When the director Jake Schreier spoke with me last weekend about his new movie “Thunderbolts*,” he could barely believe the Marvel blockbuster had actually come out.
“It’s strange to work for three and a half years on something and then make peace with it being in the world,” he said. “You work on these movies right up until the deadline. We only finished this thing maybe three weeks ago and even for the home version, I was still tweaking the effect shots two days ago in my hotel room.”
But now that the movie — about a team-up of Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes and other rogues — has made its way into theaters, Schreier was able to discuss some of its late twists, including the cheeky new title change teased by that asterisk.
Spoilers will follow.
The decision to add the asterisk was part of Schreier’s initial pitch for “Thunderbolts*,” he told me. Still, he was surprised by just how willing the Marvel Studios president, Kevin Feige, was to commit to a marketing change that has now retitled the movie “The New Avengers.”
Recently rumored to be in negotiations to direct Marvel’s forthcoming “X-Men” reboot, Schreier had been on Marvel’s radar for a while. After his breakout film, “Robot & Frank,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012, he met with the studio about potential directing opportunities and worked on second-unit photography for “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” directed by his college friend Jon Watts. Still, Schreier didn’t feel quite ready to take on a project so huge until his acclaimed work on the Netflix series “Beef.”
But there was something else about this project that made it the right opening salvo with the studio. “The main thing is just if a movie has Florence Pugh in it, you should try to direct it,” he said.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Schreier on set with Sebastian Stan, left, who plays Bucky Barnes.Credit…Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel
How much did you know about what Marvel wanted this movie to be when you first met for it?
I think there were seven meetings over the course of seven months to pitch on it. At the first meeting where they’re talking to a lot of people, it’s just a conversation with Brian Chapek, our executive producer. It is essentially, “These are the story points, this is who’s in it, this is what we’re trying to do. What sounds interesting about that to you?” Then, if you move on to the next round, you’re given a draft of the script.
So when you first met on the movie, they told you it would end with the Thunderbolts becoming the New Avengers?
Yeah, that was very exciting. I thought, “Well, if I get this movie, I’m the new director of ‘Avengers,’” and then it was made very clear to me that was not the case: “No, no, you’re making ‘Thunderbolts.’” But in its own way, that’s where these discussions about the asterisk came from. In my last pitch, I said, “Oh, we should do one Instagram post where we put an asterisk on the title and say, ‘Until we come up with something better,’ to kind of tease this idea.” They really ran with that, and we were thinking, “We’re going to introduce them as the New Avengers right at the end of the movie, and then in the credits sequence, it’s going to be a little weird if you just go back to ‘Thunderbolts.’” That started this idea of, “Could you actually switch the name out at the end?”
The title switch leads to a montage of skeptical headlines about these people becoming the New Avengers.
To be honest, that came from testing. When I was making the movie and listening to the score and imagining that moment, I assumed there’d be a cheer. When we actually tested it, it was more of an uncertain, halting applause and people didn’t know how to feel about it at first. That’s where the title sequence comes from: It felt like we needed to show the audience that we understood this isn’t necessarily obvious or even going to work but hopefully you come to embrace it, and that sequence could take you through that process.
That makes it sound like the post-credits scenes aren’t necessarily set in stone when you begin.
Yeah, it is fluid. Kevin was always really good at being responsive to how the material feels and feeling where to take the next steps with the franchise. I directed one of the post-credit scenes and not the other: I did the grocery one and then the second post-credit scene was filmed just a month ago in London as part of the production [of “Avengers: Doomsday,” due in 2026 from the directors Joe and Anthony Russo]. I was there, and we talked about what it needed to do for our characters, but Florence said it was like being dropped off at school by your parents as they wave goodbye.
You included the Taskmaster character in all the posters, even though she’s killed moments into her only scene. In some trailers, she was even superimposed to appear as if she would be part of the team for the whole movie. Take me into those decisions.
That was a tough one because it’s a character that matters to a lot of people and we don’t want to take that lightly. That idea came after the strike when it just felt like the movie at that point was a little bloodless. It’s not rated R, but if we were trying to tell a story that had real tension about people who killed people for a living, you needed to depict that in a way. Obviously, we could have introduced a new character and then gotten rid of them, but then it wouldn’t have the resonance or potentially the shock of doing it to Taskmaster.
Schreier working with Florence Pugh on the set.Credit…Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel
Is it difficult to approach an actress like Olga Kurylenko, who played Taskmaster in “Black Widow,” to tell her you’d be bringing her back just to kill her off?
It’s not easy. It’s like in sports: Players want to play. Olga’s a great actress and of course that’s a hard conversation to have, but she was an absolute pro about it and willing to show up, and I’m very grateful for that.
Steven Yeun was attached to play Sentry for a long time, then dropped out. It’s been rumored that other actors turned the role down before Lewis Pullman came on board. Was there a fear of committing to more Marvel movies in addition to this one?
I think the hardest part is that they don’t get to read a script. That’s a big leap for any actor to take. I met up with Lewis back in L.A. and we were scrambling because I think we were maybe a month out at that point. I basically gave him the oral history of Thunderbolts because I wasn’t allowed to give him the script, but it’s like, “I will tell you the whole story, I will show you the concept art, I’ll show you the animatics.” I just really tried to show him how interesting the character could be and why it would be worth taking that leap.
Why did Marvel not allow actors to read the script at that point?
These things are so secretive. Also, I think there is this trust that we’ll get in there and we’ll figure it out together. Something Kevin always talks about is you can never come into a Marvel meeting at any point of the process and say, “I think we’re done, I think this is it.” It’s always, “This is good. Here’s how we think we can make it better.” Lewis absolutely got to be part of the development, and he and Florence worked on the scenes. We rewrote stuff, made it work better and fit the role to him.
Sentry’s backstory goes to some dark places. Did you wonder whether Marvel would allow you to get away with some of that?
There were moments where I was apprehensive. Throughout the process, I was surprised at the degree to which Kevin and the folks at Marvel were actually the ones pushing me toward making it different than what they had done. And if you have the Sentry and the Void [the Sentry’s villainous alter ego] in your movie, you’re going to have to go there. We talked to Paul Jenkins, who created the character, and it always was a parable for mental health. Also, he is extraordinarily overpowered and his only kryptonite is that there’s this Void side to him. If you’re going to make any movie that works with that character in it, it’s going to have some amount of internal conflict that works as well as the external conflict.
What do you wish you’d known about making a movie like this before you embarked on it?
You’re spending maybe two-thirds of your time on action work, and you can get a little lost at times. On a TV show, you are directing at least one scene of deep emotional consequence on any given week, but on a movie like this, you can go whole weeks where you’re really more in an action world. At times, we would do these scenes that really define the core arc of the movie between either Yelena and Bob [the Sentry’s civilian alter ego] or Yelena and Alexei [Yelena’s father, played by David Harbour], and you’re doing them in half a day. It was grounding to remember, “OK, that is actually the heart of our movie.” But some of those scenes we didn’t get to until Week 5 of the shoot or Week 8. If I were to do it again, I’d be more prepared for maybe even scheduling to keep a connection to that side of the film.
The last thing I want is to learn how Bucky Barnes got elected to Congress. What district is he in? What did he campaign on? Tell me everything.
Wow, why do I not want to step in it on this question? As he says, it’s his Brooklyn constituency, this is canon. I think he would have run on a platform like, “We all deserve a second chance.” He’s done so much good for the world.
But I do appreciate that there’s a congressional carve-out for him to have long hair and a cool beard. Those things aren’t going away despite him being a politician.
It’s politics, you can do those things now. Didn’t The Times have a whole article about loose-tie style?