Producer Kevin Feige is thrilled to reassemble The Avengers team and bring Marvel’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” to the big screen for the legi...
Producer Kevin Feige is thrilled to reassemble The Avengers team and bring Marvel’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” to the big screen for the legions of fans who helped make the record-breaking Marvel’s “The Avengers” a worldwide hit. “Making ‘The Avengers’ films is in certain ways just plain fun, especially now as we are embarking on the second one,” says Feige. “It’s exciting to get these great actors, who had a good time on the first movie and who have had their own experiences filming their solo movies, and bring them all back together. That’s half of the issue right there. With Joss Whedon’s dialogue and the way he can bring those characters to life, I could just watch The Avengers sit in a room and talk for two hours. I think a lot of people in the audience could too. But we have to do more than that, of course, and you need a reason to have them all come together.”
And the reason this time around is the villainous Ultron. Offering a brief introduction to the story, Feige says, “Tony starts to realize that he doesn’t have to be in the suit the whole time in order to be a hero, so he decides to develop a system that can help him do that. That, combined with a few other things, brings about Ultron and Ultron is unbelievably powerful and unbelievably driven and, in a fun way and in a very Joss Whedon way, is completely insane. When you have that combination of traits in a body that you can’t kill and that you can’t stop, it gets to be very scary. And it gets to be very, very terrifying for all of the characters.”
Feige points out that the character of Ultron has been in the Marvel comic books for over 40 years but is more relevant and more frightening than ever today. “We all have in our pockets technology that tells people where we are and tells people what we’re doing,” informs the producer. “We happily do that, by the way. Many people happily tell the whole world where they are and what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. We all know that there are people listening and watching, and what if people could control that and what if that control went another few steps? We know there are drones out there; we know there are cars that can more or less drive themselves coming soon enough. At what point has humanity given over too much and are people going to regret it? Ultron is able to exploit all of that in a very, very big way.”
It is Tony Stark who creates Ultron in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it was purposed karma that put Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark up against James Spader’s Ultron. Feige says, “Tony Stark is much more responsible for the creation of Ultron in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You look at everything that Tony is, which was brought about by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, and you look at Robert’s history and his filmography, and then you start to look at Spader’s and you look at ‘Less Than Zero’ and their shared experiences coming forward. What’s fun about Ultron in the comics is that he has a daddy complex and he’s very competitive with his creator. James is not competitive with Robert career-wise, but that they’ve had that shared journey through the film business. It was just the icing on the cake of that casting. Robert called us early on and said, ‘James Spader. That is the second best casting you’ve ever done.’”
Feige points out that the notion of artificial intelligence is not new to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and has, in fact, been there from the beginning. “In the very first few scenes of the first ‘Iron Man’ film, we have somebody talking to the JARVIS system in Tony’s house,” informs Feige. “In ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ Cap comes upon a bunker that ends up being the new Zola where he has taken his consciousness and put it into computer equipment from the 1970s and is still active and is not necessarily very nice.”
Continuing, Feige adds, “You can look at this thread of A.I. throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which we did based on the stories we were telling at the time, but also knowing that when we started leaning towards what we wanted to do in the next Avengers film with Ultron, we didn’t want it to have come out of nowhere. We wanted to see the notion that robotics and artificial intelligence as it is in the real world exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at a believable level before we take it to the Ultron extreme.”
Feige and his filmmakers did not set out with a goal to make “Avengers: Age of Ultron” a bigger spectacle than “The Avengers.” Feige notes, “Early on Joss [Whedon] remarked that it’s not about going bigger. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. We want it to hit the same emotional beats that the first one hit, to go even further with the character interactions, to go further with the relationship between those characters. That’s what was exciting to us—to bring new characters into the mix that can enhance the relationships of the existing characters. There are beats in this film with The Avengers in very pedestrian surroundings, which are great and are very fun and very heartwarming.”
That being said, Feige adds, “But of course you want to have the spectacle as well and you want to have the characters interact with each other in the best Marvel splash-page possible.”
“Avengers: Age of Ultron” is a global experience, taking audiences from one end of the Earth to another. Feige explains, “The movie takes place all over the globe now; it has much more in common with a James Bond movie or a Bourne movie in terms of the globetrotting than the first one did. Part of that was just the nature of the story and part of that was we wanted to intentionally have a more diverse group of settings. So we’re in Eastern Europe, we’re in the United Kingdom, we’re in South Africa, we’re in Asia, we’re in New York. The Avengers are not American heroes; they are not only international, they’re intergalactic and the best way to play that is to go there. So we shot on more distant locations than we ever have on any of our other films.”
Looking back on what made The Avengers” such a success and what that signals for “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Feige comments, “It was the interaction of the characters and seeing all of those diverse characters in one film. That was one part—the uniqueness of that—and I think that will still hold true for ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron.’ There is a conceptual uniqueness in having different characters from different movies all in one movie that’s exciting to people. But what really did it was the way in which the characters interacted with each other and the way in which it all made sense that they were there in one film. We found that tonal balance in the first one and will carry it over into the second one.”
