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

we had over the course of writing Civil War kind of realized the paths that Steve and Tony were on were crossing Captain America who was always willing to jump on a grenade is slowly learning to value things other than sacrifice he realizes that maybe there's more to life than always threatening to lose yours and Tony was becoming wider in his in his view right about what he needs to do and how he needs to save people we realized Oh for Steve to become his best self he needs to get a life and for Tony to become his best self he needs to lose his he went oh that's pretty good everybody should have a milkshake that's a good day I'm Steve McFeely and I'm Cris Marcus and this is how we wrote a Marvel blockbuster [Music] our relationship with the MCU has been largely based around Steve Rogers Captain America it's been very satisfying you rarely get to take a character through that many changes it gave us a lot of windows that we were able to reach through for endgame it was always going to be Avengers three and four it was always intended to be two separate movies I mean that was from on high from Kevin he did not want to make a two-parter they're very different structurally and tonally and that was always our intention I remember no one from Marvel ever asked us to write these movies Kevin never called and said I want you guys to write these we just started negotiating I think really all we were handed was Thanos which necessitates the use of the Infinity stones which are this this and this throughout the MCU and if you want to get rid of people you can but you're under no obligation to just kill them willy-nilly and that was just about all this is not to say we picked people at random to kill not any more than we do on a daily basis and there were a bunch of obvious implications from that namely we could bring in the Guardians because two of Thanos has stepdaughters were on that ship it could be anybody from anywhere and in fact should be the beauty of working for Marvel as compared to the rest of Hollywood is when you get a job you have for the most part a release day so you are working on a real concrete movie the whole time and that things are staffing up and people are starting to make drawings of things you're writing about we spent the last four months of 2015 locked in a conference room reading everything we could reviewing all the movies that we knew about and then writing every ridiculous or non ridiculous idea we had we're the ones that are locked in the room and sort of being fed under the door some people are afraid to go into the room and other people don't I believe it's a big table where there's usually one representative from Marvel in this case is a woman named Rin Tran then it's Kevin as often as you can get in there and Joan antha softness they can get in there our collective is really important to how these last four movies that we've worked on have come out that's one of the delightful parts of that room as they know they came in and said here's all the baseball cards with magnets on the back and we went all amazing and so we really just just throw up every face of live and ankle in the MCU on the back it said whether we had this actor or not that were something like 60 or 70 names up there and then just staring at them and going I've never seen those two people together that would be fun or they are gonna hate each other let's put them together there were big ideas and little ideas really did give them to Marvel into the Russos and just said circle things let's start winnowing down the movie that we're all thinking of in our heads but haven't talked about yet research and development you start at that stage once the circles come back we got cat picks up Thor's hammer obviously we all agree that should happen somewhere it gives you little mile markers to make you feel like you're not just in a vast sea if you say when would cap pick up the hammer well probably pretty late probably over there put that card over there we can work toward that's why the snap is really helpful it was always always gonna be the marker between the movies but it's a really nice flag to sort of play on the ground and drive towards the four months in that room are slowly getting to that outline and people coming in and looking at the sort of serial killer board host it's everywhere and whiteboard and there's three by five cards and sometimes there's action figures you're winnowing down possibilities and you're killing ideas you have plenty of days where you go I just nothing happened why don't we do for a little we didn't eliminate possibilities oh oh talking my language bedtime story again we were in grad school writing novels and short stories so we didn't have a film class or anything so we just bought a book by Sid Field cult screenplay and he had sort of charted out a lot of blockbuster movies or just films Act one there's a turning point Act two is sort of the most important part to get right and there's usually a midpoint between Act one and and the midpoint there's a little pinch and in between the midpoint and the end of Act two there's a second pinch and then the third act is whatever is gonna be and when I say pinches and midpoints those are plot points where the movie turns good examples are in Winter Soldier cap is on the run and he doesn't quite know who's chasing him and number of clues lead him to camp Lehi and he goes down in the basement and he turns on a computer and it turns out to be his nemesis from 1945 only now in computer form and he tells him that the entire time what he thinks he knows he doesn't know and that Hydra has existed this entire time and has been shaping the century the movie now flips and the audience is like holy crap I didn't realize that but I guess that makes sense you know there'll be somebody out there watching this going like of course it's a formula it's a framework so you don't dive into despair which is something you can hang things on so that you can actually spend more time on the character work and on the the really interesting details a card might just say cat picks up earlier well that's not enough of a scene but we know that's gonna be over there and that gets a thumbtack on the wall but then another scene might be Gamora nebula hug it out that's sort of cheeky code for they're gonna have a meaningful scene where they reconcile and there are frequently cards that are entirely subtext where it's just like cap needs to find a life Tony needs to sacrifice his to remind us there is a through line for these people the cards come off can first you literally type up the cards it's like transcribing the collective thought of the last four months we'll have talked about that scene a lot but it still only says Gamora and nebula hug it out so that one of us has to describe that scene