Interview (Written): Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (“Captain America: Civil War”)
A /film interview with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely who are Marvel mainstays having written Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor 2: The Dark World, Captain America: Winter Soldier, and the newest entry in the MCU — Captain America: Civil War.
Juggling all these characters and storylines, how detailed was your outline?
McFeely: Oh, always. I am fairly obsessive compulsive. In order to work together, we need to know pretty much every step along the way where we’re going. We can freelance a little bit within the lines, but we need to know we’re writing the same movie. So yeah, on all our projects we’re big outliners.
Markus: Even though Marvel is actually a very small shop and you don’t have to talk to that many people while you’re making a movie, in terms of getting permission and things like that, there are so many key departments when you are making a movie like this, with character designers needing to get started on conceiving a costume, to effects people, the stunt people. If we didn’t have guidelines being issued on a regular basis, everyone would be left with no time to do their job by the time it actually got to production. So you need to start informing these departments very early on.
This is very much a Captain America sequel, not an Avengers film. For the both of you, what made this Captain America’s story?
McFeely: It’s the Bucky story. As we were crafting Cap 3 before we all decided it was Civil War, we were picking up the threads of Winter Soldier, and primarily that’s the hunt for Bucky. We kept coming back to the things Bucky did over those 60, 70 years as an assassin. What would come back and bite him in the ass?
Markus: What do we know he did?
McFeely: Yeah. And there was one, and we sort of pulled our punch on it a little bit. If you are familiar with Winter Soldier, then you know Zola tells them that Hydra Head killed the Starks. If he killed Tony’s parents, well, then there would be one very specific Tony Stark who has something to say about that. You can only make that Civil War.
Markus: That’s the concept.
McFeely: At the same time, I think Kevin wanted to address all the third acts of the Marvel Universe, which are not dissimilar. You know, we fight bad guys from the sky…
Markus: And make things blow up. Also, there is a certain conceptual level where it feels like Avengers movies are people coming together to fight an external threat. That’s literally what Nick Fury designed them to be. They get these guys together when a big threat comes. This is a different kind of movie. And it felt right for it to be a Cap movie. It’s political. In a weird way, Cap has become…for as much as people tend to think he’s a Boy Scout and a very black and white person, his movies have become where you deal with uncomfortable problems. Maybe that’s just who we are. [Laughs.] But they are murkier than your average superhero movie.
Here’s a clip from the movie:
For the rest of the interview, go here.