Summing up, Feige says, “The biggest challenge is exceeding expectations. Not just audience expectations, but our own expectations. And I hope that we are able to deliver on those expectations and give audiences a movie that they love as much as we do.”
Q: There have been a lot of threats in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So far there’s only been one that brought all the heroes together, and now another looms. Tell us about it.
A: Making ‘The Avengers’ films is in certain ways just plain fun, especially now as we are embarking on the second one,” says Feige. “It’s exciting to get these great actors, who had a good time on the first movie and who have had their own experiences filming their solo movies, and bring them all back together. That’s half of the issue right there. With Joss Whedon’s dialogue and the way he can bring those characters to life, I could just watch The Avengers sit in a room and talk for two hours. I think a lot of people in the audience could too. But we have to do more than that, of course, and you need a reason to have them all come together.
Iron Man goes through a lot of stuff in his most recent movie; he has to save the President of the United States, there’s a government coup that’s going to take over the US. It’s huge, and he does it by himself. Thor encounters a character who predates the known universe itself, and who is working on exploiting a force of nature in this convergence that could threaten the entire universe, and he does it by himself. In “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” Cap is not quite alone—he’s got Black Widow with him—but they have to stop this threat that has exposed S.H.I.E.L.D. as being an organization that had rats within it the form of HYDRA, and they were going to do something that would keep the globe and all of us under their thumb if they didn’t save the day, and they do it alone. So what in the hell can be big enough for all of the characters to need to team up together?
We thought long and hard about that and as always you go back to the comics and you look at whom they faced off in the comics. While it is a sequel, the events of “Marvel’s The Avengers” carries through these Phase 2 films, as we saw in “Iron Man 3,” as we saw in “Thor: The Dark World” and in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” And it goes through to “Avengers: Age of Ultron” as well. So there is something directly related to the end of the first “Avengers” film that has gone awry in large part because of the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. that we witnessed in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” that has caused them to come back together. They feel responsible in a way, based on the events of the first “Avengers” film, to finish cleaning it up, so to speak, to get rid of these alien weapons and things. That’s the initial reason. But why they stay together is because of Ultron. Ultron is one of the most formidable villains that they’ve ever faced in the comics in the form of this artificial intelligence, which has the added curse for them of being somewhat and in part created by them and created by the technology that we’ve all been enjoying in four Iron Man films, counting “Marvel’s The Avengers.”
We know that Tony deals in artificial intelligence; he’s got JARVIS, whom we all love, which is one step towards that. In “Iron Man 3,” Tony participated in the finale of his own movie, but in a big way it was JARVIS and it was the other suits that helped save the day. Tony starts to realize that he doesn’t have to be in the suit the whole time in order to be a hero, so he decides to develop a system that can help him do that. That, combined with a few other things, brings about Ultron and Ultron is unbelievably powerful and unbelievably driven and in a fun way and in a very Joss Whedon way is completely insane. When you have that combination of traits in a body that you can’t kill and that you can’t stop, it gets to be very scary. And it gets to be very, very terrifying for all of the characters.
What is incredibly exciting to me is that I now sit here at a time in Marvel Studios history where we’ve made enough films and we have enough characters, that the audience has told us with their ticket-buying dollars that they enjoy the shared universe conceit. Other studios are trying to do it now as well, which is another sign that the audience enjoys it and that it’s working. We now find ourselves in exactly the position that I hoped we would be 8-years ago when we started talking about it, which was to bring that comic-book-reading experience to the masses and to the movie-going public at large. In a Marvel comic book, because the characters all inhabit the Marvel universe, anyone can pop up in any book. It’s not just about the major heroes meeting the major heroes. There are sub-characters and there are relatively minor characters that show up between the books. We now find ourselves having enough of those kinds of characters that we can do that. We can have Selvig show up in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and we can have Robert Redford refer to Iron Man in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” That is fun. So as we enter “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” we are certainly not shying away from the opportunities to do that.
But we never want it to be distracting or confusing in any way. If we need a character in the script that has to have a certain amount of information, in another script it would just be a random scientist that so and so goes to see. In our universe it can be a very specific actor from a very specific movie that if you’ve seen those other movies you know who that is, and if you haven’t, you’re just getting the information you need for the story to continue. Of course, it can also be a new character as well.
Q: Do you think that today’s technology makes Ultron scarier than he’s ever been in the comics?
A: Ultron has been in the comic books over 40 years but is more relevant and more frightening than ever right now today when we all have in our pockets technology that tells people where we are and tells people what we’re doing. We happily do that, by the way. Many people happily tell the whole world where they are and what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. We all know that there are people listening and watching, and what if people could control that and what if that control went another few steps? We know there are drones out there; we know there are cars that can more or less drive themselves coming soon enough. At what point has humanity given over too much, and are people going to regret it? Ultron is able to exploit all of that in a very, very big way.
Q: You seem to foreshadow that with the Lumerian Star in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” Is that intentional?
