The Russo Brothers, Marvel’s Money-Minting Directors, Reveal Their Secret Weapons – Hollywood Reporter

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterOn the heels of ‘The Electric State,’ the two reveal that time they gave the studio back its fee, the “bad luck” actor they fought to cast and why the era of big-budget streaming features won’t be a “healthy part of the business” going forward.
By

Aaron Couch
Film Editor
If you had run into the brothers Joe and Anthony Russo as 20-somethings circa 1994, they probably wouldn’t have seemed like guys who’d become two of the biggest directors of all time. Both were living in their native Cleveland, where Anthony was a law student, and Joe, 17 months his junior, was attending drama school. Neither felt quite satisfied with their chosen path, so they both dropped out and pivoted to filmmaking, maxing out their credit cards to fund their $30,000 debut feature, Pieces, which has never been released but nonetheless caught the eye of a notable mentor, Steven Soderbergh, when it screened at Slamdance in 1997.

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From there, they took a winding road that led them to directing and executive producing critically adored (but ultimately canceled) shows such as Arrested Development, Happy Endings and Community, before landing a meeting at Marvel Studios. (Studio chief Kevin Feige was a Community fanatic.) Against the odds, they won the job to direct Captain America: The Winter Soldier and became the most important and prolific filmmakers on the Marvel roster, directing that $714 million grosser, the $1 billion hit Captain America: Civil War and a pair of Avengers movies that are among the top-grossing films of all time, with their total box office haul equaling $6.85 billion.

Along the way, they became trusted friends of Robert Downey Jr., who lured them back to direct him in two more Marvel films, 2026’s Avengers: Doomsday (which goes into production in London next month), and 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars.
“They’re like family now,” says Downey. “I’ve driven out to the North Fork of Long Island to visit Anthony and Ann [Russo’s wife] and will probably do so again this summer.” He also counts Joe and his wife, Alicia, as close friends with him and his wife, Susan.
After helming Avengers: Endgame, the Russos put their focus on their company AGBO, producing Netflix megahit Extraction and best picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. Their latest directorial effort, The Electric State, arrived on Netflix on March 14, and its reported $300 million budget is a testament to their status as name-brand directors able to get companies to buy in to their vision.
During a conversation in Beverly Hills in late February, the duo reflect on staying in debt for a decade after their debut feature, their return to Marvel — and why James Bond isn’t in their future.    

Anthony, you and Joe come from a tight-knit Cleveland family. Were they concerned when you dropped out of law school to become a filmmaker?
ANTHONY RUSSO I was living in our parents’ house at the time, and my dad stopped talking to me for six months.
You were two guys in your 20s with $30,000 in credit card debt that you used to finance a movie. Did you feel like you had a plan?
JOE RUSSO We were in way over our head. We couldn’t afford to develop the film. Once we shot the movie, we had the film in a refrigerator for almost a year. There could’ve been a blackout. We would’ve lost all the footage.
ANTHONY Then we started film school [Case Western Reserve University] and we were getting student loans from film school to finish that movie. We poured a lot on. We paid the debt from that movie for a decade.
So even after directing a George Clooney movie, 2002’s Welcome to Collinwood, the debt stayed?
JOE We were dumb enough on Welcome to Collinwood that the studio wanted us to cut two days from the schedule. We said no, and we gave them back our fee. We did the movie for free. So we stayed in debt.
When did you finally start making a living as directors?
JOE It was almost 10 years. It was probably around Arrested Development where we actually started making money that we could live off of.
How did you link up with Imagine Entertainment, which produced Arrested?
JOE We did a pilot for FX for a show called Lucky. Might’ve been our favorite thing we’ve ever done. The show didn’t last more than one season, but it was pretty radical in tone.

ANTHONY We probably got more meetings off of that pilot, even though the show didn’t work. Everybody all of a sudden wanted to meet with us. One of them was Imagine.
JOE They said, “We have this crazy script. It’s 70 pages long and it’s supposed to be a 22-minute show, but the writer’s brilliant. Could you come in and help try to cut the script down, add a vision to this?” It was like 24 location changes in five days. How could we possibly pull this off?
ANTHONY They hired us because we were known as guerrilla filmmakers who were doing something interesting in the indie space. They threw the ball to us and said, “Try to reinvent how we can make television in a way that’s affordable, but also creatively stimulating.”
JOE Our solution was, use digital Betamax cameras, shoot with almost no lighting. Shoot without permits. We sent out a [note] to the cast that basically said, “Do your own hair and makeup, expect to be running gun, expect to be chased off premises.”
ANTHONY “Show up in your costume each day.” They ended up nixing a bunch of our ideas because they’re like, “These are all union violations.”
Who was the hardest character to cast in Arrested Development?
JOE It was Gob. [Will] Arnett showed up like a week before shooting.
ANTHONY [Jason] Bateman’s was very tough as well.
JOE We literally had to bring him into the studio four times to get him cast because he had been in a bunch of failed pilots. So he was viewed as baggage at that time. Mitch [Hurwitz, the show creator] was very nervous. He was like, “This could be bad luck if we cast him.”

