Welcome to the most entertaining Marvel Cinematic Universe interview you can find on the internet!

When visiting the set of a superhero movie, especially a Marvel Studios production, secrecy is generally at an extreme level and it’s nearly impossible to learn revealing details from cast and crew. The real info for hardcore fans comes from the directors, producers, and writers and with Avengers: Infinity War that was absolutely the case. Screen rant visited the set of the third Avengers installment - the biggest superhero movie - in June 2017 and last week we shared our extended interview with directors Anthony and Joe Russo. This week, we can share another special conversation we had with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

Marks and McFeely are known commodities in the MCU, having helped write all three Captain America movies and continuing on with the Russos for Avengers: Infinity War and the untitled Avengers 4. In our group conversation, the pair get very real, and very funny, about everything from problematic villains and MCU plot holes to the problem with the Academy Awards and new heroes joining the Avengers. Enjoy.

Can you tell us what Avengers: Infinity War is about?

How long does it take for Thanos to take the screen?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: What isn’t it about? This is about the culmination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is about everyone getting together, or trying their hardest to get together, to fight a guy named Thanos.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Who hopefully will come together in a way that will be satisfying? We’ve been teasing Thanos for many movies in 30 second clips, so hopefully all the lead up will allow us to really go to town with him and make him a villain that requires this epic level of storytelling. That is the word I would use most often. It’s ridiculously big.

You’ve talked about how you’ve brought all these characters together but are there any character pairings that you think people will be very surprised to see?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: It’ll take 18 movies [laughs].

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: We won’t tell you exactly but you’re going to get Thanos and you’re not going to feel like we’ve continued to jerk you around and kept him in check.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: In many ways it’s Thanos’ movie.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: I don’t know about surprised, because it’s very hard to surprise people…

STEPHEN MCFEELY: That’s not true at all. I think we will surprise the hell out of people.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: OK. We will surprise people.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: I don’t know if we can tell you what the pairings are but yeah, one of the goals… After Civil War, we got in a room for 4 or 5 months trying to crack these two ridiculously big things.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: We had wall of characters and at a certain point you just go [motions hands] - “That’s funny and that’s funny. What’s a story that could get those two [characters] together?”

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Right. We talked a lot about, it’s a Joe Russo term, “strange alchemy.” What is it when you put the two characters together, even in a fairly normal traditional situation, but since we’ve invested in those characters and known them, we sort of delighted in the idea of those two people rubbing against each other. So, we always chased “delight” – and terror. Lots of terror.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: And there’s also… we’re coming off Civil War. We’re coming off Winter Soldier. So that’s there’s lots of backstory that still needs to play out in addition to the Thanos situation. Like, I just walked by Sebastian Stan out there. You could put Bucky in a room with anybody and they’re going to say, “Oh sh*t! He’s a maniac.” He’s shot Natasha [Romanoff] twice as far as I can keep count, so it’s going to be interesting.

What about bringing in the cosmic universe? That seems to be something we’re all very curious about. How are the Guardians of the Galaxy coming in?

Are you saying this movie is going to be on par with Daenerys finally meeting Jon Snow? [Laughs]

STEPHEN MCFEELY: That’s part of the “strange alchemy”, right? One of the reasons that first Avengers movie was so popular and so exciting is, you were taking 4 franchises and [claps] smashing them into each other. Hopefully we have the same kind of magic here, where we bring this completely different set of characters and smash them into varying groups of our characters. Another thing to think about, one of the challenges we’ve had is, how do you make sure this is not 25 people moving from one scene to one scene to one scene? So we talk, being a little facetious about it, but we talk about how it’s like Nashville, right? So you’ve got 4 or 5 different stories weaved together and then come together and then break apart. So, you get all these different pairings and groupings of 4 and 5 and 6.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: And even now, not unlike something like Game of Thrones, where you have this vast canvas with characters you’ve been watching this guy over here molesting this girl over here in the East for years and only now does it have that feeling of massive plates shifting and finally bringing these characters near each other.

What we just watched was them coming to Wakanda to kind of warn them that something happened. Looks like they may have taken some sort of beating before that. But it’s early to the film. What can you say about how it starts? Because as it stands now, all the characters in the MCU are scattered. Where does this pick up?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: I’m absolutely telling you that. Yes!

STEPHEN MCFEELY: It’s going to blow that away.

You mentioned that this is Thanos’ film but I know that M’Baku has also been add to the cast.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: That is something we didn’t want to blow off. Didn’t want to devalue Civil War by having a phone call saying, “Let’s all get back together because there’s an even worse guy.” Nah, everything’s fine now. So we dragged that a long way through it so that we are valuing the resentments we’ve built up between these characters.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: They’re ill-prepared to handle this.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Yeah. And it shows.

