Joss Whedon: The Biography (67 page)

“I love Banner’s introduction. It’s one of my favorite scenes, and he knew how to play that. Joss had a great bit where there was just a baby cradle there, and Banner says, ‘I don’t always get what I want.’ Joss suggested that maybe he goes to that cradle and he rocks it. It’s just a light thing, but it sort of says a lot. And I just thought that was a really great choice. I was pissed because I didn’t come up with it myself.”

Cobie Smulders appreciated that Joss “was so protective over me, and he was so protective over Maria Hill. She’s in comic books, but she’s relatively new in the movies. So it was really important for him to give her a voice.”

As usual, Joss continued to rewrite his script as they were filming. The actors were surprised how quickly he could come up with dialogue that immediately made the scene better. Downey recalled a moment toward the end that brought Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man together. “It needed to say a lot and it needed to also not just be one line but it couldn’t be two pages, so he said, ‘Give me a second’ … It wound up being four lines which included all of us, and he gave us, I think, three pages of options,” he said. “The guy is really just kind of a machine, but it feels organic.”

Chris Evans agreed. “That’s a great way to put it. He’s just so good as a writer—he’s amazing. The banter is so witty … his set-up lines are seamless, they work, they’re right, so when this great exchange happens, you are like, ‘Man, that is so clever.’ If, for whatever reason, it doesn’t work, he can come up with a new exchange just like that.”

While Nick Fury and Agent Coulson serve as a through line that unites the various films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was a more important constant on the set of
The Avengers
. Production spanned the country, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to locations around Ohio to New York City, and actors came and went as the film’s sprawling ensemble format required, but Joss was always there at the center of it all.

“Nobody was doing it every day, eighteen hours a day, except Joss,” explains Gregg. “People would come in and work for a couple of weeks. They’d do their combat stuff, their training, their listening, and we got to hang out a couple of times at night, which, I guess, that was the most fun, maybe. They were happy to be there. They had great stuff to do thanks to Joss. It’s a very different experience if the script isn’t that good or if the director has a kind of megalomaniac power streak, which just isn’t Joss’s MO. He runs the ship kind of—to me he was the unseen Avenger. He was part of the gang.”

Renner noticed Joss’s good-natured dedication as well. “All of us would just pass the baton and come in and do our little bit and get the heck out, while he was there just trudging away every day,” he says. “Every once in a while, I’d pop in and do one of my bits, and I could see, like, oh yeah, it’s starting to wear on him a little bit. But really he never lets it affect anybody else—his professionalism is always right on.”

“It was grueling, as big shoots are,” says Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige, “but Joss is able to get an atmosphere where everyone’s productive, everyone is pleasant, everyone is about the work,” Feige says. “He’s a self-deprecating guy. It’s fun to sit behind the monitor with him and hear him tear apart his own words or tear apart a shot.”

Joss even found a way to relax amid his nonstop work—though he might sometimes have tried to resist it. Much of the crew had been with the shoot for the first three months in Albuquerque and the following six weeks in Ohio. As production was nearing a close in Cleveland and moving on to a much smaller shoot with a smaller crew for three days in New York, Tom Hiddleston realized that there wouldn’t be a wrap party with everyone before they left. He wanted to find a way to thank the crew,
whom he felt not only had been extremely kind to him, a Brit on foreign shores, but were the unsung heroes of this huge blockbuster.

Hiddleston decided to throw an all-night party at the House of Blues (they had been doing night shoots, so everyone’s body clock was set to stay up all night). But the night of the party was right before they were scheduled to film a big scene, in which Loki crashes a party at an art gallery and flips a man over and takes out his eyeball. Joss sent Hiddleston a note to let him know that he was exhausted and didn’t know if he could make it: “I’ll try and come for half an hour. Salute you, then head back and keep writing, and keep cutting, and keep thinking.”

“Yeah, he came to the party,” Hiddleston laughs. “And then he was the first person on the dance floor and the last person to leave.”

It was not the only time during the shoot that Joss used dancing to unwind. He would spend weekend downtime going to dance clubs with the cast. And Joss, Gregg, Renner, and Hiddleston confirmed that there was “some
Avengers
affinity” for the video game
Dance Dance Revolution
.

But Joss had always loved to dance. After all, it’s how he impressed Kai the first time they met. Sister-in-law and
Dr. Horrible
collaborator Maurissa Tancharoen confirms that Joss “is not just a big dancer. He is a dancing machine. A dancing fiend. Whenever there is music playing, he does not care where he is, he will start dancing. And soon enough, a circle forms around him, and everyone is dancing. Seriously. Anywhere. If he could dance twenty-four seven, he would.”

Joe Quesada, editor in chief of Marvel Comics, calls Joss “the most enthusiastic white boy dancing fool that I have ever seen in my entire life. He’s that kind of dancer that I wish I could be, which is ‘Hey there’s nobody dancing on the dance floor—I’ll change that!’ He’ll just go out there, and then everybody’s dancing.”