The show was loved by critics, but wasn’t a ratings hit. It did start the next phase of your career as the guys who can come in and oversee critically acclaimed, inventive TV.
JOE The head of the studio hated how we shot the pilot. I remember her calling us on day three and saying, “These dailies are never going to come together.”
ANTHONY But the show’s lifeline was, everybody’s assistant loved the show.
JOE Then a year later, we all won Emmys and sort of the rest is history.
ANTHONY We did do a movie in that run, which was You, Me and Dupree. That wasn’t an ideal situation for us, the way it worked. We hadn’t been used to bigger-budget studio filmmaking at that point.
JOE But that was the movie that paid off our debt finally. That was the first thing we ever made that made money that people considered a financial success.
When did Kevin Feige come into your lives?  
JOE In season two of Community, we were going to get Justin Lin to come back and do the paintball episodes, and he couldn’t because of his schedule and Fast & Furious. So we ended up doing the paintball episodes and one was the Star Wars spoof. Kevin is the biggest Star Wars fan you’ll ever meet. Our agent called —
ANTHONY — “Marvel has a list of 10 directors that they want to talk to about the next Captain America movie, and you guys are on it.” That was unbelievable to us. They just were meeting with people who were doing interesting things. They didn’t even let us read the script until after the first meeting. Over those two months, the movie kind of took over our lives. We fell in love with it, and we were doing storyboards. We were rewriting scenes just to show them tonally what we would do. We created an animatic, to give them an idea of tone and texture, and we finally won.

JOE We were running Community at the time, which was no small gig. That was a very complicated show. A lot of personalities — messy personalities — involved in that show. Every episode was a big creative swing. It was a really intense period for us. I remember sleeping in the trailer on the lot of Community quite a bit just to keep up with the edits and prep for Captain America.
ANTHONY But before we went in for that last meeting on Marvel, my wife reminds me that I said to her, “Look, if we don’t get this movie, I have to rethink my entire career. I don’t understand any of that if this doesn’t happen.” It just felt like the movie was ours.
JOE We were very happy in television. We had a lot of creative control. We didn’t have a lot of headaches. We could push around studio executives and heads of studios, and get things done the way we wanted to get them done. So if we’re going to go back to film, it’s got to be something valuable and something we’re really excited about.
You’ve had a lot of key meetings in your life. How high does trying to recruit Robert Downey Jr. to star in Captain America: Civil War rank?
ANTHONY We pitched Kevin on the idea and Kevin goes, “All right, I buy it. Now you guys got to go get Downey.” And I was like, “What do you mean we got to go get Downey? Aren’t you coming?” And he didn’t.
JOE Downey was sitting on a chaise lounge, splayed out like a king, on the roof of his office in Venice. Ant and I showed up and we’ve been rehearsing this pitch, and you’re literally pitching the biggest movie star in the world to take his giant cash cow character and convert it into a villain.

ANTHONY In a Captain America movie.
JOE In a movie that wasn’t even titled after his character. And it was the pitch of our lives. And he said, “Yes, let’s do it.” He liked the risk, to Robert’s credit, and that choice led the explosive upside to Infinity War and Endgame.
In the years since Endgame became one of the biggest movies of all time, you’ve gone on to focus on AGBO, which is a major company now. Who are your peers that you can go to for advice on the business end of things?
ANTHONY Look at the two directors that we interacted with early in our career: Steven Soderbergh, who is a radical self-generator and operates outside of the system, and Ron Howard, who runs Imagine, which is a kissing cousin to what AGBO would become. We didn’t deep dive with Ron about that, but he was certainly a figure that we studied.
JOE Taking power into your own hands, getting your own financing, working on your own timeline. Making what you want to make, financing what you want to develop. You do grow tired of the studio system. We thought, “If we don’t escape the system, we’re going to burn out and want to quit.” And AGBO reinvigorated us and gave us a lot of opportunities to express ourselves in other ways. Working with younger filmmakers, like with Everything Everywhere All at Once, creating Extraction.
You’ve been at the forefront of change — from spearheading an indie filmmaking approach to TV in the 2000s, to the Marvel boom, to the streaming wars. Where do you see things going next?