A: The notion of artificial intelligence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been there from the beginning. In the very first few scenes of the first “Iron Man” film, we have somebody talking to the JARVIS system in Tony’s house. In “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” Cap comes upon a bunker that ends up being the new Zola where he has taken his consciousness and put it into computer equipment from the 1970s and is still active and is not necessarily very nice. You can look at this thread of A.I. throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which we did based on the stories we were telling at the time, but also knowing that when we started leaning towards what we wanted to do in the next Avengers film with Ultron, we didn’t want it to have come out of nowhere. We wanted to see the notion that robotics and artificial intelligence as it is in the real world exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at a believable level before we take it to the Ultron extreme.
Q: Talk about casting James Spader as Ultron.
A: We’ve been huge fans of James Spader for many years and always were looking for something to do with him. But we don’t like to cast great people in small parts just for a cameo’s sake or for fun’s sake, so we didn’t have anything for him. When Joss Whedon started talking about the fact that he didn’t want a monotone, cold, calculating robotic voice and wanted in some ways an outrageous personality that you haven’t seen before necessarily in an A.I., he said, “You know, like a James Spader-type.” We said forget the type, let’s just get him because we love him and because that is a guaranteed way of not falling into the “I-am-a-robot” problem, which we did not want to have with Ultron. He doesn’t have that in the comics, but sometimes he could fall into that occasionally. But with Spader you’re never going to fall into that.
We’ve altered his origin a little bit; Tony Stark is much more responsible for the creation of Ultron in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You look at everything that Tony is, which was brought about by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, and you look at Robert’s history and his filmography, and then you start to look at Spader’s and you look at “Less Than Zero” and their shared experiences coming forward. What’s fun about Ultron in the comics is that he has a daddy complex and he’s very competitive with his creator. James is not competitive with Robert career-wise, but that they’ve had that shared journey through the film business. It was just the icing on the cake of that casting. Robert called us early on and said, “James Spader. That is the second best casting you’ve ever done.”
Q: How are you introducing the two new characters in this film, and how did the story dictate that?
A: Part of the fun of The Avengers in the comics is that it’s a shifting roster. If you look at any given run in “The Avengers” over the course of many years, the team can be quite different. We want to showcase that and we want to explore that, so we wanted to bring some new members into the mix in the second film. Knowing that we have so many great characters already, we didn’t want to add them just so we can have more people or just so we have to pull back on the camera when they’re all standing together even more.
There needed to be a reason and with Wanda and Pietro there are a couple of very good reasons. We connect them to Ultron in a big way in this film and we connect them to another Avenger who comes about towards the end of the film. We also wanted to embrace their comic origins, which is that they start as bad guys. They start as villains and for half the movie are villains before they come over and become Avengers. It’s a very Marvel thing to have characters switch allegiances. They have very strong emotions; they have very strong belief systems and morals and it led them to follow the wrong person. They come over and want to work with The Avengers. But do The Avengers trust them, considering they were fighting them earlier in the movie? I love that dynamic in our comic books and those were the perfect characters to do it with.
Q: Do Wanda and Pietro come from a science already established in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
A: There’s a line in the script for “Avengers: Age of Ultron” where Captain America is looking at Ultron that has been created and is seeing what has happened, to Bruce Banner and some of the other characters in the movie, and says “You know, I really miss when the craziest thing science ever made was me.” Captain America was a science experiment gone right. The Hulk was a science experiment gone wrong. There are things that we touch on a little bit with Black Widow and with Hawkeye—less so in the movies than in the comics—that there are some genetic enhancements that have been made. Many of our heroes come about from scientific experimentation and Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are no exception, and we will see in the beginning of the film what was being done to them and by whom.
Q: Is it fair to say that their DNA is directly connected to the Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
A: It’s one way to think of it, yes. As I was listing off those characters that have been enhanced I forgot to mention the Winter Soldier—we see flashes of the experimentation that he underwent in his movie. Thor was born with powers and abilities and Tony Stark invented the Iron Man suit, but Steve, Bruce and Natasha Romanoff, to a certain extent, had a darker way to their journey, which frankly in my opinion—and this certainly holds true for Wanda and Pietro in “Avengers: Age of Ultron”—makes them even bigger heroes. These are people who went through very painful experiences and who have every reason and excuse in the book to have turned against society or to have rejected it and to become very egotistical and become a villain. Instead they’re able to use that for good. It takes Wanda and Pietro a little time to go through that in the movie, but they get there.
Q: Talk about Vision and how he plays into this story.
A: The Avengers and certainly Tony Stark and all of us at Marvel are not Luddites. We don’t believe that technology is inherently evil and what’s great is when you have the mythology in our comic books you see two things: you see the creation of Ultron, which as I said is one of the scariest, deadliest villains we have based purely on technology’s evil. But the genius of the comic creators and the comic writers is that they had another A.I. come about, in Vision. He spun out of the origins of Ultron and became one of the primary members of The Avengers. We’ve loved Vision for many, many years but we needed to find the right way to do that and the right way to bring him about was obviously as part of an Ultron origin story.
In this film Ultron wants to take over and enslave humanity, but he also believes that he is going to help the world push evolution further. He believes that evolution is him—that it is technology. He believes that the biology of humanity and organics is for the 20th century and that he now is clearly more advanced. But he has a body throughout much of the movie that is built on steel and various composite materials that isn’t advanced enough for him, so he starts to create a new body that is the perfect blending of organics and of metallic and advanced materials.
