Captain Marvel is now only two months away and we were lucky enough to be part of a small group who got to infiltrate the Kree ship when it landed briefly in LA last year. Whilst we were there, we chatted to the directors of the new flagship Marvel movie, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. The pair were quick to reveal that Captain Marvel is an “expansive and strange” love letter to classic action-heavy films like Terminator 2, The French Connection, The Conversation, Top Gun, and most surprisingly the uber-violent Paul Verhoeven satirical masterpiece RoboCop.
The directorial team shared that their pitching process was unconventional and essentially encompassed them creating a visual mixtape of their fave action movies. “I know that our movies don’t look like we’re like big action nerds but we are fans of action movies,” Fleck explained. “So we just put together these clips of a lot of our favorite movies and cut them together to music and they were like ‘That’s cool’ and we were like ‘Isn’t it cool? Let’s make a movie!’ We had to do that like five times.”
For Boden there was a certain cult classic that really stood out. “RoboCop is one of our big ones. Captain Marvel isn’t a dark movie in that way like RoboCop, but I think that what’s exciting to us about RoboCop was this idea of a character who’s finding himself and finding his past, and even though it’s a dark movie it’s also extremely emotional in that way. If you remember that scene of [Murphy] walking into his own home and remembering those moments from his past life and remembering who he was, that’s big. And that was one of the first things we talked to Marvel about in terms of this character–the idea of self discovery and reconnecting and rediscovering your humanity and who you were, and it’s a huge part of this film.”
We’re super excited at the prospect of seeing a sci-fi action epic set in the MCU which takes from such high-caliber influences, and we don’t have to wait to much longer now with Captain Marvel flying into cinemas on March 8!
Images: Marvel, Disney
