Director Joe Johnston's "Captain America: The First Avenger"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 21 July 2011 17:09

Written by Frank Lovece

In 1991, director Joe Johnston helmed one of the first comic-book movies outside the Batman and Superman franchises: An adaptation of Dave Stevens' indie comic The Rocketeer. That underrated gem, set in a winds-of-war 1930s, featured a young stunt pilot who strapped on a Howard Hughes experimental jet pack to fight Nazi saboteurs and provocateurs.

Though the film wasn't a commercial success, you couldn't argue that Johnston -- whose credits included being an Academy Award-winning visual-effects art director for the three original Star Wars and the first two Indiana Jones pictures -- wasn't the right guy to bring that pulp-adventure aesthetic to life.

The Texas-born Johnston, who'd already directed the hit Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), would go on to another family-friendly blockbuster, Jumanji (1995), as well as the critically acclaimed October Sky (1999), based on the memoirs of a 1950s coal-town teenager inspired by Sputnik to build his own model rockets, eventually winning science fairs that got him out of the sticks and into NASA.

Jurassic Park III (2001) followed, as did the less-than-successful Hidalgo (2004) and The Wolfman (2010).

Now Johnston, 61, seems poised to return to form with the Marvel Studios comic-book adaptation Captain America: The First Avenger, starring Chris Evans as the star-spangled superhero.

Johnston, in the midst of moving to a new house, spoke by phone in a one-on-one interview.

FFT: I understand that you were already working on Captain America before finishing everything on The Wolfman.

JJ: I overlapped the two projects, which is something I've never done before. I basically worked about three years straight, which is just madness to do that. I only had three weeks to do prep on Wolfman [after original director Mark Romanek left over creative differences].

On Captain America I had 30 weeks. I hope it shows! It came together pretty well. Marvel was very supportive and I never got any studio notes or anything while I was shooting. [Producer] Kevin Feige and [co-producer] Stephen Broussard were very supportive of what I wanted to do, and that make s big difference.

Kevin's a very creative guy himself and I think that's what the difference is. When he has an idea it's coming from someone who is creative and knows the material. No one is as well versed in the Marvel Universe as he is. He actually had great ideas. "What if we tried this, what if we tried that?"

FFT: For example?

JJ: The rebirth process. In all these movies when a character is transformed, like in The Wolfman, it's almost torture. Hugh Jackman in Wolverine goes into this thing that drills into the skull and it looks like agony. We've all seen it; it's all been done before.

Kevin and Stephen said, "What if we try something different? It's not a torture chamber, it‛s more like a moon launch, Mission Control, each guy doing one job, all coordinated by Dr. Erskine." It's much more of a clean, sanitary process, as pain-free as it can be.

FFT: Jon Favreau said in 2006 that he had approached Avi Arad, then head of Marvel Studios, to do Captain America as a comedy. Louis Leterrier said during a Q&A in France where he was previewing The Incredible Hulk in 2008 that he offered himself to direct Captain America but Marvel turned him down. How did you come into the project?

JJ: I never knew I was in competition with anybody! My agents called one day and said, "You wanna do Captain America?" I had just gone to England for the hell of prepping Wolfman in three weeks. I didn't know anyone else was up for it. When I heard about it, it was from my agents saying "it's yours if you want it".

FFT: You've done all these big special-effects movies, but my favorite of all of yours is October Sky …

JJ: That's still my favorite of my films. We were so under the radar the studio had no idea what we were doing.

FFT: There you go. And it's this small, very human story that got all the details of small-town West Virginia just right. It feels like if you combined the humanity of that movie with the period superhero thing of The Rocketeer, that you'd have somebody who could direct Captain America, and "get it."

JJ: Kevin mentioned both those movies. He's a fan of The Rocketeer, and the period is similar.

But I really believe these movies have to have a really strong human story at the heart of it, otherwise it becomes a big special-effects extravaganza. With that type of film, if you can’t access the characters, then you're just along for the effects ride and that gets old pretty quick.

FFT: Right. Then you get Green Lantern!

JJ: I didn't see Green Lantern.

FFT: Chris Evans is good actor and he's held his own as a leading man and all. But why is it that Marvel went after him so vehemently, after he turned them down three times? Was there really no other available actor in the world who could have played this role?

JJ: There were, and we interviewed and screen-tested probably 12 to 15 guys, and we liked a lot of them. But we always came out of the meeting or the screen test saying, oh, if only he were four inches taller, or if only his voice were a little clearer, or if he only didn't do that funny thing with his face.

Chris had turned down the project a couple of times. I said get him in here, have him come in and look at some of the art being done for this.