[Laughs]

STEPHEN MCFEELY: It’s M’Baku and Thanos – that’s it. [Laughs]

Are there any other villains coming that we should expect to see?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: But no, there’s a substantial war coming.

Speaking of the comics, when you guys were cracking the story can you list any comics that you read?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Uhhh… I don’t even confirm villainous.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: I would not confirm M’Baku is villainous in this for our purposes.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: And villain is a derogatory term that Thanos wouldn’t agree with.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: [Laughs]

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Another one of the things we set out to do in this was, if Thanos is just a bad guy, then you’re dead in the water. It’s just a bad guy, you know? You get bored pretty quickly after he’s torn off the first few heads and we have 2 movies.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: That’s sort of metaphorical but uh… I’m not really sure.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: So, hopefully you’ll come away from this the same way you do in the comics where he started off as a rogue villain but he’s his own thing now. Where you go, “I can’t say he was wrong.” [Laughs]

Which comic?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Oh geez, almost all of them. That teaser piece had some close-ups of that omnibus that we had sort of over-posted it.

Can you talk about how much of this will be on Earth? How much will be cosmic?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: It’s like an omnibus.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: It’s a giant bound Infinity Gauntlet one but we read anything that had Thanos in it. Anything that had the [Infinity] Stones in it. A lot of Archie [Laughs]

Can you guys talk about the collection of the Stones? How the Stones almost help you guys shape your story? Were each of these passing gems, we were all watching like, “Well this is the one where the Stones sort of come together.” Making it a little bit easier for the next person. It’s not like they’re spread…

STEPHEN MCFEELY: We can’t give you a percentage but it’s fairly split. That’s part of the nature of all these groups coming together.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: And we wanted to not have it be the feeling that it all comes down to Earth every time. It’s this sort of “Earth-ist” point-of-view that you have to tell a science fiction story. “In order to conquer the universe I have to take over this one little tiny planet.” We needed a broad canvas the whole time so that it didn’t feel like, coincidentally, every stone is in America. [Laughs]

Can you go back to Thanos for a second. The MCU has received tons of critical praise but the one thing franchise has been dinged on is that the villains are just not as impressive as Loki, over and over. That’s something you guys are aware of, so trying to create “THE BIG BAD” of this franchise. I’m curious how are you navigating that?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: They’re still spread out. Remember, one of our jobs, we’re big structure guys. So if you go back and look at Winter Soldier and Civil War particularly, they are, whether you like the movies are not, they’re pretty well structured. Big choices have been made.

We had to do the same thing here and yet we had six MacGuffins – it can be relentless if you do this right. Which means, every time you collect [an Infinity Stone] – I don’t mean to get into the screenwriting weeds – but every time you collect one it can’t just be a check mark. It has to do something characterful. It’s got to move the plot forward but it also has to stakes and cost for literal characters at the time so that it’s not just a shopping spree. And I think we’ve done that and boy, we’re going to wrench some emotion out of each and every one of those moments that we can.

And he totally doesn’t see himself as the villain.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Well, part of it is motivation, where if you have a villain who just wants to kill somebody or just wants to take over the world because it seems like a fun thing to do, or has been paid by the Russians to take over the world… run for President to take over the world. That guy is not very interesting. He’s pathetic. But we take this from [Jim Starlin]; Thanos is an amoral philosopher. He’s not the Devil – although he does sometimes have the Devil standing next to him. We wanted that all the way through, to have a villain with understandable motivations and emotions. Thanos has family. Thanos has two daughters that we know of. Thanos has 8 million back stories in the comics but they’re all kind of sad.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: What I want to point out, is that my favorite two [villains] in the entire MCU are Loki and Kilgrave, because he’s creepy and awful, but really cares in a strange way.

Chris, can you clarify what you were saying about Devil?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: For sure. And screen time, right? A lot of screen time for both of those characters. Chris is right, they both have these weird family relationships. So Thanos will get the benefit of both of those things. He’s got daughters that he clearly has to deal with, and James did a nice job of setting the table for us so we’re certainly going to run with that. And screen time. This is not a [hero’s] origin story. Very often, in the screen writing weeds, we’re trying to get a character up and off the ground and so the bad guy tends to be a foil for the development of the hero and that’s not the case here. If anything, it’s the opposite. Our heroes are foils for the villain, whose story we need to tell at large.

Are these films getting to the more weird, other-wordly characters and the personification of death or is it more motivated by family?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Oh, I just meant Mephisto in the comics. [Laughs] I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of Mephisto. He’s often seen in hell, but he’s not the evil. He’s something more elemental, more primal.

