Joss Whedon: The Biography (64 page)

Marvel liked Joss’s ideas and gave him an offer to write and direct, with several stipulations, including a ninety-two-day shoot and a quick turnaround for postproduction, even the substantial special effects sequences. The studio specified that the villain must be Loki, brother of the fallen Norse god Thor, who turns against his sibling in the superhero’s solo film. Also, it wanted a big fight among the Avengers in the middle of the film that leaves the team shattered, and an epic battle at the end. “I was like, great, you just gave me your three acts,” Joss said. “Now all I have to do is justify getting to those places and beyond them.” Or as he put it at another point, “I have enough signposts to build from, all I had to do was try to make it matter and try to have reasons for the conflicts.”

The Avengers
was already set for release in May 2012, which gave Joss confidence that, unlike
Wonder Woman
, this film was really going to happen. He was all in.

“I kept telling my mom that reading comic books would pay off,” Joss joked. His stepfather, Stephen, had jokingly taunted him for years with the question “When are you going to make a real, grown-up picture, without the vampires and the rocket ships?” Each time, Joss would reply with the same answer: “Never. It’s never gonna happen.” Now he was about to board the biggest rocket ship of his career.

In fan circles, rumors abounded over who would take the helm of
The Avengers
. Early buzz focused on
Iron Man
and
Iron Man 2
director Jon Favreau, but he declared himself out of the running. Other rumors
pointed to
The Incredible Hulk
director Louis Leterrier, who reportedly had expressed interest in the project. But fans really started to get fired up with the news that Joss Whedon was in the mix.

Oddly, the possibility was first raised on April 1, 2010, via the now-defunct website IESB. The fact that the story was posted on April Fool’s Day caused many to question its validity. The
Los Angeles Times’
Hero Complex website did some digging and reported on April 3, 2010, that “insiders at Marvel Studios say no director has been signed yet but that Whedon was on the short-list and conversations took place. This could be promising, Whedonites.”

By April 13, 2010,
Deadline Hollywood
was reporting it as all but a done deal, yet official confirmation actually wouldn’t come for another three months. At San Diego Comic-Con, Joss himself confirmed the story, during
Entertainment Weekly’s
Visionaries panel on July 22, 2010. Sharing the stage with his former WB neighbor J. J. Abrams, Joss told the crowd that “that is not an official thing, because I think Marvel couldn’t afford a press release, so can I just make that an official thing? I’m directing
The Avengers
.” Two days later, it became
extremely
official when franchise stars Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson took to the Comic-Con stage to officially introduce the full cast and director of
The Avengers
.

On the surface, Joss might have seemed a risky choice to oversee the culmination of a half-dozen blockbuster motion pictures. Marvel had tapped other non-blockbuster directors like Favreau and Branagh, but those filmmakers had a roster of previous films under their belt. Up to this point, Joss had directed just one feature film,
Serenity
, which starred largely box office unknowns with whom he had already worked on
Firefly
. But fans were confident in Marvel’s pick. “Oftentimes in the Marvel fan community, there’s a lot of second guessing,” Feige says. “There’s a lot of ‘OK, let’s see—how are you gonna screw it up?’ The more movies we make, the more benefit of the doubt I think they give us. But in the case of the Joss choice, it was unanimously positive for the decision, and I think that extended across the Marvel universe and the Whedon universe equally.”

One of Joss’s first tasks was to get the script in order. He retained some story elements from previous drafts, sharing “story by” credit with Zak
Penn, but Joss would ultimately receive the sole screenplay credit. Nevertheless, the writing of
The Avengers
was a collaborative process, much like Joss’s work on
Toy Story
with Pixar. He popped into Marvel headquarters fairly regularly to talk about the essentials of the
The Avengers
script: structure, narrative, and characters—generally, how exactly to build this blockbuster. The members of the studio’s team were all exceptionally well versed in comic book lore; they and Joss shared the same reference points, which immediately put everyone on the same page. Feige was taken with Joss’s love for the characters in particular. “There’s been much made of superheroes being the myths of our time,” he says. “Joss looks at these characters, as we do, not just as comic book characters but as great literary characters. And he is so well read that he pulls on all of those examples to put them together. He’ll often go to great composers. He always has music running in his office and it’s often film music, often classical music.”

Joss also contributed a dialogue polish to the
Captain America
screenplay. It gave him a stronger foundation with the character of Captain America / Steve Rogers, who he felt would be the audience’s connection to world of
The Avengers
. “I did spend a lot of time with the character, which for me was important, because Steve’s perspective in this world is very much, as much as anybody’s if not more, the audience’s,” Joss said. As a supersoldier from the 1940s who awakens in the modern world at the end of
Captain America
, Steve Rogers “is looking at this world with fresh eyes and he is not impressed. His feeling of disconnection is something that’s going to be laced throughout [
The Avengers
]. It’s a film about lonely people, because I’m making it, and my pony only does one trick…. He’s a classic man out of time in the very literal sense and so to have worked on his ’40s incarnation, even a little bit, was a nice introduction to this and kept me grounded in his perspective.”

