In these last ten years, Marvel Studios has been home to a plethora of prominent talents, both in front of and behind the camera. But despite this constantly changing line-up of collaborators, there’s been a clear overarching vision to the cinematic universe, with each installment thus far having some part to play in the build-up to next year’s Avengers 4.
With every project having a purpose to serve and a cross-movie continuity to honor, you sometimes have to wonder how much creative freedom the individual filmmakers have to realize their personal visions. If you ask writer-director Joss Whedon, however, the house of Kevin Feige gives its helmsmen enough breathing space to leave their own personal stamp on these multimillion-dollar features.
Speaking at a Marvel roundtable that’s viewable on the Infinity War home video release, the director of the first Avengers commended the studio for taking chances on up-and-coming filmmakers, and what’s more, for letting them be themselves.
“Something Marvel does that is brilliant and it applies to all of us is that, nobody here necessarily had the resume to make the next big action film. They were interested in having that person speak they weren’t interested in saying, ‘look just do, just hit the marks.’ They wanted each one of us to bring ourselves to the movie and you can tell, as much as there’s a throughline in Marvel, you can definitely tell who’s who and what they constantly want to talk about.”
While Whedon doesn’t always have such nice things to say about his experiences in the MCU, having previously characterized Avengers: Age of Ultron as a pretty exhausting and dispiriting job, there’s certainly something to be said about Marvel’s willingness to call on the services of talented directors with little-to-no experience on big-budgeted franchise fare, from Doctor Strange helmsman Scott Derrickson to Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi.
Sure enough, Feige’s comments from earlier this year suggest that Marvel Studios remains keen to work with filmmakers unaccustomed to such high-profile projects. Moreover, the trend continues as soon as next year, with indie duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck set to bring us Captain Marvel on March 8th, 2019.