But before he can utilize the new body, it winds up in Tony Stark’s hands and Tony, who feels responsible for the creation of Ultron in the first place, thinks he needs to redeem himself because he knows technology is not evil. He thinks that something better can come about and the way he’s going to do that is by imparting some of Jarvis into this thing that becomes Vision, who is played by the voice of JARVIS, Paul Bettany.
Q: How did you and Joss Whedon work out the spectacle and bigness of the film?
A: Early on Joss remarked that it’s not about going bigger. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. We want it to hit the same emotional beats that the first one hit, to go even further with the character interactions, to go further with the relationship between those characters. That’s what was exciting to us—to bring new characters into the mix that can enhance the relationships of the existing characters. There are beats in this film with The Avengers in very pedestrian surroundings, which are great and are very fun and very heartwarming. But of course you want to have the spectacle as well and you want to have the characters interact with each other in the best Marvel splash-page possible.
Joss has come up with a number of things that are going to help us go to even bigger places. One of those ways is that the movie takes place all over the globe now; it has much more in common with a James Bond movie or a Bourne movie in terms of the globetrotting than the first one did. Part of that was just the nature of the story and part of that was we wanted to intentionally have a more diverse group of settings. So we’re in Eastern Europe, we’re in, the United Kingdom, we’re in South Africa, we’re in Asia, we’re in New York. The Avengers are not American heroes; they are not only international, they’re intergalactic and the best way to play that is to go there. So we shot on more distant locations than we ever have on any of our other films.
Q: Will we have the opportunity to see these secondary characters from other films come in and help?
A: What is incredibly exciting to me is that I now sit here at a time in Marvel Studios history where we’ve made enough films and we have enough characters, that the audience has told us with their ticket-buying dollars that they enjoy the shared universe conceit. Other studios are trying to do it now as well, which is another sign that the audience enjoys it and that it’s working. We now find ourselves in exactly the position that I hoped we would be 8-years ago when we started talking about it, which was to bring that comic-book-reading experience to the masses and to the movie-going public at large. In a Marvel comic book, because the characters all inhabit the Marvel universe, anyone can pop up in any book. It’s not just about the major heroes meeting the major heroes. There are sub-characters and there are relatively minor characters that show up between the books. We now find ourselves of having enough of those kinds of characters that we can do that. We can have Selvig show up in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and we can have Robert Redford refer to Iron Man in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” That is fun. So as we enter “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” we are certainly not shying away from the opportunities to do that.
But we never want it to be distracting or confusing in any way. If we need a character in the script that has to have a certain amount of information, in another script it would just be a random scientist that so and so goes to see. In our universe it can be a very specific actor from a very specific movie that if you’ve seen those other movies you know who that is, and if you haven’t, you’re just getting the information you need for the story to continue. Of course, it can also be a new character as well.
Q: Do you feel you’ve earned the right to bring back these characters from other films for cameos?
A: Absolutely. I mean we’re not going to shy away from using characters from the other films if the story calls for it, and in “Avengers: The Age of Ultron” it’s going to call for it.
Jeremy Latcham, our executive producer, has an office in London. He’s there full-time while we’re filming. In every production office you will find printouts of headshots of the cast because as you’re building a film, you have the schedule on one wall, you have some concept art on the other wall, and you have all the cast up as you’re filling in the blanks. Most of the blanks have been filled for us because of the other films but it is the biggest cast wall you’ve ever seen and you can’t believe it. You would think it was the opening of an awards show or something with all the featured presenters with the amount of known names that are on his wall right now.
Q: Do you think there are advantages to filming in practical locations?
A: Sure. The truth is when you go to the places, you get more of a substantial look, which is why the Bond movies have that reputation and feel that way. When you have computer-generated characters and when you have so many sequences that need to rely on visual effects as you do in our films, whenever you can have a shot of your actors come out onto a real street in a real country on a real location it just adds that much more to it. It’s grounding a film as outrageous and as fantastical as a Marvel film in some kind of reality.
So going to South Africa, going to South Korea, going to London, going to Northern Italy, which will stand in for Eastern Europe, and even going to New York for a little while as we did in the first Avengers film, really adds to that reality.
Q: Does South Africa stand in for Wakanda in the film?
A: No. It is South Africa. You can’t get into Wakanda. Wakanda’s a very hard place to get into, so they go to South Africa to get something from that region, namely the kind of metal Ultron would want to use to make his body as powerful as it could possibly be.
Thankfully Ultron has found somebody named Ulysses Klaue who deals in a black market, smuggling business of vibranium. Ulysses Klaue is going to have a hard time negotiating with Ultron for his very limited vibranium stash.
Q: What do you think the audience connected with so well in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and what’s the biggest challenge going forward?
