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A few weeks ago, I was able to interview Kevin Feige, the President of Marvel Studios and producer of the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, coming out in theaters this Friday, April 4, 2014.
Here is an excerpt from the interview about Captain America, his filming experiences, and the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy.
Question: Can you tell us what comes next?
Kevin Feige: We’re spending a lot of time now in the cutting room on Guardians of the Galaxy, which comes out August 1st. We just released the teaser for it recently. In about two weeks we start filming Avengers: Age of Ultron. That’s coming up very fast and that will be the next movie up in May of 2015. In about ten weeks, we start filming Ant-Man with Michael Douglas and Paul Rudd. That comes out in July of 2015.
We haven’t announced what comes after that in 2016/2017 but we’re actively working on any number of things and are beginning to hone in on sort of exactly what the movies will be in ’16 and ’17.
Question: Is it intentional that you always incorporate older superheroes?
Kevin Feige: Well I think its indicative of our development process. We just believe that’s the best way to bring the villains into it. It’s more personal in this movie than in any other movie because of who the Winter Soldier is.
Question:Were you worried about any fan controversy surrounding the Winter Soldier, like there was when he (Bucky) first showed up in the comics?
Kevin Feige: Comic fans always knew sort of two things – characters die and come back to life in comics, like in soap operas. But there are two characters in the Marvel Universe that are never going to come back to life – Uncle Ben and Bucky Barnes. About 10 years ago a comic book writer, Ed Brubaker, went to publishing. I didn’t have anything to do with it. He went to publishing and said, “I have an idea to bring Bucky Barnes back.” And I’m sure they’re like “what are you talking about? You can’t do that.” And they pitched the idea and it was great. And it was the Winter Soldier idea and it was done so well. I think fans went “No, you can’t – Oh that’s great, we love that.”
Question: Is there any hope to get other characters with other studios?
Kevin Feige: No. I think we’re all busy. SONY’s busy working on Spiderman movies. Spiderman II is coming out very soon. Fox is working very hard on X-Men and they’ve got an X-Men Movie coming out very soon. And we clearly are spending a lot of time doing our two movies a year. I don’t want to say never say never necessarily but I don’t know that that would happen any time soon, and we’re certainly not planning for it.
Question: With the backlog of Films, do you find this to be a challenge or is it easier?
Kevin Feige: I don’t know if it makes it easier. It’s a bit of a challenge but it also is just fun. You know the challenge frankly as I sort of eluded to before is not to overdo it. As you know until the movie comes out, we’ll reveal that there are goings on at Shield and we want to say “Hey, what if a US Senator was part of this?” Well we have a US Senator and he was in one of our movies, Gary Shandling, so let’s bring him back. Let’s see if he might be willing to do it and he absolutely was and he flew to DC and shot that for us. Now that we’re approaching a dozen movies now, it is fun to go back and connect dots, in ways that you would do anyway.
Question: What are you most excited about right now with Marvel Studios?
Kevin Feige: I am most excited about how the world reacted to that Guardians of the Galaxy Teaser. That Teaser represents the tone and the vibe of the movie quite overtly. So we were sort of leading with our most unique and different element, which is not always what movie marketers do.
As we’ve been talking about today, each Marvel Studio’s movie needs to be unique, needs to feel like its own fresh entity. But Guardians takes that to the extreme. It happens to be based on a Marvel comic book but for all intents and purposes, from an audience who has no idea those characters are from the comics, it is an original movie put out in the summer where there are a lot of sequels. So I hope people are as excited as we are to see something wholly new and wholly original. That’s what I’m most excited about.
Question : Do you hope that Guardians becomes a series of films?
Kevin Feige: Well sure. I mean, it takes place on the other side of the galaxy but at the same time, there are elements in it that quite directly link it into the other movie so it absolutely is a part of our cinematic universe. The truth is we don’t make every movie one at a time so we’re putting everything we have into that first movie. There other stories to tell – are there ways we could take them on other adventures? Absolutely. But we never find ourselves going “Oh, this is a great idea. Let’s save this for Part 3?” No if you don’t put it in here, there won’t be a Part 3. You need to put all the great ideas in the movie at hand. So that’s where all of our energies is going right now into Guardians.
Don’t forget to check out the movie this week, and follow the hashtag #CaptainAmericaEvent for all the fun.
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