight between these exact characters in New York.
ANTHONY: This is a good example of how we work.
All of us will decide on our story points
and what we want to happen.
And then we'll go into a cycle where we work with our VFX team
and our stunt team on various ideas about how that fight can happen.
Sometimes we'll explore six, seven, eight different possibilities
before arriving at what is the right thing,
what's servicing the story best, what's servicing the characters best.
But I think this was an example
where we explored many possibilities of that fight.
McFEELY: Yeah.
STARK: Yeah, now he wants to run. Great plan.
No, I want to protect the stone.
STARK: And I want you to thank me. Now, go ahead. I'm listening.
ANTHONY: And I think we were all delighted
that we could call back to a really old movie.
- (ALL CHUCKLE) - McFEELY: That's right.
I tried to bench you. You refused.
JOE: One of my favorite scenes in the movie, as well,
is this showdown between these two great actors.
McFEELY: Yeah. You've been waiting for this sort of confrontation.
MARKUS: If you remember in Avengers,
Tony goes to space for a very brief moment
and sees what is, in effect, the looming threat of Thanos.
And now he is in space again
and it's time to face that thing he saw back then.
JOE: And these characters all have very cathartic histories
that are clashing with each other.
Strange obviously lost the Ancient One and learned a very powerful lesson
about protecting the Time Stone
and what his mission is as Master of the Mystic Arts.
Tony saw a vision of all of his friends dead.
These are powerful motivators that drive these characters
on their missions, and their missions are conflicting with each other.
McFEELY: Again, this movie,
if you've invested, can be very rich because of that.
Because you bring all that into the movie with you.
JOE: Well, that's what makes the movie unique, right?
Is that, historically,
I don't know that you can point to another movie
ever being made like this,
where there are 18 subsequent stories having been told
that were all from different successful franchises.
So it creates a very unique movie-going experience.
We couldn't tell the story without all of those stories being told.
There's no way that you can introduce all of these characters.
McFEELY: No. It's built on 17, 18 other movies. Yeah.
MARKUS: And if you just wrote this script
and said there's a wizard and a man in a metal suit
and they fight a purple guy, people would laugh you out of town.
(LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: It's a testament to Kevin and to Marvel
the audience has become accustomed to this type of storytelling.
Or a segment of it is.
So that they're on board for a movie that starts right in the middle
and assumes that you know a decent amount.
ANTHONY: I have to tell you that I've been hearing from grandmothers
who've never seen any of the movies before.
McFEELY: Tell The New Yorker. MARKUS: Yeah.
ANTHONY: What's that? McFEELY: Tell The New Yorker.
ANTHONY: I didn't see that. But I'm telling you they're...
I feel like first-time viewers are responding strongly
and not just, you know...
People who are outside of the target audience.
JOE: These are some of the richest emotional scenes in the movie because...
McFEELY: We've always targeted this as the midpoint roughly.
JOE: These two characters have a devastating history together.
ANTHONY: And we may have shot this scene twice as well.
JOE: And Thanos, as you can tell,
the Black Order, also the Children of Thanos
is that he goes from planet to planet. As he destroys a planet,
he can, if moved, collect a child from that planet
and train them and turn them into a part of his cult.
ANTHONY: We're actually gonna release a elongated version of this scene
hopefully on the DVD you're listening to right now,
where Thanos and Gamora go even more deeply
into their history together.
And it's really... I think it's really wonderful stuff.
Very complex, sort of, malignant family relationship.
But it just ended up being too long for the film
and we ended up figuring out a tighter version of the movie
that gave us the right balance of emotional complexity and depth
but also kept the story moving.
JOE: Part of what defines Gamora as a hero is the fact that she rebels
and is the only one who's rebelled against Thanos.
McFEELY: She calls him on it, right here in this scene.
And the audience... I think the audience desperately need someone to say,
"You are nuts. This idea of yours is not...
"No one else thinks this."
JOE: It's not stable. It's not sane. McFEELY: Yeah.
She's our surrogate.
MARKUS: But it's also the closest you get to
Thanos emotionally making his case.
You know. "There's a reason I do this. I'm not just a lunatic."
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: His Malthusian philosophy about population control.
McFEELY: He's nearly vulnerable here. That's about the only...
There's obviously... End of the second act, he gets vulnerable.
ANTHONY: Yeah. MARKUS: And look at that.
ANTHONY: And when he gets rejected at the end of this scene, he becomes...
He goes hardcore in the other direction. (CHUCKLING)
McFEELY: He does. Once he gets it, this better be worth it.
MARKUS: "I offered you caring.
"If you don't want that, I have something else for you."
McFEELY: I have seen lots of online stuff about
"Can we talk about that Thanos is hot?"
ANTHONY: Oh, really? McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: Of course. ANTHONY: Yeah.
Yeah. Bad boys.
McFEELY: Yeah. You can't change them.
MARKUS: Well, he's got a kind of Tony Soprano
kind of a bulky magnitude.
JOE: Are we saying that nutsack of a chin is attractive?
- (LAUGHTER) - Is that what I'm hearing?
I am disappointed.
But not because you didn't find it.
McFEELY: This is, again, a story thing.
The catalyst for the whole movie
was when Thanos figured out where the Soul Stone was
because he captured Nebula on his ship
and rooted around her brain
and found out that Gamora knew where the Soul Stone was.
JOE: It's the reason why he has not...
McFEELY: Why he hasn't gone after for it before.
JOE: Gone after the stone at that point.
Because the minute he does, the forces of the universe
are gonna line up against him.
If he doesn't know where the Soul Stone is, then what is the point?
McFEELY: Exactly. And that's a question we had to answer
based on all these other movies, you know?
It's a darn good question.
So, normally you want your inciting incident
the catalyst for this to maybe be on screen
and maybe be first.
But given how we wanted to approach the story,
we've buried it to basically the midpoint.
So, and again, it keeps you off balance,
but it's definitely there. There's a reason that it's this.
JOE: This is certainly
along with the scene on Gamora's home planet,
really illustrates how psychotic Thanos is.
McFEELY: Yeah.
I'm surprised the screaming made it all the way through.
It's crushing.
JOE: Yeah. MARKUS: It's hard.
ANTHONY: Karen, again, had a very brave performance in this movie as well.
NEBULA: You know what he's about to do.
He's finally ready, and he's going for the stones.
- All of them. - He can never get them all.
NEBULA: He will!
He can't, Nebula.
Because I found the map to the Soul Stone...
and I burned it to ash. I burned it.
JOE: Gamora is being undone by her robotic sister
who she, in part, helped create.
'Cause every time Gamora would beat Nebula in a training session
as a way to punish Nebula, Thanos would replace parts of her
trying to create a better fighter through robotic parts.
And, so, there's a lot of tragedy that surround these characters.
This is a tragic irony for Gamora.
McFEELY: Because of the work done, say in Guardians of the Galaxy 2,
their relationship is stronger, so that Gamora is torn here.
She may not give this information up six movies ago, but she would now.
JOE: It's easy to jump on the grenade,
but would you throw someone else on the grenade?
McFEELY: That's right.
ANTHONY: As Thor points out, families can be tough.
MARKUS: That's so true.
JOE: I think, you know, she's looking at buying time here
and getting Thanos away from Nebula.
McFEELY: Okay, Anthony, if Joe was hung up in Iraq and being tortured,
what would you do? That's really the question I have.
ANTHONY: I would give up Vormir.
McFEELY: (LAUGHING) Is that 'cause he's sitting here?
(LAUGHTER)
ANTHONY: You have to. You have to live to fight another day.
McFEELY: No. I agree. It's true. Strategically.
ANTHONY: It's one step forward.
JOE: This scene blends the tones of the movie
in a way that I don't think any other scene in the film does.
It's absurdism married to pathos.
And, you know, Thor's behavior is what lends to the absurdism.
He's in a place where he's refusing to recognize how severe his situation is
and all the terrible things that have happened to him.
Talking to a very cynical raccoon.
Or getting cross-examined by a cynical raccoon.
So, dead brother, huh?
McFEELY: I mean, we've often said that
Marvel's the best sandbox to play in, right?
It's not just because these characters have a long history in the comics,
it's because other films have developed the characters.
So we get to take, you know, these two Guardians and this Thor
literally from their movies that came out just before this.
And use them to our advantage. I mean, the other movies are tools for us.
You sure you're up to this particular murder mission?
Absolutely.
McFEELY: And he crushes this scene. JOE: Yeah, he does.
I think more than any of the actors in these films
the one that can go from comedic to tragic the fastest is Hemsworth.
And that's a real gift as an actor.
He's never fought me twice.
McFEELY: I mean, he's grown over these movies, I think.
JOE: Yeah, tremendously, I think.
ANTHONY: It's very hard to hold this together, what he's doing here.