You talk about structure. Are you structuring it as one huge movie or one movie, push it aside, second movie?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: It’s cosmic and crazy but in a way that we always try to ground stuff. Particularly in Winter Soldier and Civil War we took stories that everyone was familiar with, Brubaker’s run and Civil War, Millar, but make a different soup out of the ingredients. So we’ll do something similar here because we owe it to the characters and these 18 movies were the characters.

Because there’s movies that come out in between, right? Have they influenced part four?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Both.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Boy, yeah. Can’t have the second one without the first one. But our hope is that it’s breakfast and then lunch.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: It does not feel like you hit pause and then unpaused it. It is two very different..,

We saw something earlier, as we were walking around, that implied Captain Marvel will have–

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Yes, Yes. By the way, another nightmare. [Laughs]

Just mailboxes.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: What did you see?

She has a very telling mailbox.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: She has a mailbox! [Laughs]

I’m sure that’s very under wraps but is there anything you can share about the characters possible involvement.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: You’ve caught us.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Well, super excited to have her—for one thing. You know, that movie does not exist yet so we’re following up on something that is good intentions at the moment. But that’s a power scale that right now doesn’t exist in the MCU. It’s, or she’s I should say, in some ways the closest to Captain America which is a weird, now rare kind of character which is sort of a person who’s right and knows they’re right and doesn’t really want to hear it when you tell them they’re wrong. So, with all these flawed, fucked up people and Quill who’s a mess and Tony who’s a massive ego all contorted. It’s fun to get another person with a clear vision in there and going, “Shut up.”

How much of the Infinity Gauntlet story is going to be in this?

Yeah he comes to Earth, he gets reincarnated…

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: I can no longer keep track of which thing that’s called infinity is what.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Is there Pip the Troll?

How do you guys approach introducing a major character in the MCU like how you did with Black Panther in Civil War before his movie, with Captain Marvel for her movie, Pip the Troll for his movie? [Laughs]

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Yeah there’s a car accident.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: They assume the bodies…

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: All of it! [Laughs] That’s why we’re so conversant in it. It has elements of everything that had the word “Infinity” in front of it.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: That’s right. We steal all the things that are helpful to us and we’re not slavish to anything that doesn’t.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Well it’s also because a lot of those things then, you know, then you get into things like characters we don’t have the rights to. You know, so Silver Surfer is flying all over those things but it’s like, “You’re in [Defenders].” [laughs] Unfortunately he flew to Century City and never came back.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: 2022. Pipppp![Laughs]

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Well there’s a lot of conversations, right, and I’m neither confirming nor denying what you just supposed, neither on Pip the Troll or how Captain Marvel works, okay? But we have had to juggle both [Captain] Marvel, Black Panther, Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Marvel - specifically because they all exist in various ways in and around these two movies.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Thor 3.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Well at least that’s before this first movie. Black Panther is too. So we think we handled it and solved it in fairly clever ways, [knocks on wood] but it certainly was an issue. If you wanna do what you wanna do here, how does it affect this movie and not just make this movie. Why is Ant-Man and Wasp not in Infinity War Part Two? So we gotta work on that and figure it out.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: And also, how do you do it so like… I think he’s writing down, “Ant-Man and Wasp are not in Infinity War Part Two” because you just said that.

Matching the tones too. I mean obviously the tones of Guardians and those movies are so different from what we expect Black Panther to be versus what, you know, Spider-Man will be—all those movies play such different roles. How do you work with that?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: No no, how is the story of that movie not just part two of this?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: How do you not fall into the trap of what these movies are sometimes accused of which is just sometimes feeding each other and not being standalone things.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Right.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: So you can’t make them overly dependent on each other, and yet you still want to have this bloodstream flowing through the universe.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Peyton Reed and his group of writers are going to make whatever movie they want. We had very small requests like, “It would be great if right there that person was—is that okay? Good?” You always make the best movie you can. Same thing with Black Panther and same thing with Captain Marvel. They’re gonna make the movies they’re gonna make and in this unique case, very small tiny suggestions for beginnings and endings like that.

What would you say is the tone of the movie and what type of movie is it. Is it a disaster movie?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Well, I mean sometimes you play into it. You cut to the Guardians and it’s a breather. If you’re going from T’Challa and Captain America being very intense, you cut to Quill and Drax and it’s like, sighs. It doesn’t mean they’re not carrying as much plot, it just means the tone is different. But it’s also fun to drag people into each other’s tones. Pull someone into the Guardians and have them go, “What the fuck is with you guys?”

STEPHEN MCFEELY: It is difficult to explain.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: It’s Oscar-worthy.