it can have dialogue it can have jokes it can have sound effects the outline and all the scripts after it we write them to be read it's meant to be a pretty good read so that you are getting at least a nominal sense of the excitement or sadness the dynamics that we're trying to build we revise the heck out of it and then it's numbered and this case probably one through 80 or 90 and then we set it off to be blessed if I have Marvel my Marvel and Joan ant there is what is called the Marvel Parliament I didn't name it which is all their primary producers from various projects they know what their characters are up to so you know we kill that we have a scene in black panther that literally says he doesn't do that remember we have a who has the power of a god he's omnipotent and omniscient so we're faced with telling a story where even if we don't defeat him how do you even start trying to solve the problem with a guy who can kill you with a thought and can see you coming from a million miles away and it was Trent ran I think mostly because she was just frustrated said I wish we could just freaking kill him and we stopped and went oh because he was serious about what he said and all he wanted to do was balance the universe and so he then got rid of them and that one frustrated comment went us down a road that we probably should have been on down before if we were honest with thanasis character and then we jump five years and and we still can't solve the problem because the stones are gone and yet Scott Lang we just requested can you leave him in the quantum realm and with fresh eyes look at our problems Oh any of you guys ever studied quantum physics only to make conversation quantum you know might have a solution for you and in its time traveling in real quantum physics the quantum realm does have completely different time qualities than out here an hour yeah how did you even figure that out Google no we had actual time that's right we had physicists we spurt me and experts come in and say it could happen that's one of the ways it could happen no they said back to the futures but they did oh how dare he no offense to the Magners in fact the you that's right and that was really helpful to us clearly the holy grail of nerdom it was first we shied away from that we said okay we're gonna time travel but we're gonna go to places we haven't been before because we don't want it to seem like we're patting ourselves on the back but then wiser heads prevail and go well there's a very satisfying thing to do which is glance off what you already know and go down a different direction which allows Steve to say hail Hydra in an elevator that vaguely resembles the elevator from Winter Soldier so you're getting all these different little tweaks of satisfaction as it goes along yet it's progressing the primary plot that sequence where they're figuring it out in the movie is patterned after all of us sitting in the room going wait you know who else is alive during that time period the ancient one use them to bring everyone back just like that yeah just like that changing the past does it change the future if we go back we get the stones before Thanos gets them danos doesn't have the stones problem solved Bango that's not how it works being able to sort of weave these threads together that was a lot of fun once we got the okay to write the script what we then do is we assign a page count to each scene so Chris will take number one through seven I'll take you know eight through 14 and we will go away for a week it's generally in our individual houses done at our own pace your pages are due on Friday or Monday say and then we swap and usually there's a text in the morning ready almost and then we put them together and then we read them out loud and then assign the next week's work I did a fight scene last week you're doing it that's right yeah and they'll change a lot you know a lot of big set action set pieces so we really do try to dole those out equally because you just have to get the raw material down if you're uninspired you can wind up just writing everything in all caps and going BAM he throws up BAM it's about how our characters are progressing through that action sequence and what does it mean for their character and what is the cost to go through it and we work that way checking in every week until we have what we call the Frankenstein draft and that is long repetitive some gold in there a lot of chuffa once the Frankenstein is on its feet then we're largely together to hack it into shape functional is the best thing you could ask for from the first round we sit together for however many weeks it takes and read through it and edit as we go and write new scenes that's when it goes from semi failed experiment to functional script we meet our deadlines and the announced first draft it was almost like the draft was a progress report on where we are now and where do we want to get to let's all work on that vanos was delightful it's strangely a breath of fresh air to be handed a 12 foot tall purple man is a character who controls every scene basically and then when he does not control the scene say on Boromir he's thrown for a loop he becomes credibly dramatic because he's faced with this really big choice and then he ends up controlling the scene again and at great cost not every character always is that sort of like a rhinoceros you know 2016 May 1st as both drafts are in and then we're in prep all the way through the rest of 2016 so that's at least five or six real drafts of each one we're getting notes back and we're having new ideas about how to fix it winnowing down and really focusing on what these movies are about now let's go honey that was originally written for infinity more illustrate that people weren't just snapping off on the battlefield it wasn't just Danis getting rid of his enemies that it was happening on a more global scale so that when that snapped his fingers suddenly you saw Hawkeye who you hadn't seen for the rest of the movie and it didn't work in the pacing of it it forced a reset of tone and I think was Joe Russo and Anthony who said let's put it at the top it lasted one cut and think about what it does now as the first scene of endgame it shows your character you didn't see a year ago the audience is ahead of the character and now they're watching going oh no you're not really gonna you bastards are you really gonna do this in front of me reinforces what you felt at the answer of infinity war so that you're relaunching right back in Jewish the draft process particle Isis wants the cameras to break so that you're doing 15 drafts of one scene Joe and Anthony are now sitting across the table from us and we put it up on the screen and we're reading it out loud and we are you know everyone's weighing in like we can beat that or we can cut that or what-have-you as the