JOE: He's as compelling an actor as anyone in the world right now.
McFEELY: We knew all this on set. I mean, everybody went,
"Oh. Oh, wow, that was an impressive day."
JOE: He really encapsulates a lot as an actor.
And, his choices are very rich and they're bold, and different.
MARKUS: It's too bad he's ugly. He might be a perfect...
McFEELY: He could have a future if he wasn't such a hideous wreck.
MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: By the way, we're talking about Rocket.
I'm sorry, who are we talking about?
MARKUS: Oh, yeah. I mean, the sheen on his fur.
What more could I lose?
JOE: Comedy is at its best when you emotionally commit to it.
Not when you play the joke, but when you play against the joke.
And that whole scene is a masterclass in comedy from Hemsworth.
Because he's crying, while also playing, you know,
and putting on this ridiculous...
McFEELY: Bravado. JOE: Bravado.
And refusing to admit
that he's already had his ass handed to him by Thanos.
Thank you, sweet rabbit.
Hmm.
Huh?
(SQUELCHES)
ANTHONY: One of the only times Groot becomes interested
- in anything other than his game. - (LAUGHTER)
MARKUS: When Thor gets pinkeye. McFEELY: Yeah. (CHUCKLES)
JOE: I think a lot of people assume
that Rocket put it up his ass to get it out.
McFEELY: What do you think?
JOE: It was up his ear, remember?
McFEELY: Oh, it was up his ear, right.
(LAUGHTER)
MARKUS: No, that's definitely an ass eye.
JOE: Yeah. McFEELY: Oh, boy.
MARKUS: Here we have Thor's destination.
JOE: So this is part of what makes Infinity War Infinity War.
The grand, exotic cosmic locations. The scale of the movie.
This is on a massive scale. It's a star that's a forge
that is manned by giant dwarves.
Ancient dwarves, an ancient race of weapons makers.
McFEELY: We struggled a lot as to where this axe was gonna be, if you remember?
ANTHONY: Oh, yeah. JOE: Many locations.
McFEELY: And, again, I've been saying it and it's like I forget every movie
but every scene needs to do more than one thing and so
we had scenes where it was trapped by basically a dragon.
I mean, all sorts of things.
But this scene, not only does it provide a test for Thor
but it also shows what Thanos has wrought, right?
And that's the second element
that gives you a little myth about the forging of the gauntlet
and that he's a ruthless SOB.
And I don't know why it took us so long to figure out
that scene needed to do that. (LAUGHS)
ANTHONY: I know, it was such a huge breakthrough. But it finally came.
JOE: Well, there's so many things on our plate, it's usually...
Lot of times it's trying to make one scene work
before you can move to the next scene
to understand how that needs to work in the story.
Stop.
Thor?
ANTHONY: It was also difficult
because Thor is basically going off on his own in this movie.
Of course, Rocket and Groot are with him
but there aren't a lot of people
who are on their own specific mission in this.
McFEELY: He's on a non-stone mission. He's on a Thanos mission.
MARKUS: And yet it goes back and connects to the central spine.
ANTHONY: Exactly. It was essential that Thanos had something to do with this.
MARKUS: And we have the magnificent Peter Dinklage.
JOE: That's right.
If we didn't infuse Thor with this tragedy,
this sadness about his existence
and everything that's happened to him,
again, you might not believe,
ultimately, that he could solve the film.
So we really, really had to make it tragic
and it's part of the reason that Loki's death was so important
at the beginning of the movie is that, you know,
watching his brother finally make the choice
to be a hero instead of a villain and then tragically suffering for it
sends him on this journey
to do whatever it takes to solve the problem of the film.
Eitri, this isn't about your hands.
Every weapon you've ever designed, every axe, hammer, sword...
it's all inside your head.
ANTHONY: One thing we can talk about here is the...
You know, we have a lot of different environments in the film,
different worlds, different locations.
The story evolves in different ways through these locations.
These are very big, complex movies to make and they involve a lot of people
so everything from what we're shooting on set
to what's being designed by the visual effects department, etc.
So the way that we keep everybody
on the same page on these movies visually
is we had Charlie Wood and his Art Department
develop very specific drawings of every environment
that were artist's representations of what it would feel like.
What the colors would be, what the textures would be,
what the atmosphere would be like.
And we had our cinematographer Trent Opaloch
work very closely in developing that
in terms of what the lighting would look like ideally in these locations.
And Dan DeLeeuw and our Visual Effects team would work very closely as well
and give their creative input and bring up their concerns
about what the look could be and how it would work in the film
so that we developed this artwork
by the end of going through that process of pre-production
where we had visual representations of every environment and every set.
And we would bring those with us to set when we were executing
because sometimes that work was done many, many months before
or even a year before we actually shot some of this stuff.
And we would have it on set. We would use it as our guide
as we moved through the post-production process
and visual effects would start to take over.
Again, we would use those drawings as our guide
to what we were all trying to achieve
and we continue to reference those drawings
all the way through color timing,
which is the final visual tweaking that you do to the film.
So it was really helpful, I think, for us to achieve
the looks that we have in the film
and it was a really good process to keep things consistent
through a very elaborate process.
STARK: (GRUNTS) That was close.
I owe you one.
MARKUS: And here we're coming on strange alchemy on a grander scale
which is
first group fight-slash-meeting between Guardians and Avengers.
DRAX: Thanos!
(YELLING)
(GRUNTING)
ANTHONY: Again, this is an example of a lot of work with stunts teams,
visual effects teams,
figuring out, you know, once again, once the story is firmly fixed
and the script...
What does all this mean on a physical choreography level?
MARKUS: People have such different powers, different...
You know, sets of movements that they can make.
To bring them all together in a satisfying way is really a task.
PETER: Everybody stay where you are. Chill the eff out.
I'm gonna ask you this one time.
ANTHONY: The showdown.
Yeah. I'll do you one better. Who's Gamora?
JOE: This is where the, again, absurdism smashes into logic.
We have the very intelligent and rational Strange and Stark
trying to deal with the insane Guardians.
McFEELY: But everyone's on their arc, right?
I mean, Quill is behaving this way because Gamora's been taken from him.
You'll notice the small thing, the one who claims their adventures
is the kid who just got knighted as an Avenger.
Then we got a combined...
Just on a plot level, the fact that Thor is alive
and on another mission
so that leads to the button of the scene.
SPIDER-MAN: So you're not with Thanos?
With Thanos?
No, I'm here to kill Thanos.
McFEELY: Remind people that Quill is from Earth
and here he is meeting Earthlings
and that's probably a new experience.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
Yeah. Tall guy, not that good-looking, needed saving.
Where is he now?
MARKUS: And back to Thor.
JOE: This was one of the more complex sequences in the movie to edit
was where the scenes with Thor went
as he was building the axe to maximize his entrance into the Wakanda battle.
Did it have a name?
Stormbreaker.
That's a bit much.
ANTHONY: We've been fortunate in the movies
that we've all done together
is we've always gone into production with a very tight script.
MARKUS: Yeah.
ANTHONY: And so that the movie ends up being pretty reflective.
I think, you know, perhaps more than is normal for films.
The movie ends up being very reflective of the script.
I just blanked out on where I was going.
McFEELY: Well, a part of that is, in this case, the scenes changed.
Placement of scenes changed a lot.
You know, the editing of the third act particularly,
it was sort of conceived to be cut between Titan and Wakanda
with Thor's journey being done relatively early.
We, you know, perpetuated it so that it happened late.
Yeah.
One of the reasons we've previously had scripts that were in really good shape
is because we had three years between Captain America movies.
We had two years between 1 and 2.
We had two years between Winter Soldier and Civil War.
And then between Civil War and this one, we had two years for two movies.
ANTHONY: It changed things up.
MARKUS: Which is not to say the scripts were in bad shape.
ANTHONY: No, no.
MARKUS: They just weren't as beaten up as the other ones.
ANTHONY: In fact, now I remember what I was gonna mention was,
you know, I think one of the things that we all learned the most
in the post-production process
as we would screen the movie for test audiences
was how to structure the movie and throw from storyline to storyline.
I would say if anything,
the intercutting between the various storylines
is what evolved the most in the editing process.
Which is unusual for us in our past work.
MARKUS: Figuring out how long you can be away from a character.
But you're away from Tony, from New York to cutting back to the ship.
He's away for probably the longest amount of time
- Iron Man's ever been away... - McFEELY: From a movie Iron Man's in.
- MARKUS: Yeah. Right. - (McFEELY LAUGHS)
McFEELY: Yeah, we always knew that it would be an issue.
ANTHONY: Yeah, it took a long time to get it right and calibrate it.
McFEELY: By the way, this is the first scene we shot, right?
JOE: It was. ANTHONY: Oh, my gosh, yes.
