Honest Trailers Helped Shape CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER
In a recent interview with Collider, Captain America: The Winter Soldier directors Anthony and Joe Russo talked about some interesting aspects about their development of the movie. One of the more interesting and cool aspects about what they discussed though is how the Honest Trailers web-series from Screen Junkies helped them in shaping the movie into the awesomeness that it is.
A couple of weeks ago, Screen Junkies released an Honest Trailer for The Winter Solider, and they admitted that the movie was actually really freakin' good. Their team had to nitpick to actually find something to complain about. When the directors were asked how they felt about that Honest Trailer, Joe responded:
"Flattered and amused. What’s so funny is that I’m an avid honest trailer watcher. I love it, it cracks me up. So I think we talked about it in the commentary we used to sit in the room and go, 'this is not going to end up in an honest trailer. This logic isn’t sound enough yet.' We literally tried to Honest Trailer proof the movie. Because what Honest Trailers really is, and I’ll say litmus test again, is 'how sound is the logic in your film? How ridiculous are the buys that you’re asking the audience to make?' So we would just comb through the script over and over again and go, 'how do we shore up this logic? How do we shore up this logic?' So it was a very helpful exercise for us.'
I loved that they did everything they could to Honest Trailer proof the movie, and succeeded in doing it. One of the things that was brought up by a lot of fans that wasn't pointed out in the Honest Trailer was how Captain America got his shield back after falling from the Helicarrier. When that was brought up in the conversation Joe said:
"Out of the Potomac? He’s got a homing beacon on it, it’s very small (laughs). Clearly he’s had issues with losing it in the past."
As for any deleted scenes in the movie, it turns out there weren't that many. Anthony had this to say about why there wasn't a lot of footage left on the cutting room floor:
"We come from sort of do-it-yourself independent filmmaking so we’re very smart on a producing level about where we spend our money and how we spend our money, and we just wanted to make sure everything we did was gonna end up onscreen so we worked very hard to have a tight script. So by the time we got to shooting—our shooting script is remarkably similar to the final edit of the movie."
When asked if they were holding anything back Joe said:
"That’s all we got. And we feel bad about those scenes because you can make the argument that those four minutes of footage should have stayed in the movie. But we’re hard on our material. We’re really hard on it. We like propulsive pacing. We just want to make sure it’s as tight as possible."
There's no way you could do an interview with these guys and not ask about Captain America 3, and this is what Joe teased,
"If you go in my office on the floor, there’s quite a few books in there. And in fact one of them, which would be a huge spoiler for Cap 3, I [was just in my office] the other day and I was like, 'why did I leave this out?' You could walk in there and blow the whole thing. We review the compendiums and go back over books, there’s stuff you haven’t read for years. As we kind of comb through the books you go, 'I remember when I was a kid I loved this.' And then you put a Post-It note in there to remind yourself of cool lines, cool frames, cool tone, you know. I’m sure I have a big Post-It on the famous France line from The Ultimates. It’s all that. It’s all of the iconic moments."
I'm confident that these two directors are going to give fans a spectacular third Captain America film. I love this character, and I'm glad that he's in good hands.