“Characters have to make sacrifices. To really, really feel the true emotion and the hero’s journey, they have to go through trials, and those trials could cost them something.”
― Joe Russo
“We like smashing genres into each other, so if you can find something that’s really idiosyncratic in respect to superhero genre and you can smoosh it into it, you usually wind up with something fresh and different.”
― Joe Russo
“We feel a lot of the future of storytelling is going to be in the VR space.”
― Joe Russo
“We like existentially wacky characters who exist in existential crisis.”
― Joe Russo
“We love being told good stories, and we love telling good stories, and all of our energy and our effort and our thought and our passion goes into telling the best story that we can.”
― Joe Russo
“What we love about working at Marvel is they’ll have a crazy opening for a movie like ‘The Avengers’ – like, a record-breaking all-time opening – and you get to the office on Monday, and they don’t even have a pizza; it’s back-to-work time.”
― Joe Russo
“We made ‘Pieces’ in Cleveland with zero connections to the film business. Absolutely zero.”
― Joe Russo
“We took a very interesting journey from being really extreme art house filmmakers. But we find that working in commercial filmmaking and creating a brand on that high level affords us a lot of interesting opportunities.”
― Joe Russo
“The feature space is a spectacle space. It’s about getting people out of their houses to go to theater when we all have a lot of things in our home now that occupy our attention.”
― Joe Russo
“Films used to be an event that required work and effort to get to a theater to see. Now, really good content is available immediately to us on many devices. At the same time, the audience’s appetite for storytelling is evolving, and people want to spend time with characters for many years.”
― Joe Russo
“It was always the intent, in a larger arc, to split the Avengers up before the greatest threat that they’ve ever seen.”
― Joe Russo
“If you look at what we did with ‘Winter Soldier’ with the Cap character in terms of bringing him into the modern world, trying to ground the movie tonally into something that was a step toward real-world, at least to the degree you can do that in a superhero movie, that’s still the tonal universe that we’re playing in ‘Civil War.’”
― Joe Russo
“’Avengers 3′ has a beginning, middle, and a very definitive end, and ‘Avengers 4’ does the same.”
― Joe Russo
“I find that when I watch films where the villain is more complex, I find that it makes the heroes more complex and ultimately, in the story, more interesting.”
― Joe Russo
“Everything is finite, right? Nothing can last forever.”
― Joe Russo
“I think movies moving forward are going to become long-form storytelling.”
― Joe Russo
“’The Infinity War’ is meant to be a culmination film. It’s meant to join together all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe against an incredible universal threat – Thanos.”
― Joe Russo
“I think there’s a lot of people in their dingy boats in the middle of the ocean pining for the days of closed-ended narrative.”
― Joe Russo
“Our job with Thanos is to make him the preeminent villain in the Marvel Universe. That is his role in the comics. That’s his role in these movies.”
― Joe Russo
“I’m Italian, so I absorb other cultures through their food.”
― Joe Russo
“Disney represents the future of filmmaking in North America.”
― Joe Russo
“You look at ‘Arrested Development’ or ‘Community,’ we’re constantly either deconstructing genre or tone. We like to say it’s like being a mad scientist: you get to play in a laboratory and experiment with directions to take narrative in.”
― Joe Russo
“With a character called Captain , you have to address the concept of who he is because his identity is tied to his country.”
― Joe Russo
“My brother and I are politically-minded guys.”
― Joe Russo
“Heroes are a way to remove yourself from what may be difficult concepts to talk about in your life. They’re a way to get some distance and have an experience in a theater where you’re confronting those issues in a way that’s safer for your psyche.”
― Joe Russo
“I sat in a theater when I was 11 years old and watched ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ from 10 in the morning until 10 at night the day it came out.”
― Joe Russo
“Anthony and I are putting together a company where we won’t lose our jobs based on quarterly earnings and can afford to play a longer game. That short game is what creates a glut of mediocrity in the market because people are desperate for hits, and it puts so much pressure on executives to deliver them. We will take that pressure off the artists.”
― Joe Russo
“I’ve been collecting comics since I was 10 years old. One of the first books I ever got my hands on was a Captain America-Falcon team-up.”
― Joe Russo
“Chris Nolan went through Slamdance a year and a half after us, and he went on to direct ‘The Dark Knight.’ So the joke now is if you want to make superhero movies, that’s where you have to go.”
― Joe Russo
“I was a comic book nut. For real. I still have a collection in my closet.”
― Joe Russo
“I like acting a lot, but it’s not something I get out of bed for every day.”