JOE: The first three days of shooting, I think.
Three days of shooting.
MARKUS: And Benedict can just do that. McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: He can float and move his head like that. He's an extraordinary actor.
ANTHONY: But this was us for the first time trying to figure out
the tonal composition and balance
between Avengers and Guardians.
- And it was... - MARKUS: Yeah, you were just
handed those Guardians.
MARKUS: This was the first time you've ever dealt with them and Strange.
JOE: Yeah. Of course, Strange's ominous...
McFEELY: Yeah. JOE: ...prophecy.
ANTHONY: Oh... Who knew?
MARKUS: And now, a little bit of heaviness for you.
McFEELY: So when you get to Vormir and you get to the rules of Vormir,
you're gonna need an expert.
You're gonna need to... Whoever tells you what the rule of Vormir is,
you don't wanna doubt it.
So that dovetailed nicely
with a fetish Chris and I have
of bringing Red Skull back into the universe so...
MARKUS: Chronologically, he's the first guy...
Well, and cinematically he's the first one ever to
be obsessed with these Infinity Stones in the MCU.
And he clearly did not die at the end of The First Avenger.
So the idea of where he might have gone was so tantalizing.
And, you know, again, much like
being able to fill roles that would be there anyway
with William Hurt or Benicio del Toro,
we had a character who fit this moment perfectly.
I am prepared.
ANTHONY: This is what always surprises me most about you guys
is your fluency and facility with the scope of what the MCU is.
Because you're responsible for so much of it.
In part, that's why.
McFEELY: Well, it is. Not too many people get the opportunity.
The MCU's a unique experiment
and the fact that we've been there for all the phases is a privilege,
but it also means that...
Yeah, we know where all the bodies are buried
and sometimes you can dig a body up and put him in a scene.
JOE: Especially when he already looks like a corpse.
(LAUGHTER)
JOE: Don't remember at what point...
Do any of you? That we conceived
that this should be the way that you attain the Soul Stone?
McFEELY: It was early on. That was the only way we got it.
I'm pretty sure there's no... The first draft was always
you had to make an exchange like this.
MARKUS: Well, it was also...
I mean, when we began to lock into this movie being
Thanos' journey and Thanos' movie.
You know, he needs a dark moment.
And what is a dark moment for a person
who bathes in darkness all the time?
It's losing the one thing that he loves.
And we couldn't have that be just accidental or purposeless
if we're gonna kill off a major character like Gamora.
If we're gonna kill off Thanos' daughter,
there has to be a massive plot reason for it.
And it dovetailed nicely with this one missing stone.
McFEELY: The end of act two for us
is always the darkest moment, usually on a character level.
But it might be on a plot level.
So sort of an easy look at it would be,
"Oh, we lost Gamora. That's bad for the Avengers.
"That's bad for us as an audience member."
That's not why it's the end of act two.
It's the end of act two because it's bad for Thanos.
It's the worst thing that could happen to Thanos.
The one person he loved more than anything
is the one thing that stands in the way of him getting what he wants.
So we always wanted to drive that this is the end of act two.
JOE: This is all Brolin.
McFEELY: Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.
GAMORA: And I was always so disappointed.
ANTHONY: Except for the stubble of his beard.
That's our VFX department.
McFEELY: (CHUCKLES) Fair.
MARKUS: Boy, if I was Thanos, I would not wanna shave.
McFEELY: Sure.
ANTHONY: We should hold a contest to design a razor that he could use.
MARKUS: Going over those ridges must be just...
JOE: On that nutsack of a chin.
I'm just gonna keep saying that.
(LAUGHTER)
ANTHONY: My eight-year-old son has said it a million times.
MARKUS: It's better than the reverse.
McFEELY: Big moment for Zoe, obviously.
Again, second time she really gets
to be the voice of the audience and tell this guy he's wrong.
JOE: And one of the saddest moments in the movie for me
is her reaction to Red Skull.
ANTHONY: Well, to me, what I love is, again, this character is so amazing
'cause she's such a fighter.
And even in this moment where she's facing this situation...
JOE: Well, her first decision is to kill herself to save the universe.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: But then she doesn't hesitate. It's this moment right here.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: But then she goes right to trying to invalidate Thanos.
ANTHONY: That's amazing acting. The way she's processing this.
JOE: She's telling us a lot in one look.
GAMORA: No.
This isn't love.
ANTHONY: This is why she gave up Vormir to save Nebula.
She's still looking for a way out.
McFEELY: Right.
ANTHONY: She never stops.
Even for you.
JOE: And Alan Silvestri's score here, it's really spectacular.
It's tragic and oddly majestic.
McFEELY: Well, this is the most operatic the movie gets, right?
MARKUS: Bubbles. McFEELY: Yeah, and that helps, right?
You saw bubbles and you know, "Oh, he did the thing."
JOE: He has control over reality. She has such a sad look.
McFEELY: And that's when she knows she's lost.
No!
JOE: There is an inevitability to the movie not dissimilar to
another Josh Brolin film, No Country for Old Men,
where the second time you see the movie
it becomes quite obvious that Thanos is gonna win the film.
At earlier points in the movie
we referenced the snap quite a bit in the film.
It's like the old Hitchcock adage,
"You're gonna bring a gun out, you better use it."
If we're gonna talk about the snap, well, we're gonna use it.
He's almost unstoppable in the film.
McFEELY: He's got the strongest will.
I mean, that's one of the things we always thought
is that he's not dangerous because he's got the Stones,
he's dangerous 'cause he has the will to use them.
JOE: He won't quit.
JOE: It's part of the mysticism of the Stone is that
he's transported back down the line.
McFEELY: This is an image you guys always had.
Do you know where it came from?
ANTHONY: Todd Harris, one of our storyboard artists
came up with this idea.
McFEELY: That's cool.
ANTHONY: Transition that made it look like
he'd been transported somewhere else in the cosmos
but you find out that he's back down.
The Blood Stone.
MARKUS: That's a whole other Marvel series.
JOE: Here we go. It's now ramping into the third act.
We're arriving at Wakanda.
McFEELY: That actually makes sense, though.
'Cause this moved around a lot
but when you call it sort of the beginning of the third act
it's better here than it would be 20 minutes earlier.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: And this amazing city is gonna come to the defense of the universe.
It's gonna be the last stronghold.
When you said we were going to open Wakanda to the rest of the world...
this is not what I imagined.
JOE: Led by this man.
ANTHONY: Will there ever be an Olympics in Wakanda?
MARKUS: I think I have the... Not sure it's really something you want.
(LAUGHTER)
Plus, they're gonna win everything.
JOE: T'Challa's been on a really interesting journey since Civil War.
Should we bow?
JOE: He is assuming the throne,
he is faced with conflict after conflict.
Eternal strife and civil war in his own country.
And now the fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
And the only thing that stands between ultimate doom
is Wakanda.
MARKUS: And Bucky's hair.
McFEELY: Look, who's got a fancy arm.
ANTHONY: A vibranium arm.
Life's never been better.
JOE: And the smartest individual in the Marvel Universe.
Shuri. The only one who could have any chance of removing the stone
from Vision's head and saving his life.
MARKUS: One of the things I love about Marvel
is it's a population of genius scientists.
- You know? - McFEELY: That's right.
MARKUS: Yeah, they're musclemen and guys in armor
but the bedrock is brilliant, brilliant scientists.
ANTHONY: That is a superpower.
JOE: Again, the movie stops for no one.
Thanos stops for no one.
MARKUS: The moment you think you might have a taste of the solution,
here comes the ticking clock.
McFEELY: It occurs to me
that Falcon says that there are a lot of types of situations and this...
(LAUGHTER)
We got a vision. We got a lot of situations.
ANTHONY: It is one unfolding situation.
MARKUS: We got an Anthony Mackie situation.
McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: Of course, a country as advanced as Wakanda would have a protective shield.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: Which forces...
McFEELY: Well, it becomes T'Challa's decision.
He has a big choice to...
His isn't necessarily a suicidal one, but it's an incredibly dangerous one.
- "Am I gonna open up the shield..." - JOE: It was a chess game.
McFEELY: "And lose a lot of these people
"in order to buy 10 more minutes for my sister."
JOE: "To destroy that Stone."
Vision, get your ass back on the table.
We will hold them off.
MARKUS: And here comes the big line.
You even notice Captain America might be missing something in this movie.
(LAUGHTER)
And get this man a shield.
ANTHONY: Since the end of Civil War.
JOE: Not only gave him one, but two.
MARKUS: "Get this man a shave."
JOE: Now we're starting to ramp into... Towards the climax.
We're beginning to cross-cut more, the music's carrying across the cuts.
We're tying together the sequences now.
The stories are starting to blend as you move into the third act.
McFEELY: And you as an audience member,
you think, "Oh, right, I see where this is going."
