The Avengers (2012): Joss Whedon Demanded A War Movie

[[wysiwyg_imageupload:850:]]Joss Whedon attended the recent SXSW, the film and music festival in Austin, TX, and the gang at LeakyNews managed to wait all day until The Avengers director took his turn for a panel.

Whedon discussed his other projects and The Avengers at length, but regarding the latter did state when Marvel initially approached him that he demanded to do a war movie. He also said he didn’t just want it to be a typical good guy vs. similar bad guy flick as well.

The first thing I said to the people at Marvel was, I want to make a war movie.

A lot of these movies do a beautiful setup and the hero fights a slightly larger version of himself, and it’s clean. I just wanted to dirty it up, I wanted to really put them through their paces. The feeling you get from a good movie like – oh my god it’s still coming, we’re not going to get out of this alive – that’s the feeling I wanted to make.

Whedon also mentions the restrictions put on him by Marvel, and again how he feels it is a good thing.

Limitations are something I latch onto. A novelist–has a blank page. A genre writer never has a blank page. — That’ useful to me. By the same token the restriction of budget or set or location, anything like that, can be really useful. When you can have everything, everybody wants to give you everything and then it’s very hard to make things feel real, to make things feel lived in.

Head on over to LeakyNews via the link above for more from The Avengers director Joss Whedon.

The Avengers assembles May 4th, 2012 and is directed by Joss Whedon, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Captain America, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye.

Check out the Cosmic Book News The Avengers Movie Hub for more news, images and trailers.