Following the debut of the Captain America: Civil War trailer, which you can check out in the player below, directors Anthony and Joe Russo sat down with Empire to talk about the film and the teases that the trailer offers.
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“You cannot have a character called Captain America without examining the politics of what that means, especially in this day and age,” Joe Russo says. “The heroes in this universe operate under their own auspices, not under the directive of a government, and that can cause a lot of problems. There’s a certain level of imperialism that we’re examining – what right do those that have power have to use that power, even if it’s to do good? How do you govern that kind of power?”
Russo went on to talk about the namesake for the film, the 2006 comic event, and how there’s not much by way of adaptation.
“We’re using the essence of what Civil War was about,” Joe Russo said of the source material. “The comic book isn’t applicable to the storytelling that we’ve structured up to this point, but the concept of registration, the notion that heroes need to be either monitored or controlled because their power can be scary, is applicable.”
“The challenge was, we’re doing the story of Civil War,” Anthony Russo adds. “Which everybody knows is nominally about superhero registration. And in a lot of ways that can be a political issue, and we didn’t want the conflict of the movie to solely exist on that level. We wanted to figure out very personal reasons why everyone’s relationship to this idea of registration is going to become complicated. That’s what the relationship between Steve and Bucky allowed us to do, to get very personal in terms of why people would lean one way or the other.”
Also seen in the trailer are the Sokovia Accords, named for the town seen at the climax of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
“The Accords are the world jointly trying to govern the Avengers moving forward,” continues Joe Russo. “It has to do with the effects of Ultron and Sokovia, and New York City , and Washington D.C. Examining the third acts of all the Marvel movies, we’re saying, if you could point to the collateral damage in all those incidents, could you use that against the Avengers to control them?”
Finally, Joe Russo spoke about the inclusion of William Hurt as General Thunderbolt Ross in the film.
“The job is to tie all these films together. To be able to pull from The Hulk, which may have been forgotten about a little bit, and make it relevant again within the cinematic universe, is important to us. We thought it would be interesting to take a character who had a fanatical anti-superhero point of view. Now he’s become much savvier and more political and has put himself in a position of power, not unlike a Colin Powell. He’s cornering the Avengers politically now, he’s out-manoeuvring them.”
Captain America: Civil War will be released on May 6, 2016.
