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It’s easy to repeat a winning formula in movies, albeit
generally with diminishing box office returns. Less easy to replicate a formula
that includes within it the analogue creativity of an authentic auteur. It’s to
the credit of Disney, and to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige in
particular, that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has continued to expand the
rulebook of the blockbuster while retaining some of the spirit of indie
filmmaking.
https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/eternals-and-director-chloe-zhaos-independent-spirit/
Feige has regularly sought to use emerging indie filmmakers
to helm new entrants in the MCU. They include Ryan Coogler, fresh from Fruitvale
Station, to make Black Panther, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck whose
indie fayre included Mississippi Grind before making Captain Marvel; and
the Russo Brothers whose comedy starring Owen Wilson You, Me and Dupree was the
unlikely jumping off point for Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers:
Endgame. (The DC Extended Universe followed suit, notably hiring Patty
Jenkins to make Wonder Woman)
The Marvel boss explained that the MCU uses so many indie filmmakers because they offer “unique
points of view” that can “take you to places you’ve never gone
before” :
“The real answer is, frankly, continuing what we’ve learned
with all of the different types of filmmakers that we have used. When you get
people with unique points of views, regardless of the size of film they’ve done
in the past, and empower them and surround them with the great artists and
technicians that can bring spectacle, that can bring the visuals that a Marvel movie
requires, they can take you to places you’ve never gone before.”
The latest to accept the call is Chloe Zhao just before she
made Oscar winning docu-drama Nomadland. That film, set like her
previous features in the American mid-west largely using a cast of
non-professional actors, couldn’t be more different to the huge production
schedules, large star cast and executive micro management of a tentpole like
the Eternals. Which is part of the attraction to both director and studio.
“An auteur with an eye for natural settings and a
sensitivity for intimate, personal stories, she pushed to make sure her Eternals
wasn’t just another computer-generated superhero movie full of coiffed
crusaders with ‘Man’ in their monikers,” says Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/chloe-zhao-eternals/
According to Nate Moore, a coproducer on the film, Zhao has
deconstructed who gets to be a Marvel hero—and reinvented the MCU in the
process. It’s that regeneration which Feige and Disney know they need if
audiences are to keep coming back for more.
Once Zhao came on board, she reworked the script and made a
plan to shoot it in her style: “minimal green screen, lots of location shoots,
natural light, wide-angle lenses that can capture both close-up intimacy and
vast landscapes within the same frame.
“I’m not going to try to do something different for the sake
of doing something different—that’s not interesting to me,” Zhao tells Wired.
“There’s no reason for them to get someone like me just to shoot a movie on a
soundstage.”
Some Marvel films may need big CGI worlds, but because her
movie is about heroes who have been on Earth for 7,000 years, she wanted her
cast to be able to interact with real physical spaces.
And while Eternals’ central characters must save Earth from
the Deviants, according to Moore the film also challenges assumptions about
what comic book characters should look like.
So, Eternals is the first Marvel movie with a deaf
star (Lauren Ridloff as Makkari) and also features Brian Tyree Henry’s Phastos,
one of the MCU’s first openly gay superheroes (leading to the film facing
censorship in places like Saudi Arabia). Several characters are a different
race or gender than they were in Jack Kirby’s original 1970s comics.
For Zhao, that’s the point. Talk of inclusion gets tossed
around a lot in Hollywood, but it often devolves into box-checking; she wants
to honor her characters’ diversity by making their personal identities part of
the plot.
“There are many different ways a human being can be heroic,”
Zhao says. “I want to explore as many as possible, so that more audiences can
see themselves in these heroic moments and feel they can relate.”
Feige likens her to an anthropologist, someone who studies
her subjects and then makes films showcasing their abilities. She did it with
the real nomads featured in Nomadland and the Lakota rodeo cowboy at the
heart of The Rider.
Wired says, “For Eternals, she cross-pollinated the
tale of human evolution in Harari’s Sapiens with Marvel’s own mythology to
explore how extra-terrestrials would have integrated with humanity over the
course of millennia.”
Feige says he told her “that it was her vision for this
movie that made me think that, post-Endgame, the MCU could survive.”
She had to do so without her regular cinematographer, Joshua
James Richards, and work with Ben Davis BSC an extremely experienced DP whose
work includes Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain Marvel.
“It was a totally unique experience,” Davis told me. “It was
mostly shot single camera Arri LF on a Ronin rig usually at magic hour. When
you’re dealing with a huge cast, in costume, that becomes challenging.
All of her films are shot in this very realistic drama-doc
style and this was no different in many respects. Her shooting style is very
spontaneous. There were no on camera rehearsals, very little blocking out. The
actors knew that they were required to respond to the scene in front of them.
Chloe would give a direction – the objective of the scene – and it was up to
all of us in front and behind the camera to respond to that. It took a while
for us all to adjust but it was very rewarding.
“Our characters may be gods but she didn’t want any shot to
feel artificial and contrived. For her,
as soon as you become over dramatic with the look it feels phoney. We had
to plant these characters within a truth and honesty so you believe where they
are and what they are doing.”
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