Anthony and Joe Russofirst managed to elevate the massively popular MCU with their dedication to on-screen storytelling in 2014 withCaptain America: The Winter Soldier. Their work on the next two Avengers movies would go on to be the top-grossing Marvel movies of all time. Now, they’ve collaborated once again with Netflix to bring viewers something completely different withThe Electric State, but something they insist couldn’t have been made without their time spent on “Thanos and the Black Order.”
Adapted fromSimon Stålenhag’s graphic novel,The Electric Stateis a star-studded adventure across a war-torn US in the ’90s. The movie centers aroundStranger ThingsbreakoutMillie Bobby Brown’s Michelle and her mission to find her little brother with the help of oddball drifter Keats (Chris Pratt) and her robot companion.
In order to bring this retro-futuristic world to life on-screen, the Russo’s tell Collider’sSteve Weintraubthis movie required them to take VFX to the next level. During their conversation, they discuss howAvengers: Infinity WarandAvengers: Endgamemade the intricate motion capture possible and share how crucial it was to present a retro feel to complement the script byChristopher MarkusandStephen McFeely. They also reveal details on production forthe next two Avengers movies, including their extended runtimes. you may watch the full conversation in the video above or read the transcript below.
What Are the Russo Brothers' Favorite Stanley Kubrick Movies?
“Kubrick sort of depends on the month.”
COLLIDER: I have a lot of things to ask you about the movie, but I do want to start with my curve, which is, do you have a favorite Stanley Kubrick film?
JOE RUSSO: Yes, we do.
Both of you with the same movie?
JOE RUSSO: No, I don’t think so.
ANTHONY RUSSO: I don’t know if it’s the same movie. It’s really hard. I love Stanley Kubrick. It’s so hard for me to pick a favorite.
JOE RUSSO: It is. Kubrick sort of depends on the month, right? I have a different favorite.
I agree with that answer.
JOE RUSSO: But [A Clockwork Orange] was the one that I fell in love with when I was, like, 14, so I’ll sayClockwork.
There’s no wrong answer.
ANTHONY RUSSO: I sort of had the same experience withClockwork, but I think what endures more with me isThe Shining. But there are so many.
Listen, there’s no wrong answer. The answer is all of them.
JOE RUSSO: I watchedEyes Wide Shutagain, like, two months ago, and I was like, “This is a fucking good movie.”
‘The Electric State’ Would Have Been Impossible Before the Avengers
The VFX required some experience.
Do you thinkThe Electric Statecould have been made five years ago, or are we at the cusp of where technology and film meet?
JOE RUSSO: It was very difficult to make that movie. It took us five years to make it. It took a lot of prep from a production design standpoint and a design standpoint. Those robots were very difficult to bring to life in the way that we did with the level of detail. In a lot of weird ways, the strike, I think, helped us out because we got more time to work on them in post and work on those VFX. But I don’t think so.I think it took us makingInfinity WarandEndgameand working with Thanos and the Black Orderto understand, really, how to advance motion capture performance to that next level, and a lot of motion capture performance was used on the robots.
I’ve watched a lot of movies and I was truly stunned at the VFX work in this film watching it yesterday. The daylight shots, I couldn’t tell. It’s fucking great. I normally don’t go deep on VFX, but I want to commend everyone who worked on it. Talk a little bit about bringing this to life because the VFX could either make or break this movie. If the VFX don’t look good, this movie doesn’t work at all.
ANTHONY RUSSO: Thank you for mentioning that, by the way, because we did work so hard and so long on that. It was a spectacular collaboration between Dennis Gassner, our production designer, Matthew Butler, our visual effects supervisor, and Steve Windon, our cinematographer. The look of the movie was really worked between that triangle, with us, obviously, in that, as well.
One thing we had going for us was thatwe wanted to commit so strongly to a retro feel, a retro texture, and imperfections. It wasn’t slick, the look of these robots. Early on, we almost had to stop and correct some of the designers who were starting to work at it because everybody’s instinct with a robot is to make it super sophisticated, and we were like, “No, this is the opposite of that.” These things couldn’t be less sophisticated, and that is their charm and their fun and their virtue is their basicness. So, I think that may have helped us a bit in terms of grounding it, making it textured. Also, the fact that we were chasing a period aesthetic, as well, helps give us that texture. So, it was a combination of all those factors that allowed us to have these really strong graphics.
I love talking about editing. This movie has so many VFX shots in it, and every VFX shot costs a lot of money. Was there a pressure to deliver a movie that’s two hours or an hour and 50?
JOE RUSSO: Never. There wasn’t ever. We’ve had a great relationship with Netflix. They really have let us make the movies that we want to make. It’s tricky. We tried to make this one in the studio system and it just wasn’t going to be affordable. This movie’s a difficult movie because so many of the characters are CG, andliterally every shot that they’re in is a CG-oriented shot. It costs a lot of money to do that. So, kudos to Netflix for stepping up and letting us make the exact movie that we wanted to make.
Did you have a cut that was, like, 2:20, where you were like, “I don’t know how it’s getting shorter?”
JOE RUSSO: No, we didn’t. We were tough on our material anyway. We have a motto thatnothing was ever better longer than it was shorter.If you can tell a story in a more compressed fashion, then it’s going to be a better story. So, we were just tough on the material. I don’t even know what the running time is now.
ANTHONY RUSSO: It’s about two hours where we landed. We’re really world-building in this story. It’s a layered, complex story with a lot of characters, so part of the process was certainly us feeling out the right combination of that to make the movie sing. We landed where we landed simply because of story, our instincts, and what we wanted the story to be.
We Now Know How Long the Next Avengers Movies Will Be
“We’re working away.”
I’m just about out of time, so I gotta sneak in some questions about something called Avengers. I know, it’s some other movies that you’re working on. For fans, I’m hearing you’re filming in London. Where and when are you filming?
JOE RUSSO: We are in London. We’re there now. We’re working away. We roll cameras sometime in April, and that’s on the first one. Then, the second one will be shortly behind that.
Do you have, like, a six-month shoot? An eight-month shoot? How long are you going?
ANTHONY RUSSO: It’s a standard-length shoot.
JOE RUSSO: So, six months for each of them.
Do you know when we’re going to start hearing about casting and which characters are coming in?
JOE RUSSO: Never. Not until you go to the theater.
Sure. I don’t believe that. There are these things called set pics and whatnot.
JOE RUSSO: We’re pretty good about shutting that down.
ANTHONY RUSSO: We’ve sort of strategized to hopefully be effective with that.
“We May or May Not Survive”: The Russo Brothers Have a Busy Schedule With ‘Avengers: Secret Wars’ and ‘Doomsday’
“It’s a lot of work.”
How much on a movie like this are you like, “We’re doing as much soundstage work as we can to prevent things from getting out?”
JOE RUSSO: We are doing quite a bit of that. We don’t want people getting photographs, so we are being pretty stringent.
ANTHONY RUSSO: And the location work we are doing, we have picked those locations with that in mind, as well.
Do you view the movie already as a two-and-a-half or three-hour film? Do you think it’s going to be one of those?
JOE RUSSO: If I were a betting man, I would say the first one is two and a half and the second one’s three hours.
