"Thor's dead!" Joss Whedon screamed. "I killed Thor!"
It was at the end of a long day on the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Whedon's second turn as the writer and director of Marvel Studios' crown jewel franchise. The gargantuan production was in its final weeks last July on a converted back lot at a largely abandoned police training facility outside of London, doubling for the fictional Eastern European nation of Sokovia, home to the film’s climactic battle. Whedon had dreamed up a bit of business in which a pack of robot "Ultrons" hurtle an ambulance at a crowd of civilians, and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), being a nearly indestructible Asgardian warrior, throws himself in its way, pivoting the vehicle in the air and hurling it at a fuel truck, where both vehicles blow up.
To pull this off, Hemsworth would first pretend to throw the ambulance onto the truck, and react to a nonexistent fireball. Then the set would be cleared, so the real explosion could be filmed and merged seamlessly into the same shot with the actor in postproduction. It was painstaking, time-sucking technical work, requiring absolutely none of Whedon's trademark witty dialogue for the actors to speak. But Whedon did not seem to mind. As he walked Hemsworth through the plan, the 50-year-old director grimaced and flexed as he transformed himself, if for a moment, into a rubber-limbed version of the hammer-wielding superhero.
Joss Whedon and Chris Evans on the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron
Jay Maidment
"I'm glad you could see this dramatic and Oscar-worthy scene that will no doubt be quoted for generations," Whedon said minutes later in the director's tent as the crew went through the final preparations to shoot the explosion. "'Boom!' children will say. 'Boom!'"
Just then, Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios' president and creative impresario, and Age of Ultron's producer, stepped into the tent and sat behind Whedon. "Did you just get done telling him it's not just about big explosions?" Feige said to his director.
"But in a character way!" Whedon joked back. "This is totally going to change Thor's whole course. Thor 3 is going to be affected by this as well. I saw a truck blow up! I cannot live with that burden! I must go on a walkabout! I must have a journey!"
Finally, it came time to shoot the explosion. "There will be two bangs!" first assistant director Jamie Christopher said over a loudspeaker. "The one from the tanker is the big one!"
The cameras started rolling. The tent grew silent. Everyone leaned in for a good view of the monitors capturing every possible angle. Christopher called action. And the truck went boom, launching a massive fireball into the air — and directly onto the patch of road where Hemsworth had been standing. The tent erupted into laughter.
"Oh man," Whedon said, shaking his head. "I told you it was going to affect Thor 3!"
"May he rest in peace," said Feige, smiling and turning to me. "That's a big spoiler."
"I super totally killed Thor," Whedon said, doubled over. "It's funny because he's dead."
Thor is not dead. The rig for the ambulance hadn't so much hurtled the vehicle as gently tossed it down the road, which made Hemsworth's Thor look more than a little silly dangling from its windshield. In the finished film, Whedon’s scrapped it completely; Thor still causes the tanker to explode, just from a much safer distance.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
20th Century Fox / Courtesy Everett Collection
Three years ago, it was Marvel’s mightiest superheroes who caused Whedon to blow up. The Avengers opened with the biggest debut weekend ever in the U.S. ($207.4 million), and became the third-highest grossing film of all time and the most successful comic book movie ever made (with $1.5 billion worldwide). That kind of astronomic success was brand new for Whedon. His original TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse had well established him as a cult TV auteur, but the same things that secured him such a devoted following — his dedication to challenging storytelling and cultural conventions, matched with a pulpy and idiosyncratic creative sensibility — also earned Whedon a reputation for being a perpetual underdog. Buffy and Angel were modest hits, but their niche audiences never crept past the bottom of the ratings charts. Firefly, meanwhile, was battered by its network (Fox), and brutally canceled before all of its initial order of 14 episodes had aired. Whedon's herculean efforts to resurrect the show with his 2005 feature film Serenity (his feature directing debut) had also flopped, grossing just $38.9 million globally. Before Marvel Studios came calling, Whedon's most recent major triumph had been the 2008 web series musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
The Avengers changed everything. In August 2012, Marvel Studios signed Whedon to a three-year deal to write and direct the sequel, as well as develop "a new live-action series for Marvel Television" and "contribute creatively to the next phase of Marvel's cinematic universe," according to the statement released by the studio. The deal confirmed Whedon’s ascension to a pinnacle of professional success, recognition, and influence the likes of which he had never really known. It was as if the weird theater kid who liked playing Dungeons & Dragons and arguing about comic books with his buddies on Saturday nights had suddenly been elected student body president and prom king, and become captain of the football team — and the entire school loved him for it.
