How to Write A Marvel movie Explained by Marvel Writers(Part 2)

By Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus

Chapter 5 Functional First Draft

Functional is the best thing you could ask for from the first draft. We sit together for weeks and read through it, edit as we go, and write new scenes. That’s when it goes from semi-field experiment to functional script. We meet our deadlines and then that’s the first draft, and the draft was like a progress report, on where we are now and where we are going.

ON WRITING — Thanos

Thanos was delightful. It’s a strangely a breath of fresh air to be handed a 12-foot-tall purple man. He is a character who controls every scene basically and when he does not control the scene, say on Vormir, he is thrown for a loop, it becomes incredibly dramatic. Because he is faced with this big choice and then he ends up controlling the scene again and at great cost. Not every character is like a rhinoceros.

2016 May first is both drafts are in and then we are in prep all the way through the rest of 2016, so that’s at least 5 or 6 real drafts of each one. We are getting notes back and having new ideas about how to fix it, winnowing down and really focusing on what these movies are about.

WRITING THE SCENE — Hawkeye’s Family Disappears

People weren't just snapping off from the battlefield, it wasn’t just Thanos getting rid of his enemies, that it was happening on a more global scale. So when Thanos snapped his finger, suddenly you saw Hawkeye who you hadn’t seen for the rest of the movie, and it didn’t work in the pacing of it, it forced the rest of the tone. We put the Hawkeye at the top of Endgame, and think about what it does not as the first scene of Endgame, it shows you a character you didn’t see a year ago, the audience is ahead of the character and reinforces what you felt at the end of infinity war, and so you are relaunching back into it.

Chapter 7 — Formulating The Shooting Draft

The draft process particularizes once the cameras turn on so that you are doing 15 drafts of one scene. We read out each draft in the room, so we can discuss and beat that or we can cut that or what have you. As the department comes on, it’s becoming more interactive, it’s all part of the character-building storytelling process, you are just getting more tools, as the movie solidifies around you.

ON WRITING — DEPRESSED THOR

We were inheriting a Thor from Ragnarok who was very well and radically retoned from the previous Avenger movies. So we had to fly in Hemsworth and Taika Waititi, well word was getting out from Australia, “do you guys understand what we’re doing with this movie?” No, I don’t know what you mean, on another continent. “ Are you making him an idiot?” I don’t understand. In Ragnarok, he loses his kingdom, his father, his sister, and his eyeball. We just thought about what would happen if any one of us sustained that much loss and failure, and you would get incredibly depressed, and probably retreat from the world. That is a comedic performance with a lot of pain behind it.

Chapter 8 — ON SET

At the beginning of the day, Chris and I are there for rehearsal, and if anything that would come out of rehearsal like somebody doesn’t like a line, or the door is now a window, we will tweak, or provide alts. Once they start shooting, they are going to shoot it all day so our job is kind of done. So at that point, we are either revising things we need to do on Infinity War, if that’s where we are, or we’re looking ahead and trying to shine up Endgame. The footage was going directly to the editor, who is assembling the movie as it is shot, and really clarifying what we’ve got, what we don’t have, because the set is there, if we can get these actors back in the room, and have them say, “we have to go there” , you know, sometimes a much better line than that, this will tie together as a much more organic way.

ON WRITING — CAPTAIN MARVEL

Captain Marvel was going to be in it, but we didn’t have much to go on. They had cast her and that was it. It was a tough balance to strike when you have a character that powerful, who you are going to bring it and you don’t want to seem like well we just bought in this person who can clean the house that we couldn’t clean in the previous movie. So we have to decide on a balance not making it feel like a cameo but not having her around so much that she solved all the problems for everybody.

It also wasn’t the point of the movie. The point of the second movie was saying goodbye to the original six Avengers, so their stories were gonna be way up there. We had the same issue with Black Panther in Infinity War because people were going” Oh Black Panther, he is coming back two months from now, all right I’m gonna get a lot of Black Panther.” And he got some and we went to Wakanda, but he wasn’t the lead character. It was not fair to have Captain Marvel come in and solve all their problems, it didn’t seem like good storytelling.

Chapter 9 — Script Tweaks

We probably wrote the last thing for Endgame, Jan. or Feb. of 2019, we knew we’d have about a month of reshoots, particularly final battle shots. It was so ambitious. It is more correctly entitled additional photography, it was stuff that we didn’t know we needed or we knew we needed but could never get. Yeah, we did a few tweaks early this year.

Writing the Scene — Tony’s Funeral

The end of the movie was always on the board from Oct. 2015. It was a big responsibility, I mean you don’t want to arbitrarily kill them, nor would we be able to. But it has to be the right end to that arc, and god knows how many movies now as, Tony Stark, to get him to that point where that was the only thing left for him to do was sacrifice himself.

It’s straight out of a splash panel, whenever a hero dies in a comic, you get these sort of big two page spreads where everybody is there and they’re sad and they are in various versions of their costume, we called it a wedding for production, so that if something was lying around, it didn’t say Tony’s funeral, but it was a tour through the MCU, through what has happened before, saying goodbye to the person who started this cinematic sequence. It’s not when people die that is sad for the audience, it’s when the people left behind have to react to it. I get choked up when all those people at the end of Endgame. I get choked up at the end of the Infinity War, when people like Okoye are so devastated because TChalla just disappeared in front of her. I’m not devastated because T-Challa disappeared, I am watching her reaction, watching Rocket’s reaction to seeing Groot disappear. It’s almost something Tony would’ve been uncomfortable with in life, he would make a joke about it, he would’ve brought ACDC out to play. That’s why we set up his giving of his own eulogy in the very beginning of the movie with this device, where he could record into his own helmet. Because we knew we wanted his to comment on his own demise at the end. We always thought it was incredibly apropos that Toney give his own eulogy.

EPILOGUE — — “Part of the Journey is the end” — Tony Stark

Usually, your good guys lose and they lose for 5 minutes and we’re now they find a new way to get around it and the movie ends. What happened when they lose at the end of the movie, and you wait for a year and then we wrap it in the surrounding wrap, cut the bad guy’s head off, and take the stone away. This is really how you keep this unprecedented thing like the MCU alive. Most of the movies ended with a win, we wanted to see what happens to their personalities when they don’t. When we tested this with various secret audiences, they always said, “first part’s the slowest”, we know that and guarantee if we cut that in half, if Captain pick up the hammer and says” on your left”, it wouldn’t resonate that much as you hadn’t gone so dark before. We really want them to feel we value these characters as much as they do. The watchword was ‘stick the landing’.

(Interview video clips originally sourced from YouTube)