How to write the biggest movie of all time

Above: Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans).

Below: Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus.

Avengers: Endgame screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely talk penning billion-dollar-plus blockbusters

Congratulations on having written the biggest film of all time! That’s a pretty great thing to have on your LinkedIn page.

Christopher Markus: [Laughs] It’s a little hard to grasp.

Stephen McFeely: I should join LinkedIn so I can put it on my page.

If you can’t humblebrag about that achievement, what’s the Internet even for?

SM: [The achievement] doesn’t hold a lot of water in my house. I’m still taking out the trash.

How do you deal with the amount of characters in a movie like Avengers: Endgame?

SM: We were on that movie for four years, but the critical, crazy-looking part was the last four months of 2015 when we got back from Civil War Not the Civil War, but shooting Civil War The planning for that period looks like Carrie from Homeland We had 3 x 5 cards all over the walls – movie one [Infinity War] on wall, movie two [Endgam another. Each wall trading cards of all characters in the M could move them around or put team together and think about, “What if they went to this place, or what if these people switched places? Who would be interesting together?” It was a really fun blue sky period and that lead to two outlines by the end of that year that turned into scripts that we re-wrote for the next two years. l process! st draft it or six riting ately and three to ur weeks writing together. And then on a Marvel movie, we wind up rewriting that movie ad infinitum. We realised after the very first script we wrote, where we sat shoulder to shoulder and argued over commas, that we got into the writing game because we like to write! And sometimes that’s by yourself. It’s important for every project to take four to six weeks to sit in your underwear and crank out pages.

How do you split up the writing workload between you both?

CM: Generally we will outline together until we come up with a long, extremely detailed outline so we’re clear on what’s happening. Then we’ll number it and separate it and be like, “You do one through five, I’ll do five through 10.” Then we’ll come together later and put it together and not edit it and just keep cranking through the outline until we have a large, unwieldy draft that we will then rewrite as if a third writer had written it. We sit at a desk together and fix this really pretty terrible script.

When writing an MCU film, you not only have to trace character arcs in a particular film, but their arcs over a huge series of films. How do you track it all?

CM: Again, you break out the 3 x 5 cards and start colour-coding and tracking people until you have a grasp of it. We’ve been around for it so much of it now that a lot of it is ingrained now.

SM: Some of it is our own, so Cap’s journey we’re pretty familiar with.

CM: With some characters you know they’re not going to get much screentime, so they won’t need a multi-stage arc – you might only touch on them two or three times in the movie. Every beat needs to be very precise, but it doesn’t have to move them as far as others.

SM: The job of Avengers: Endgame was to say goodbye to the original six Avengers, so that was where the major arc work was going to happen. Where did these characters need to get to by the end of the movie so we could feel good about saying goodbye to them?

Speaking of goodbyes: Old Steve Rogers is still alive. Could we him see feature in another MCU film?

SM: You mean a 100-yearold Cap? [Laughs]

CM: I’m sure you could make a hell of a movie starring a 100-year-old Cap, that would be awesome!

JAMES JENNINGS

AVENGERS: ENDGAME IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY, 4K ULTRA HD AND DIGITAL.