And as Whedon made clear that day in July on the Age of Ultron set, he wanted to make the most of his newfound status as a true geek god. "With Avengers 2, it's like, I feel like I can do better," he said. "It can mean more. And I can work harder. And I can enjoy it more."
Scarlett Johansson and Whedon on the Avengers: Age of Ultron set
Jay Maidment
As Whedon stood on the ridge of a ruined (fake) bridge, looking over the rubble-strewn carnage, he sounded deeply content with how well he'd been able to hit that target. "I've had the best time," he said. "Every detail has fascinated me. I feel differently about it than I did [before]. Hopefully, that will show."
Eight months later, however, as Whedon was close to completing Age of Ultron in time for its international debut on April 22, and U.S. debut May 1, he looked and sounded like he’d been hit by an exploding truck for real. His voice was choked into a ragged croak, and his lower lip sported a nasty-looking scab where it had split in half. "Well, I have been to the other side of the mountain," he said. “I gotta say, it's been dark. It's been weird. It's been horrible. About a month and a half ago, I said goodbye to my kids, and I've been living in Burbank next to the studio. I feel every day like, I didn't do enough, I didn't do enough, I didn't do enough. I wasn't ready. Here's failure. Here's failure. Here's compromise. Here's compromise."
In practically the same breath, Whedon added that the worst, he hoped, was behind him. "I'm now coming out the other side, realizing that once again, for all its many varied and soon to be heralded flaws, it's my movie," he said. "It's the movie I set out to make. And I have the honor of saying, it's fucking bonkers. So there's that."
Since he first signed on to make The Avengers, Whedon has spent the last five years with a prime seat for Marvel Studios’ escalating popularity, as its vast, and lucrative, cinematic universe has transformed the slates of every studio in Hollywood. He’s stood in the company of gods and titans, on screen and off, sometimes as their master, and sometimes at their mercy. There is simply no one better qualified for this experience, and it’s clearly given him much personal joy. And yet, it has also brought him to the brink of an almost existential misery. Now that his time at the top of the Marvel Studios tower is nearing its end, the only question left to ask is, what could he possibly do next?
Jay Maidment; Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
A little over a month before The Avengers opened in May 2012, Whedon was asked by the British magazine SFX how he might try to top the spectacle of the first film if he were to direct the sequel. "By not trying to," he said. "By being smaller. More personal. More painful."
Three years later, Whedon had spent five months shooting Avengers: Age of Ultron in South Africa, South Korea, Bangladesh, Italy, and London. He'd added three major characters — Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), and the Vision (Paul Bettany) — to the already teeming ensemble of Thor, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Captain America (Chris Evans), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). He'd slipped in cameos for several characters from other Marvel Studios movies, including Iron Man's Col. James Rhodes, aka War Machine (Don Cheadle), Captain America's Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Sam Wilson, aka Falcon (Anthony Mackie), and Thor's Heimdall (Idris Elba). And Ultron, the artificially intelligent genocidal villain of the title, was a computer-generated character voiced and performed via motion capture by James Spader, which added another demanding layer of VFX complexity.
What was that again about making the Avengers sequel smaller? "That has not gone my way," Whedon said with a laugh en route home from the set in July. "I totes failed to make it smaller. There is a lot of movie."
Both Whedon and Feige insist, however, that the precipitously expanding scope of Age of Ultron was never by design. "The truth is, whether anybody will ever believe it or not, we never sat down — we being Joss and I and the team at Marvel — and said, 'How do we make it even bigger?!'" Feige said on set. "It always was, 'Where do we want to take the characters?' That's the way Joss thinks."