The most distinctive description came from Eliza Dushku. “He has this crazy-legs dance, and that’s what I lovingly, affectionately call him. His knees are double jointed or something and they pop out to the sides, and nobody can replicate his dance. His crazy-legs dance is a genius creation that only he can demonstrate.” (It sounds remarkably like the “Dance of Joy,” which Joss performed in a cameo as the demon Numfar in the
Angel
episode “Through the Looking Glass.”) Dushku once joined Joss at a super-trendy club to go dancing. He was decked out in khakis, a button-down shirt, and Reebok sneakers. “Boy just had such swagger,
and we danced for like four or five hours. Some people came in and joined our circle, but he was the star of the room.”

“He’s a grown-ass man, and he takes care of business,” says Clark Gregg, “but like a lot of great creative people, he’s still really deeply in touch with this kind of fantastical, energetic childlike qualities that we really love to play. You really see the joy—that joyous side that a lot of grown-ups lose track of, a kind of Peter Pan side that comes out in his desire to go get bacchanalian at night.” Gregg found a kinship working with Joss and a new inspiration on the dance floor. When his wife asked what he wanted to do for his birthday, Gregg responded, “I think I want to go Joss style. I just want a fantastic party and I just want to dance until I can’t move anymore.”

Back on the
Avengers
set, Joss the dancing fiend became Joss the perfectionist. He insisted on being involved in even the seemingly minor details of production. “From my own experience, because he wrote it, he did a part of everything,” Cobie Smulders says. “How my hair is, how I look in my wardrobe, how’s the strap. ‘What about this light here, can we move that?’ ‘I think you need to be a bit tighter here, switch this up a little bit.’ ‘I think this line needs to be dripping a little bit.’ He’s so hands-on, and it’s basically because he cares about the characters.”

His exactness even carried over to his daily drink orders, which had to be made precisely to his specifications, a combination of distilled water, lemon juice, agave, and cayenne pepper. He would drink eight bottles a day on set. He gave one to Smulders, who found it gave her quite the rush. “I thanked him for it,” she laughs. But she understood the need for both the extra energy and the routine. “That’s the only routine you can have on the set of a crazy movie. That’s the only thing you can hold on to.”

Jeremy Renner marveled at Joss’s ability to keep so many facets of such a huge production moving. “I don’t know who else could have done
The Avengers
, by the way. Pulled all those people together,” he says. “In my experience on
The Avengers
, there’s so many people to appease and to make feel good or to wrangle in, and he tracks everything. He’s just on it, and you just know you’re in good hands when he’s there.”

“When you’re doing a movie like
The Avengers
,” explains Kevin Feige, “it basically means you have six A-list stars who are used to starring in their own movies. Every one of our characters and every one of the actors has carried their own films. And people have asked, ‘Well, [is it hard to deal with] all those egos on set?’ And the truth of the matter is, all of the actors we have are as excited as we are about this movie and about putting this together. So if they have egos they certainly have kept them in check. But I do think that Joss led by example in that regard. Joss does not have a giant ego, does not go around beating his chest.”

Robert Downey Jr. prided himself on his cantankerous attitude while filming movies, often starting each day “refusing to do what [he’d] signed on to do.” He “happily” brought that attitude along to
The Avengers
. “I just thought ‘How are you gonna put all of us clowns together? He’s wearing a suit, he’s all jacked up, he’s so and so and poor Mark Ruffalo, he’s gonna out do us,’” he said six weeks into production. “And I have to say Joss Whedon is nailing it. He’s so smart and so good. And it’s gonna be great. I can’t believe I just said it, I never could’ve believed this but it’s gonna be great.”

Chris Evans, who’d previously starred not only in
Captain America
but also in two Fantastic Four films as the Human Torch, enthused, “Personally, just the stuff I have been able to do on this movie, to date, this has been the most geeked out that I have felt on a movie set. I literally come sometimes and get truly, truly excited about coming to work, and that’s a good feeling.” Reports from the set echoed Evans’s sentiments. The pressure on Joss and the cast to deliver a film that would satisfy the expectations of comic book fans and a blockbuster-hungry studio was balanced with the determination to have fun.

Joss and Hiddleston, for instance, got to indulge their fanboy love of
Die Hard
. For every Loki speech, Joss would explain what kind of performance he wanted Hiddleston to give him: vulnerable, complete megalomania, absolutely terrifying—or the Alan Rickman. “When I actually did the Alan Rickman for the first time, the crew didn’t know what was going on,” he laughs. “They burst out laughing—they just loved it.”

Joss also gave into the absurdity of the moment from time to time. Hiddleston describes one instance while they were shooting the scene at the end of the film in which Loki gets Hulk-smashed. Ruffalo had already taped his motion capture performance for the CGI Hulk at the
Industrial Light & Magic studios, so Hiddleston was the only performer on set, throwing himself into the six-foot-by-two-foot trenches that the art department had carved into the floor of Stark Tower. “[I was] literally jumping into the air and hurling myself to the floor,” he says. “Joss had written this wonderful moment where Loki essentially looks like he’s being stunned almost to death—apart from emitting a very quiet, high-pitched squeal.”