Quotes from Joe Russo

I think that what people love most about the Marvel universe are the characters.

I've seen 'Goodfellas' a hundred times, and one of the things that I take away from that movie is dynamic pacing and energy. I just think that film is sort of a paragon of excellence in filmmaking and the compression of narrative.

As filmmakers, we are interested in unique voices.

We want to empower artists and filmmakers to forge new paths.

We like existentially wacky characters who exist in existential crisis.

I've been fortunate enough to travel to Edinburgh a few times over the last few years, and I just loved the city. I find it one of the more beautiful cities in Europe.

Chris Nolan went through Slamdance a year and a half after us, and he went on to direct 'The Dark Knight.' So the joke now is if you want to make superhero movies, that's where you have to go.

We get excited by ideas, and we're more excited by being surprised by ideas than we are in dictating the course of events. We've found that leads to more interesting storytelling.

I sat in a theater when I was 11 years old and watched 'The Empire Strikes Back' from 10 in the morning until 10 at night the day it came out.

We grew up near a cinematheque in Cleveland, so we were very influenced by international cinema, the French New Wave, Italian neo-realists.

What we love about working at Marvel is they'll have a crazy opening for a movie like 'The Avengers' - like, a record-breaking all-time opening - and you get to the office on Monday, and they don't even have a pizza; it's back-to-work time.

There's always loose points that people bring up, which is great, and I think that's why you read criticism is because you want to see what worked and what didn't work, and certainly you have to filter it because there's a lot of people who just love to troll.

Our language - the way that we deal with most actors is we don't like to get very complicated because we don't want them to think too much because we find it takes them out of the moment.

'Avengers 3' has a beginning, middle, and a very definitive end, and 'Avengers 4' does the same.

What we do is service a story first, and then you figure out how to pay for it later. If the narrative isn't your primary focus, then the movie is going to become diluted, and you don't have a movie that is as good as it could be, so it probably won't make as much money.

What's interesting about the fans is, fans are very fickle. They all have their own opinion.

They don't understand that we've changed our mentality and making a six-figure income no longer drives how we live our lives. Happy, healthy, together and with the world as our backyard, that's how we want to live.

Anthony and I are putting together a company where we won't lose our jobs based on quarterly earnings and can afford to play a longer game. That short game is what creates a glut of mediocrity in the market because people are desperate for hits, and it puts so much pressure on executives to deliver them. We will take that pressure off the artists.

Everything is finite, right? Nothing can last forever.

We like smashing genres into each other, so if you can find something that's really idiosyncratic in respect to superhero genre and you can smoosh it into it, you usually wind up with something fresh and different.

If you look at what we did with 'Winter Soldier' with the Cap character in terms of bringing him into the modern world, trying to ground the movie tonally into something that was a step toward real-world, at least to the degree you can do that in a superhero movie, that's still the tonal universe that we're playing in 'Civil War.'

In 'Winter Soldier' - in terms of character-based, 'Winter Soldier' was so specifically for us: everything in that movie was designed around that version of Captain America that we wanted to see, that we wanted to explore. Everything in that film, all of the stylistic choices just flow from that.

It was always the intent, in a larger arc, to split the Avengers up before the greatest threat that they've ever seen.

We grew up on Scorsese and Coppola and '70s crime thrillers.