Interview [Written]: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who wrote the screenplay for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, go into some detail explaining some of the movie’s big twists in this Vulture interview.

SPOILER ALERT!!! ONLY CLICK MORE IF YOU ARE READY TO LEARN ABOUT KEY PLOT TWISTS!!!

An excerpt from the interview:

At what point was the decision made to take S.H.I.E.L.D. down so spectacularly in this film, and who was responsible for making it?
McFeely: That’s a Kevin Feige decision. A writer can’t walk in and say, “This movie’s not happening unless I take down S.H.I.E.L.D.,” but Kevin can walk in and say, “We think this might be pretty cool.” That gave us a lot of ways to go and opened up the storytelling, that Steve could have such an effect on the world. He doesn’t change as much as characters do — he’s sort of our Gary Cooper. The world does not change him too much — maybe we’ll try that in other movies — but in this case, it’s a success because he changes the way the other characters look at the world. And S.H.I.E.L.D. going down is part of that.
Markus: That particular decision came from Kevin, but there are a lot of mythology decisions in there that we pitched. The S.S.R. being under Camp Lehigh, Zola being in a computer down there — that’s all stuff that we pitched hard and eventually they said, “Let’s run with that.”
McFeely: They’re very open to ideas, and sometimes the weirder or more challenging they are, the more excited they get. They don’t want to stand still and they don’t want to be slavish to the comics. They want to create something that’s indebted to the comics, but not a one-to-one, panel-for-panel remake.

You reveal that two recurring MCU characters, Agent Sitwell and Senator Stern, are HYDRA-aligned. Agent Sitwell was particularly surprising for me because Marvel has been using him as a protagonist in their shorts.
McFeely: That was our pitch, and that was a lot of fun. With Sitwell, we needed to reveal someone who was boots-on-the-ground, who you’d seen before, to shake you up. Short of bringing Agent Coulson back to life and turning him bad — and we didn’t know he could be brought back to life — we had to use some returning characters to make this conspiracy story ring true. It can’t be all new people where you’re suddenly saying, “And Bob from Accounting who you’ve never met, he’s HYDRA too!” You needed one or two recognizable faces to make the reveal resonate.

For the rest of the interview, go here.