― Joe Russo
“We grew up on Scorsese and Coppola and ’70s crime thrillers.”
― Joe Russo
“I’ve had emotional experiences in VR that I haven’t been able to have in two-dimensional experiences.”
― Joe Russo
“We’re constantly striving to bring something new and different to the table, either in the way that we’re using the cameras, or the storytelling we’re using in the scene, or the way that the characters are being motivated by the action.”
― Joe Russo
“We never intended to be comedic directors; it was just something we fell into.”
― Joe Russo
“If you’re a fan of auteur filmmaking, I’d say get yourself invested in some really good TV shows.”
― Joe Russo
“Tim Miller is a very good friend of ours. We’d love to see ‘Deadpool’ jump into the MCU.”
― Joe Russo
“I think we find that it’s most helpful when we have both of our brains applied to an issue.”
― Joe Russo
“Our language – the way that we deal with most actors is we don’t like to get very complicated because we don’t want them to think too much because we find it takes them out of the moment.”
― Joe Russo
“We want to empower artists and filmmakers to forge new paths.”
― Joe Russo
“As filmmakers, we are interested in unique voices.”
― Joe Russo
“We grew up near a cinematheque in Cleveland, so we were very influenced by international cinema, the French New Wave, Italian neo-realists.”
― Joe Russo
“Being a global citizen makes you a more interesting person.”
― Joe Russo
“I’m more compelled as an artist to see diversification than I am to keep watching an Anglo point of view in storytelling.”
― Joe Russo
“We began in indies, and maybe we’ll make another smaller film again sometime.”
― Joe Russo
“I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to Edinburgh a few times over the last few years, and I just loved the city. I find it one of the more beautiful cities in Europe.”
― Joe Russo
“We tend to intensely scout an area and then use our imaginations to make the best use of the geography.”
― Joe Russo
“If you’re a comic book fan, you know that any epic book, you would open it up – as a kid, I would just go through and look at who was fighting who. I’d stand there in the store for 15 minutes until the guy told me to buy the book or get out.”
― Joe Russo
“In ‘Winter Soldier’ – in terms of character-based, ‘Winter Soldier’ was so specifically for us: everything in that movie was designed around that version of Captain America that we wanted to see, that we wanted to explore. Everything in that film, all of the stylistic choices just flow from that.”
― Joe Russo
“We always try to make each film different so they don’t get repetitive.”
― Joe Russo
“There’s nothing I hate more than going to see a movie and thinking, ‘That could have been an hour shorter.’”
― Joe Russo
“We like layers of character and personality in our storytelling. We like very distinctive, unique personalities interacting with each other. And I think, because there are two of us, and we’re a collective, we identify with that. We call it the mastermind principle: Two minds aren’t doubly better than one – they’re exponentially better than one.”
― Joe Russo
“I always say one of the great scenes from ‘The Dirty Dozen’ is where Jim Brown has to get grenades in the chimney.”
― Joe Russo
“We get excited by ideas, and we’re more excited by being surprised by ideas than we are in dictating the course of events. We’ve found that leads to more interesting storytelling.”
― Joe Russo
“There’s always loose points that people bring up, which is great, and I think that’s why you read criticism is because you want to see what worked and what didn’t work, and certainly you have to filter it because there’s a lot of people who just love to troll.”
― Joe Russo
“What’s interesting about the fans is, fans are very fickle. They all have their own opinion.”
― Joe Russo
“The template that ‘Infinity War’ is following is a very different, complex template because you’ve never seen so many characters in one film. It obviously has to be a multi-perspective film.”
― Joe Russo
“What we do is service a story first, and then you figure out how to pay for it later. If the narrative isn’t your primary focus, then the movie is going to become diluted, and you don’t have a movie that is as good as it could be, so it probably won’t make as much money.”
― Joe Russo
“I’ve seen ‘Goodfellas’ a hundred times, and one of the things that I take away from that movie is dynamic pacing and energy. I just think that film is sort of a paragon of excellence in filmmaking and the compression of narrative.”
― Joe Russo
“My feeling is that it’s important that you show kids reality.”
― Joe Russo
“Marvel is a very streamlined studio.”
― Joe Russo
“First favorite character growing up was Spider-Man, second was Wolverine.”
― Joe Russo
“As filmmakers, we love ambitious storytelling; it’s one of the reasons we pushed to do ‘Civil War.’ We want to be as ambitious in scope as we possibly can.”
― Joe Russo
“I think that what people love most about the Marvel universe are the characters.”
― Joe Russo
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