He's gonna get the thing that he says he needs to solve the problem.
You see the pieces falling into place.
THOR: (ON RADIO) Fire the engines!
JOE: The scenes are becoming complementary now.
McFEELY: The editing is quicker, right? And we're, I don't know...
JOE: We're starting to have a good pace here.
McFEELY: The scenes are longer earlier on.
JOE: The time for talking is past us. Now is the time for action.
And, Thor, one of the things I loved about him as a kid
was the fact that he was a god.
And that his abilities were god-like.
And this is like the Trials of Hercules.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: He has to do something insanely difficult
that requires an insane display of power
that very few people in the universe could pull off.
Well done, boy.
That's Nidavellir.
JOE: That's one of the more charming moments for his character
is that the sort of childlike glee that he has.
McFEELY: That's the thing, 'cause this is Nidavellir.
ANTHONY: For a character who's lost everything.
JOE: They win.
ANTHONY: This is a movement back into his youth.
His Asgardian heritage.
MARKUS: Yeah. It's not all darkness.
Except when it doesn't work.
Damn it.
McFEELY: Faulty flanges.
- EITRI: The mechanism is crippled. - What?
With the iris closed, I can't heat the metal.
McFEELY: You wanna talk about Dinklage and how you shot him
perspective-wise and everything?
Is there anything that comes to mind there?
JOE: Yeah, I mean, certainly it's very complicated
to change scale on characters when you...
It has to do with how you oriented the camera, the lenses
when you have other characters in frame,
when you're working with a giant character.
So it's a very laborious process of matching lenses,
moving Peter in for his shots, bringing him out
then moving Hemsworth in for his shots.
And then changing the scale of each of them.
It required the most math and science of anything we did in the film.
ANTHONY: There was a lot of trial and error involved
in the sense of figuring out what techniques make it look best.
And feel best.
Sometimes these actors
are required to do a lot of very technical things
that are performed over and over again
many times because of the technical processes required to achieve the look.
MARKUS: They're very patient.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
It's not as easy as it looks for them.
JOE: All of Wakanda is uniting.
McFEELY: Right. Again, people come in when they're needed.
MARKUS: We also said we did not know, because we hadn't seen Black Panther
'cause they were still making Black Panther
about their war chants.
McFEELY: Oh, my God. Yeah.
MARKUS: And when the actors came
from across Atlanta, from the set of Black Panther over to ours to do this,
they just started doing it. And it was impressive.
McFEELY: Blood-curdlingly cool. Yeah. JOE: It was super.
Yeah. It was amazing. It was very inspiring.
And that led to...
So after watching M'Baku do it,
at the opening with Winston doing it at the opening of the sequence,
it led to the responding war cry that T'Challa leads.
Coming up here.
That is the voice and face of Carrie Coon there.
ANTHONY: Yeah. And I think Winston was just trying to get...
You were just trying to heat all the actors up,
and so, the way they were doing that was with the war chant.
McFEELY: That's amazing. Yeah.
MARKUS: Yeah, don't do that off-camera.
McFEELY: Save it.
They surrender?
Not exactly.
(ALIENS SNARLING)
MARKUS: And here comes...
McFEELY: Space Outriders. MARKUS: ...the hounds.
(WAKANDANS CHANTING IN XHOSA)
ANTHONY: You never told the space dog story before.
McFEELY: What's the space dog story?
ANTHONY: Well, there was a focus group after one of the test screenings.
Somebody was commenting on something
that happened in this section of the film,
and he said, "You know those space dogs?"
(LAUGHTER)
He referred to them as space dogs.
JOE: So he thought it was hilarious,
so he incorporated it into Bradley Cooper's read.
ANTHONY: Now, Rocket refers to them as space dogs when he's shooting at them.
- He's like, "Come on, space dogs!" - (LAUGHTER)
McFEELY: That's right. That's right.
They're killing themselves.
JOE: So this is part of the chess match here.
They're going to surround the city
with creatures who are willing to die in order to breach the shield.
MARKUS: And Cap just said, "We don't trade lives."
But now he's up against someone who does.
McFEELY: Right.
- They have blood to spare. - ANTHONY: Yeah, which is awesome.
JOE: And T'Challa's forced to make a decision
here about how they're gonna handle it.
Because if the Outriders do encircle the city,
there's no way that the Wakandans can stop them
from breaching the tower that Vision is in.
Again, this is all a race to destroy the stone
before they can get their hands on it.
All right, back up, Sam. You're gonna get your wings singed.
JOE: War Machine being War Machine.
Unleashing an arsenal in this movie.
McFEELY: I think that action scenes should define character.
Right?
So we had a couple of beats of some bombs there
and some Falcon stuff,
but now we're being told that we're about to get surrounded.
So we have a character choice to make.
Are we gonna wait?
Or are we gonna invite the fight to us?
MARKUS: Which might more easily lead to our death.
McFEELY: Yes.
JOE: And T'Challa being the leader that he is...
McFEELY: Right. He makes a call.
JOE: Makes the call here.
Makes the courageous choice.
He knows it's gonna be a great sacrifice to do this.
McFEELY: Listen. You're ahead of time.
We had no idea "Wakanda Forever" was gonna be amazing. (LAUGHS)
Wakanda forever!
(ALL SHOUTING)
BLACK PANTHER: Now!
JOE: It's part of this chess match.
He just made a move here.
McFEELY: Picking angles that clearly demonstrate what has just happened.
JOE: Here comes Cap in front of the line with Panther.
McFEELY: I just love this. (LAUGHS)
JOE: Well, as comic book fans, those are the moments
that I live for when we make these movies.
These are some angry space dogs.
MARKUS: But you also wanna...
It's good to see the kind of brutal fighter Cap has had to become
in the last three years. He's been, you know...
You understand, boy?
ANTHONY: Yeah, it's worn on him.
It'll kill you.
Only if I die. (EXHALES)
JOE: Vintage Ragnarok Thor.
McFEELY: Right, just a little taste of it.
(LAUGHTER)
MARKUS: Vintage Dinklage as well.
(STRAINING)
(YELLING)
McFEELY: (WHISPERS) I gotta go to the gym.
JOE: It took us a long time to figure out
how to design this Dyson sphere
and the forge, and how it would work.
There's a lot of conceptual art created to figure it out.
Kept refining the rules in post as we were developing the VFX.
Hopefully it's evident that, you know, this is a forge
and needs to be opened in order for it to work.
And that the door is closing and forcibly needs to be pried open again.
McFEELY: Right. And again, if it gets too technical
and it somehow takes away from character,
we've screwed up.
He has to endure in order to make the thing.
JOE: And it almost cost him his life.
McFEELY: And in doing so, allows for another character
to make, basically, the only choice he makes in the movie.
MARKUS: Yeah.
There's something very satisfying
that, from here on out,
Thor's axe will have a little bit of Groot in it.
McFEELY: Oh, I do like that.
JOE: That really represents this cross-pollination.
I think he's dying.
JOE: We all know, if you've seen Thor, that these weapons have a healing power
for Asgardians.
McFEELY: That's right. In the first Thor, he... Yeah.
JOE: So that's the tension here in this moment,
is can he get the axe in time to heal himself?
We also heard Peter Dinklage state
that this could conceivably control the Bifrost.
McFEELY: In theory.
MARKUS: There aren't too many other franchises
where you could chop off a character's arm
and that could be a heroic moment
and the other guy gets to use his arm as a handle.
ANTHONY: All is right in the universe.
JOE: I wanted to work really hard here
to make this intense,
so that you really felt these characters
were on the run in a way that you hadn't seen before.
That the Avengers with backs against...
McFEELY: You do this to Black Panther.
- I mean, they're... - JOE: Yeah.
MARKUS: Rag-dolled.
JOE: And Cap here. McFEELY: Yeah, he's getting... Yeah.
ANTHONY: My favorite is the Hulkbuster.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: They're just getting overwhelmed.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: They're outnumbered.
McFEELY: Yeah. That's one shot that tells the whole story there.
JOE: Yeah.
And then perhaps the most rousing moment in the whole movie.
An incredible score from Alan Silvestri.
Combines with, I think, one of the biggest cheer moments in the film.
McFEELY: Yeah.
Because a raccoon, a tree, and a Norse god showed up.
ANTHONY: Yeah, yeah.
JOE: Thor is now on mission. McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: He has what he needs to win the film.
We were listening to a recording made in a movie theater in India
during this section of the film.
And when Thor shows up, it literally sounds like a rock concert.
Everyone's like... (YELLING)
Now of course, Thor went to Earth
on the assumption that Thanos would arrive there
at some point to retrieve the two stones that he knows are on Earth.
MARKUS: But Thanos had a stop to make first.
His hometown.
JOE: This is the setting of,
in Thanos' mind, the great tragedy that inspired his holy mission that he's on.
