August 1st 2014. Shepperton Studios, London. As the only Irish website invited on-set, to say that we’re excited about getting a first look behind the scenes of The Avengers: Age Of Ultron is an understatement.
Driving past massive warehouse after massive warehouse, one of which still probably boasting to be where part Guardians Of The Galaxy was filmed, we stop at one with nothing but a giant “A” outside. We’ve arrived.
Once we’re inside, we see director Joss Whedon setting up a shot where it looks like the superheroes mode of transport - The Quinjet - has crash landed in a forest. The full-scale aircraft is placed into a huge section of fake grass and trees, and as Whedon yells “Action!”, out comes Mark Ruffalo, looking confused and lost. “Guys?” he asks trepidatious. “Cut!” responds Whedon, and they go around for another take. On a nearby monitor, we can see what looks to be an interior shot, perhaps preceding the one filming now, of Scar-Jo’s Black Widow leaving the Quinjet and entering the woods. Now, over nine months later with the latest trailer released, we know that there’s a massive brawl about to take place in these woods.
But for today, it’s mostly all quiet.
Next thing we know, we’re being invited into the Quinjet itself as the crew take a break, and we’re shown the deceptively small interiors, which somehow have to contain not only all the Avengers, but a film crew, too. We sit in the captain’s chair, the same chair we’ve seen these superheroes sit in previously, and we’re barely able to contain our excitement. Our guide tells us that “at some point or another, pretty much all of the Avengers fly this ship”, which gets our brains buzzing with the hilarious image of Thor trying to work the controls, but before long it’s time to talk to the Norse God himself.
As massive as you’d imagine, but decked out in blue jeans and clean white t-shirt, Chris Hemsworth talks initially about the latest comic book developments of Thor being made female. “I welcome the challenge,” he jokes of continuing to play the role even as the gender changes, “but I don’t think Disney went for it.” Who would he think would be a great female Thor? “Ooooh. Jennifer Lawrence? I’ll aim high!” Last time we seen Hemsworth with the hammer and cloak, he was saving London (and the planet) in Thor: The Dark World, but he’s very happy to be back part of the ensemble, even with his fall-back Loki being AWOL. “In this we begin as a team, as opposed to coming together as a team in the first one. So this time round there’s the constant threat of us falling apart, especially as we’ve got individual threats. And Thor is personally seeing a bigger story, and he segues off on his own when he realises this might be a part of something bigger.” When asked about his contract he confirms that he’s got “another Thor, and then another Avengers” to do, but considering Avengers: Infinity War is split into two movies, does that still count? Or will we be saying goodbye to Thor mid-war? Chin strokes all round, eh?
Straight after that, we’re ducked back into a little makeshift tent in a darker corner of the soundstage, giving our interview with Mark Ruffalo a much more romantic vibe than we’d normally get! He’s the first actor to play the Hulk in two movies (“Yeah! That’s quite a feat by itself!”) and as one of the more laid-back interviewees we’ve ever encountered, his laconic delivery of answers about a giant schizoid green monster sound almost peaceful: “I think Banner is more comfortable with himself. He’s confidence is better, but it definitely gets shaken in this iteration of the movie.” We’re sure that Banner has changed between the movies, but is The Hulk capable of change? “I feel like we haven’t even scratched the surface with Hulk, as far as being a character goes. The technology hasn’t been available, and also I think we’ve sort of being ignorant about our approach, as in ‘What can we do with The Hulk?’. Yeah, he’s great and it’s exciting when he freaks out and smashes, and we’re dying to see him do that, but then there’s a whole character there that we’ve seen in the comics who can talk and who has a personality. I just see this whole chapter that hasn’t been unleashed or cracked with where you can go with that guy, and there are nuances in him. Is it always just rage? I think there’s a battle of identity between him and Banner, and it’s about establishing dominance. What troubles Hulk, in a very primal way, the only thing that troubles Hulk is Banner, because Banner is the only thing that has any control over him, and that’s an interesting dynamic that hasn’t been explored yet.”
