The Russo Brothers Break Down their Career from "Arrested Development" to "Avengers: Endgame"

We grew up film fanatics.

We weren't, you know, we were sort of film geeks,

guys that liked to watch a lot of movies

and talk about a lot of movies.

And I remember the day that we told our father

that he was gonna drop out of law school to make a movie.

Yeah, it was a rough day.

Hello, we're the Russo brothers.

I'm Anthony. And I'm Joe,

and this is the timeline of our careers.

[soft piano music]

LAX 2194.

Yes, if you pull this up on IMDb,

you'll this interesting title there.

Yeah, it's called LAX 2194.

We had nothing to do with that project,

so we don't know why it's on our IMDb page.

We've actually tried for years

to get it off our IMDb page, unsuccessfully.

We've never heard of it. We were in Cleveland

at the time going to school.

We have no idea what the project is.

So IMDb, if you're listening, please,

can you take that off our page?

We've never heard of it our very, very

first movie was called Pieces, Joe and I made it,

I think we shot it between like 94 and 97,

took us about three years.

Which is why we weren't working on LAX 2190 something.

It took us three years to shoot this movie

in our hometown of Cleveland, Ohio using friends

and family as cast and crew.

Yeah, we were inspired by Robert Rodriguez who had

recently made El Mariachi and wrote

a book about how he made a movie for $7,000.

We unfortunately did not get this

movie done for $7000, it cost us

a little bit more than that we ran out of money.

Yeah we did.

Remember, we shot it on 16 millimeter,

we ran out of money and we had to keep the negative

in the fridge.

For six months, it sat in a fridge, the entire film,

the entire film.

We would've lost the whole movie, we were sort of

film geeks guys that liked to watch a lot of movies

and talk about a lot of movies and we weren't

necessarily Spielberg in the backyard with the camera

shooting film through, so we really didn't know

how to make a movie we had to buy some books to

teach ourselves how to do it, found the one guy

in Cleveland that could be a DP and I remember the day

that we told our father that he was gonna drop out of law

school to make a movie.

It was a rough day.

Yeah, our dad didn't speak to him for six months

It was, it was a lot of awkward meals at the dinner table.

Yeah, it was awkward for a period there

but he eventually came around and became one of

our biggest champions so he became very happy

at some point with my choices.

We're not here, sitting right here

without our father so.

Yeah.

This was a very experimental genre film.

the kind of movie that only a guy like

Steven Soderbergh would enjoy and thank goodness

he was actually sitting in the theater

for that screening.

Said he really liked the movie

and it was the start of our career.

We never released it because we used a lot of music

in that movie that we actually cut the film to,

we didn't know anything about the film business

and how much music costs so when we went to clear

Led Zeppelin and Funkadelic and all these other

awesome bands we'd used in the movie,

we couldn't afford it.

We were sort of like what, we need to pay for this stuff?

Really?

It's a film, it's a disaster

It's a documentary its supposed to look like that

Good news is the safe is crackable.

I received a phone call while I was living in

UCLA student housing and I picked it up

and the voice on the other end said hi this is

Steven Soderbergh, is Joe there?

I was getting a MFA degree in film at the time

at UCLA and I thought it was one of my other fellow

classmates messing with me and fortunately for us

it was actually Steven Sodherbergh.

We went to eat with him at a Cruside Cuban restaurant

on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles

and had a really interesting conversation with him.

He said he wanted to produce our next film

and help us get into the business,

he really liked some of the stylized elements

of Pieces and thought we had potential.

It was gonna become our Godfather so to speak.

At which point we, Joe and I went into

about a three year cycle where we wrote

three screenplays, eventually Steven

formed a partnership with George Clooney

when they were making Ocean's Eleven, so they

had a production company based at Warner Brothers

and we got a call one day from the head

of their production company and he said basically

Steven wants to produce some other movies through this

company and you guys were the first names he brought up,

so we sort of showed up with our three scripts

that we had written and Steven said

that one and we made Welcome to Collinwood.