McFEELY: So all this wreckage is sort of the second part of a design.
You'll get a chance to see perfect Titan in a couple of seconds here
and all of this is...
MARKUS: And there were drafts where we spent more time on perfect Titan,
where we saw more of a backstory for Thanos.
But in the end, this was all you really needed
and the rest was fairly gratuitous.
JOE: Strange knows he's the bait.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: He's hidden the stone
to keep it away from Thanos,
with the intention that they're going to remove the glove from him,
so they never want the stone anywhere near him
in case they don't get to the point where they're gonna remove the glove.
Of course, all of that goes haywire.
MARKUS: Nice place, Titan.
McFEELY: No? Yeah.
JOE: Mmm-hmm. Doesn't look too crowded.
McFEELY: Tax rates are ridiculous.
ANTHONY: "I'm telling you,
"if I didn't kill half the people there...
"The place was dying.
"It was falling apart.
MARKUS: "Doesn't it look awful?"
McFEELY: Oh, it's corrupt on the inside.
MARKUS: Yeah, outside city walls, bad scene.
I'm a survivor.
Who wants to murder trillions.
With all six stones, I could simply snap my fingers.
MARKUS: Ah, the snap.
McFEELY: By design, we hit the snap a few times
to make you know what's going on when you get to it.
And we're also setting up here the final shot of the movie,
so you need to hopefully feel
that when he does sit on his porch
and look out at the sunrise on a grateful universe,
he's accomplished exactly what he's set out to do.
ANTHONY: That's, I think, one of the most unnerving things about Thanos,
is that there is a nobility in him, you know?
- It's not ego, it's not power. - McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: He basically looks at himself as a servant.
And when he's finished his service,
he rests.
JOE: The geometry of what goes into these movies,
especially this film,
with the amount of characters in it, and the scale of the action
is very thought out.
Every frame is very thought out.
So that you can track the action,
so you can follow what's going on in the movie.
If the framing were to become too stylized or dense,
or "Look at me,"
it detracts, one, from the storytelling,
but also complicates how you receive the story
with all of these characters and all of the different small incidents
that occur over the next 30 minutes of the movie.
SPIDER-MAN: Magic.
More magic.
Magic with a kick.
Magic with a...
- Insect! - (YELLS)
McFEELY: As you can imagine, when you have a gauntlet
that has nearly unlimited power,
and every time you use it, you can do what you want.
We wanted to create small physical rules
that would allow people to hang in a fight with him,
so the idea that he had to, you know, close his fist to use a stone
was the bare minimum that allowed us to have a fight.
JOE: So that every choice they're making, you'll notice
in that last minute of fighting, is to keep him from closing his fist.
From Peter webbing it
to the cape wrapping around it.
Well, well.
You should've killed me.
It would've been a waste of parts!
(GRUNTING)
Where's Gamora?
JOE: And that's Nebula's most triumphant or heroic moment
in any film up to this point.
McFEELY: Everyone gets their moment and she stays on story.
'Cause we need to know that no one was around to watch Gamora die.
JOE: Now here's the plan being executed.
McFEELY: Mmm-hmm.
Are those the Bands of Cyttorak that we decided?
MARKUS: Those are the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak.
- And everybody has a part. - McFEELY: That's right.
JOE: "The best laid plans of mice and men."
If only it didn't tragically line up with the revelation
that Thanos had murdered Gamora.
Be quick. He is very strong.
Parker, help! Get over here.
She can't hold him much longer. Let's go.
ANTHONY: While these scripts are supremely well-written
by monsieurs Markus and McFEELY...
MARKUS: They are good, aren't they?
ANTHONY: Occasionally, an actor will contribute something that...
- McFEELY: How dare you. - (LAUGHTER)
ANTHONY: For the record, this was my plan.
This was a nice contribution by Mr. Pratt.
MANTIS: He is in anguish.
- Good. - (GROANING)
JOE: This is some of the most amazing effects work,
I think, in the whole film,
is her interaction with his head
and Brolin's performance here really being translated.
McFEELY: So on the day, Brolin is wearing a skull helmet.
JOE: He's wearing a strange foam headpiece
that is the size of Thanos' head.
So he's acting with this peculiar...
McFEELY: Her palm is touching that.
JOE: She's touching that.
We have a camera on his face
- and he's delivering this performance. - ANTHONY: Helmet cam.
MARKUS: And she's on ropes having been sort of lowered down to approximately...
She's not actually sitting on him.
ANTHONY: Hopefully on this DVD, you will also have a scene
that shows you how we shot this. (CHUCKLES)
Because it was extraordinary.
Imagine Josh Brolin at the center of all this on set.
McFEELY: Yeah, wearing pajamas and a Thanos helmet.
It was ridiculous.
ANTHONY: With foam all over his body. (CHUCKLES)
McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: Also, we had to put foam around his arm
- when they interact with his arm. - McFEELY: That's right.
ANTHONY: So it's Thanos' size, and his chest,
so people don't get too close to him.
We had to put his proper chest size around his body.
MARKUS: This is really, when you look back on it,
the moment all hope is lost. (CHUCKLES)
Because Thanos is now angry
and back on mission.
McFEELY: This was shown at Comic-Con.
JOE: Right.
McFEELY: And it apparently brought the house down.
JOE: So he uses two stones there.
He uses the Power Stone
to destroy the moon.
And then he uses the Space Stone
to pull it so quickly
to the surface of Titan.
Again, we're ramping up the cross-cutting here.
We're starting to bleed the narratives into one another.
McFEELY: Some fine work by Jeff Ford.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: Our amazing editor
who has done all of our Marvel films.
McFEELY: Right, as sort of
the fifth member of the storytelling team.
ANTHONY: Here's the space dog.
JOE: By the way, that was an iconic moment
from the books where Panther punches...
As he's known as Black Dwarf in the books,
but we call him Obsidian in the movies.
Not for sale.
MARKUS: Rocket cannot resist an artificial body part.
McFEELY: Strange alchemy.
ANTHONY: Facial hair bonding moment.
McFEELY: Right, sure, just a little.
MARKUS: And they haven't seen each other since the end of Ultron, I think.
I am Groot.
I am Steve Rogers.
McFEELY: Jokes in character.
Steve's earnestness will lead to something funny.
ANTHONY: He's very legitimately confused there.
McFEELY: As one would be.
MARKUS: And again, Wanda faced with the choice of
- love versus duty. - McFEELY: Right.
Everything's doing more than one thing.
So because of their experience in Edinburgh,
they know that Wanda is a force to be reckoned with,
so that if she stayed behind to guard the stone,
their path is blocked,
so we need to get her out onto the field.
MARKUS: And when she comes out and we cut to Proxima,
you realize that this was not just the screenwriters' plan.
This was the villains' plan, too.
They are not just merely throwing everything they have.
They know that their goal,
Vision, is always guarded by this very powerful character.
They need to draw her out.
ANTHONY: Yeah. McFEELY: Right.
JOE: And, of course, he's not dead.
Yet.
That is Florence, who made her first appearance.
McFEELY: That's right. It's her third movie.
JOE: Who made her first appearance in a scene-stealing role
in Civil War,
when she faces off with Black Widow in a parking garage.
Somebody get to Vision!
BANNER: I got him!
On my way. (GRUNTS)
McFEELY: Ow.
JOE: Now, again, Proxima's been marking Wanda.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: It's her job to keep her away from Vision while Corvus extracts the stone.
McFEELY: This gets a big cheer.
JOE: Yeah, but unfortunately for Proxima...
MARKUS: She's got friends.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: Yep.
And these friends know how to fight.
MARKUS: Just to give you a touch of what these actors are actually going through,
this is an incredibly hot, muddy horse field
in Atlanta, or outside of Atlanta.
JOE: With mosquitoes and snakes.
MARKUS: And sweating.
JOE: All manner of unpleasant...
ANTHONY: Paul Bettany wears one of the most
restrictive and intense costumes of any of the cast.
Completely painted up, his head is encased,
his body's encased.
MARKUS: And the last place you wanna be is 90 degrees, 90% humidity.
(IN HULK'S VOICE) No!
(IN NORMAL VOICE) Oh, screw you, you big, green asshole!
I'll do it myself!
Come on! Yeah!
- (GRUNTING) - (BANNER GROANS)
(GROWLING)
- (GRUNTS) - BANNER: See ya!
(SCREAMING)
JOE: Let's talk about Banner's arc.
This is an arc that makes Banner a hero.
And not just someone who whines for the Hulk's help all the time.
Banner has to step up and solve the problem on his own.
This puts him and the Hulk in a very interesting position
at the end of the movie.
As he states there, they clearly have a lot to discuss.
I thought you were formidable, machine.
JOE: Vision gets skewered quite a bit in the movie.
McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: He can take it.
And there was a point,
there was a draft where that tackle
was Cap's first appearance in the movie.
JOE: That's true.
MARKUS: They called us insane.
- And we may well have been. - McFEELY: Yeah, it was not satisfying.
ANTHONY: He was very underground.
McFEELY: Yes, that's right.
ANTHONY: Yeah, but that's, again, speaking...
We had no model for this movie.
You know, when we all set out to start to make it.
Because never has a movie been made with this number of characters
that has recorded this type of narrative structure
in order to accommodate those numbers.
So there was a trial and error process
to figuring out how you fine-tune this thing.
JOE: Like Lancelot in John Boorman's Excalibur,
Captain America shows up at the key moment in the battle
- for the first time to save Vision. - McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: And then after we read the draft, we did conclude that we were all insane.
McFEELY: And remember... MARKUS: He still has that appearance.
It just happens to be in the Edinburgh train station.
McFEELY: We have a unique opportunity here.
I mean, it's not...
Certainly, other movies have done it. But we know we have two movies
to tell character arcs.
And so, some characters are gonna be better served in the second story.
I think it's okay to say that Cap's...
Cap has a big story in the second one.
MARKUS: And now...
JOE: The Raven.
- (MARKUS CHUCKLES) - McFEELY: Yes.
Joe and Anth had a peculiar obsession
with The Raven.
JOE: I did. I loved The Raven growing up.
And I wanted to see a scene in this movie where
Thanos' full powers went against Doctor Strange's full powers.
MARKUS: And The Raven you referred to is Vincent Price.
Boris Karloff.
JOE: Yes. MARKUS: Is it Roger Corman?
McFEELY: It is.
JOE: And Jack Nicholson's first appearance.
I believe it's his first appearance.
And this is one of the only uses of the Soul Stone in the film.
McFEELY: Right. JOE: Right there.
ANTHONY: Until
its final use.
Yet you never once used your greatest weapon.
MARKUS: Now you find out that part of the strategy.
JOE: He knows it's a fake. Right.
And here comes Tony.
So the journey that Tony's been on
as a genius scientist is that, you know,
the evolution of his armor.
This is the best it's ever gonna get for Tony
and this nanotech.
He goes to the cutting edge of what his mind can deliver
and it still is not enough to beat Thanos.
And in fact, barely keeps him in the fight.
McFEELY: You know, after his initial remark,
there's not a lot of smart aleck here.
MARKUS: This is also earlier where you...
You realize this interesting parallel between Thanos and Tony.
They're both aware of something
from an early point
and constantly having to deal with being smarter.
Thanos is a futurist as much as Tony Stark.
JOE: Which is why he's aware of Stark from that original battle in New York
as the person who undid the plan.
And that line, I don't wanna skip it,
because it's one of the best lines in the movie.
"All that for a drop of blood."
Really underscores the existential statement that the film makes,
is that everything that they throw at Thanos in this movie,
which is everything that they have
leads to that one drop of blood.
Until, of course, Thor at the end of the film.
(GROANING AND PANTING)
You have my respect, Stark.
When I'm done, half of humanity will still be alive.
MARKUS: And a little bit of respect from Thanos.
JOE: Also,
we should talk about that misdirective. You know?
McFEELY: In terms of?
JOE: Tony Stark getting impaled here.
McFEELY: Right.
JOE: That also was to make you believe that this could potentially be the end
of Tony Stark's journey in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In fact...
McFEELY: It really gets a reaction. JOE: It's a plot twist.
ANTHONY: It certainly was going to be, had not Doctor Strange intervened.
McFEELY: I remember, everyone had their topic sentence.
Doctor Strange said, "Under no circumstances.
"If it comes down to you, or the kid, or the Time Stone,
"I'm gonna let you die."
And then he clearly does not.
JOE: He reverses himself.
McFEELY: And in between then, he looked at 14 million futures.
We should also do a shout-out.
It's one of the storyboard guys,
but hiding the stone in the stars,
- I don't know whose it was. - JOE: It was Darrin, I believe.
McFEELY: It was Darrin Denlinger? JOE: Right.
ANTHONY: Yeah, I can't remember if that came out of storyboards
or visual effects, but I don't know.
McFEELY: Oh, okay. I don't wanna...
Let's just not give credit to anybody.
ANTHONY: I love that, too.
I've been delighted by that
for a long time now.
MARKUS: One to go.
ANTHONY: I love that little look he gives Doc Strange.
JOE: So a lot of fans were upset with Star-Lord's choice in this movie.
McFEELY: Oh, you mean, when he reacts upon learning that Gamora is dead.
JOE: If you remember, yeah.
McFEELY: I think we're just putting
characters in positions that act like humans.
JOE: He's had a tough life.
MARKUS: It's utterly understandable.
ANTHONY: Yeah, he's emotionally distraught.
JOE: He made an emotional decision.
MARKUS: But he's also... He was prepared to kill her earlier.
JOE: Yeah.
MARKUS: Thanos prevented him from doing that
and then Thanos killed her.
It's a terrible knot to be tied in.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: It's also a very human mistake
and I think what's interesting about narrative
is if you can learn to view things from the point of view of different people,
different characters,
- you can learn things about life. - MARKUS: Mmm-hmm.
JOE: Thor makes an equally complicated decision
coming up here.
ANTHONY: It's also, you know, Gamora shares a very unique problem.
Like you were saying before, Chris.
It's like she reveals something very specific
to Quill.
You know, he has information and understanding
about her jeopardy in this movie
that nobody else understands.
So it becomes his job.
He becomes her protector at that point,
you know, by being invited in.
McFEELY: It's interesting to put responsibility on him.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JOE: Thanos has so much power at this point
that it is merely...
He's swatting the heroes like flies.
MARKUS: Yeah. He is choosing to let it go on a little longer.
And this is what Bruce Banner has been warning them about
as the herald from space
for the whole movie.
And now it's here.
JOE: Two close-ups on Wanda and Vision
who both realize what they're up against.
BANNER: Cap.
McFEELY: When we decided that it was gonna be the snap in a minute...
Working backwards, he's gonna get all six stones,
which means at some point, he's gonna get Vision's stone
and audience members know that,
but we wanna give people...
I think William Goldman probably said,
"Give the audience what they want, but not in the way they expect."
So in order to create
this crazy Romeo and Juliet type of tragedy,
right, the idea that in order to keep the stone from him,
she's gonna have to kill the man she loves
was too rich an opportunity to pursue,
even though we needed him to get it,
so it gets doubly tragic towards the end here.
JOE: There are a lot of plot twists packed
into the last five minutes of the movie.
McFEELY: Yeah, it's...
JOE: It includes her trying to murder Vision to save the universe,
Thanos then restoring Vision.
Thor hitting him in the chest with an axe.
McFEELY: On the end of his journey. (CHUCKLES)
JOE: Yes. Could have won the movie. Finger snap.
ANTHONY: We go into quintuplet overtime.
JOE: So, a lot going on emotionally. MARKUS: Bettany has the opportunity
to have not one, but two death scenes.
JOE: And this is an incredible performance
on both Lizzie and Paul's part here.
McFEELY: Yeah. They really sell it.
You could never hurt me.
MARKUS: Again, sacrifice.
I just feel you.
ANTHONY: Yeah, and again, that moment where you know
all of these heroes are willing to sacrifice their own lives,
but the threshold to cross is,
when are you willing to sacrifice somebody else?
MARKUS: And the story being built through many movies. I mean,
that stone that is in his head was in Loki's staff.
She then was given her power from that stone
and is now consequently the only person who can destroy that stone.
McFEELY: Steve's the only one who gets a round two there.
ANTHONY: Yeah. That's right.
MARKUS: Well, if it's a movie about strong wills, he's got one.
JOE: Which gives him the opportunity to do this.
But remember it's in slow motion, so this is seconds that he's able to...
ANTHONY: Thanos taking him in.
JOE: Thanos is amused by this.
And also admires will in others.
And then we get to see the full display of Wanda's power here.
She was created via a stone. Her powers came from a stone.
So it gives her the ability to stall Thanos.
ANTHONY: I wonder if... JOE: And destroy a stone.
ANTHONY: Thanos would have tried to make Cap a child of Thanos.
McFEELY: Oh.
MARKUS: There's a What If comic.
McFEELY: There's a What If comic, yeah.
JOE: And again, more amazing score from Alan Silvestri here.
Now in a traditional commercial ending,
this could have been the end of the movie.
I think we go past it two more times.
ANTHONY: Again, the humanity of Thanos, I always love this moment here,
where he acknowledges that her sacrifice
is like his own.
McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: I did the same thing a couple of hours ago.
McFEELY: In fact, actually I think that he would have taken Wanda, you know?