JOE We are in the biggest transitional moments in the history of linear visual storytelling. It’s very hard to say in this moment where it’s going because a lot of that is going to be dictated by the taste of Gen Z once they become the dominant consumers. And I don’t know that anyone knows what their taste is yet because they have been trained on a completely different model of consumption than we are used to. I expect radical change, I expect immersion, I expect a blending of virtual and linear, gaming and linear.
You helped spearhead that brief era of megabudget streaming movies with The Gray Man and now The Electric State. Do you think streamers will continue to take $250 to $300 million swings?
JOE They ascribe the same algorithmic attention to something they spend a lot of money on as something they spend very little money on. By that model, you should probably just make everything for a medium number, right? Logically, it probably doesn’t make a ton of sense to continue to spend that way, but I think they might — because people still believe in ambition. Executives still believe in ambition. People still want the branding that comes with ambition. They still want that sex appeal that comes with ambition. So I still think you’ll see some of those pop through, but I don’t think it’s going to be a healthy part of the business model.
ANTHONY The Electric State is certainly a big test case for this whole thing. The struggle is, can you eventize a streaming [film] when they don’t create any sense of special place in terms of how they’re presenting to the audience for a movie to say it is an event — and they don’t go out into the wider marketplace to declare that an event. But they have tried using the tools they have available to them to eventize this film, and we’ve tried. So we’ll see how this plays, we’ll see what this does for Netflix and we’ll see where it all goes.

Citadel showed Amazon the power of a Bond-style franchise. Is directing an actual Bond movie something you would entertain now that Amazon has control over the property?
JOE We’re focused on the next two Avengers movies. But we love Bond. We love working with Amazon. We’ve got a number of projects at AGBO that we’re developing for us to direct right after the Avengers films.
Do you see a role for AI in filmmaking? How do you have nuanced conversation about the topic, given that some people may fear the worst versus seeing the benefits?
ANTHONY We have to approach AI the same way we approach all technological innovations. It’s potentially a valuable tool, but it’s the kind of tool that artists always have to remain in control of, but there’s going to be some valuable role in the creative process and the filmmaking process.
AGBO is based in downtown Los Angeles, and you’ve had plenty of production there. A big topic of conversation is how to bring production back to L.A. What do you think it would take?
JOE The rebate. We have larger productions that can save tens of millions of dollars by shooting in the U.K. or in Australia. The only way you can keep projects here is by being competitive with the rebate. It’s a shame, because this town was built around the industry, and the industry seems all but gone now.
Doomsday is the first MCU movie that you and AGBO will produce. On practical terms, how does that change the equation from your previous MCU movies?

JOE It just involves more of the infrastructure from AGBO and all the things that we’ve built at the company to help us as filmmakers, the personnel infrastructure, as well as the technological advancements from our innovation team.
ANTHONY We’re just excited to bring the storytelling tools and techniques that we’ve developed at AGBO over the past few years to our work at Marvel.
There was a leak of an Avengers concept art recently. Often the final movie doesn’t reflect that artwork. Should anyone be worried about being unwillingly spoiled?
JOE No, because that artwork was not from Avengers: Doomsday or Secret Wars.
ANTHONY Nothing spoiling in there. That’s not our concept art.
With your previous Avengers movies, there was a now-famous set of baseball cards with a card for every Marvel actor, and they included how many movies the actors were contracted for. Was there an equivalent on these movies? How do you figure out who is in these movies?
ANTHONY Yes, we continue to use the baseball cards.
JOE Now they have magnets on them so we can put ‘em on a board and look at ‘em. It’s the only way to keep track of the amount of characters that we’re working with.
ANTHONY And as far as how do we look at who’s in the movies, it’s just a long creative process of exploring where we want to take the story. What is the most surprising and exciting area for us to push into, and which characters help us in that effort?

Avatar 2, Deadpool & Wolverine and Spider-Man: No Way Home show that people still will show up to the theater for these massive movies, but given changes to the theatrical landscape since Endgame, are you approaching these Avengers movies any differently?  
JOE We can’t control the economic environment. We can’t control what’s happening in the world around the time of the release. We can’t control the audience’s desire to leave their homes or not. All we can do is make the best movie possible in the hope that it excites them.
This story appears in the March 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySend us a tip using our anonymous form.

Source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/avengers-doomsday-directors-1236161664/