departments come on it's becoming more interactive it's all part of the character building storytelling process and you're just getting more tools as as the movie solidifies around you remember we had it we were inheriting a Thor from Ragnarok who was very well and radically reat owned from the previous Avengers movies so we had to fly in a Hemsworth and Taika Waititi word was getting out from Australia do you guys understand what we're doing with this movie all right no I don't know what you mean fury on another continent are you making him an idiot I don't understand Ragnarok yeah he loses his kingdom his father his sister and his idol right we just thought about what would happen if any one of us sustained that much loss and failure and you would get incredibly depressed and probably retreat from the world that is a comedic performance with a lot of pain pain behind it at the beginning of every day Chris and I are there for rehearsal and if anything were to come out of rehearsal like somebody doesn't like a line or the door is now a window we will tweak or provide alts that's a big one where we just eight or nine different jokes that somebody could say once they start shooting that they're gonna shoot that all day so our job is kind of done so at that point we're either revising things we need to do on infinity war if that's where we are or we're looking ahead and trying to shine up and game the footage was going directly to Jeff Ford the editor who is assembling the movie as it is shot and really clarifying what we've got what we don't have because the set is still there if we can get these actors back in the room and have them say we have to go there you know sometimes a much better line than that this will all tie together in a much more organic way and if you don't mind my asking where the hell have you been all this time but she was always going to be in it but we didn't have much to go on they had cast her and that was it it is a tough balance to strike when you have a character that powerful who you're going to bring in and you don't want it to seem like well we just brought in this person who can clean the house that we couldn't clean in the previous movie so we had to decide on a balance between not making it feel like a cameo but not having her around so much that she solved all the problems for everybody it also wasn't the point of the movie um the the point of the second movie was saying goodbye to the original six Avengers so their stories were gonna be way up here we had the same issue a little bit with Black Panther and infinity war because people got off Black Panthers coming back two months from now all right I'm gonna get a lot of black panther and he got some and we went to Wakanda but he wasn't he wasn't the lead character it was not fair to the other six Avengers to have Captain Marvel come in and solve all their problems it didn't seem like good storytelling we probably wrote the last thing for endgame January or February of 2019 we knew we'd have it up about a month or reshoe it's particularly final battle stuff it was just so ambitious it is more correctly entitled additional photography it was it wasn't stuff we got wrong it was stuff that we didn't know we need or renew we need it but could never get yeah we did a few tweaks early this year the end of the movie was always on the board from say October of 2015 it was a big responsibility I mean you don't want to arbitrarily kill him nor would we be able to but it has to be the right end to that arc and God knows how many movies now as Tony Stark to get him to that point where that was the only thing left for him to do was sacrifice himself boy it made me happy when people responded in the movie theater and got what that meant it's straight out of a splash panel and whenever a hero dies in the comics you get these sort of big two-page spreads where everybody's there and they've said and they're in various versions of their costume we called it the wedding for production so that if something was lying around I didn't say Tony's funeral and it was a bit of a tour through the MCU through what has happened before saying goodbye to the person who started this cinematic sequence it's not when people die that is sad for the audience it's when the people left by and have to react to it I get choked up when we move through all those people at the end of endgame I get choked up at the inner infinity war when people like a coy a are so devastated because the chawla is just disappeared in front of her I'm not devastated because the child I've disappeared I'm watching her reaction I'm watching Rockets reaction to a seeing group disappear and it's almost something Tony would have been uncomfortable with in life he would have made a joke about it he would have brought ac/dc out to play which would well would have been cool but they're busy and he is very much not there but that's why we set up his giving of his own eulogy in the very beginning of the movie with this device where he could record into his own helmet because we knew we wanted him to comment on his own demise at the end we always thought it was incredibly apropos that Tony Stark give his own eulogy usually you're good guys lose and they lose for five minutes and now you know they find a new way to get around it and movie ends what happens when they lose at the end of the movie and then you gotta wait here and then we wrap it in saran wrap because we took the bad guy's head off and we take a stone so that really is how you keep this unprecedented thing like the MCU alive most of these movies have ended with a win we wanted to see what happens their personalities when they don't when they you know very very definitively lose these are confusing times when we have tested this with various secret audiences they always said first points the slowest anyway well we know that but guarantee if we cut it in half even if we could when cat picks up the hammer when he says on your left it wouldn't resonate as much because you hadn't gone so dark before really want to make them feel that we value these characters as much as they do the watchword was stick the landing right and that's why we the code name for these was Mary Lou just because was named primarily red [Music]

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Keywords: vanity fair, vanity fair marvel, vanity fair how to, how to write, how to write screenplay, how to marvel, how to make a marvel movie, how to screenplay, screenplay marvel, stephan mcfeely, christopher markus, marvel writers, writers break down, script writers, marvel screenwriteres, marvel writer breaks down, screenwriter break down, writing a movie, writing a blockbuster, marvel blockbusters, marvel timeline, marvel storyboard, how to write a marvel movie

Id: ax1ML6VDXMY

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019