The Russo Brothers Break Down Scenes from Their Movies

Hi, I'm Anthony Russo

And I'm Joe Russo.

And we're here with Vanity Fair

to break down some scenes from our career.

I like this.

This is sort of like the pensive.

We're gonna look into the past.

Yes, yes. And sort of-

Let's conjure up an old Marvel film.

[glass breaking]

Wakanda forever!

I am...

Inevitable.

[fingers clicking]

I still marvel at the technology that, you know,

they were able to use to capture Brolin's performance.

It might be one of my favorite performances

of anyone we've ever worked with because of, you know,

the way Josh understood the assignment of, you know

playing a character.

It's almost Kabuki in a way.

You remember the first time we were on,

in rehearsals with him and we had a screen in the corner

and we were mapping Thanos on to him

and he was walking around in those motion capture pajamas.

And I remember him just like getting so excited

Yeah. that he could

make this character that was

eight and a half feet tall move.

Bring it to life. I remember what he said,

He was like, he, he said it felt,

I feel like I'm studying acting again as a kid,

'cause it was so experimental.

It was such a new form of performance

he had never experienced before.

It's basically puppeteering.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Mr. Brolin,

his chin looks nothing like this in reality.

This is all- Absolutely nothing.

[electricity pulsing]

And I...

Am...

Iron Man.

[fingers snapping]

I dunno if we've told this story in it's entirety.

And, and certainly not while watching the scene.

It's probably the most pressure we've ever had in,

in trying to come up with a line with Markus, McFeely

in any of these movies.

You do not want to fuck up Tony Stark's last line.

Part of the pressure came from Jon Favreau,

who called us up after he read the script.

[Joe] Oh, geez. I remember this.

[Anthony] And said to us,

Are you guys really going to kill Iron Man?

He did. Yeah.

And I remember pacing on the corner of a stage

on the phone with Favreau trying to talk him off a ledge.

'Cause he's like, You can't do this.

It's gonna devastate people and you don't want them,

you know, walking out of the theater and into traffic.

We did it anyways.

Yeah, we did it anyway.

And, and to Jon's credit,

he hadn't stepped through the process

in the way that we had. Right.

So we would've had the same reaction

if somebody had dropped that.

We felt like we had earned the arc that, you know,

would feel redemptive and emotional and uplifting

and hopeful, even though he had, he had sacrificed his life.

So he actually asked to improvise a few lines here.

We tried some alternate versions of it.

And they were sort of more in this snarky, Tony Stark vein.

He wasn't playing it with enough pain of the, you know,

the power of the stone surging through his body.

In fact, the edit that we ended up settling on

in that version was a version where he said nothing.

[Joe] We redid this three times.

Third times the charm.

Our editor,

Jeff Ford. Jeff Ford.

Who is one of the most amazing filmmakers

we've ever collaborated with.

Edited the first Iron Man movie.

So he had been on the journey with the character

since the original John Favreau directed Iron Man.

[Joe] He hit play and Thanos says, I am inevitable.

And then beep beep beep.

And Jeff went, And I am Iron Man.

And we were like- And we literally,

we were like, stop! Stop the Avid.

It was like we were struck

by lightning. What did you just say?

And then all of a sudden- We called Downey.

We said, you gotta put the suit back on.

He had already said goodbye to the character like twice now.

Right,

So that pickup that we did with Robert

was at a stage in Los Angeles.

It was directly across from the stage

where he originally auditioned for the role of Iron Man.

To make the whole thing even more emotionally-

Devastating for Robert, we asked him to put the suit on

and come back to where he had originally secured the role

and to give his, his final line.

'Cause the character. Say goodbye

to the character, once again.

[Joe] So this is from

the Battle of Wakanda, in Infinity War.

We better keep them in front of us.

How do we do that?

We open the barrier.

This will be the end of Wakanda.

Then it'll be the noblest ending in the history.

Sometimes I think about the scale of all these scenes

and I don't know how we're still standing.

I don't know either.

And how we did all of this.

Yeah, we storyboarded extensively.

A sequence like this is impossible

because the amount of people required

to create a scene like this is in the hundreds.

And some of those people

are gonna be present on your production.

And some of those people are gonna be located

on the other side of the planet,

working in visual effects studios.

So the only way to communicate the idea of the scene

to that wide range of people is to create

a very specific model of what the scene is gonna be.

An automatic.

[Anthony] Sometimes it includes moments of

what we call fight vis, where we actually shoot

stunt people fighting in the stunt gym to sort of

stand in for certain moments within the pre-visualization.

And it's an incredibly elaborate roadmap

that we revise and we revise and revise

over many months before we get to production.