Took us about a year to cast the movie.

We were relatively unknown filmmakers

with a movie that only Steven Soderbergh liked

so it was you know, not necessarily a calling card

film and we sat on the couch in George and Steven's

office, we used to call it the Russo brothers corner

and we had a phone and a side table and we'd make

calls all day just trying to get actors interested,

talking to agents.

This was in the very, like right around 2000, I think

right when we were doing this so it was way after

that sort of the epic 90s, the indie films of the 90s

so we were able to target like some of our

favorites from those movies.

Yeah.

Sam Rockwell, William H. Macy, Patricia Clarkson.

Michael Jeter, Isaiah Washington.

George Clooney played a role in the film.

George actually jumpstart the movie.

We couldn't get the budget we need until George

actually took a role, a small role, in the film.

Yeah.

But he steals every scene he's in,

playing a safe cracker who teaches 'em, teaches our group

of criminals how to crack a safe

which is the plot of the whole film.

We were able to go back home to Cleveland where we

had made Pieces originally and you know

the prior film we had made was basically

a do it yourself movie where the crew is like,

you can count 'em on one hand.

So we go to our first day of shooting on Welcome

to Collinwood in Cleveland and we're shooting

in this warehouse area and we start to pull up to set,

the two of us on the first day and all of the sudden

there's all these trucks all over the place,

all these police all over the place and I start

to get really anxious and Joe and I are looking

at each other, what the heck's going on,

we're supposed to shoot here today,

everything's in the way.

There's cops and trucks all over the place.

We had no idea that this was our crew

and the police were there for our production.

We literally, we had no frame of reference

for that scale of production

Go from a budget like that to a budget like that

you get cops and trucks.

By slightly, you mean 200 times the budget.

That's right.

But it was still minuscule compared to Captain America

Winter Soldier so we had to shoot some complicated

stunts on this movie, one of which

involved hanging Michael Jeter and Sam Rockewell

from a pipe about 30 feet over the ground

for a sequence in which they were trying to sneak across

a pipe in order to get into this apartment

to break into a safe.

The learning curve was steep again

for guys who had played just about

every role on their first movie behind the scenes.

Now we had to start understanding how other departments

worked 'cause that movie was our film school essentially.

Yeah, it very much was.

[upbeat music]

This was right after the rise of The Sopranos

and I think The Shield had just premiered on FX.

FX was striving to be like the free cable HBO.

That's where I met a guy named Kevin Riley.

Yeah, Kevin Riley.

Who was a real maverick, very smart executive.

The time when they were trying to make

television more cinematic

they couldn't afford like the big feature director.

They began looking at indie directors

to bring to television for the first time so

somebody had somehow mentioned us to Kevin

liked what we were doing and he offered us

this pilot called Lucky which was a very

strange comedy about a degenerate gambler.

And we shot it handheld and really aggressive

and different and it caught a lot of peoples attention

in the industry and I think the show lasted one season

it was one of our favorites.

Or even just a few episodes, yeah.

The pilot became kind of an industry favorite

and I can't tell you how many meetings we got as

a result of that pilot, people really loved it.

Luckily, that pilot got in the hands of Ron Howard

and David Nevins and they had a pilot script

for a show that they were really excited about

called Arrested Development.

Michael look, look what happened to my fox.

Someone cut off his little foot, is it noticeable?

Well, you gotta remember you're gonna be all spattered

in red paint that's gonna distract the eye.

Ron Howard said a very interesting

thing to us at the time, he's like, he felt like

it was really important to try to reinvent what

television comedy could be, that was the aspiration

of that show I mean, which is a tall order.

Because reality television was coming in

and it was taking up all the time slots 'cause

it was really cheap and you know

he felt like sitcoms were stale

and single camera comedies were becoming the thing

of the moment the problem was that they were expensive.

