CAPTAIN AMERICA Directors Anthony & Joe Russo Talk About Their Development Process With Marvel Studios



It's really tough to learn the development process for a film because things are so secretive during the process. In fact, even after a movie is released it is tough to get any producer, writer or director to spill the beans on their respective development process.

Each producer, writer and/or director has a different style when it comes to creating a film's story and script. Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Captain America 3 directors Anthony and Joe Russo have revealed bits of their own process.

To start, everything begins with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige. If he has a big idea it needs to be incorporated into a story.

"Usually when Kevin has an idea in his head, it’s a big idea that affects the whole universe," Joe said via Collider.com
"For instance the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D.," Anthony added in the same interview. "That would be an example of a big idea coming from Kevin [Feige] that a movie then has to wrap itself around."

Once the Marvel boss has his say on what he wants in a film it is up to the Russos to find tidbits they like from the Marvel comic book universe.

"If you go in my office on the floor, there’s quite a few [comic] books in there," Joe said in a another interview with Collider.com. "And in fact one of them, which would be a huge spoiler for Cap 3, I just was the other day and I was like, 'why did I leave this out?' You could walk in there and blow the whole thing. We review the compendiums and go back over books, there’s stuff you haven’t read for years. As we kind of comb through the books you go, 'I remember when I was a kid I loved this.'And then you put a Post-It note in there to remind yourself of cool lines, cool frames, cool tone, you know. I’m sure I have a big Post-It on the famous France line from The Ultimates. It’s all that. It’s all of the iconic moments."

The Russos then get together with the screenwriters in a room to brainstorm.

"Something that we’ve taken from our work in television is what we call working in a room, which is basically where you take the creative braintrust, and in this case it’s us and Marcus and McFeely and Nate Moore, our producer at Marvel, and we literally sit in a room for weeks on end and discuss the storytelling and the narrative, discuss execution, discuss tone," Joe said via SuperHeroHype.com. "Then once we have a script, read the script out loud, and stop and go as we read out loud and talk about how we can polish things or how we can make things better, if anybody has a stronger idea if we have something that’s not really working. So that process has been almost identical, other than the inception phase, because we’re all so close with each other now and have worked together and all have a short hand it doesn’t really feel any different."

One of the final pieces of the development stage is to get back with Feige and make sure everyone is on the same page with ideas and characters so they can fit into the bigger picture, which is the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.

"We love to share ideas and inspire each other," Joe said via Cinema Blend. "And Kevin [Feige] is great about making sure all of us are up to speed on the current drafts of future stuff. Especially if it’s a character who you are working with, or something that you might be doing."

It can be assumed that during this process there is a lot of pre-visualization and concept artwork being created for the ideas and concepts created in the story and scripting phase. Once this is all said and done and Feige, along with the other Marvel executives, approve the film is ready for production and prepping for principle photography. [This is all assumed and is not noted anywhere online by the Russos.]

So there you have it. A quick look behind-the-scenes of how the Russos, and Marvel Studios, work together to create a movie.

Captain America 3 releases on May 6, 2016 and begins filming in Atlanta in spring 2015.