In addition, Joss consulted with Kenneth Branagh, who was in the middle of postproduction on
Thor
. He asked Branagh if he could see a rough cut of the film that laid out the full narrative for villain Loki, because he wanted to know where both he and Thor ended up in the film so he could take off in the right direction in
The Avengers
. After viewing it, Joss asked the actor playing Loki, Tom Hiddleston, to meet up for a cup of tea and just talk about the character. Hiddleston recalls the e-mail, which, among other things, said, “The motherfucker lives in you, and I want to know it all.”

Hiddleston had actually met the writer years earlier, when Joss saw him in a production of
Othello
in his native London. Chiwetel Ejiofor, who played the stoic and menacing Operative in
Serenity
, starred as the titular Moor, and Hiddleston was his lieutenant, Michael Cassio. As Joss caught up with his friend Ejiofor, he spoke with Hiddleston and was “very sweet” in his appraisal of his performance. They met again in L.A. in 2009 to discuss a possible role in
The Cabin in the Woods
, but in the end, Joss told him that he’d love to find something for them to do together but he didn’t think there was a part for him in the film. “I was like, ‘Dude, totally fine,’” Hiddleston laughs. “We then disappeared from each other’s lives for a period of 365 days, and the next time I meet him, he had signed on to write and direct
The Avengers.
”

They met in Santa Monica, and Hiddleston ran through what he’d done to prepare for and play the character of Loki. He listed the wide variety of research material he’d consulted: all of the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby comics,
The Ultimates
, comics by J. Michael Straczynski, the Norse myths themselves, the works of Wagner. He discussed how he approached the role of the damaged brother, mentioning several Shakespearean influences: Edmund in
King Lear
and Cassius in
Julius Caesar
. “I literally plugged in some kind of USB into his hard drive, and downloaded all of the Loki information—metaphorically,” Hiddleston laughs.

Joss completely understood where he was coming from. They shared the same references, and the love of villains both classic and pop cultural. “Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in
Die Hard
was a landmark moment in my conception of bad guys in the movies. He’s magnetic,” Hiddleston says. “We used to talk a lot about Peter O’Toole, and James Mason. Joss is a huge, huge fan of James Mason and his work. And how long before my time, before Alan Rickman’s time and any of the current crop of British bad guys, the great godfather of British actors playing the roles in Hollywood movies was James Mason. That was such a touchstone for us.”

After ingesting all there was from Hiddleston’s dissertation on Loki, Joss said, “I want to dive off the deep end…. Because of the way that you’ve established the spiritual origin of the character, I now want to create the Lord of Misrule, the God of Mischief,” Hiddleston remembers. “And in
The Avengers
, I need you to be more menacing, more feral—and above all enjoy yourself.”

Hiddleston, of course, wasn’t the only actor to reprise his role from Marvel’s previous superhero films.
The Avengers
would also feature the return of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man, Chris Evans as Captain America, and Chris Hemsworth as Thor. (After Joss cast him in
The Cabin in the Woods
and then recommended him for
Thor
, Hemsworth says, “it was funny to come full circle and now be working with him again.”) Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner would reprise their supporting roles as Black Widow from
Iron Man 2
and Hawkeye from
Thor
, respectively, while Samuel L. Jackson and Clark Gregg would continue their string of appearances as Nick Fury and Phil Coulson of the shadowy defense organization S.H.I.E.L.D.

But one major role would need to be recast. Edward Norton, who played the title character in
The Incredible Hulk
, had met with Joss to discuss his participation in the film—a meeting that, according to Norton’s agent, went well. But contract negotiations stalled, and in July 2010, Kevin Feige released a statement confirming that Ed Norton would be replaced with a new actor in the role of the Hulk / Bruce Banner. Fan reaction was mixed; many liked Norton’s take on Banner and looked forward to seeing how his character worked in an ensemble piece, while others were soured by his involvement in the media-hyped drama behind the scenes of
The Incredible Hulk
, in which the actor and the studio clashed over the tone of the film and issues of creative control.

Joss already knew who he wanted for the new Hulk: indie actor Mark Ruffalo. “Mark was my dream choice and I had my heart set on him,” Joss explained. “I wanted a completely fresh take on the character so I went to Marvel very early on and said, ‘I know the guy who would be a great Bruce Banner’ and they said, ‘Unless it’s Mark Ruffalo, we really don’t know.’ And I was like ‘What?!’ I just froze and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. You did not just say that,’ and I showed them my list that I had in my wallet with his name at the top and they were completely on board.”