So they went to indie filmmakers like us to try

to figure out a way to accomplish everything that they

wanted on a budget.

So Dogma was big at the time, it was a film movement,

it was very stripped down film movement

and Anthony and I thought well all right

so let's just Dogma Arrested Development

and we wrote a cover letter to the cast saying

everyone gets the same trailer, be prepared to

do your own hair and makeup,

we're gonna move quickly, natural light.

The first two things never happened by the way but

they were part of our initial idea.

The spirit of them, but you know

we were pushing everybody to work at a certain pace

and we came up with this idea to use digital

cameras and these were the first, it was the first

time I think in network history, that someone had

shot, or asked to shoot a narrative show

with digital cameras so of course

the network thought we were insane,

remember this was like 2002.

Yeah, we wanted it to feel like a mockumentary,

we were also being very referential to

reality television which was taking over

the programming at the time.

It felt like people understood the aesthetic behind it.

Yeah, so their big concern was like oh you guys can't

shoot on digital video cameras it's gonna look like crap

and we were like, we want it to look like crap

that's the whole point,

that's the whole aesthetic we're going for.

And also the point is that with digital camera

you move much faster you keep the camera rolling

so you can just shout out ad libs to the actors

and they can just keep going.

It was a tool for us to really try to reinvent

how things were being made, what budget level

they were being made and that yeah,

I mean there's a lot other to the narrative

of Arrested Development.

We convinced them that you know, that was the way to

go and then we had to get the script down from

60 pages to shootable.

I think we ended up shooting a 36 page script.

So the other thing about Arrested Development and this was

an innovation that we came up with

while we were trying to figure out how to shoot

this enormously long pilot is the element of the narrator

which was performed by Ron Howard,

you know that narration in Arrested Development allowed

us in the editing process or even in the script

process to pull out chunks of the story

so that we could just get to the funny parts

you know, so anything any sort of plot that we

needed to summarize Ron Howard could do it very quick

as a narrator.

I think we came up with this two weeks before we shot.

Yeah.

We were sitting in a room with Mitch going

how do we get all this, you know

how do we get all this plot out of the way.

We had tried to cut the script other

ways and we couldn't do it.

There were other techniques that we came up with

which included flashbacks so that we could

get really quick story bites out.

The narrator was the key to all that because

it allowed us to go anywhere at any time.

So with the show like Peer Pressure

I think which was episode nine of season one

where I believe it's Buster wants George Michael to get

weed for Lucille because she's having dizzy vertigo

attacks this sort of crazy episode unfolds

and I think ultimately that might've been

like a penultimate episode in terms of all the stylistic

techniques we used on that show plus the level of insanity

that it reaches at the ends, the shootout on the docks

with the hot cops and a bunch of fake drug dealers.

If you look at Peer Pressure

as a sort of a way to encapsulate

what Arrested Development is,

I think it really touches on

the thematics of the show which have to do

with parents and children and and the tone,

the insane tone of the show.

[upbeat music]

So we just won an Emmy on Arrested Development

for the pilot and it'd given us

a lot of political capital in the television space

and we were able to pick and choose projects

moving forward, one script that came across our desks

we really fell in love with was written by

Dan Harmon and it was called Community

and it was about a collection of misfits

at a community college and we just thought it was a genius

idea and that the execution of the script

was you know, really per our taste

it was layered, it was clever, it had really

unique characters in it.

It had call backs, call forwards

it really reminded us of Arrested Development

in a lot of ways.

I should say our approach to television

was exactly what our approach to indie filmmaking was

prior to that which was you know we would approach

a project from the very beginning

just with a script basically and then we would

build the show out from there like a feature director would.

What excited us about working on those shows was that

you could come in and create a world

and that's what people came to us for to create worlds

and they asked us to come in and executive produce

this show and sort of godfather it.

