Captain America: The Winter Soldier celebrated its 10th anniversary last month. It’s pretty crazy that it’s been ten years since that movie was released, and it still stands as one of the best films that Marvel Studios has produced.
The film was directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, who went on to direct Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. They recently talked about their time making The Winter Soldier during an interview with Games Radar.
Anthony said: “It makes me feel really old! It was honestly a thrill. I mean that whole period was so immersive and thrilling for us. We basically entered the MCU on that movie and exited it seven years later with Endgame.”
He added: “That whole ride was like a rollercoaster that more and more people kept joining. We started working with Marvel in 2012 and Endgame released in 2019. I mean, when you think about it only being seven years, that’s a lot to pack in – four movies in seven years.”
As their productions got bigger with Marvel one thing they want to emphasize is that it always felt like family, just a really big family!
Anthony went on to say: “Family is really important to us. We grew up in a big Italian family and we have always seen our movies and our work as an extension of our family. If you’re gonna go spend time away from the ones you love, you want it to be with other people that you love.”
He continued: “The thing that stands out to me most is how long our relationships have lasted coming out of those movies – our creative collaborators, our actor friends, everyone that we worked with, we still spend a great deal of time with them, are very close to them, and share a lot of memories with them.”
As you’ve seen, the filmmakers continue to cast the actors that they worked with on those movies.
Joe went on to talk about what they are always looking to accomplish with the films that they make and how they aim for their movies to be “in dialogue with the audience”, adding “that’s how we’ve always approached it and you can see this in different ways through our work”.
Anthony elaborated on that saying: “We like active audiences because we grew up as film fans and as pop culture fans in general. We love the way that fandoms can make storytelling their own and the creative process that you can bring to it as a fan.”
He went on to say: “To be able to sit in those movie theaters, for Avengers: Endgame, and to feel the volume and the energy, and just that intensity of audience reaction within a movie theater, I don’t think Joe and I had ever experienced that level of intensity before in a theater. And that was special.”
These guys did something special with the Marvel films that they made and Marvel is still trying and struggling to tap into that creative energy that they left behind.
Kevin Feige recently talked about Captain America: Brave New World and how he wants that film to reach the bar that The Winter Soldier set. Good luck with that!