A: It was the interaction of the characters and seeing all of those diverse characters in one film. That was one part—the uniqueness of that—and I think that will still hold true for “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” There is a conceptual uniqueness in having different characters from different movies all in one movie that’s exciting to people. But what really did it was the way in which the characters interacted with each other and the way in which it all made sense that they were there in one film. We found that tonal balance in the first one and will carry it over into the second one. The biggest challenge is exceeding expectations. Not just audience expectations, but our own expectations. And I hope that we are able to deliver on those expectations and give audiences a movie that they love as much as we do.
And the reason this time around is the villainous Ultron. Offering a brief introduction to the story, Feige says, “Tony starts to realize that he doesn’t have to be in the suit the whole time in order to be a hero, so he decides to develop a system that can help him do that. That, combined with a few other things, brings about Ultron and Ultron is unbelievably powerful and unbelievably driven and, in a fun way and in a very Joss Whedon way, is completely insane. When you have that combination of traits in a body that you can’t kill and that you can’t stop, it gets to be very scary. And it gets to be very, very terrifying for all of the characters.”
Feige points out that the character of Ultron has been in the Marvel comic books for over 40 years but is more relevant and more frightening than ever today. “We all have in our pockets technology that tells people where we are and tells people what we’re doing,” informs the producer. “We happily do that, by the way. Many people happily tell the whole world where they are and what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. We all know that there are people listening and watching, and what if people could control that and what if that control went another few steps? We know there are drones out there; we know there are cars that can more or less drive themselves coming soon enough. At what point has humanity given over too much and are people going to regret it? Ultron is able to exploit all of that in a very, very big way.”
It is Tony Stark who creates Ultron in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and it was purposed karma that put Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark up against James Spader’s Ultron. Feige says, “Tony Stark is much more responsible for the creation of Ultron in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You look at everything that Tony is, which was brought about by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, and you look at Robert’s history and his filmography, and then you start to look at Spader’s and you look at ‘Less Than Zero’ and their shared experiences coming forward. What’s fun about Ultron in the comics is that he has a daddy complex and he’s very competitive with his creator. James is not competitive with Robert career-wise, but that they’ve had that shared journey through the film business. It was just the icing on the cake of that casting. Robert called us early on and said, ‘James Spader. That is the second best casting you’ve ever done.’”
Feige points out that the notion of artificial intelligence is not new to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and has, in fact, been there from the beginning. “In the very first few scenes of the first ‘Iron Man’ film, we have somebody talking to the JARVIS system in Tony’s house,” informs Feige. “In ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ Cap comes upon a bunker that ends up being the new Zola where he has taken his consciousness and put it into computer equipment from the 1970s and is still active and is not necessarily very nice.”
Continuing, Feige adds, “You can look at this thread of A.I. throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which we did based on the stories we were telling at the time, but also knowing that when we started leaning towards what we wanted to do in the next Avengers film with Ultron, we didn’t want it to have come out of nowhere. We wanted to see the notion that robotics and artificial intelligence as it is in the real world exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at a believable level before we take it to the Ultron extreme.”
Feige and his filmmakers did not set out with a goal to make “Avengers: Age of Ultron” a bigger spectacle than “The Avengers.” Feige notes, “Early on Joss [Whedon] remarked that it’s not about going bigger. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. We want it to hit the same emotional beats that the first one hit, to go even further with the character interactions, to go further with the relationship between those characters. That’s what was exciting to us—to bring new characters into the mix that can enhance the relationships of the existing characters. There are beats in this film with The Avengers in very pedestrian surroundings, which are great and are very fun and very heartwarming.”
That being said, Feige adds, “But of course you want to have the spectacle as well and you want to have the characters interact with each other in the best Marvel splash-page possible.”
“Avengers: Age of Ultron” is a global experience, taking audiences from one end of the Earth to another. Feige explains, “The movie takes place all over the globe now; it has much more in common with a James Bond movie or a Bourne movie in terms of the globetrotting than the first one did. Part of that was just the nature of the story and part of that was we wanted to intentionally have a more diverse group of settings. So we’re in Eastern Europe, we’re in the United Kingdom, we’re in South Africa, we’re in Asia, we’re in New York. The Avengers are not American heroes; they are not only international, they’re intergalactic and the best way to play that is to go there. So we shot on more distant locations than we ever have on any of our other films.”
Looking back on what made The Avengers” such a success and what that signals for “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” Feige comments, “It was the interaction of the characters and seeing all of those diverse characters in one film. That was one part—the uniqueness of that—and I think that will still hold true for ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron.’ There is a conceptual uniqueness in having different characters from different movies all in one movie that’s exciting to people. But what really did it was the way in which the characters interacted with each other and the way in which it all made sense that they were there in one film. We found that tonal balance in the first one and will carry it over into the second one.”
Summing up, Feige says, “The biggest challenge is exceeding expectations. Not just audience expectations, but our own expectations. And I hope that we are able to deliver on those expectations and give audiences a movie that they love as much as we do.”
Q: There have been a lot of threats in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So far there’s only been one that brought all the heroes together, and now another looms. Tell us about it.
