BLACK WIDOW Writer Jac Schaeffer talks about Writing One of the Most Anticipated MCU Movies

Phase 4 of the MCU has been announced and the first movie that we get in this phase is Black Widow. With the popularity of Black Widow and all that went down in End Game, it would be hard to be the person that has to fill in all of those missing pieces throughout her life. That is exactly what writer Jac Schaeffer was asked to do. In an interview with Inverse, she talks about having to take on this task and still be honest to herself and the character.

First off, how did she react to the death of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow in End Game:

I cried like a baby. I was very moved by it.”

It was a strange feeling. I have some proprietary feelings because if you are a writer who gets very emotionally invested in your work — which I think is most writers — the characters feel very real to you. So seeing her death in a movie that I didn’t have anything to do with — it was a little bit similar to seeing an ex-boyfriend with another partner. There’s a weird sort of removal that feels wrong and right at the same time. But her arc in the movie is wonderful.”

The cool thing about the Black Widow movie is that it isn’t just an origin story, it also covers times that we didn’t see in the MCU story arc. Like what did Natasha do after the events of Civil War.

Very much on her own and over the events of the Black Widow movie; she has to reckon with some of the red in her ledger.

While at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel was nice enough to show us one of the, I am assuming, many fight scenes in Black Widow. It was an extremely intense fight between Natasha and Yelena, a spy played by Florence Pugh. The fight took place in an apartment and it was close quarters. I was surprised with the moves they could pull off in such a small space. The fight was gritty, violent, and rivals the fights that you will see in any male-driven action films.

The fighting [in Black Widow] is a lot of close contact, hand-to-hand combat,” she says. “It’s very visceral. There’s a lot of aggression and power in a very human way that I find really satisfying and really exciting to watch, but it’s the polar opposite to writing for super-powered characters

I would like to see alternatives to violence in superhero movies.” She added, “Maybe I would qualify that by saying, alternatives to glamorizing guns and weaponry. That’s one of the reasons that I love Captain Marvel — it’s all about inner power. And the destruction is not at the expense of human life.”

Schaeffer goes into detail what goes into writing a villain. Here is what she had to say:

“My kids are really obsessed with ‘good guys vs. bad guys,’” Schaeffer said of her two preschool-age children. “Sometimes I explain [to them], ‘Every good guy can be a bad guy’ and vice versa. It’s complicated, but that’s sort of lost on them. That’s one thing that I think can be explored more in the future — I would hope that there are ever-increasing moves toward the gray and toward complexity

I really can’t wait to see how Phase 4 unfolds, and I am doubly excited that it starts off with one of the strongest female characters in movies today. Click on the link above to read the whole interview and see how Schaeffer feels about being the Wandavision showrunner.

Black Widow stars Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff, David Harbour as Alexei/Red Guardian, Florence Pugh as Yelena, O-T Fagbenle as Mason and Rachel Weisz as Melina. Black Widow will be released on May 29th, 2020. Let us know what you think.