We came up with a very different look

than Arrested Development we just felt like

these were two very different shows

there's more of magical realism

to Community and I think the tie that

binds on all the projects that we work on from

Pieces to Collinwood to Arrested to Community

up til this point were all about ensemble casts

and all about misfit families that were

either bonded by blood or bonded by friendship

and Community was a show that once we created

a sandbox and everybody jumped in and started

playing the box just kept getting bigger

and bigger and bigger.

We started to think about the pilot like a John Hughes

movie you know we were very referential to

that in terms of the style of which we approached

the pilot to Community with

and then that evolved like I think we were

once the show got picked up and we wanted to move

forward we're talking with Dan

we didn't want to stay stuck in that genre so we

began to dabble in various genres with that

show and sort of run different episodes

at sort of different narrative conceits

and cinematic conceits and that really became

part of the lifeblood of what that show was.

[upbeat music]

You know if you ask Kristin out from statistics

she'd probably say yes.

That's why I don't ask.

Too shy or too scared?

We'd had about a decade run in television

that went really really well and during that run

Joe and I had started to think about

transitioning back to features and we really wanted

to do an action feature and we were working on

an idea together for that when all of the sudden our

agent called up and basically said you know,

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 so they had already

made Captain America The First Avenger

and they were thinking about making another one

and for some reason we showed up on

that list, later, we found out why

when we went in to finally meet with Kevin Feige

and his team.

We had directed these two paintball episodes

on season two of Community and the paintball

episodes in Community were well known

because they were action spoofs.

Dustin Lynch is a very close friend of

ours and had done the one in season one

and we did two episodes back to back in

season two one was based on

spoofing Sergio Leone and the other was spoofing

Star Wars, Kevin, it turned out

Kevin Feige who runs Marvel

was a huge fan of the paintball episodes

and asked us to come in and talk about what

we would do with Captain America.

Yeah, we did it and one thing I love

about Marvel is that they don't necessarily

bring people in who they think are actually hireable,

they're really just going out of creative exploration

so you know, the conversations with us could've

just ended there but things clicked

and we kept I think over two months

we maybe met with Marvel over four times

over two months where we kept getting more

and more specific about what we would do

with the second Captain America movie.

The fortunate thing about being asked

to do a Captain America film is that

I started collecting comics when I was a kid

I still have my collection,

it's a really big collection and in my closet

and I think stories that speak to you

as a child that you have an emotional

connection to stay with you for your whole life

in a way that no other story can so

I think I learned a lot about narrative from reading comic

books, Anth was a Lord of the Rings fanatic

he used to carry it around like a bible everywhere

he went and I had a stack of comic books

and that's I think that's where the two of us learned

to tell stories at a very early age.

We had the bug to do a movie like this

and I think there's very few phone calls

coming off of Community that could've pulled us away

from that show.

I think that and that movie was surprising for

a lot of people you know not a lot, I don't think

anyone thought of us at that point as action directors

but we wanted to do a really hardcore

action film 'cause it's one of our favorite genres

and styles and the movie worked really well

and we ended up having a long run with the MCU.

[dramatic music]

So continuing our work with ensembles on

Captain America Civil War we supersized it

from Winter Soldier, I think worked with

more characters than were in any Marvel movie

up to date at that point it really sort of started

trending in that direction of what would ultimately become

Infinity War and Endgame.

The main set piece of that film

of course is a battle between the Avengers,

they'd split into two sides over the course

of the movie to a philosophical divide

and it was set in an airport in Germany,

you know from a staging standpoint

it was by far and away the most

complex thing we had done in our careers

up to that point and I think took a good

50 days of shooting to execute.

It was almost like a movie within the movie

it was such a complex and large sequence

and a lot of people ask us, you know

how do we approach action, how do we execute action,

I think that sequence is a really good example of how Joe

and I approach it but like we always,

we design everything around character

you know all action for us is just

an expression of character and specific

to the narrative of what's happening with that character

that moment in the story and I think if you look at

the airport sequence in Civil War

you'll see the whole sequence

is sort of a series of character moments

where everybody is having a very unique

experience to where they are in the narrative

at that point and that gives us the shape

and the form for the sequence

and gives us a narrative thrust

to push through the sequence.

