You murdered half the planet.
A small price to pay for salvation.
JOE RUSSO: The level of ambition with Avengers 3 is unprecedented.
But that was the reason that we wanted to do it.
ROBERT DOWNEY JR: Infinity War is nuts.
The difficulty in executing it was so well thought out.
A lot of things have to kind of fit into place,
and that's just a tricky target to hit.
This is D-Day, man.
People don't understand what they're walking into with this movie.
This is not going to end well for a lot of people.
KAREN GILLAN: The stakes are very high,
and we are going to say goodbye to people.
The whole thing is just gigantic.
Through the experience of working with Markus and McFeely on Civil War,
we knew that there was a culmination coming.
But how do you combine all these different tones,
all these different characters?
And I think the way we end up balancing it
is we always try to ground it in an emotional truth for the character.
If we take out the stone...
there's still a whole lot of Vision left.
Perhaps the best parts.
Can we do that?
Not me, not here.
I know somewhere.
It felt like there's a lot of substance behind them coming to Wakanda.
We've seen Wakanda as a powerful nation,
but we've also seen it have to battle with itself.
And so being a part of this major moment for the Avengers,
it felt like very significant storylines merging.
ROGERS: Seems like I'm always thanking you for something.
I think the men really respect each other and have similar moral compasses,
and are eager to be there when the other person's in need.
He just happens to have a whole army.
Where's the fight?
On its way.
For our 19th movie, ten years in the making,
the Russo brothers really wanted to create this big, epic battle
that was worth the biggest, baddest villain and his army.
Probably the most physically challenging thing that we've ever clone
was execute that Wakanda sequence.
The scope is gigantic on this movie,
and it's the largest battle that we've ever done.
Thank you for standing with us.
(SPEAKS XHOSA)
(HELICOPTER BLADES WHIRRING)
We shot Wakanda in a practical location. It was a big ranch in Georgia
that we transformed into the fields of Wakanda.
DAN DeLEEUW: Working with the Russo brothers,
the main theme is, they want to keep everything grounded.
So art department's gone in and basically built a river
and has dressed in a lot of trees that are more indigenous to Africa.
Charlie Wood and his art department actually carved an artificial river
through the center of this field,
and we had a gigantic pump that could do like 30,000 gallons a minute.
It was very elaborate.
We want the scope to be huge.
So what we're doing is, we're using a set as the center of the war scene,
and then anything you see off in the distance we're actually replacing
with plates and textures from Africa itself.
We actually had to work in tandem with Ryan Coogler.
He and his team had maps of Wakanda. That was very helpful to us,
so that we could look at where we wanted to place the battle,
understand strategy.
So it's literally like doing a Jenga puzzle.
(CHANTING IN XHOSA)
The way the Russos work, they're willing to try different things.
There was a lot of input, and we could share how we would express ourselves,
what war cries we use as Wakandans.
We have another one that's more aggressive
Okay, what's that one?
It's mie effa, which means "win them."
Sie effa means "separate them." And they just go... (GRUNTING)
You get the actors involved,
and of course they know their characters better than anybody.
They have great input.
When you say it, it's the greatest "Wakanda forever" you've ever said,
because this could be it.
You know, it became sort of the cadence of the whole set.
People walking around saying, "Wakanda forever!"
Wakanda forever!
(ALL SHOUTING)
We're gonna clash the Wakandan army with the Outriders.
Where good meets evil, and they battle.
It was really amazing to see the vastness of the battlefield.
It made sense that this is the sort of battle that could end the universe.
You definitely kind of catch yourself looking around
and you have goosebumps.
We've got the Wakandan army,
so we have 70 extras here on set, and then stunt people.
We'll do digital versions of those, so we can create the art for those 70
to take them out to about 500.
Then we've got the Outriders, which are Thanos' beasts.
There's 10,000 of those.
(SNARLING)
VICTORIA ALONSO: There was a lot of thinking into the texture,
what they felt like, what they looked like, what the teeth looked like.
They had to pose a real threat.
(GRUNTS)
(ALIENS YELPING)
Why was she up there all this time?
A lot of our action is based around character decisions and moments.
Less punch/jab/cross/uppercut,
but it's more of the things
of, "What are you going to remember about the character?"
Combination attacks working together.
That's our goal, it's to give you moments and less choreography.
One of my favorite moments is when Proxima tells Scarlet Witch...
He'll die alone. As will you.
She's not alone.
In a real, real moment of threat,
there's two other women there, standing by each other.
