Joe and Anthony Russo, directors of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, recently had a Q&A with Nerdist where they talk about deleted scenes, the third movie in the franchise, and much more! Check out an excerpt below — click here for the complete interview!
N: Now that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is finally coming to home video, I have to ask if there are any deleted scenes that you are happy people will finally be able to see?
Joe Russo: Yeah, a couple of them. We really like those scenes, and it really is a function of watching the movie as a whole and thinking, “Oh, we could speed up here a little bit, maybe – maybe this point isn’t absolutely necessary.” But there is a scene between Sam Jackson and Scarlett that we said at the time is a master class of acting, where they have just two or three lines of dialogue, but it’s really fraught with baggage and back story. We think that’s a great scene, so we’re glad people get to see that.
There’s a great scene between Maria Hill and Jasper Sitwell that didn’t make it in the film, and also I thought it was really excellent acting between those characters – really grounded them. It showed a different side of them. For those two scenes, I think, we’re the happiest that people will finally get a chance to see.
N: So going into Captain America 3, what are some lessons that you learned fromThe Winter Soldier that are helping you in your approach?
AR: That’s an interesting question. What did we learn? It’s interesting, because these movies have such a long and thorough development process that you really go through a huge system of trial-and-error before you even get to executing the movie. So in terms of figuring out – we had very specific ideas about how we wanted the Captain to fight. His fighting style, we wanted him to have learned since he’s woken up in the modern world. He studied modern fighting techniques and warfare techniques.
That kind of stuff we worked out very thoroughly in prep, and you think about how that’s going to translate visually. How are we going to shoot it? What parts of it are going to be shot with practical effects on sight? Where are we going to sweeten things with visual effects, digital effects, in post? You go through a huge experimental process, in terms of figuring out how this thing works, so by the time you get to execution, everything is working like it’s supposed to.
So I think we’re just beginning a whole new process. I feel like Captain America 2worked, and we’re happy with it, and now we want Captain America 3 – we want to build it on the shoulders of Captain America 2, but we want to do something new and different and surprising with it. So we’re very much in that new process of trial-and-error and experimentation, both with the writers, Markus and McFeely, and with the visual development team and the producers, et cetera. So we’re kind of beginning a whole new process of trial-and-error.