It's kind of like making the movie

before you make the movie.

[intense music]

Voula!

[heroic music]

Wakanda forever!

[army shouting]

They were making Black Panther

while we were shooting Infinity War.

And they were on a process of discovery with Ryan Coogler.

Anthony and I went to visit Ryan early in prep,

and it was the most impressive prep

we had ever seen for a film.

He had every wall covered with the structure of Wakanda,

the culture of Wakanda.

It was so dense and so detailed.

We were completely blown away.

I remember walking outta that room going

That movie's going to be absolutely incredible.

And I remember Chadwick taking Anthony and I aside

and explaining to us the mythology

that they had been developing.

We had a depth of relationship with Chadwick

'cause we introduced the character with him

in Civil War and he was basically the ambassador

for everything that had been done after that movie

with Ryan Coogler.

He would go off and work with some of the other actors

on the sort of Wakanda formation, or Wakanda chants.

Stunt players who are not in Black Panther

and he would, he would take them through the chants,

how to pronounce it correctly.

The diction, the form that they would take, you know,

how they would hold their body in an attack stance.

He was being the leader of Wakanda.

[army charging]

That's one of my favorite shots in the movie.

Seeing the scale of the army coming down the hill.

Tricky sequence to shoot

'cause we had the Hulk Buster in it.

These costumes look amazing,

but they are designed to look amazing.

They aren't necessarily something you would wear to compete

in the Olympics or a sporting event.

So to have all these actors have to sprint full speed

to get them to hit their marks

[Joe] on the shots. Yeah.

I always felt immense amount of power in the scene

in the sense that like Earth's last stand would unfold

in Wakanda, this country that had sectioned itself off

from the rest of the world and now literally

was carrying the fate of the world in its hands.

Yeah, it was resonant experience as filmmakers to,

to execute the scene and even more resonant now.

[triumphant music]

Evans is like an Olympic athlete.

Literally. He really is.

He is very quick.

And a lot of times we thought we would have to augment him

or use camera tricks to increase his speed as Cap.

And we were always stunned that we didn't need to do that.

Yeah.

[Anthony] This is from Captain America's Civil War.

The two sides of the Avengers who've been

divided by the Sokovia Accords

are finally going to confront one another.

What do we do, Cap?

We fight.

This is gonna end well

This movie is brutalist in tone.

It's it's meant to be devoid of color.

The whole idea behind it was all these characters

were slipping into this morally gray area.

They didn't understand their identities.

They, you know, they were in conflict with one another.

And so we wanted to use a location where, you know,

civilians wouldn't be running away

while they were fighting each other.

We didn't feel like they could recover from that.

So we chose an airport tarmac.

They're not stopping.

Neither are we.

What's interesting is we shot this on the back lot

of sound stages in Atlanta.

And I remember we took the temperature

of the black top and it was 128 degrees on the black top.

So all of the ground you're seeing here is the black top.

Everything else back here is all CG, right?

None of of that exists.

When they ran at each other this side,

there's no CG characters on this side.

So these are the only two real characters on this side.

Spider-Man is CG.

Ironman is CG, Vision, War Machine.

It was Scarlett literally running by herself

with a stunt player in a hundred and you know,

28 degree blacktop, over and over.

I remember her looking at us at one point and going

we can't do this one more time.

There's certain actors who could escape

from having to do a sequence like this over and over.

Sebastian could not, Renner could not, Scarlett could not.

Mackie takes flight, Lizzie takes flight,

and Rudd of course is completely covered.

And I remember having long conversations agonizing

with our visual effects supervisor, Dan Deleeuw.

Because as Iron Man takes off and War Machine,

their suits are so heavy

and this is the kind of physics that we break down

and use in order to

construct how people move. Work it out

behind the scenes, right.

We have an estimated weight of both of these suits

so we can figure out how they move.

In order for these guys to fly,

they have to be moving at a much higher velocity

or they will just fall out of the air like a stone.

But we needed to compress them into a single shot.

So we got this nice running shot here.

This is one of those moments where we cheated on physics.

You know, admittedly,

we cheat on physics lot. They had...

They had thrusters in their hands.

That was the compromises.

We kept the hands down for a little bit,

but then he eventually has to transition here.

This is the one we spent months about

in the editing room talking about.

[intense music]

There was a moment where we had Bettany

on wires outside in that heat,

and that suit doesn't have any seams in it.

I think we were probably at risk of him

getting heat stroke once or twice.

I remember, you remember this?

Where... Yeah, I can never forget it.

He lifted his arm once and a, a hole popped

in one of the seams and it just started squirting sweat out.

