Quotes from Anthony Russo

It's incumbent upon a director, if you want to pull the best performance out of an actor, you have to really work to who they are and how they work and not just expect them to hit a mark every time. You have to be very adaptable in the approach that you use with every different actor.

We were film geeks. We devoured everything: really obscure art films, foreign films. We were the kind of guys that lived at the Cinematheque. But at the end of the day, your favorite movies are like everybody else's favorite movies. Because those are the movies that become a touch point where you can connect to other people.

People always say, 'Oh, I'd love to work with my sibling,' or 'My God, I could never work with my sibling.' It was just a natural process for us. We started collaborating on our first films and it evolved. We have a passion for film that we shared as we were growing up.

Among directing teams, you find a high percentage of brothers. You need the ability to compromise. With siblings, you've grown up with a pattern that, yeah, every once in a while you have to give in for the greater good, for the family collective.

What Joe and I get excited by, creatively, is exploring all of the different forms of filmmaking.

Joe and I always say that our guide through action is always story and character. We're always driving right at the character beats, or else the action beat doesn't work.

'Community' gets to be the indie movie, while a 'Modern Family' gets to be the big blockbuster release. They service that big massive audience, and we service a smaller audience. But we get a lot of creative freedom.

Yes, DVDs are gone, but there is this wonderful Internet platform out there called YouTube.

We knew people in Cleveland who had been making movies for 20 years that nobody sees. Every couple of years, they make a little small movie on their own, and it goes to some minor festivals, and that's it. Four years later, they do it again. That's a fulfilling life for some filmmakers, and they're happy to work that way.

It's hard to give specific advice because there's so many different types of animals. In making movies, you just have to figure out what type of animal you are and then find the road.

The thing I always loved about the movie business is it is really a cowboy industry in the sense that there's no prescribed road into it or through it.

We like to collaborate on everything, so we have no formal divisions on where we each like to focus, and we like to put our brains together on every aspect of a project. We just have a nonstop dialogue.

The second we started talking about doing the 'Civil War' storyline with Marvel, we brought up Spider-Man. Right away, Kevin Feige hinted to us there might be a possibility of them being able to work that out, and that's all we needed - he was in the movie the second we heard that.

We like mature storytelling. We like dramatic storytelling. We like intense storytelling.

Joe and I have always been drawn to ensemble storytelling. We like the idea of telling stories from multiple characters' points of view and thinking about the story from multiple characters' points of view.

We don't program movies. We don't run studios. We make movies.