Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
38 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTO: EVERETT DGA: Let's say you find yourselves teaching a class in How to Direct for Marvel. What's the first thing you write on a board behind you? ANTHONY: Get enough sleep. JOE: It's like any project. It's having a point of view, knowing what you want to say. We've had a great creative experience with [Mar- vel]. They've given us an insane amount of freedom. We had such creative control in television, we didn't want to leave it, and we thought, if we're going back to do movies, we want to be in a similar situation. And I think we feel like a bit of a sub studio [at Marvel]. A: Your whole motivation for being there has to be powered by your passion for the material. That's what carries you through. J: What's unique is, they're very lean structurally. Kevin [Feige], the head of the studio, interfaces with you every day, so you get the an- swers that you need immediately. There're no layers of infrastruc- ture, people trying to guess what it is the boss wants. You're talking with the boss, and he's a pure creative. It works no different from any other studio. There's material, and the main drivers of the ma- terial are the directors [who] come in and tell them what you want to do. Kevin's very supportive of the different voices working there. James Gunn's voice is very different from our voice, which is differ- ent from Ryan Coogler's, and from Taika Waititi's. Q: You've worked with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely on all four of your Marvel movies. How does that relation- ship work when you're dreaming up these films? A: It's a deep partnership. We sit with these guys for months in a room talking through every possible narrative thread. J: We borrowed our process from television. Having worked in all this different media, we've selected the best elements and com- bined them into a codified process. It's a room, and the best idea wins. Collaboration is essential to our relationship. It's very easy for us to talk to other people, because [An- thony and I] have talked every day for 25 years. A: As a director on movies this big, it's es- sential that the script is exactly what you want to shoot. Because there's such an elaborate process in terms of how things are de- signed and built and structured, it all needs to come from a docu- ment everyone can understand, i.e., the scripts. Q: Originally, Infinity War and Endgame were going to be shot con- currently using cross-boarding. What changed that? A: Blocking the two together was an effort to economize on how much we would have to spend on the cast, so we could play with more actors in each movie. Its upsides are typical to television. Once we got the greenlight, though, we began to see the downsides. It's a really complicated process, especially two movies as big and complex as these are. Any meeting lasted all day because we had to cover so much ground. People started to get confused, including ourselves. We finally just had to separate these two behemoths. In our brains, the movies are very distinct, so we didn't want creative bleed-over in people's minds. Actors William H. Macy and Sam Rockwell, above, are flanked by directors Anthony and Joe Russo while filming Welcome to Collinwood; opposite top, with Kate Hudson on You, Me and Dupree; and on the series Arrested Development.