Joss Whedon sat down with us next, and he’s exactly as sharp minded and sharper tongued as you’d imagine. “With the first one, I set out to make a war movie. With this one, I wanted to make a science fiction horror movie. And then in the first week of shooting, I said to myself ‘This is clearly a western!’, and then it became a war movie again, and then ‘Oh, it’s a romantic comedy! Oh, it’s like a 40s romantic comedy! Oh noooo, it’s Ibsen!’” Ibsen, by the way, is a 19th century Norwegian poet who has been called The Father Of Realism. See? We told you Whedon was funny! “With The Avengers, there’s a very simple mandate: it doesn’t get any bigger. That’s what it’s about. It requires everybody who already has their own franchise to get together. So I have to be thinking in terms of scope and scale, in a way that the other guys don’t have to. And that’s not trying to one-up them! The world almost ends pretty much every time the Marvel logo comes up, let’s face it!” Would you up for directing an Avengers/Guardians collab film? “I cannot possibly imagine, and you’ll have to pardon my expression, a film with more f**king people in it!” So what is next for Whedon after this? “I kinda feel like it’s time I should create something totally new. During my vacation from Avengers, I made Much Ado About Something, and it turns out those characters were even older (than the Marvel ones)! I think it’s about time that I looked at a really blank page.”
A quick break from the interviews and we’re outside the studio, watching Aaron Taylor Johnson’s stunt-double in full Quicksilver costume running up what looks like the Travelator from Gladiators. Then we’re able to hold Thor’s hammer (not a pun) and Captain America’s war-torn shield. Then we hold them both at once and become Captain Thor!
Producer Jeremy Latcham – the guy involved with the first two Iron Man movies, the first Avengers and then Guardians – is next to chat about Ultron. “We’re on day 87 of a 93 day first unit shoot, and when you get this late into the shoot, it’s nice to look back on what you did on day 20 and be like ‘Oh wow, that looks really good!’ My favorite days are when all of the cast are on set, because sparks fly and those guys are so darn funny!” Any big changes since the first Avengers? “One of the big changes is that SHIELD has fallen apart. Winter Solider happened, SHIELD fell, those Helicarriers crashed to the ground. So now we’ve got Tony Stark and Steve Rodgers trying to put the Avengers together without a parental unit like Nick Fury hovering over them. And what you kind of realise is that these guys probably work best with rules and probably do need adult supervision, so do they do get along without the construct of SHIELD looking over them?”
Last but not least, we get to talk to the two new additions (or are they?) to the Avengers team, Aaron Taylor Johnson as Quicksilver and Elizabeth Olsen as The Scarlet Witch. These two recently played husband and wife in last year’s Godzilla, and now they’re playing brother and sister, plus Johnson is playing a character that was also recently seen in X-Men: Days Of Future Past, someone who basically runs really REALLY fast. Did Johnson have to do much training for that? “My trainer is an athlete and when we were training to run, it just didn’t really work. The way that they run, it’s all very precise with how high their legs can go and stuff, and it all just became very one-note, very one-dimensional and very boring to look at when you speed it up. In the tests we discovered it worked a lot better when it was a lot more dynamic, a lot freer with our arms and legs and stuff. Like, if you sped up Usain Bolt or something, it would just be in one kind of line, in a sense, and we wanted something that was more dynamic and movement based with ducking and diving and punching and stuff. There was fine-line as well because if we got to close to free-running or parkour or anything like that, that was very Captain America style. Everyone has their thing; that’s another thing I’ve learned. ‘Oooh, can I do this?’ ‘Oh, Thor kinda does that.’ So you have to find your place in the stunt world.”
(POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!)
We then asked Olsen what she could tell us about her relationship with James Spader’s character in the film, to which she dropped a massive plot point: “I think I can talk about it… Aaron and I are characters that have a lot of anger, especially towards Tony Stark and the Avengers, and we want revenge. We meet Ultron and even though we don’t fully understand his intentions, we hear the way he preaches and he preaches peace and he believes what we believe; that the Avengers create destruction. They’re responsible for killing our parents, basically. Tony Stark’s bomb is responsible for killing our parents, so we have an allegiance with Ultron, which ends up kind of turning on us, and we end up… especially my character, I end up really having to deal with my ignorance in that decision, and it makes a lot of the problems that happen towards the end of the film my responsibility.”
After that the lovely folks at Disney showed us the Comic-Con trailer, which we asked them to replay immediately, trying to decipher key moments in the teaser that relayed back to what Chris, Mark, Joss, Jeremy, Aaron and Elizabeth had just told us. From the on-set stuff we’ve seen, from what everyone involved has told us, and from the footage we’ve all seen so far, it’s probably fair to say that The Avengers: Age Of Ultron is going to be the biggest movie of 2015, in every way that a movie can be big.
The movie opens in Irish cinemas on April 23rd, and it can’t come soon enough!
Words: Rory Cashin