Like it was on a, it was like a stream of water

coming out of his suit.

And that's, I remember we just called cut

and we're like, you gotta, you gotta get out of that suit.

You probably have, This is dangerous.

You probably have three pounds of, of body weight in sweat

inside your, your suit at this point

Safety is always the top concern,

but what happens is you get lost in the moment.

Everybody was so excited to be shooting this scene.

Like every crew member is a massive fan of these characters

A massive fan of the comics.

So the opportunity to actually stage a scene like this

on camera was so overwhelming to people.

We had people on set that day crying

when they, when they saw

how they were lined up. Because they had

read these, read the books as, as a kid, as we had.

And we probably had 30 people behind us

all trying to get a peak of all these characters

running at each other.

So it was easy to get lost in the moment

of what we were doing.

You got hard kid, where you from?

Queens.

Brooklyn.

Some people are lucky, like Evans.

And once he puts the helmet on, it's a stunt player.

You know, Robert, I think the reason that he played Iron Man

for a decade is because he never really had to go to set.

As soon as iron man suited up, Robert was gone.

[Narrator] And Michael's big moment finally came.

I give you the new CEO for the Bluth Company.

This is from the pilot of Arrested Development

where Michael realizes that he no longer

wants to be a Bluth.

My favorite Bluth and the, uh,

sexiest creature

I have ever laid eyes on.

The style of arrested development and where we derived it.

Anthony and I were big fans of a film

that had won the Cannes Film Festival called Man Bite's Dog.

Which is a satirical look at a serial killer.

It's a mockumentary. A camera crew follows him around.

It's a wickedly funny and disturbing movie,

but it was shot vérité.

And the style of Arrested Development

owes an incredible debt to that movie.

We added some more flourishes to it, you know,

to create some more snap zooms.

To get into characters heads a little bit more,

to get into closeups. Yeah.

Joe and I like sort of mixing tones.

It's part of how we sort of find,

sort of freshness and and oddness in material for ourselves.

Part of our inclination to go to the style

Joe was talking about here,

is the show is so absurd, Arrested Development.

So we thought it would be fun to commit

to a camera style that says to an audience instinctually

hardcore realism, naturalism, reality TV.

[Joe] And reality TV was big at the time.

So we felt like they would understand the language

of what this was.

My lovely wife, Lucille.

[Lucille cheering]

Mom!

[Lucille screaming]

There's a lot of really diverse coverage in this sequence.

It's because we would run three cameras all at once.

One of the techniques we used,

again to create a feeling of realism,

is we wouldn't let the camera operators watch rehearsals

so that we would just throw them in there

as we were ready to shoot.

So they weren't prepared.

They didn't know exactly where things were gonna happen.

They had to find it.

That's where we got some of our best footage is, you know,

an operator catching up to a subject.

In a shot like this, there's probably a camera operator

hiding just off over here.

There's probably one more over here.

This shot here, me and two other operators shooting

run and gun on digital cameras.

This is the first show, narrative show,

I think in TV history.

'Cause we're just at a point where that technology

had become good enough.

We also didn't have to light as much.

You can tell, if you look at like

how much definition you're losing

out of these windows back here,

it's because this was an earliest version of a,

a digital camera which could not retain as much information.

The problem with digital video at the time

was that it didn't look as good.

It, it didn't function as well as film

and people were scared of it,

but we wanted to embrace it for the show because we were

trying to lower the cost of the show, number one.

Number two, we felt that that the fact that the image

was degraded and imperfect fed the realistic feel of it.

It was not a polished show.

It was not lit perfectly.

It felt like you were capturing something

that was just happening and not recreating something.

[Woman] Congratulations!

[crowd clapping]

Sorry. It's not the right time.

We came into conflict with the studio

over our shooting style.

So these operators over here on the edges of the frame

this camera might pan right or left

and shoot right through an operator on its way to get

coverage of another actor.

In editorial, we were just gonna chop that piece out.

We're doing this because we were moving so quickly.

We had 60 location changes in a five day shoot.

It was completely insane.

But we remember getting a phone call on like day two of it.

And I remember the head of the studio wanted to fire us

because she said we had no idea what we were doing

because she kept watching dailies

and seeing other cameras in the shots.

She said, this stuff is never gonna cut together.

What are you doing?

In her defense, they, it was very chaotic.

We're like, trust us, trust us, trust us.

We know what we're doing.

So this is from an episode of Community.

It was a two part paintball episode.

[paintball guns shooting]

Shirley! What are we the supposed to do?

[Shirley] How 'bout we save this schools ass.

Deal.