MARKUS: But then, also, again tying all the movies together.
He gets to use the Time Stone just like Doctor Strange did.
THANOS: Now is no time at all.
McFEELY: Again, that's part of the challenge
of trying to tell the story.
You've got such powerful MacGuffins.
How do you keep them off the table reasonably
and then how do you use them in fresh ways?
MARKUS: In essential ways. McFEELY: In devastating ways. Yeah.
MARKUS: And not just showing off,
but making it so the movie wouldn't have happened had they not done that.
ANTHONY: It was a great stunt here, that body...
McFEELY: Yeah.
(McFEELY EXCLAIMS)
JOE: There's a lot of painful moments stacked together here.
(SIGHS) Hmm.
Watching Vision die twice.
MARKUS: We did want there to be a physical toll,
having all those stones together. All that power coursing through you.
JOE: Look at how powerful this axe is. McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: The man who made the, uh... ANTHONY: Eitri.
JOE: The gauntlet and the axe
provided Thor with the weapon that could defeat the gauntlet.
McFEELY: It's the Thanos-killing kind.
I told you...
JOE: Unfortunately, he didn't go for the head.
ANTHONY: Well, that's the thing. McFEELY: It's particularly savage here.
ANTHONY: This is a small misstep on Thor's part.
McFEELY: That's right.
ANTHONY: To take this moment of revenge.
McFEELY: That's right. JOE: But very human and understandable.
ANTHONY: Had he killed him quicker.
MARKUS: And as monumental as this moment is in cinema,
my primary memory is Josh Brolin with a huge chest piece
that made him look like one of the Fruit of the Loom guys
with, then, a huge foam axe stuck in his chest.
(ALL CHUCKLING)
JOE: An often-discussed beat.
McFEELY: Are we committing to it being Soulworld?
JOE: Yeah, of course it is.
(McFEELY LAUGHS)
JOE: So Thanos is transported
through the power that was needed
or required to wipe out half the life of the universe
into this dream state inside the Soul Stone.
MARKUS: And he is allowed one last meeting
with that which he gave up to get there.
JOE: The spiritual representation of his daughter.
Did you do it?
ANTHONY: It's a fever dream.
JOE: Yeah. Is it a fever dream?
Is it a part of storytelling, is it plot?
Does she exist inside that stone? Is this in his mind?
MARKUS: The freedom you have when you've made 18 movies prior to this.
McFEELY: It's just so valuable for him as a character, though.
In the next couple of minutes, he goes through
some sort of palpable regret
and then by the time he gets to the porch, I think he's...
MARKUS: 'Cause when your villain wins, I don't want evil cackling.
I want to know the cost.
JOE: See there, with his gauntlet and the arm,
the power that it takes to use all six stones
is significant,
and clearly damaged the gauntlet and damaged Thanos permanently.
MARKUS: And I love the growing disbelief
here from Evans.
JOE: We always knew we wanted to play past the snap.
Because the snap is just ending the movie on a plot trick.
This is ending the movie on emotion.
It's a horror film having to watch
- each of these characters disappear. - McFEELY: If we had ended on a snap,
- I would argue that it's a cliff-hanger. - JOE: Yeah.
McFEELY: But I would say it's not a cliff-hanger.
JOE: No, it's a tragedy.
McFEELY: It's a tragedy, 'cause the villain wins,
- all the way to the end. - JOE: It has an ending,
it's just not an ending that people are used to.
ANTHONY: Thanos set out to save the universe
and the movie's over when he does.
MARKUS: Captain America has never outright lost.
He has laid down everything he can and eked out a victory
- and he cannot do it here. - McFEELY: It wasn't good enough. Yeah.
ANTHONY: This moment I love.
Danai's performance here is so fantastic.
It's her whole mission
is to keep the king safe. To protect the king.
McFEELY: And that's the first time somebody who...
Well, there's that, and it's also a lead character
who just had his franchise blow up
and this is not going to be secondary players.
- Right. - MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: What was interesting there is that not only is it the horror of who goes,
who disappears,
in this random act of violence,
but how the people who are left behind feel.
McFEELY: That's what... Even if somehow you...
Scratch that.
I don't get sad when sad things happen
nearly as much as I get sad when I watch people like Danai
reacting to sad things happening.
MARKUS: Yeah.
JOE: And as Ant said, her whole mission in life
is to protect the king, and the king has disappeared in her arms.
McFEELY: Yeah.
MARKUS: And then you remember,
"Oh, we have even more beloved heroes up in space."
JOE: Quill is such a tragic figure in this movie. He suffered so much...
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: In the film and now he has to watch
parts of his family go in front of him before he goes.
Quill?
Steady, Quill.
Oh, man.
JOE: There's a lot of pain in him as a character.
A lot of who he is has been defined by pain.
McFEELY: I mean, all these characters lose things.
That's sort of how they become our heroes.
I could look at every person on the screen and
tell you what they lost before they got to this point.
MARKUS: And here you go. McFEELY: Aye.
- You're all right. - I don't know what's happening.
I don't know... (GROANS)
MARKUS: Yeah, and Tony
starts the movie talking about the possibility of having a child
and effectively loses one at the end.
JOE: If I remember correctly,
right, it was, "I don't feel so good."
Tony looked at him, he said, "I'm sorry," and disappeared.
McFEELY: Yeah. JOE: And at the end of the day...
McFEELY: It wasn't as drawn out like this.
JOE: He kept driving
to put more and more emotion into it.
And just went up to Tom and said, "You don't wanna go."
McFEELY: That's correct. Yeah. JOE: "You're a child."
This is...
And you're using your strength as Spider-Man to fight this.
And then that was the performance that came out.
It was a pretty spectacular performance
for a 21-year-old actor.
Now, this is a colossal loss for Tony.
Is at the...
As snarky as his relationship is with Peter Parker,
he cares deeply about him. And to have him die in his arms is...
Will change him forever.
Certainly Thor could have a lot of guilt
about his actions moving forward.
MARKUS: He just went on the ultimate hero's journey and it didn't work.
ANTHONY: I always loved this scene.
JOE: And here is the end of the hero's journey.
ANTHONY: I always loved the symmetry of Loki's, "You'll never be a god," to...
McFEELY: And then Steve saying, "Oh, God." Yeah.
It was always the last line of the movie.
- Yeah. - JOE: Again, for our eagle-eyed viewers,
you'll see to the right there,
- a scarecrow made of Thanos' armor. - MARKUS: Ah.
McFEELY: Oh, I never saw that.
JOE: That is an homage.
McFEELY: I really got to see this on IMAX.
JOE: Yeah. ANTHONY: What do you know?
JOE: This is a very complicated performance from Brolin.
It's like...
There's a certain sense of relief for him, that he can rest.
But there's tragedy.
McFEELY: Yeah, a little hint of pride. MARKUS: The score is very moving,
- but it's not necessarily sad. - JOE: Yep.
ANTHONY: Yes, there's satisfaction.
- Well, there you go. - McFEELY: Ouch.
ANTHONY: There's your kick in the nuts.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: Sorry about that.
MARKUS: Well...
There's another one coming.
McFEELY: Better luck next time, right?
ANTHONY: These are all the wonderful people
- that brought you that kick in the nuts. - (McFEELY LAUGHS)
MARKUS: She kicked you in the nuts.
Oh, yeah. They definitely kicked you in the nuts.
(McFEELY LAUGHING)
JOE: Part of the difficulty
in cinematic universes and serialized storytelling,
is how do you differentiate?
The choice in this movie, which, I think, was a very bold choice,
and everybody really,
to everyone's credit, from Marvel to Disney,
really embraced the choice
of ending a commercial movie
in the most tragic and sad way that you could possibly end it.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: And it's been a long time, I think,
since we've seen a film on this scale, where the heroes lost.
McFEELY: We point to Empire Strikes Back a lot.
That was seminal for us. I was 10 years old
and watched it six, seven times that summer.
JOE: Well, it's that resonance, when I think that there are things
that you can deal with in fantasy that you can't deal with in real life.
We live in a very complicated world right now.
This is a complicated movie.
And sometimes, villains win.
And I think that
in storytelling, as important as a satisfying ending can be,
it's also very important that there are times in your life
where you go through emotional catharsis in a movie theater
watching a narrative that allows you to grieve for things in your life
that you can't face or don't want to face.
ANTHONY: For as hard as it is to have a villain win in a movie,
it's much harder in real life.
MARKUS: Mmm-hmm. McFEELY: Fair enough.
MARKUS: And sometimes, movies can help you with that.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
McFEELY: Do we have a record for credit scenes?
ANTHONY: We must, I am dying to find out.
McFEELY: Well, who's in the top 10? JOE: This is a long roll call here.
McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: It is amazingly long, you can...
There's a long range of activities you can engage in
during the run of those credits.
