On a crisp morning in Berlin, I’m in what must be the most exciting underground car park in Europe. Overhead is the International Congress Centre, an abandoned concrete and aluminium monster from the seventies, glinting in the heart of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. The car park is of the same vintage: its glowing lighting and tangerine tiling should give anyone who has seen The Bourne Supremacy or the final Hunger Games film a tingle of deja vu. This car park isn’t just a car park: it’s both the concourse of Sheremetyevo International Airport and the tunnels of the Panem Capitol, too.
As of this morning, it’s also the Bucharest underpass where Captain America and Black Panther have their first public tussle in the new Marvel blockbuster, Captain America: Civil War. “Can I even say that?” grimaces Chris Evans, aka Captain America, as he sits in his trailer after lunch, outlining the premise of the scene he has just shot. “I don’t want to give too much away. Interviews for these films are hard.” Earlier, Evans was in his full white-and-blue regalia, brawling with co-star Chadwick Boseman on the tarmac. But now he is back in mufti: dark tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt tight enough to confirm not every piece of eye candy in the Marvel franchise is computer-generated.
Captain America: Civil War, out in the UAE on May 5, is Evans’s fifth Marvel Studios film — seventh, if you count cameos. The suit feels like a “second skin” now, the 34-year-old actor says, but he admits his confidence is a recent development. He arrived on the Avengers set two months before his 30th birthday, and remembers the relief he felt halfway through the shoot, when his debut Captain America film, The First Avenger, was released and “wasn’t a horrible bomb”. Spool forward two years, and Evans was on the set of Cap’s second solo film, The Winter Soldier (2014), a critically beloved triumph that strayed from the familiar superhero template into surveillance thriller territory (it even featured Robert Redford).
The Winter Soldier took $714 million (Dh2.6 billion), almost two thirds of which came from non-US audiences. That’s not bad for a character conceived amid the star-spangled patriotism of the forties, and which the Hollywood Reporter said in 2008 was “perceived as a tough sale overseas”.
Evans cheerfully admits he can’t personally account for the success of the series. “I don’t really understand it,” he says. “There have been plenty of superhero films that have had trouble hitting the mark.”
He is just happy to be back on set, chasing franchise newcomer Black Panther (Boseman), saving old friend Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and punching Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) in the ideological title fight that is at Civil War’s core. Evans’s bewilderment at the Marvel enterprise is understandable (he is not even sure if the scene he has just shot takes place in Germany or Romania). The studio has gone from Hollywood upstart to $4 billion Disney subsidiary in eight years, with 13 films in the can, only one of which — 2008’s The Incredible Hulk — wasn’t a commercial hit.
This isn’t easy to replicate: just ask Warner Bros, which spent a reported $400 million on the recent Batman v Superman in order to tee up its own superhero franchise, only to end up with a dour, unconvincing slog that made $800 million but whetted few people’s appetites for four years of more of the same.
In Berlin, speaking a good seven months before the release of Batman v Superman, Stephen McFeely, one of Civil War’s co-writers, tells me that he is uneasy with Hollywood’s obsession with darkness. “I suppose Civil War is dark in that it has people you like on both sides fighting,” he says with a twang of reluctance, “but ultimately there is nothing more cartoony than two superheroes fighting. It’s what you do when you’re eight years old: you have two action figures and smack them together. So we hope this film does not feel laden down with self-importance.”
If anyone here has a grasp of the bigger picture, it’s Nate Moore, Marvel’s 37-year-old vice-president of production and development. He is on set to check that the $180 million film’s two-brother director team, Joe and Anthony Russo, are staying on schedule, and fretting about what’s going to happen tomorrow when the film’s crowning action sequence — a 12-person showdown, featuring the debut of the new Spider-Man, played by 19-year-old British actor Tom Holland — will be captured at Leipzig/Halle airport.
Moore talks about the Marvel operation in a way I’ve never heard a studio talk about their films before — he makes them sound like fast-food. They may be rolled out fast for mass consumption, but each one is hammered and burnished to a golden gleam, with meticulous micromanagement and a fix-at-all-costs mindset. Joe Russo will later chucklingly refer to the “endless dialogue” between writers, directors and producers and “the famous Marvel reshoots”.
It can evidently be gruelling. Joss Whedon, the director of the Avengers films, said at the Tribeca Film Festival last month that he was “beaten down by the process” during the making of the second, Age of Ultron, and “came off it feeling like a miserable failure”. On Civil War, says Moore, the film’s centrepiece battle was endlessly redone “so that each character would have a proper moment and people who love any individual character would feel like their character was serviced”.
Studio president Kevin Feige’s “singular vision” is the Marvel secret, says writer Stephen McFeely. “Very often at other studios, this person has a final say on one thing, that person has the final say on another, and they may or may not be talking to each other.”
“But it’s also a complete faith in the properties,” says Markus. “There is very seldom somebody saying that we’d get in a lot more 18-24 year olds if Captain America rode a skateboard. You get that at other studios, where they’re just trying to dial up the knobs.”
But Marvel’s confidence, he continues, is “purchased with its own success”. “If there had been five bombs in a row, you can bet Cap would be on that skateboard,” he says.
“It’s become necessary to make these movies distinctive,” says co-director Joe Russo. “And if you’re not a high-quality film,” says Anthony, “you’ll be dead by Friday 6pm. Social media will kill you. There’s nothing to hide behind anymore.”
Given Batman v Superman’s 38 per cent Friday-to-Saturday box office tumble on its initial weekend, the Russos’ words seem prescient — but the early enthusiasm for Civil War (the latest tracking figures point to the fifth-biggest opening of all time) suggest they won’t be bitten by them just yet.
Who are the Russo brothers?
The Winter Soldier’s success notwithstanding, these Italian-American boys always seemed doubly counterintuitive choices as Marvel helmsmen: one-time proteges of Steven Soderbergh, they are midcentury European art-house buffs (their favourite film — this goes for both of them — is Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist), who made an unplanned swerve into comedy in 2002 with the Soderbergh-produced ensemble caper comedy Welcome to Collinwood. That, in turn, led them into the sitcom business: first Arrested Development, then Community, with the Owen Wilson rom-com You, Me and Dupree in between. What’s in it for them, they say, is the sheer scale of the canvas they get to work on. The Winter Soldier allowed them to play in the seventies conspiracy-drama sandpit, and in Civil War, they’ve indulged their love of Brian De Palma and David Fincher’s psychological thrillers. Anthony, the older of the two, says the one thing they’ve tried to avoid is making a superhero movie with the familiar three-step arc: gain powers, learn to use them, battle monster. “We’ve seen those,” he says. “They’re just not interesting at this point.” Instead, they enjoy grafting comic-book characters on to more venerable genres — “mad-scientist-style”, as Joe puts it. “Kevin [Feige] enjoys it as much as we do,” he says.
Is a superhero death coming?
Anyone familiar with the Civil War comic-book series will be aware that the story ends with what should only be described in the vaguest, spoiler-skirting terms as a “tragic event”. That would have made for a heck of a cliffhanger in the film, too, but Markus and McFeely think that a major character’s death in a film has to count for more than it does in the comics, where it’s rarely final.
“The audience’s instinctive reaction is ‘they’re not really dead’,” says Markus. “If you’re going to do it, you have to be fully committed to never seeing that character again.”
But, says McFeely, that’s not to say they’ll never kill off a main character. “It’s a question that will come up a lot on the next Avengers movies,” he says. “Because that could be the end of one person’s story — or a lot of people’s stories.”
A sideways glance to Markus. “But we don’t know who.”
