Making Of Avengers: Age Of Ultron

Here we are. It's day one in principal photography. We're in Italy. Environmental, this place is gorgeous. It's unlike anything we had in the first movie. It's just a ton of texture. It's pretty exciting. There's something about being out in the field and being in the middle of Italy. You're in this town that we've got the whole place shut down. You have five intersections, cars overturned, you have real explosions. And action! It's a great way to sort of kick start a shoot, you know, on location. That makes you feel authentic. Aaron and I are coming in cold, basically, and so it was nice to have our own substantial work with our characters before coming on to set with all those intimidating people. Coming back after being away and seeing each other was a very sweet reunion. We all, as actors, went on this journey together through this wild thing that became Avengers 1. Go Bruce! Go Bruce! Go Bruce! It's all common ground now, and it's not quite as daunting as the first time around. I was talking to Robert and Chris and a lot of the guys before we started shooting, and all of us were looking forward to coming back and kicking it off again. I never want to work with these kids, but I'll get them back. In this one, we're together a lot, which is great for us, terrible for Joss, because it's tough to wrangle ten crazy actors that love each other. Oh, my God. We're about to get yelled at. Them having that kind of comfortable ease with each other is a delight. Every now and then, it's an exhausting delight. Today, we have some balls and shots. That just happened. Here we are in Robert's trailer. He didn't get the one he asked for, but we feel we did pretty well. This is Avengers Tower. This is what Stark Tower became after it was destroyed. It's just sleek, elegant, futuristic. I mean, it's Tony's house, so it had to be flashy. I don't know of anyone in the history of any superhero franchise who seems to have never run out of money. Joss wanted it all to be connected. He wanted to be able to move from downstairs to upstairs and vice versa. We needed to perform for Tony's world, for Anna's world, and then float down into sort of the gaming area of the HQ, which was a little bit more fun. If you look carefully at the details, you'll see there's a cap poster, there's stuff for Hawkeye, there's stuff up in the lab where Tony's working for all of the team. This is really our sort of giant science fiction space, and we put it at the beginning of the film because it has this grand, optimistic, things-are-going-well feeling. We have a party here in the house, because who wouldn't have a house party here? We ended up realizing we have this big Avengers Tower set, and we're all trying to attack right here. Because instead of having it built here, and then fly away and attack across town, it seemed more visceral to kind of have the attack happen right here in this big, huge space, because if you build a set this big and you don't blow it up, you're doing something wrong. Joss was beginning to put together the character of Ultron, how he came about, what he wanted to do with the character, and he said to us, I think it's got to be James Spader. It was another moment when we went, yes, there's nobody else on the list, there's nobody else that we talked to. First day when he gives his speech at the party, I know all of us were kind of eager to be the audience and just to spectate and just watch him perform. And it was really exciting, because it was really good and really intimidating. And I was tangled in strings. Spader knew what he was in for, and he went for it regardless, because he thought, if I'm going to do it, let me really do it. It was terrible to put us on a set together. I just want everyone to know that now. I showed up at the studio, and they put me in a suit, and they had me go through a range of motion, very specific motions and movements and so on, which they captured with all these sort of sensors all over me and reference cameras all around me. And within 10 minutes, the sort of rough image of Ultron was on a screen, a monitor in front of me. I've outgrown you, Tony, I've evolved. Performance capture is the entire performance, so you're filming an actor's entire role. It just happens to be a different bunch of cameras. But the actual nuances, all of the acting choices, you're authoring the role in exactly the same way that you would if you were playing a live action. He and I got to do some stuff, and it's ridiculous. We're wearing these very unflattering suits, and I'm trying to explain to him how it all works. But I was like, I'm working with James Spader. Look at you, Ruffalo. You really, like, pulled one over on the world. I think it's so fitting because Ultron is everywhere and everything and has these almost Shakespearean soliloquies at times, and I certainly think that his theatrical background is all over this. Well, this church is in the exact center of the city. He had this thing with red dots for eyes, and so we would rehearse looking at him so we could have something to respond to. And then during a take, we'd have to, like, look three feet above his head, which was so irritating because he was doing so much that you wanted to watch. Probably the majority of the shots, Aaron and I are both going like this. Like, just, like, shoot. We didn't want Ultron just floating out there by himself. We wanted him teamed up with someone. We wanted there to be an opportunity to have the twins help carry some of that villain burden. These characters are integral to the Avengers comic books. We also wanted to have another powerful female character. I wanted not just a new perspective, but a new visual language. She can get inside their heads, he can move so that everything is super slow. That's going to give me a language I wouldn't have used in the first one. When it comes down to Pietro, we went through a very large number of testing and looks so that we can feel that it was organic. We didn't want it to be about the effects, per se, so we looked at, you know, various blurs and trails. We ended up with something which I think is pretty simple, but also pretty sophisticated