A: Making ‘The Avengers’ films is in certain ways just plain fun, especially now as we are embarking on the second one,” says Feige. “It’s exciting to get these great actors, who had a good time on the first movie and who have had their own experiences filming their solo movies, and bring them all back together. That’s half of the issue right there. With Joss Whedon’s dialogue and the way he can bring those characters to life, I could just watch The Avengers sit in a room and talk for two hours. I think a lot of people in the audience could too. But we have to do more than that, of course, and you need a reason to have them all come together.
Iron Man goes through a lot of stuff in his most recent movie; he has to save the President of the United States, there’s a government coup that’s going to take over the US. It’s huge, and he does it by himself. Thor encounters a character who predates the known universe itself, and who is working on exploiting a force of nature in this convergence that could threaten the entire universe, and he does it by himself. In “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” Cap is not quite alone—he’s got Black Widow with him—but they have to stop this threat that has exposed S.H.I.E.L.D. as being an organization that had rats within it the form of HYDRA, and they were going to do something that would keep the globe and all of us under their thumb if they didn’t save the day, and they do it alone. So what in the hell can be big enough for all of the characters to need to team up together?
We thought long and hard about that and as always you go back to the comics and you look at whom they faced off in the comics. While it is a sequel, the events of “Marvel’s The Avengers” carries through these Phase 2 films, as we saw in “Iron Man 3,” as we saw in “Thor: The Dark World” and in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” And it goes through to “Avengers: Age of Ultron” as well. So there is something directly related to the end of the first “Avengers” film that has gone awry in large part because of the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. that we witnessed in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” that has caused them to come back together. They feel responsible in a way, based on the events of the first “Avengers” film, to finish cleaning it up, so to speak, to get rid of these alien weapons and things. That’s the initial reason. But why they stay together is because of Ultron. Ultron is one of the most formidable villains that they’ve ever faced in the comics in the form of this artificial intelligence, which has the added curse for them of being somewhat and in part created by them and created by the technology that we’ve all been enjoying in four Iron Man films, counting “Marvel’s The Avengers.”
We know that Tony deals in artificial intelligence; he’s got JARVIS, whom we all love, which is one step towards that. In “Iron Man 3,” Tony participated in the finale of his own movie, but in a big way it was JARVIS and it was the other suits that helped save the day. Tony starts to realize that he doesn’t have to be in the suit the whole time in order to be a hero, so he decides to develop a system that can help him do that. That, combined with a few other things, brings about Ultron and Ultron is unbelievably powerful and unbelievably driven and in a fun way and in a very Joss Whedon way is completely insane. When you have that combination of traits in a body that you can’t kill and that you can’t stop, it gets to be very scary. And it gets to be very, very terrifying for all of the characters.
What is incredibly exciting to me is that I now sit here at a time in Marvel Studios history where we’ve made enough films and we have enough characters, that the audience has told us with their ticket-buying dollars that they enjoy the shared universe conceit. Other studios are trying to do it now as well, which is another sign that the audience enjoys it and that it’s working. We now find ourselves in exactly the position that I hoped we would be 8-years ago when we started talking about it, which was to bring that comic-book-reading experience to the masses and to the movie-going public at large. In a Marvel comic book, because the characters all inhabit the Marvel universe, anyone can pop up in any book. It’s not just about the major heroes meeting the major heroes. There are sub-characters and there are relatively minor characters that show up between the books. We now find ourselves having enough of those kinds of characters that we can do that. We can have Selvig show up in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and we can have Robert Redford refer to Iron Man in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” That is fun. So as we enter “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” we are certainly not shying away from the opportunities to do that.
But we never want it to be distracting or confusing in any way. If we need a character in the script that has to have a certain amount of information, in another script it would just be a random scientist that so and so goes to see. In our universe it can be a very specific actor from a very specific movie that if you’ve seen those other movies you know who that is, and if you haven’t, you’re just getting the information you need for the story to continue. Of course, it can also be a new character as well.
Q: Do you think that today’s technology makes Ultron scarier than he’s ever been in the comics?
A: Ultron has been in the comic books over 40 years but is more relevant and more frightening than ever right now today when we all have in our pockets technology that tells people where we are and tells people what we’re doing. We happily do that, by the way. Many people happily tell the whole world where they are and what they’re doing and what they’re thinking. We all know that there are people listening and watching, and what if people could control that and what if that control went another few steps? We know there are drones out there; we know there are cars that can more or less drive themselves coming soon enough. At what point has humanity given over too much, and are people going to regret it? Ultron is able to exploit all of that in a very, very big way.
Q: You seem to foreshadow that with the Lumerian Star in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” Is that intentional?
A: The notion of artificial intelligence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been there from the beginning. In the very first few scenes of the first “Iron Man” film, we have somebody talking to the JARVIS system in Tony’s house. In “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” Cap comes upon a bunker that ends up being the new Zola where he has taken his consciousness and put it into computer equipment from the 1970s and is still active and is not necessarily very nice. You can look at this thread of A.I. throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which we did based on the stories we were telling at the time, but also knowing that when we started leaning towards what we wanted to do in the next Avengers film with Ultron, we didn’t want it to have come out of nowhere. We wanted to see the notion that robotics and artificial intelligence as it is in the real world exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at a believable level before we take it to the Ultron extreme.
