Anna Boden and Ryan K. Fleck are a team of American film directors, editors, and screenwriters best known for their collaborations on Half Nelson, Sugar, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Mississippi Grind and recently wrote and directed Captain Marvel. They have been collaborating for almost 14 years, both writing, directing and editing as well. They talk about the elements of the film that influenced and created that ’90s vibe.
Screen Rant: Amazing job. I’ve been a Captain Marvel fan for a very, very long time back. When she was Binary on the X-Men. But when you guys got hired, what themes did you want to explore and during production, what themes did you discover in the film?
Screen Rant: Blockbuster is obviously prominently featured in this film. Uh, if you were to go to a Blockbuster and pick out movies from the ’90s to help inspire Captain Marvel, what would those films be?
Anna Boden: From the very beginning I think that what we saw in the comics that we wanted to bring to life on the screen was that we have this strong character who’s confident and like amazingly powerful, but at the same time so human. And we wanted to explore somebody who, you know, the theme of self discovery and discovering that what makes us powerful isn’t just our strength and our confidence, but also our vulnerability and, and things that some people consider weaknesses and embracing all of that is what gives us our power. And in production. What did we discover?
Ryan Fleck: Oh, I dunno if we deviated too much. I mean, I’m sure we discovered something, but I don’t have a quick answer for it this moment.
Screen Rant: The character that I wanted to see in this film but wasn’t there was Rick Jones, but I was curious, is there any other characters that didn’t quite make it into the film that you were like, all right, maybe we might try like a Rick Jones or I know that Kamala Khan was hidden in a panel before she debuted and I think it’s Captain Marvin were 14, I believe. Uh, so is there any other characters that you wanted to kind of bring in here that to make it?
Ryan Fleck: Hmm, definitely we looked at Terminator 2. It’s not nineties film, but we looked at Robocop a bunch for this movie, Matrix of course and even the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Again not a 90s movie, but threw some of that in the mix as well.
Screen Rant: Now Marvel Comics has a tradition of being progressive with their storytelling, using the actual comic book as almost. as a mirror image of a backdrop of what society is kind of going through. With the Marvel films expanding, Marvel’s definitely stepped up to the plate and started doing that. So how do you balance the subtext of this movie along with it being such an adventurous storyline?
Anna Boden: Another character that we loved from the comics that didn’t make it was Hellen Cobb. But I think that we have some of her spirit in here anyway.
Screen Rant: I grew up with the music in this film. So I have to know what was maybe one of your favorite songs this in this film.
Anna Boden: What gets us excited about any movie is the social relevance and the character themes and the character journeys and like the adventure story. And the fun of it is kind of part of what you have to do to get people to enjoy the other stuff. And so that’s really where we come at it from. And then making people laugh, making people, making people have a good time. That’s just how, how we express the kind of platter that we give the other stuff on.
Screen Rant: I like it. Me, I like Nirvana. So there we go. A great job on the film, guys. Thank you so much. I love this movie.
Ryan Fleck: Garbage is one of my favorites. How about yourself? Um,
Anna Boden: well, I just love a bunch of the songs in the movie. I don’t want to choose just one. But I’m going to have to go Salt and Peppa.
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- captain marvel Release Date: 2019-03-08 The Avengers 4 Release Date: 2019-04-26 spider-man homecoming 2 Release Date: 2019-07-02