and sort of elegant as a solution for Pietro. There's this blue street trail. When I run fast, you'll see that, you know, if the light catches it, it'll have that kind of sort of lightning bolt sort of strike. You see pictures of Scarlet Witch, and she's always like that. So we have these images and these, like, you know, red balls around her hands for some sort of fire energy. And Joss really wanted me to work with a dancer. It changed a lot, the conversation about how Scarlet Witch would move, kind of creating a vocabulary. We took her power and said, okay, she's got telekinesis, she can move things, she can have a little bit of energy kind of shielding or pushing, and she can get inside your head and tweak it so that all your worst fear is going to come to the fore. It was also fun for us to have a sequence with Scarlet Witch who could take down the Avengers without throwing one punch. I wanted to get deeper into these characters. You need visual momentum, and these dream sequences are designed specifically to be as engaging as an action sequence. We all get our opportunities to delve deeper into the backstory of each one of these characters, and every one of the Avengers comes to the table with a lot of baggage. It took a long time to understand when Scarlet Witch gets inside of Banner's head, forces him into the Hulk, and what is the Hulk's nightmare? What makes him go crazy? What we tried to do with Hulk is really try to take him to the next level in terms of photorealism. With Mark's performance and Joss's direction of the story, there's a lot more moments where we can really get in touch with his feelings. The first time we did this, the technology was at a place such as you could capture movement, and then you had to do all the facial recognition separately. In that time, this technology's taken another major leap forward. Trying to create a performance that is as physical as the Hulk really helps to have your body informing that. What is great for playing a character like the Hulk is it enables you to climb into the mind of the Hulk without having to wear an enormous amount of prosthetic makeup, which actually stops you from really acting. So you can have all of the pain of that character, or the anger, or the aggression, or a mixture of all of those things, and the nuance of what Mark was doing facially. He's not having to fight against tons and layers of prosthetic makeup. He can just internalize that, even with a character that big. You're stronger than her. You're smarter than her. You're Bruce Banner. Right, right, right. Don't mention Puny Banner. We are here in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Hulk and Hulkbuster are going to be fighting each other right up and down the streets, throwing through a market, all kinds of crazy stuff happening. We scouted the area initially, took lots of photographs and measurements and really just got an idea of the city and the layout, and we started to previs the whole sequence and try to figure out where the cam angles could be, what the set was, and what the environment was, and how we could use the environment to tell the story that Joss wanted to tell. In the script, initially, it's imagine Hulk if Hulk hulked out. You know, it's that kind of craziness. So we've tried to amp up Hulk. It's been great to just sort of open it up, and instead of trying to recreate places, really get to go there to get the local feel and the architecture and the life. It gives the film a veracity, and when half your characters are CGI, you just need that. It had to be very carefully planned, and then it was a lot of talking to the special effects guys, who are the people that do the practical effects on set, and getting them to blow cars up and rip parts of the street up and give us explosion there and dust hits here, and then you take it all back to the cutting room, and then you start doing what we call post-vis, which is then effectively taking the previs, the sort of animated cartoon version, and now cutting out the Hulk and the Hulkbuster and trying to put that back into what you've already shot. Right after they've had their visions, when all of them are realizing how disconnected they are from feelings and past and thoughts and how messed up they are, they're confronted with a normal family life. It puts a weight on, oh, this is why we do what we do. Everyone has to sort of take a look at themselves like, oh, yeah, what we're doing is really not quite so important. This is what it's really all about. Seeing everybody on set in costume and standing there with everybody, it's pretty fun to watch. It's pretty fun to see all those superheroes come to life. This is like a family of people that kind of get together and have these powers that act real normal in terms of how they react to each other, how they sit around, eat, drink, talk to each other or have brotherly fights and this, that, and the other. Isn't that why we fight? So we can end the fight, so we can go home? These movies are so successful because they resonate with the audience. The characters are multifaceted and they struggle and they are unlikely heroes and sort of reluctant heroes. Being able to embrace that and take it to an unexpected place I think is one of the first ideas Joss had on this film. There's enough interpersonal and character stuff going on that you have something to hold on to when you get into the big set pieces. We are in the heart of Seoul. We are at Gangnam. You see all the tall buildings. It's really busy. I'm so excited and so proud as a Korean that we're shooting Avengers 2 here. The South Korean government was unbelievably helpful and inviting to allow us to do a massive sequence there. Korea is a very, very cutting-edge technological society and they love the notion of us going there and showcasing that. And we have one of the biggest street chases we've ever had in a Marvel film right there through the streets of Seoul. The idea that we're going to shut down huge parts of Seoul, close off major intersections, and we said it's the equivalent of shutting down 405, the 101, the 10, all in the middle of Los Angeles, all on a weekday. We've been maneuvering through 