In a new interview with Vanity Fair, “The Marvels” director Nia DaCosta revealed she was in frequent contact with previous Marvel directors before and during the making of her MCU tentpole. She asked Chloé Zhao (“Eternals”), James Gunn (“Guardians of the Galaxy”) and Taika Waititi (“Thor: Ragnarok”) before accepting “The Marvels” directing gig if entering the Marvel world was a good idea.
“Are they going to kill me and destroy my soul? Is Kevin Feige a bad man?” she joked. “And they were like, ‘No, he’s just a good guy who was a nerd.’”
During the making of “The Marvels,” DaCosta would text “Shang-Chi” director Destin Daniel Cretton on tough shoot days. She would text him “I’m overwhelmed” and “I’m so stressed.”
As DaCosta told Vanity Fair, “Sometimes you’d be in a scene and you’d be like, ‘What the hell does any of this shit mean?’ Or an actor’s looking at some crazy thing happening in space, and they’re [actually] looking at a blue X. There were obviously hard days, and days where you’re like, ‘This just isn’t working.’”
“The Marvels” is a sequel to “Captain Marvel” that teams Brie Larson’s eponymous superhero with Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau from “WandaVision” and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan from “Ms. Marvel.” It’s been a shaky year for comic book tentpoles, with Marvel’s own “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and other films like “The Flash” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” flopping at the box office. Marvel is surely hoping “The Marvels” pans out more like “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” ($845 million worldwide).
“I think superhero fatigue absolutely exists,” DaCosta told Total Film magazine earlier this year. “The biggest difference from the other MCU movies to date is that [‘The Marvels’ is] really wacky, and silly. The worlds we go to in this movie are worlds unlike others you’ve seen in the MCU. Bright worlds that you haven’t seen before.”
While DaCosta tried to bring as much of her voice into the MCU as possible, she still noted to Vanity Fair that “The Marvels” is “a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie. So I think you live in that reality, but I tried to go in with the knowledge that some of you is going to take a back seat.”
“It was really great to play in this world, and to be a part of building this big world,” she added, “but it made me just want to build my own world more.”
“The Marvels” is set to open in theaters Nov. 10 from Disney.
