Joss Whedon Talks the Difficulties of The Avengers and His Approach to the Characters
Posted 11.18.11 by Ryan
After a small break, The Avengers news is starting to appear everywhere again. Just yesterday, new character poster banners were released for Marvel's upcoming comic book adaptation, and today, Yahoo has posted an interview with writer-director Joss Whedon.
The Avengers combines the individual characters from Marvel's previous movies, and the task of combining a god of thunder with, say, a government agent whose expertise is with a bow and arrow, proved challenging. "At the end of the day, the guy with the bow and arrow is a lot easier to write gags for than the god," Whedon admitted. "But we created a situation where everybody can be useful, and everybody can be in jeopardy, and they really can act as a team, even though — as we have known from the first issue of The Avengers comic — there's no reason for these people to be on the same team."
Once Whedon found a way to combine the characters, there was also the task of putting them into action.
I had one week where we shot basically the entire team arguing. I was like, "If I can get through this week, no bullet can harm me." And that week actually was complex, but went off really, really well. Then we got to the cars exploding, and I realized, "Well, this is actually much harder."
And what's harder about it was that, trying to keep action from being generic — from being the same gag over and over and over — it's extremely tough. Because we have a go-to, and it's the cars flip over and blow up. And to take that and go, "Okay, well, how do I contextualize this? How do I make it matter, and how do I make it different, and how do I differentiate all their powers and their actions?"
As for the individual characters, Whedon said the most difficult element of using Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man was finding something new to do with the character.
I think the conversations were largely about "Where is Tony now?" Like, "Who is he now? Where is he [going] from Iron Man 2 towards Iron Man 3?" He is such a well-delineated character, so it was really a question of, "What do we want to stress and what do we want to say? We have said that, we have done that, so let's not go there."
He felt a sort of isolated man who is — even though there is an element of that, just because that's sort of what any team movie is about. He didn't want to be the sort of just, "I am totally wrapped up in one thing and I am not thinking about everybody else." He didn't want to be the tortured lonely man, which I totally get. And it was easy to make him as delightful and gregarious as he can be and still go, well, there is a piece missing and it's the piece that makes him an Avenger.
For Mark Ruffalo, who takes over the role of Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the Hulk, it was about "starting fresh".
Yeah, he and I did the most character work of anyone, because we really were starting fresh, but we were starting with something that had been embodied several times. And both of us agreed upfront that the template for who we wanted this guy to be in his life was Bill Bixby, the TV [show character] who was busy helping other people. That was more interesting to us than the Banner in the first two movies who was always fixated on curing himself. We spent a lot of time talking about what makes us Hulk out, the nature of anger, how it feels.
As for Samuel L. Jackson, Whedon said that his character of Nick Fury will continue to operate in "a real moral gray area where you really have to decide, 'Is Nick Fury the most manipulative guy in the world? Is he a good guy? Is he completely Machiavellian or is it a bit of both?'"
I felt that in the other movies, they had been cameos and he had been called upon to come in and be Sam Jackson and bluster a little bit. And I told Sam upfront that my big agenda was to see the weight on someone who is supposed to be in control of the most powerful beings on the planet. The weight on somebody who has to run the organization and the gravity of it. Not that we don't have any fun with Nick, but he definitely — it's, I feel like a much more textured performance and at times really moving.
Chris Evans' Captain America was in good hands with Whedon, since, he admitted, "I love a straightforward character."
I am the guy who loves Cyclops on the X-Men, because he is square. [Captain America] is a little square, and he is aware that he is a little square, and he is aware that the world is a beat ahead of him, or in his case, 70 beats. I think that's very disarming and very charming. I relate to that guy. I also don't know who the popular singers are right now, so he is actually really easy for me to write.
There were some lines where [Chris] would be like, "Okay, now I just sound like an idiot." And in context, I was like, "Yeah, actually, now that it's all laid out that is a bit much." But he is very aware of his dignity, but at the same time understood why I wanted to find the humor in somebody who was so out of touch.
Whedon doesn't discuss some of the other characters directly; Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) were mentioned indirectly, while Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) was basically ignored along with the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. You can read more of the interview with the director here and learn more about Whedon's approach and how he worked with Downey Jr.
Next Showing: The Avengers opens May 4, 2012