[tires screeching]

These were the episodes that Kevin Feige watched,

which inspired him to call us

and ask us if we were interested

in making a Captain America movie.

Anthony and I growing up as film geeks, as film fans,

who, who obsessed over and watched everything

that you could possibly watch.

We had a very diverse range of interests

from old movies to new movies, to video games,

to fantasy films, to comedies, to Gilligan's Island.

Like you name it, we consumed it.

Tolkien. You know, we played Dungeons and dragons.

So go down the list of influences.

Community was us playing in a sandbox,

expressing those influences.

Making fun of action films, while we're embracing them.

You'll see there, we went through a series of shots

of a golf cart as if it were a vehicle

from the Fast and Furious,

with an insert of the accelerator, the tire spinning out,

the car pulling away from us at speed.

[heroic music]

[tires screeching]

[paint splattering]

[Shirley] Hold on.

Whoa!

So here's an homage to John Woo, right here.

We've got guns facing in different directions,

two characters almost back to back,

but that was part of the inspiration.

You know, Justin Lin shot that first paintball episode

and he used Woo quite a bit.

Justin was a dear friend of mine who went to film school

with me we were in the same class together at UCLA.

Watch it

That's it. Is that it?

I think that's it. That's it.

We win. We won!

We win!

[crowd cheering]

If that music feels marvel-esque in any way

it's because the composer on the show was a,

a young gentleman named Ludvig Göransson.

Who ultimately went on to a score of Black Panther

and become a very prominent big movie composer,

as well as a producing partner to Childish Gambino.

But you know, what's amazing about Community

is the amount of characters.

Those episodes were mostly 22 minutes long,

but if you count up here the amount of characters

that were lead or recurring

that were important to the story.

And this one, I mean, it was crazy.

The scale of the ensemble that we would have to juggle

from episode to episode,

make sure each character got their moments.

And I think this is really where our pension for,

for handling Infinity War and Endgame began.

You can trace the roots directly

to this ridiculous shot from Community.

The Greendale Community College Avengers.

That's right. Yeah.

[Anthony] This is in The Gray Man.

The title character, played by Ryan Gosling,

is on a cargo plane being transported

by a crew of mercenaries.

And these mercs are gonna be given the order to kill him.

I think they have already begun.

We filmed the movie for about five to six months.

And we re-shot this sequence about four times

over the course of making the film.

We have a very iterative process when it comes to action.

We like to execute an idea, cut it together, look at it,

come up with a better idea, execute it again.

And so when we initially shot,

and I don't wanna give any spoilers,

so if you don't wanna be spoiled, stop watching.

But when we initially shot this sequence

it was supposed to be on a contained plane.

And the cargo door was supposed to open

and Ryan and another character were supposed

to fall out while they were fighting.

We went from a more contained fight inside the plane

to a spectacular plane crash sequence.

So the concept of the scene is you're in a confined space.

You're in the air.

There's nowhere to flee.

There's nowhere to run, and its one person

against the gang of mercs.

[intense music]

You know, here, here, here,

and here. One over there.

And the gray man is here in the center.

The problem here is,

how is he going to survive one person against many?

We had to come up with all these ideas

about how he could possibly use

whatever is in his environment to preserve his life.

To obfuscate, create obstacles for his pursuers.

[Anthony] This technique here, he opens up a smoke grenade

and it gives him a little bit of an edge to keep going.

[Pilot] We've got a low air pressure in the cabin.

So after blowing a hole in the plane,

he makes his way to an oxygen mask,

which is just off camera over here.

He knows that the pilots are gonna be forced

to take evasive action, which is going to include diving

which will send everyone into a weightless free fall.

And he knows he needs to get a hold of that oxygen

before they take that action.

Now the inventive techniques that The Gray Man uses

to preserve his life in this scenario,

we came up with a lot of these through consultation

with CIA consultants that we had,

special forces consultants that we had,

and they have training and real world experience

about having to use elements in your environment.

That was the basic concept of this scene

The Gray Man sort of improvising with things around him.

So all the atmospherics that you're seeing

throughout here is CG.

This is one of the more heavily CG sequences.

This is not something you can replicate on a real plane

without putting actors or stunt players in danger.

This scene was very meticulous, especially difficult

because Anthony and I kept changing our minds

and we kept blowing up the scale of the scene

bigger and bigger with each iteration,

each pass that we took at the scene.

The CG work in this scene was so difficult and complex

that it, in fact, shots in this scene

were the very last shots that we finished on the movie.

They took the longest.

Thank you guys. [crew cheering]

That was awesome. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, that was really fun.

Sorry. We went on and on, but we can't shut up.