Screenwriter Zac Penn Talks about THE AVENGERS and Production Starts Next Week
I'm incredibly excited to see how The Avengers is going to turn out. This is the movie we've all been waiting for, and if they can pull this off right we are going to have one hell of an epic movie of greatness. All of our favorite Marvel superheroes teaming up to kick some ass. On top of the it's got a big incredibly awesome cast of actors! The director of the film Joss Whedon recently revealed that The Avengers production will start next week. In a recent interview he told the New York Times...
We’re just a hardscrabble bunch. Guerilla filmmaking. I start production a week from Monday. I’m going to get started on the script now. Apparently that’s a thing. I don’t get it. Improv stunts are always way more exciting-looking.
The first screenwriter of the film Zac Penn also talked about The Avengers in a few different interviews with different websites. For those of you who don't know Penn also worked on Xen 2, X-Men: The Last Stand, Elektra, and The Incredible Hulk. Of course Whedon has taken over the script and has done a pretty hefty re-write. Penn signed a non-disclosure agreement so he doesn't really go into a lot of details, but he talks about what he can.
Whedon has a pretty big fan base, but there are a few skeptics out there that don't think he will be able to pull of a great Avengers film. I always thought he had the talent to pull off something special, and apprently so does Penn.
Do you believe in Joss Whedon? Do you believe in him? I believe in him! That’s my comment. If you believe in Joss you should be excited... Actually Joss and I went to the same college so we have a long history. I’m very excited. I can’t wait to see what happens with it, you know. And it’s weird because “Alphas” is kind of almost the inverse. If you know the comic book world, this is kind of the flipside of something like “The Avengers,” so it will be weird next year to have “Avengers” coming out while I’m working on this show.
Penn went on to talk about writing a script like The Avengers and the pressure behind it, especially from the fans.
Well, you’ve got to try to not think about those things. You have to. A lot of times, the fans have pretty smart things to say about what they’d like to see. Quite often, their interpretation of why it wasn’t what they wanted it to be is a little skewed. A lot of times, people talk about why this movie or that movie is terrible, and I feel like, “That’s not why it was terrible. It was terrible for this reason.” But, I do think it’s valuable to know what it is that people want to see in the movie. Particularly on something like The Avengers, or the X-Men movies, it’s such a slippery slope. You’ve got to just try to put your head in the sand and write the best story you can. It is literally impossible to please everybody. You can’t please fans who don’t agree with each other anyway. You go read a message board and there’s 80 opinions about what should happen with every character. That’s a fool’s errand, so you try not to do it, but it is pretty hard.
It's true, you can't please everyone, especially the fanboys and fangirls. They are the most hard core. Penn is a huge superhero fan himself, so getting to work on something like The Avengers was really exciting for him.
First of all, most of what was exciting about it, that I can tell you, was just the prospect that we would finally actually do a real cross-over movie, in which characters from multiple films were appearing at the same time, and it wasn’t just a cameo. To me, that was something very exciting. Even if it had ended up being The Vision, Giant-Man and two other characters, it still would have been cool. The idea that there’s these other movies being made, and they’re all working towards this one final goal is what excited me. That, we did spend many years working on. All the people at Marvel and me would sit there and say, “Okay, so this is what’s happening in Thor. This is what’s happening in Captain America. This is what’s happening here.” So, that was probably the most exciting part of it. I didn’t have the same pre-conceptions about what The Avengers movie should be that I did about X-Men. The Avengers can go a lot of different directions. There is no one line-up. If you did an X-Men movie and it didn’t have Professor Xavier in it, that would be a weird movie. There’s a lot that I’m excited for, but I can’t really talk about what’s in it, so I can’t tell you about what worked, what they listened to and what they didn’t. But, theoretically, it should be amazing.
I find Penn's comments very encouraging. He is obviously very excited about the film project. The Avengers is going to be an epic movie event. Thor and Captain America come out this summer, and The Avengers is set to hit theaters on May 4th 2012.