[Laughs] Just to follow up on that because the Oscars are notoriously against the superhero genre. I’m curious what you guys think it will take for a Marvel movie to actually get that attention?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Can we not have that conversation?! [Laughs] This is embargoed. So Lord of the Rings, big epic thing right?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Uh, here we go.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: It’s three movies! This is 23 movies! When is someone going to get [Kevin] Feige the Thalberg award. All [he’s] doing is remaking Hollywood, please! Sorry.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: I don’t know, I mean people mumble about it with various movies for various reasons. There was an article about Wonder Woman this Monday and there’s articles about Logan, none of which are us. I think someone has to come to Jesus, so to speak, and take a look at the amount of work that’s been done.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: You can work very hard on a crappy movie. You’re not just rewarding work.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: No but I mean, Return of the King is no better or worse than the other two. It got cumulative awards. And frankly, if you go back and look at it you’re like, “Really, you gave that Oscars?” Okay, maybe they had extra Oscars that year.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Two Towers is better, let’s face it.

You called Thanos an amoral philosopher, and I’m curious because I don’t think he’s literally talking to the Devil and you don’t need to confirm or deny that, but he’s not just going to be spouting his philosophy out. Can you say anything about who’s Thanos’ supporting cast? How did you crack that?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: So there’s one level where there does have to be, “Well fuck, that’s a bigger achievement than anybody’s ever pulled off on a multi-movie scale.” But also, I don’t know what it’s going to take to remove the prejudice from the eyes of these people. It’s a civil rights drama and we’re the victims.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Star Wars was nominated for Best Picture. Raiders of the Lost Ark.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: No, I think it’s more than possible for someone with no blinders on to go in and go, “Well hell, that was a heavy lift.”

STEPHEN MCFEELY: And that movie kicked my ass all over the place.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: It’s like diving. The degree of difficulty. I think sometimes people are like, “That movie was really simple and pure and should get an award.” And that’s great, but you should also go, “Holy shit, that was a crazy complicated dive and they did it.” But the Oscars are not actually an accurate measure of anything.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Did we whine enough there?

Can you say Black Order?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Yes, you needed to make sure that he wasn’t just all by himself. It also means that he didn’t have the same scene over and over again as he went collecting stones and knocked people around. That’s how you get this sort of tapestry of film where he has emissaries who are doing some of his work while he is doing a lot of his own heavy lifting.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: But he has people…

STEPHEN MCFEELY: I don’t know if I’m allowed to say Black Order.

He at the end of Ultron said “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Not our movie.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: And we’ve all sat there and went, “What the hell is he talking about? Where was he when he did that?”

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Is that canon? Did he really…?

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Is that the real glove?

There was also the other gauntlet in Guardians.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Another delightful, delightful problem.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Odin’s a bit of a showman.

Does he have an arc in this movie? It seems like he just wants a bunch of stones.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Thanos turns out to have quite a few people to talk to both on his side and not on his side. Weirdly I think he’s the most understandable guy in the movie sometimes.

We see a bunch of Avengers here but there’s no Iron Man or Hawkeye. Can you talk about their roles?

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Yes, that’s the other thing, sorry. One of the big challenges is how to make sure he’s not just a relentless machine collecting stones like he’s going shopping. So we want to give him a full weighted emotional story. You can kind of say this is Thanos’ origin story so that he will get the weight of any of the previous heroes in terms of the decisions he has to make in order to get what he wants.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: I mean the big thing about all of these movies, but these two. You know, all the way along the line we wanted to give people choices and make them continue to have to sacrifice this decision for this decision and not just have it be like, “I have no choice in this matter.” Aliens attack New York City, what are you gonna do, not fight them? No you have to. So not criticizing that, but in order to sustain this long of an epic, to keep the waters a little muddy, to keep them going like, “Interesting, he did that. I might not have done that.” And to do that for everybody, heroes and villains alike, until you get to the end and you go, “Huh shouldn’t have done that.”

STEPHEN MCFEELY: As I said earlier, it’s Nashville, so everyone’s in a different bubble. Some bubbles come together and break apart, some bubbles come together for the third act. That kind of stuff.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Other people are uttlery CG, so what are you gonna do?

Next: Avengers: Infinity War Set Visit Interview With Chris Evans & Scarlett Johansson

STEPHEN MCFEELY: That’s right.

CHRISTOPHER MARKUS: Oh he’s in the scene.

STEPHEN MCFEELY: Sure you just didn’t see him. Ant-Man’s all over that. [Laughs]

An unprecedented cinematic journey ten years in the making and spanning the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Infinity War brings to the screen the ultimate, deadliest showdown of all time. The Avengers and their Super Hero allies must be willing to sacrifice all in an attempt to defeat the powerful Thanos before his blitz of devastation and ruin puts an end to the universe.

Anthony and Joe Russo direct the film, which is produced by Kevin Feige. Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Michael Grillo and Stan Lee are the executive producers. Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely wrote the screenplay.

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