Interview with Marvel Studios producer Kevin Feige

As one of Marvel Studios’ head honchos, Kevin Feige has overseen the production of the X-Men films, the Spider-Man films and pretty much every other Marvel movie released in the last 10 years or so (Shhh! This also includes Daredevil). And now, with The Avengers soon to assemble on the big screen, I was given some time to ask the big guy about the cinematic superhero supergroup.

So last week I was invited to Disney’s Hammersmith offices to take part in a video-conference interview with the Marvel man and it was truly awesome. Not just the interview, I mean, but the offices themselves. Even the bottles of water had Mickey Mouse ears on them. I half expected to see Goofy pushing round a post cart. Alas, this didn’t happen, but I DID sit around a big table with four other journalists to speak with Kevin Feige, who appeared on a massive TV screen. THE FUTURE IS HERE, PEOPLE.

Understandably, he was very coy about giving too much away before The Avengers hits cinemas, but for someone who is described by the NY Times as ‘one of the most powerful people in movies’, he was very down to earth and someone who just clearly loves comics and movies as much as his films’ audience. He’s just much, much richer than them

: At what point while making the previous films did The Avengers seem like a viable option?

Kevin Feige: My recollection of it is either midway through the development of the script or the production of Iron Man 1 – I don’t remember which – but there was an epiphany that we had at one point. We had become Marvel Studios so then we got our own financing to do the movies ourselves and we were essentially an independent film studio working on a movie that we knew had to compete with Spider-Man and X-Men and the best of the movies we’ve done with our studio partners. So our only goal was: make the best Iron Man movie we can, and we had strong instincts about how to do that. And all we were working on was how to best bring Tony Stark to the masses.

But there was a moment during that process when it sort of dawned on me that we could use any of the other characters we had in the Marvel universe. I had been working at Marvel movies for about five years before that and, whether it was on an X-Men movie or a Spider-Man movie or the development of the Fantastic Four movie, there was always at least one point where the screenwriter would ask ‘oh, can we use this person, or can we use that person, or can we use S.H.I.E.L.D?’ and we would always say ‘Oh no, you can’t because this studio only has these characters and this studio has those characters and we don’t have the rights to that’. And when that question came up on Iron Man, I said “Well, we can’t – oh wait, yes we can! We have it all, it’s ours!”.

And that’s how the Clark Gregg character of Agent Coulson appeared very briefly in Iron Man 1, because we wanted someone who was sniffing around asking ‘What’s Tony stark doing? What’s he working on?’ And because we already had that in the script, I thought it would be fun to do something that announces to the world, and to the fans, and to the movie-going public, that these films are going to take place in the Marvel universe; a universe in which all of the heroes exist.

But we didn’t want to take up any real screen-time doing that, we didn’t want to confuse people who had no idea what the Marvel universe was – we just wanted to make a great Iron Man movie. Which is why you had to sit through 7 minutes of end credits to see Sam Jackson walk in with an eye-patch and tell Tony Stark ‘You’re part of a big universe – you just don’t know it yet’. And that was really the beginning of it, and the movie opened and it did very well and people – whether they knew who Nick Fury was or not – seemed to love the idea of ‘What’s Sam Jackson doing in an eye-patch at the end of this movie?’. People really seemed to gravitate to that idea and that’s when we sort of knew it was going to work. And then we started laying out our five-year masterplan to The Avengers.


: With Iron Man being so popular, was there ever a danger of this turning into just another Tony Stark movie?

KF: I think that easily could have happened somewhere else, with a traditional studio that’s just looking at ‘wait a minute, that’s the biggest movie and the biggest character – let’s do that’. But that’s not really what The Avengers is. The Avengers is not Iron Man 3 – that starts shooting in nine weeks. The Avengers is about that [whole] group of characters and there is no real leader in the comic-books. They each serve their own purpose and it was important for us to do that. So while Tony Stark is an amazing character, and has a gigantic role in the movie, we did not want to make it just The Iron Man Show because that’s not what The Avengers comics was.

And we were betting that our plan was going to fall into place. We cast Chris Hemsworth as Thor and Tom Hiddlestone as Loki in both movies before the first Thor came out so we were betting on our own ability to make these movies and to get the audience to respond to these characters in a way that would make them relevant when it came to a year later with The Avengers. Same with Chris Evans and Captain America. So we were very pleased and breathed a great big sigh of relief when Thor worked and Captain America worked and people embraced those actors as those characters because we were in too deep at that point and we weren’t turning back.

We had actually started filming The Avengers before those two films came out. They came out during production and you could see Hemsworth and Hiddlestone get very excited after their opening weekend and Chris Evans was a little nervous for a while and then breathed a sigh of relief and was very pleased. And Downey Jr of course was still pleased that his movie did a little better than those other two!

: Has everything been building towards The Avengers or is it just one more step along the way to something bigger? What’s next after The Avengers?

KF: Everything that we do, and everything that we’ve done over the years, is trying to emulate the experience of reading a comic. And part of that are these big crossover events that, once a year or once every few years, all the characters would come together for some universe-shaking thing and then they would go back into their own books changed slightly by whatever that crossover event was. So, ideally, that’s the model we’re going to follow.

All of these movies led up to The Avengers and The Avengers will be the jumping off point for the next stage. Y’know, I find myself calling Iron Man 1 to The Avengers the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe – Stage 1’. Now, from Iron Man 3 up to – knock on wood – maybe The Avengers 2 will be ‘Stage 2’. Each are big over-arching chapters of the Marvel universe. So we see The Avengers now as the culmination of what has come before and the jumping off point for what’s next to come.