6, 8, 10, 12 cars at high speed, chasing the motorcycle, following it at its best speed. We're kind of hitting speeds of 50, 60. It's pretty quick when you hang on the back of the door. Those driving sequences are pretty amazing. You know what's in that cradle? The power to make real change. And that terrifies you. I wouldn't call it a comfort. Going back to, I would say it was production on the first Avengers film, and Joss was very, very interested in Ultron. And there were some ideas about how Vision, obviously the most important AI character in our universe up to that point, could play a part in that. I said, if you make a second movie, you've got to be Ultron, and then he should make the Vision, but they should put Jarvis in the Vision, and then Paul Bettany can play the Vision, because only Paul Bettany can play the Vision. I was just so pleased to see him transcend what you thought Jarvis was and bring into being what the Vision is and actually kind of exceed our expectations. It is a privilege to be a Marvel. For me, just personally, it's a nice sort of continuance of this thing, because I've kind of been involved in this whole thing right from the beginning. The depletion rate of palladium is increasing exponentially, sir. And I'm sort of annexed. You know what I mean? I've always come in right at the end. It's been fun, but it's really nice for me to sort of finally be a part of it, you know, physically. Iron Man's the one he's waiting for. That's true. He hates you the most. Joss came to show me the initial drawings and stuff. I totally flipped, and I didn't think for a minute what that was actually going to mean to me physically. In terms of how we were going to achieve that on a daily basis. I get put inside this rubber balaclava that is then glued to my face, and it's a lot of prosthetics. The makeup is actually amazingly quick, I think, for what is accomplished. It's about an hour and a half. And then there's a robot muscle suit that goes on. I wear a cooling suit that has piping that goes all around me, and they plug it in, and ice water runs through it, and it keeps me cool. It's a little like being inside a gin and tonic. I can't hear very well, because I've got this thing over my head, and there's only this much of my own skin showing. It took me a couple of days to figure it out. You know, we made a few holes so I could sort of hear conversation, and I read a lot. We're in Sokovia, which is now in Hendon in London. Sokovia previously was in Italy. Sokovia's been on stage. Sokovia's kind of all over the place, this big place that we're kind of putting together in visual effects. And today here in Sokovia, we're doing kind of the end of the movie. Everything's kind of wrapping up. Open fire! And we just had this massive strafing run. You know, Ultron has commandeered the Quinjet, and he came through, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, and is taking out everybody. We had 1,300 explosions going off one after the other, all timed, all rigged by our great special effects team. We were very lucky. We looked very hard for that location, and because we knew what we had to do to it, in the sense, the post-destruction look, that made our search that much harder, because a lot of places simply wouldn't have allowed us to have done it with all the pyrotechnics and all the special effects and our footprint, you know, what we needed to do there. Very quickly, we realized it. It actually worked incredibly well. Watching it be destroyed slowly but surely was pretty amazing to see, you know, this beautiful statue that Aaron and I were laughing about, you know, pretending it was us, and then, like, later when the world's ending and their limbs are gone, and there's, like, a children's playground that's a tank. Like, it just had a lot of humor as well. I really loved that set, because that was a world. That was a whole world. It's very weird to be this close to being done. It was sort of... I describe it as the light at the end of the ballroom, because I really have been having so much fun. It doesn't really feel like a tunnel. Part of that is because of being here, there's so much depth, there's so much room to maneuver. We've never had a set or a place to shoot like this. It's huge. You always want to end big. We've got a whole city lifting off and being ripped out of the ground, and then we've got all these sub-Ultrons that are attacking the Avengers and trying to take the Avengers out of the equation, whilst Ultron Prime is trying to destroy humanity. When I read some of the things that I read on the page, it just seemed so enormous. You'd think that there must be some diminishment of that during the making of or even the development of the script, and not so. I've been here long enough to understand that the unthinkable will happen, the unthinkable will be written, and the unthinkable will come to fruition as some of the most amazing visual effects we've seen. So that I'm proud to say, that none of that scares me. On the contrary, all of that is the greatest challenge of working here. They've got to end the film fighting together, and we've got to know that the Avengers live on. But the idea that the Avengers will live on, but in a completely different form, there's a galvanizing excitement about that. My favorite part about Avengers Age of Ultron is what's brought into potential at the end. The fun of the comics is the shifting roster, is the notion that the Avengers begin as a certain roster of people, but over time, some characters go off into their own adventures, new characters come in. So for us, that was always part and parcel of the concept of the Avengers. So it was always the idea that we were going to mix up the teammates. I feel like this is really a kind of a feeling of an ending of an era and the beginning of another, and I welcome it. I think it makes the audience even that more invested in our interpersonal relationships and the future of these characters, so that's pretty cool. To be able to create this spectacle and have it be something that you can crawl inside and feel the life within it, that's, I think that's this film in its finest form. The best take ever!