Q: Talk about casting James Spader as Ultron.
A: We’ve been huge fans of James Spader for many years and always were looking for something to do with him. But we don’t like to cast great people in small parts just for a cameo’s sake or for fun’s sake, so we didn’t have anything for him. When Joss Whedon started talking about the fact that he didn’t want a monotone, cold, calculating robotic voice and wanted in some ways an outrageous personality that you haven’t seen before necessarily in an A.I., he said, “You know, like a James Spader-type.” We said forget the type, let’s just get him because we love him and because that is a guaranteed way of not falling into the “I-am-a-robot” problem, which we did not want to have with Ultron. He doesn’t have that in the comics, but sometimes he could fall into that occasionally. But with Spader you’re never going to fall into that.
We’ve altered his origin a little bit; Tony Stark is much more responsible for the creation of Ultron in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. You look at everything that Tony is, which was brought about by Robert Downey Jr.’s performance, and you look at Robert’s history and his filmography, and then you start to look at Spader’s and you look at “Less Than Zero” and their shared experiences coming forward. What’s fun about Ultron in the comics is that he has a daddy complex and he’s very competitive with his creator. James is not competitive with Robert career-wise, but that they’ve had that shared journey through the film business. It was just the icing on the cake of that casting. Robert called us early on and said, “James Spader. That is the second best casting you’ve ever done.”
Q: How are you introducing the two new characters in this film, and how did the story dictate that?
A: Part of the fun of The Avengers in the comics is that it’s a shifting roster. If you look at any given run in “The Avengers” over the course of many years, the team can be quite different. We want to showcase that and we want to explore that, so we wanted to bring some new members into the mix in the second film. Knowing that we have so many great characters already, we didn’t want to add them just so we can have more people or just so we have to pull back on the camera when they’re all standing together even more.
There needed to be a reason and with Wanda and Pietro there are a couple of very good reasons. We connect them to Ultron in a big way in this film and we connect them to another Avenger who comes about towards the end of the film. We also wanted to embrace their comic origins, which is that they start as bad guys. They start as villains and for half the movie are villains before they come over and become Avengers. It’s a very Marvel thing to have characters switch allegiances. They have very strong emotions; they have very strong belief systems and morals and it led them to follow the wrong person. They come over and want to work with The Avengers. But do The Avengers trust them, considering they were fighting them earlier in the movie? I love that dynamic in our comic books and those were the perfect characters to do it with.
Q: Do Wanda and Pietro come from a science already established in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
A: There’s a line in the script for “Avengers: Age of Ultron” where Captain America is looking at Ultron that has been created and is seeing what has happened, to Bruce Banner and some of the other characters in the movie, and says “You know, I really miss when the craziest thing science ever made was me.” Captain America was a science experiment gone right. The Hulk was a science experiment gone wrong. There are things that we touch on a little bit with Black Widow and with Hawkeye—less so in the movies than in the comics—that there are some genetic enhancements that have been made. Many of our heroes come about from scientific experimentation and Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are no exception, and we will see in the beginning of the film what was being done to them and by whom.
Q: Is it fair to say that their DNA is directly connected to the Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
A: It’s one way to think of it, yes. As I was listing off those characters that have been enhanced I forgot to mention the Winter Soldier—we see flashes of the experimentation that he underwent in his movie. Thor was born with powers and abilities and Tony Stark invented the Iron Man suit, but Steve, Bruce and Natasha Romanoff, to a certain extent, had a darker way to their journey, which frankly in my opinion—and this certainly holds true for Wanda and Pietro in “Avengers: Age of Ultron”—makes them even bigger heroes. These are people who went through very painful experiences and who have every reason and excuse in the book to have turned against society or to have rejected it and to become very egotistical and become a villain. Instead they’re able to use that for good. It takes Wanda and Pietro a little time to go through that in the movie, but they get there.
Q: Talk about Vision and how he plays into this story.
A: The Avengers and certainly Tony Stark and all of us at Marvel are not Luddites. We don’t believe that technology is inherently evil and what’s great is when you have the mythology in our comic books you see two things: you see the creation of Ultron, which as I said is one of the scariest, deadliest villains we have based purely on technology’s evil. But the genius of the comic creators and the comic writers is that they had another A.I. come about, in Vision. He spun out of the origins of Ultron and became one of the primary members of The Avengers. We’ve loved Vision for many, many years but we needed to find the right way to do that and the right way to bring him about was obviously as part of an Ultron origin story.
In this film Ultron wants to take over and enslave humanity, but he also believes that he is going to help the world push evolution further. He believes that evolution is him—that it is technology. He believes that the biology of humanity and organics is for the 20th century and that he now is clearly more advanced. But he has a body throughout much of the movie that is built on steel and various composite materials that isn’t advanced enough for him, so he starts to create a new body that is the perfect blending of organics and of metallic and advanced materials.
But before he can utilize the new body, it winds up in Tony Stark’s hands and Tony, who feels responsible for the creation of Ultron in the first place, thinks he needs to redeem himself because he knows technology is not evil. He thinks that something better can come about and the way he’s going to do that is by imparting some of Jarvis into this thing that becomes Vision, who is played by the voice of JARVIS, Paul Bettany.