[Production designer] Rick Heinrichs and the illustrators we had, these guys put the stuff on the wall and it's mind-blowing -- it's like going into a museum of design or something. I said just get him to look at the stuff. He spent about an hour looking at the wall and about five minutes talking.

He finally said, "I gotta think about it." He told me later, "I realized I wasn't making a decision because I was afraid, and you can't make a decision because of fear." He said the project looked like fun. Chris tried anything I would ask him to do, and I let him try a bunch of things.

FFT: Like what?

JJ: He wanted to do a lot of his own stunts, and I'm good with that except for the really dangerous ones. After a few weeks he knew the ones I wouldn't let him do. He did a lot of the wire stuff. In fact, he ended up doing stuff that the gymnasts and the runners couldn't do as well.

We had guys who were supposed to be able to run up the side of the tank and leap to walls. Turns out Chris was as fast as any one of them and he has a very distinctive run. He's like a dancer when he runs -- his movements are coordinated, he's much more machine-like.

We filmed these other guys running and you could tell it wasn't him, so we brought Chris back and had him do as much as we could.

The comping [compositing] is so good you can't tell it's green screen [i.e., done in a studio with a special green-screen background onto which backgrounds are later added via computer].

FFT: He [said] he didn't do any of the motorcycle stunts, which is not unreasonable given what I'm sure were the insurer's bonding requirements on a major studio film.

JJ. Not the stunts, but we had him on a motorcycle on a gimbal in front of a green screen. We did some full wide shots with the bike and everything, and did moves with him and comped it into our forced background. The bike itself was a modified Harley -- a modern bike we engineered to look like a '40s bike.

We had Harley Davidson go back and make it look like the original bike -- a great look, but not something you just hop on and ride. Plus we had to load it up with all the gadgetry, all the Howard Stark stuff.

FFT: One scenes in the trailer had all the fan girls swooning, when Steve Rogers comes out of the chamber all super-soldier enhanced, and Hayley Atwell, who plays [British government agent] Peggy Carter, reaches up and puts her hand on his chest. That wasn't in the script -- how did you decide to incorporate it?

JJ: We shot the scene several times, but she only reached out to touch him once. We talked about it before shooting the scene and I asked, "What would you do?" And she says, "Let me see, I'll find out."

And it's a great little moment. She doesn’t actually touch him -- she pulls away before she makes contact. It's totally improv, and I guess she was going on instinct.

FFT: In the movie, Rogers as Captain America leads a bunch of commandos that are clearly modeled on [those in the comic book] Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. But you don't actually call them that.

JJ: We went back and forth. We called them the Howling Commandoes for awhile, and then The Invaders, and finally settled on Howling Commandoes [in the script itself, unsaid onscreen]

FFT: Well, that explains all the off-base fan speculation about all these superheroes from the Marvel Comics team The Invaders being in the movie.

Speaking of other superheroes, Sam Raimi, in his Spider Man movies, staged certain shots to replicate famous comic book panels. Anything like that here?

JJ: No, I didn't do that. But what I did do was read all the recent Captain America comics, the [writer Ed] Brubaker series with [artist] Steve Epting.

I looked at 'em and I noticed that there are certain angles that these comic artists draw and it's always sort of a low 3/4 -- rear 3/4, front 3/4 -- a real distinctive comic-book angle, and I looked for places where I could use that.

And a comic-book fan can say, "Wow, that's right out of the comic book," and if you're not [a fan] you won’t notice anything out of context.

I didn't copy panels, but I followed this comic book visual sense of where to put the camera. Probably just five or six times in the whole movie I have one of those shots.

FFT: You shot most of the exteriors in England, since I guess some of their towns looked more like 1940s New York than you could find here.

JJ: We shot in Manchester for Brooklyn. You'll see [The Brooklyn] Bridge in the background, which we added digitally.

But for an alley, we had to shoot on a back lot [at] Pinewood [Studios]. We could not find an alley in London for New York! There was always something that told you you were in the United Kingdom that we couldn't cover up, paint over or move.

We went to one place up in Wales, an old armaments factory, where they said you can do whatever you want, blow stuff up. We blew up a building! They only used it for training snipers and shooting movies.

But we wanted an overcast, ugly, rainy, drizzly sky, and the weather was perfect -- sunny, warm. Here we are in Wales around October, and it was like we were in Southern California!

FFT: What do you have next?

JJ: I have to wait around to see if Marvel wants to make a sequel. I'm looking for something a little simpler, lower budget, shorter schedule.

FFT: You know, sometimes movie directors will direct a TV pilot, get a co-creator credit, and if the show works, you can make as much from residuals as you can for a whole bunch of movies. Maybe you should look into that.

JJ: That's not a bad idea. I think I will!

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