- (YELLING) - (ALL GRUNTING)
It's really great to see that the audiences are embracing
really strong female superheroines.
That is one of the biggest cheer moments in the film.
(YELLS)
Coming into Infinity War, admittedly I was a little hesitant
because I just was so protective of what myself and Taika sort of built.
And I said, "Well, you know, it's not the old Thor anymore,"
and Joe said, "No, no, we know."
And Anthony said, "Yeah, we get it,
"but we've got something different in mind as well."
And they were right. They had a whole new version of it,
and one that was equally as enjoyable as that last Thor film.
New haircut?
Notice you've copied my beard.
Pretty good.
Evans was a bit off, but I think mine sounds good.
(LAUGHTER)
In Atlanta, you get days like this, which are amazing,
that just resonate what we're trying to get with Africa.
And other days you'll get the rain.
- (THUNDER RUMBLING) - MAN: Oh, God.
ALONSO: We had a lot of different weather issues.
We had rain, sun, fog, cold, heat. We had it all.
TRAN: The weather was one of the biggest challenges,
because it would just be pouring and there would be mud just sliding down
as we're trying to get our talent up to the field.
And it was incredible.
DeLEEUW: We do the best we can.
We try to cover actors for close-ups and shoot the close-ups,
and then hopefully the next day we get a shot, you know, a day without rain.
TRAN: So when Thanos shows up,
we really wanted to make this the most powerful moment ever.
EYES up, stay sharp.
The movie sort of keeps twisting at the end there
in ways that you can't believe that it's going one step beyond,
and that the fate of our characters
and the fate of the universe are still at play.
(SCREAMS)
In terms of our choices
about who Thanos would end up eradicating with his snap,
it was very story focused.
How do we pay off each individual character's storyline most profoundly?
BUCKY: Steve?
The first person to go is Bucky Barnes,
and it's shot from Captain America's perspective.
You know, we're watching Cap go through the experience of watching him go away.
We're watching Okoye, whose number one mission it is
in life is to protect the king.
She watches the king go in front of her.
And to see those characters react in those situations
is very powerful and resonant.
Groot! No.
Oh, God.
The blip-out sequence, we had gathered the whole entire talent there
circled around our directors,
and basically revealed to them that morning of,
when they came on set, that that scene was happening,
that some of them were going to be, you know, disappearing.
The audience is so good at predicting stories
that even just the smallest clue can tell them where the film is going to go.
So we worked really hard to make sure
that none of the secrets of the film leaked.
TRAN: This, by far, has been the most top-secret movie
out of all of the previous 18 movies.
Did you do it?
Yes.
It's about as massive a production as you can mount.
6,000 crew members working on the movie, spread all over the world.
This was so brutally massive as a movie.
There's almost 3,000 shots in the film,
and there's about 2,900 visual effects shots.
So it's a puzzle. It's a difficult one.
No one has ever assembled a cast of this size and this caliber.
So it was a completely unique filmmaking experience for everybody involved.
FEIGE: Of all the films we've made,
Infinity War will have the greatest repercussions.
And, really, the only way this film could be made
is in the hands of Anthony and Joe Russo.
This production, it has been a daunting task.
But we always knew that they're the people for the job.
I can't imagine trying to tackle such a huge task.
But I had a lot of faith, not in just Kevin Feige and the people of Marvel,
but the Russos. They're batting a thousand in my opinion.
We thought on Civil War that we had 12 big cast members.
How are we going to deal with all these characters?
Compared to this movie, with over 30 cast.
But the Russos prove themselves,
and they're able to integrate all these characters together
in a seamless manner.
- The energy's perfect. - Yeah, right?
Besides being incredibly smart,
the Russos are very trusting and they are very kind to the crew.
ANTHONY: Okay, everybody give it up for Geoff Haley!
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
Joe and Anthony want to create a relationship as quickly as possible,
and that's what people respond to.
Last weekend were the Taurus World Stunt Awards,
and the team from Civil War did very well.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
The Russo brothers have brought some
extraordinary precision and complexity to the Marvel Universe.
They are extraordinary technicians.
They are making the biggest movie of all time,
with the biggest movie of all time right after it.
We've had a very strong collaboration
with Markus and McFeely over all four movies.
ANTHONY: It's a very organic process.
We sit there and we grab a character and we start to tell a story.
We love this work so much that we want real fidelity
to what it is that we think and believe about these characters,
and we really want that to translate.
I think, when you get to the end of these films,
you'll understand our point of view on life
and our point of view as filmmakers.
So making these movies,
it's been a very personal journey for us.