And on that score, Whedon had much more success in his stated desire to bring a "more personal" and "more painful" approach to Age of Ultron — to make it, in other words, more Whedon-y. He used Scarlet Witch's ability to read minds to create hallucinogenic fever dreams for the Avengers, excavating the private pain that was haunting each of them. "What I wanted to do is get into the souls of my characters," Whedon said with a knowing flourish. "Their hearts and minds and their real ills and what makes them tick."
Chris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., and Evans in Avengers: Age of Ultron
Jay Maidment
With so many divergent characters, Whedon also chose to load up the film with as many genres as it could handle. "It's science-fiction horror!" he said. "OK, it's really a Western. All right, there's ballet in it. I have genre ADD. Look, this is a hard, explode-y, testosterone-filled action movie for guys, so there's got to be ballet [and] swing dancing!" Stitching together disparate genres into something unexpectedly new is also what makes Joss Whedon Joss Whedon. With Buffy, he combined a teen high school melodrama with the tropes of B-movie horror, and then subverted both by casting a soap star as the show's demon-slaying heroine. With Firefly, he reimagined the swashbuckling sci-fi adventure show as a Western about hardscrabble outlaws eking out a life on the edge of space. With Dr. Horrible, he recast the comic book villain as the accidental antihero — and he did it in song. Much like the characters who populate his stories, Whedon's obvious love for the spirit of each of these genres is matched by his eagerness to crack them open and remake them anew. And with Age of Ultron, he was getting to bring his character-driven, genre-mashing sensibility to life with a blockbuster budget.
"I'm doing, 'ARRRGGGG!'" said Ruffalo, bellowing like the Hulk. "And he's like, 'Yeah, maybe you should be in that moment like, Oh, what the fuck.' He's always bringing it down into these moments that are not superhero, and not grand, and not macho. Just the normal moments that we all experience every single day. I think that's probably the number one reason why this stuff works so well, because he takes superhuman people, and he just lets them be super human."
And there may not be superhumans dearer to Whedon's heart than the ones who live in the Marvel universe, characters he fell in love with as a young teenager. While talking about the malleability of comic book storylines in his trailer, Whedon said with absolute seriousness, "Nothing has ever made me angrier than the Gwen Stacy slept with Norman Osborn and had genetically enhanced twins [storyline]. Gwen Stacy is the bedrock of the Marvel universe. And that to me is unforgivable." (This storyline happened, by the way, in the mid-2000s, when Whedon was in his forties.)
Whedon's obvious devotion to Marvel's characters has made him an ideal director for wrangling so many of them in the Avengers movies. "He's our kind of compass," said Evans. "And if he's OK with it, if it makes sense to him and his understanding of these characters from the birth of their comic origins, we're OK with it."
It's also what drove Marvel Studios to sign Whedon to become a kind of creative consiglieri for the studio, or as Whedon once put it to BuzzFeed News, "the Tom Hagen of the Marvel Universe."
"Even at its most basic form, when you have Joss Whedon as a sounding board, or as somebody to go, 'Take a look at this cut,' or 'Take a look at this draft,' it's unbelievably valuable," said Feige. "It helped on every movie we've made." In practical terms, it’s meant Whedon has done everything from give notes on rough cuts for Iron Man 3 and script drafts for Thor: The Dark World to doing a full dialogue pass on the screenplay for Guardians of the Galaxy. (That's another thing about Whedon: He has such a knack for dialogue that he often speaks in dialogue, sometimes even with himself.)
"Sometimes, you know, it's been fun, because they've actually taken my advice, certainly at the story level," Whedon said. "And then sometimes I feel like, Ergh, you missed the point entirely." When he wasn't consulting specifically on the movies themselves, Whedon said he would also consult with the other directors about the often highly collaborative process of making a movie with Marvel Studios. "You know, talking them off the ledge," he said. "'Cause there's a certain degree of madness. But there's always method."
Marvel; Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
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