All that for a drop of blood.

[dramatic music]

You know Joe and I throughout our careers

we've always tried to find unique ways to work

unique opportunities and unique

forms to work in because we feel like it allows us to tap

into different creative muscles and find original

expressions and one of the great things

about the MCU is that it's serialized storytelling

on a scale in movie theaters

that's never been attempted before

so because it's serialized

that provided us with opportunities

as storytellers to go to places that you

normally can't go to in a single

stand alone two hour movie.

So when we realized with our partners

Marcus and McFeely who are the writers

on all of our Marvel movies that we could

possibly create a movie where the bad guy wins

and get away with it, it was very exciting

to us on a story telling level for many reasons,

one of which is you don't normally see movies

where the bad guy wins but and number two is

you know we all have lives where unfortunately

the bad guys do win sometimes so the opportunity

to go there on a narrative level was really

exciting to us because we could deliver people

a movie that had a difficult ending

but wouldn't be so devastating to them

because they knew there was a potential future,

there was a potential road forward

because these movies are serialized

so that was the big swing that we took with

Avengers Infinity War.

One of the other trends I think in

our work besides ensembles is deconstruction.

We like to deconstruct, I think Community is a show

about deconstruction of pop culture,

Arrested Development is a show about

the deconstruction of a family, of an insane family

and if you look at every choice, big choice

that we've made in the Marvel universe it's about

deconstruction, I think that we lined up really well

with phases in which we got involved

in Marvel, they had already built the beginnings

and typically what you do in a second act

is you deconstruct the beginning

and you tear it down and then in the third act

you build it back up

so if you look at our work over Winter Soldier,

Civil War and Infinity War as the second act

leading into the third act which is Endgame

we're deconstructing, in Winter Soldier, we tell

you that the good guys are the bad guys.

In Civil War, we divorced the Avengers from one

another and because they're divorced in Infinity War

they lose and half the universe is killed

which would lead us to Endgame.

[dramatic music]

We will.

Look, Endgame was a great creative

opportunity for us in that it was the ending

you know, it was our job to no longer

think about where the MCU goes in the future

but simply like to look back at the previous 21 movies

and provide the most satisfying ending to

that narrative that we can so you know

what a ridiculous opportunity where

Joe and I got to use these characters

and build upon this narrative

that had been contributed to by so many

wonderful artists through the years

even through the decades going all the way back to

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and so that was an amazing

opportunity for us as filmmakers.

You know if you had told us when we were kids

that we'd ever have the opportunity

to tell that story we would have

never believed you.

I think if you wanna assess the arcs of the two leads

of the Marvel universe, you know

Cap starting off where he did

and then you know at the end self actualize

to live out a life with his lost love,

Tony, in a certain way was always fated to die.

He was a futurist who always saw

death on the horizon, and couldn't rest until

he defeated it even if it cost him his life

and what's fascinating about him is that

he went from an egoist to selfless.

Cap goes from service to self actualization

so they have really, I think compelling arcs,

the two of them over the course of their films

and we're very happy with the end of Endgame.

We like layered storytelling, we like surprises,

we like to create sort of density of narrative

you know people on a second view or third view,

because we like to watch movies multiple times,

can find little nuances or subtle references

that they didn't see the first time around.

I think really what it is, is like Joe and I we

grew up film geeks we didn't grow up filmmakers.

The dialogue around movies was really important to us

'cause like if we weren't watching movies

we were talking about movies, I think one reason why we

like to sort of layer movies with all these sort of

interesting, just not ideas or elements is

that we love the conversation that can flow from those

kinds of things and we've got so much

in our own minds that of being apart of those

conversations that we're just trying

to sort of you know create films

that do that same thing.

Generate our own conversations.