Q: How did you and Joss Whedon work out the spectacle and bigness of the film?
A: Early on Joss remarked that it’s not about going bigger. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. We want it to hit the same emotional beats that the first one hit, to go even further with the character interactions, to go further with the relationship between those characters. That’s what was exciting to us—to bring new characters into the mix that can enhance the relationships of the existing characters. There are beats in this film with The Avengers in very pedestrian surroundings, which are great and are very fun and very heartwarming. But of course you want to have the spectacle as well and you want to have the characters interact with each other in the best Marvel splash-page possible.
Joss has come up with a number of things that are going to help us go to even bigger places. One of those ways is that the movie takes place all over the globe now; it has much more in common with a James Bond movie or a Bourne movie in terms of the globetrotting than the first one did. Part of that was just the nature of the story and part of that was we wanted to intentionally have a more diverse group of settings. So we’re in Eastern Europe, we’re in, the United Kingdom, we’re in South Africa, we’re in Asia, we’re in New York. The Avengers are not American heroes; they are not only international, they’re intergalactic and the best way to play that is to go there. So we shot on more distant locations than we ever have on any of our other films.
Q: Will we have the opportunity to see these secondary characters from other films come in and help?
A: What is incredibly exciting to me is that I now sit here at a time in Marvel Studios history where we’ve made enough films and we have enough characters, that the audience has told us with their ticket-buying dollars that they enjoy the shared universe conceit. Other studios are trying to do it now as well, which is another sign that the audience enjoys it and that it’s working. We now find ourselves in exactly the position that I hoped we would be 8-years ago when we started talking about it, which was to bring that comic-book-reading experience to the masses and to the movie-going public at large. In a Marvel comic book, because the characters all inhabit the Marvel universe, anyone can pop up in any book. It’s not just about the major heroes meeting the major heroes. There are sub-characters and there are relatively minor characters that show up between the books. We now find ourselves of having enough of those kinds of characters that we can do that. We can have Selvig show up in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and we can have Robert Redford refer to Iron Man in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” That is fun. So as we enter “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” we are certainly not shying away from the opportunities to do that.
But we never want it to be distracting or confusing in any way. If we need a character in the script that has to have a certain amount of information, in another script it would just be a random scientist that so and so goes to see. In our universe it can be a very specific actor from a very specific movie that if you’ve seen those other movies you know who that is, and if you haven’t, you’re just getting the information you need for the story to continue. Of course, it can also be a new character as well.
Q: Do you feel you’ve earned the right to bring back these characters from other films for cameos?
A: Absolutely. I mean we’re not going to shy away from using characters from the other films if the story calls for it, and in “Avengers: The Age of Ultron” it’s going to call for it.
Jeremy Latcham, our executive producer, has an office in London. He’s there full-time while we’re filming. In every production office you will find printouts of headshots of the cast because as you’re building a film, you have the schedule on one wall, you have some concept art on the other wall, and you have all the cast up as you’re filling in the blanks. Most of the blanks have been filled for us because of the other films but it is the biggest cast wall you’ve ever seen and you can’t believe it. You would think it was the opening of an awards show or something with all the featured presenters with the amount of known names that are on his wall right now.
Q: Do you think there are advantages to filming in practical locations?
A: Sure. The truth is when you go to the places, you get more of a substantial look, which is why the Bond movies have that reputation and feel that way. When you have computer-generated characters and when you have so many sequences that need to rely on visual effects as you do in our films, whenever you can have a shot of your actors come out onto a real street in a real country on a real location it just adds that much more to it. It’s grounding a film as outrageous and as fantastical as a Marvel film in some kind of reality.
So going to South Africa, going to South Korea, going to London, going to Northern Italy, which will stand in for Eastern Europe, and even going to New York for a little while as we did in the first Avengers film, really adds to that reality.
Q: Does South Africa stand in for Wakanda in the film?
A: No. It is South Africa. You can’t get into Wakanda. Wakanda’s a very hard place to get into, so they go to South Africa to get something from that region, namely the kind of metal Ultron would want to use to make his body as powerful as it could possibly be.
Thankfully Ultron has found somebody named Ulysses Klaue who deals in a black market, smuggling business of vibranium. Ulysses Klaue is going to have a hard time negotiating with Ultron for his very limited vibranium stash.
Q: What do you think the audience connected with so well in “Marvel’s The Avengers” and what’s the biggest challenge going forward?
A: It was the interaction of the characters and seeing all of those diverse characters in one film. That was one part—the uniqueness of that—and I think that will still hold true for “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” There is a conceptual uniqueness in having different characters from different movies all in one movie that’s exciting to people. But what really did it was the way in which the characters interacted with each other and the way in which it all made sense that they were there in one film. We found that tonal balance in the first one and will carry it over into the second one. The biggest challenge is exceeding expectations. Not just audience expectations, but our own expectations. And I hope that we are able to deliver on those expectations and give audiences a movie that they love as much as we do.