JOE: And some amazing names.
Oscar winners and Oscar-nominated actors and actresses
as day players in this film.
McFEELY: Yeah. JOE: It's really a credit to Sarah Finn,
who has cast all of the Marvel Universe movies.
This is truly one of the greatest casts ever assembled
for serialized storytelling.
And to our amazing crew now. You'll see there are thousands of names
in this crew list.
And a movie like this is not accomplishable
without every single person
that is recognized here.
These are truly collaborative efforts.
They require everyone working in concert together
in support of one goal, which is, telling the best story possible,
making the best movie possible.
And we couldn't have made it through
all four of these Marvel films without all the people listed here.
McFEELY: Yeah, much of this group has been together for four movies.
MARKUS: And put in a year-and-a-half in Atlanta,
just making this movie every day, like a lifestyle more than a job.
McFEELY: I did get a credit. I didn't realize that.
MARKUS: What's your character called?
McFEELY: Well, I think I'm more than Ross' aide,
but I'll live with it for now.
MARKUS: Mmm. I don't know.
ANTHONY: I think Ross would be nothing without you.
JOE: There's Terry Notary's name, by the way,
who's one of the foremost movement experts in the world,
who not only played Cull Obsidian,
but was the movement advisor
to everyone who worked in CG in the movie,
especially and including Josh Brolin.
MARKUS: He had a memorable day where he played Doctor Strange's cape.
That's right, he did it.
- He became a cape. - (McFEELY LAUGHS)
I defy you.
ANTHONY: One of the most amazing things about these credits is that
if you look through them long enough, you'll eventually find your own name.
McFEELY: (LAUGHS) That's right. I think I see the Soul Stone.
MARKUS: We named every human on Earth.
McFEELY: But I honestly think it has to be a record,
because even if you wanted to go back to
Gone With the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia,
we have whole departments that did not exist then.
- JOE: Yeah, that's right. - Frankly, the biggest departments.
ANTHONY: Right. JOE: The VFX, I mean, alone,
I think we used... Every major VFX company in the world
is involved in this movie in some way.
I think we had upwards of 15 to 20 vendors working on the movie
and thousands of shots.
It is arguably the biggest workload in VFX history
accomplished by Dan DeLeeuw.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: And his team of incredible people. Victoria Alonso.
Victoria Alonso,
who helps... Delivered all of these films.
McFEELY: Yeah.
JOE: Most insane undertaking, I think, of anyone
in movies in many decades.
The way that she delivers these films
and how much work goes into delivering these films,
the VFX in these films,
and the post-production and the score.
They've done 18 of these in a decade.
MARKUS: And there'll be 22 by next year.
ANTHONY: One of my favorite things about sitting through the screenings
is when the single credit cards end,
and this credit roll begins,
audiences have become accustomed
to that being a traditional spot in a Marvel movie
where a tag shows up.
And when there is none there, you sometimes get a visible gasp.
McFEELY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: An audible gasp from the audience. (GASPS)
McFEELY: But that's by design. I mean, we talked about that.
The idea that we wanted audiences to really sit with this ending.
We assumed or hoped they wouldn't walk out until the very end,
so that, now you're sitting in a darkened room
with couple hundred other strangers, dealing with what you just saw,
and hopefully, you were surprised and you're a little hurt,
but I know there were 10 and 12-year-olds all around me
who were really misty and sobbing up,
and so we won't give you any hope until the very end
and give you just the briefest little taste of what might be to come.
JOE: Yeah.
ANTHONY: It's part of our commitment to it. Yeah.
McFEELY: That's right, don't take it away so quickly, yeah.
McFEELY: I would like to go to the bathroom now.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
"You can't."
MARKUS: There can't... ANTHONY: "There might be a tag."
MARKUS: You owe Ken Rupenian...
ANTHONY: Again, I was talking about... Somebody told me their grandmother...
They were talking on the phone to their grandmother
and their grandmother had just seen the movie,
and the grandmother was like,
"Now, whatever you do, make sure you stay around to the very end.
"I mean, the very end, after all the credits, don't leave."
McFEELY: Again, it's a testament to Marvel.
ANTHONY: Thanks, Grandma.
McFEELY: They've trained segments of the audience
that the movie's not over yet.
ANTHONY: Yeah. McFEELY: That's crazy.
MARKUS: I think it is a staggering amount of human beings
who get together to make a movie like this, that is...
ANTHONY: Yeah.
MARKUS: I think more people made it than watched it.
JOE: Each one of these visual effects houses was responsible
for different aspects of the film.
Digital Domain was responsible for Thanos.
Weta was responsible for the fight on Titan.
ILM was responsible for the fight on Wakanda,
so you have to take large chunks of the movie
and parse them out to each company,
because the workload is so significant,
they're each dealing with hundreds of shots
and shots can take months,
- if not a year to execute. - McFEELY: Right.
JOE: So, there's a lot of the large-scale shots in this movie
that need to be delivered
to the vendors a year before the movie comes out.
ANTHONY: We're sitting through the credits and my eight-year-old said,
"Dad, do you know all these people?"
(ALL LAUGHING)
I was like, "Yeah, I know some of them."
MARKUS: "You're the boss of every one of them?"
JOE: The iterative process behind the effects, too,
is that they will create what we call a blocking pass,
where we'll just see the most loose animation
of the blocking for the shot.
Once we sign off on the blocking of the animation,
they then proceed to baking the shot
and baking in the lighting and the texture and the photorealism,
which could take many, many weeks.
So, we have to approve animation,
which can take several passes,
and then, once we approve animation,
they start baking in
all those elements I talked about.
We then sit there and review each shot as it comes in
and give comments about the lighting
or the photorealism or the color saturation.
And then, the passes are done on those shots
over many, many weeks,
until we have to deliver the movie.
You can see there, we used
a bit of Ludwig Göransson's incredible score from Black Panther.
Ludwig is a...
He's an old friend of ours from Community and Happy Endings.
He scored Community and Happy Endings for us.
McFEELY: But other than that and Rubberband Man,
it's all Silvestri.
JOE: Oh, yes, absolutely. McFEELY: No other, I mean, so...
JOE: Ludwig is also creative partners with
Childish Gambino,
- who he also met... - McFEELY: Oh, yeah.
JOE: He produces his music.
MARKUS: All right, here we go.
JOE: You finally get your respite.
MARKUS: Along with a little more tragedy.
McFEELY: Again, scenes do more than one thing, right?
So it reminds you that, yes, this happened everywhere,
not just on Wakanda or Titan.
MARKUS: Not just to heroes. McFEELY: So that is everywhere
and give you a little sense of...
ANTHONY: Nick Fury and Maria Hill. McFEELY: That's right.
ANTHONY: They're still out there somewhere.
MARKUS: We have not seen them in a while.
ANTHONY: Fighting the good fight. JOE: These movies are at their best
when you're cross-pollinating genres.
And I think this movie, in particular,
was very unique, in that,
it incorporates a lot of different movies into one movie.
And certainly once he snaps his fingers,
- it becomes a horror film. - McFEELY: Right.
- Well, you're also... - JOE: Because you're talking about...
McFEELY: You're handheld here,
so you're a little bit more, like, Winter Soldier and much of Civil War.
JOE: Yeah. McFEELY: You know, this feels...
JOE: We're trying to be in their point of view.
We're trying to make this feel as realistic as possible.
We knew we wanted to orchestrate it all in a oner.
McFEELY: Is it a oner?
JOE: From the time they exit the car, yeah.
McFEELY: It is, okay.
JOE: So, it's all happening real-time for you,
because there's a ticking clock here.
What's going to happen?
- What's Nick Fury going to do? - McFEELY: Right.
MARKUS: He's going to say, "Mother." ANTHONY: He's going to say, "Mother."
McFEELY: Yeah, it was too easy not to do that.
MARKUS: Now, what is this machine?
ANTHONY: We must have shot... MARKUS: Who is he talking to?
ANTHONY: We must have done this shot at least a dozen times on set.
- It was a long shot. - McFEELY: The push in?
ANTHONY: And every single time we got to the last...
Nick Fury, of course, said the full...
Sam Jackson said the full line.
For that last line, every time and every time,
- everybody on set would just lose it. - McFEELY: The crew would just chuckle.
JOE: Yeah. ANTHONY: Every single time, cheer.
MARKUS: And, of course, that symbol you just saw...
McFEELY: Right. MARKUS: May or may not mean
help is on the way.
JOE: Well, obviously, Thanos is returning.
McFEELY: Spoiler alert.
JOE: Thank you, thanks for listening. ANTHONY: That also gets a gasp.
MARKUS: Thanks for listening. ANTHONY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: Hope you enjoyed it. McFEELY: We'll see you in a year.
MARKUS: See you next year. ANTHONY: Yeah.