Captain America: Civil War opens in theaters May 6.
POWER–TO CONTROL OR NOT CONTROL?
Chris Evans: This is one of the tricky themes of the film and I think it’s tricky when it comes to the variation between your head and your heart and sometimes it’s much like in politics, your heart may say one thing, but the truth may be different. Sometimes it’s tough to connect those dots and along the way comes a certain level of compromise. And I think this is where we hope the film has some real depth, because we want the audience to be uncertain in terms of what they believe and who is right and who is wrong, and that’s why neither Steve or Tony is 100 percent certain in what they believe. I think Tony is thinking with his head and I think Tony realizes that you can’t have a group of people have this much power, acting as vigilantes, without paying some sort of allegiance or respect to some form of a Government. Steve is thinking with his heart, where he has just come off of a film where he is seen the Government fail, which is a bit of a role reversal. Normally Steve would think with his head and Tony would act with his heart. It’s a real gray area and I wish I had an answer, I wish I knew. And I think the application varies from situation to situation and country to country and circumstance to circumstance. And so I think in a very roundabout way my answer to your question is I don’t know. And that is what makes the landscape for this film so ripe.
HEAD OR HEART GUY?
CE: Depends on the topic. Typically I act with my heart. For most of my political beliefs and convictions, I hope for the best and I try to express those convictions. But there are certain things where you just have to say listen, it just doesn’t work that way, and we would love it to, but it just doesn’t work that way. And the outcome requires a head based response as opposed to a heart based response.
GOING BIGGER AND BIGGER
I see no reason why the mighty Marvel engine should slow down at all when it came to making movies. I say, let’s keep going, let’s let the wave get bigger and bigger. It’s not like they’re making bad movies, they’re making great movies and if you want to put them in this superhero box you can but they’re good movies. Marvel’s superhero machine has no equal during the Team Cap conference. They’ve got a monopoly on it, they’re doing it and no one else can try and copy it.
GETTING INTO POLITICS?
CE: My political aspirations, I did an interview not too long ago and you are looking at the two to three hour interview and at one point she asked if I would ever consider politics and I said I would never say never. And that really was enough to kind of catapult headlines. And that’s the way it is in this industry, anything you say can be used against or, or not against, but certainly focused on. And it’s certainly a focal point that I have been asked about for the past two days, constantly. Which is okay. My uncle is a Congressman and I think he’s a man that I have enormous amounts of respect for, and I do think politics is one of the most noble professions you can embark on and I think it requires a certain amount of patience and intellect and levelheadedness and you have to be able to inspire people but at the same time reserve a certain level of humility and honesty and it’s a real cocktail of beautiful attributes. And I think it’s a noble thing to try and fight for the better man of society. So I said I would never say never, because maybe someday I may pursue it, I don’t know. I could say with any, I could say that with a music career, I could say that with a dance career, I will never say never to anything.
MOVIE IMPACT
With regards to this film somehow mirroring the reflection of terrorist acts today, that’s a tough one. There’s always been violence and certain acts in films for as long as I can remember, and I grew up in the 1980s watching movies probably do things far worse than what we see today. Whether or not those things have a sort of ripple influence on the people who are choosing to terrorize innocent people, I don’t think they are getting it from films. They are probably coming from places much deeper.
RELATIONSHIP OF FRIENDS?
CE: I consider loyalty to be one of my defining traits and I think it’s a really beautiful attribute and I don’t want to say that it’s exclusively isolated to being from Boston, but being from Boston, that was one of the things that I was kind of ingrained with as a child, that loyalty is a real noble quality. And I think in this film, when you struggle with your enemy, it’s easy to siphon off ties and it’s easy to kind of, when the battle is over, turn the page. And I think when you are fighting with someone you love and you care about, a family member, this isn’t just a friend, this is family, the depth of the situation only magnifies and it becomes a complex situation to walk away from. You can have a battle, but the scars remain and the wounds are deep and I think it’s not as easily rectified because there is still a history. There are open channels of love and respect that, the stakes are higher. And to fight an enemy, you haven’t lost much, because they weren’t an enemy to begin with. But when you fight a loved one, things really break down and things are lost and it’s tragic and it’s sad and it’s heartbreaking. That’s what this movie really tries to tackle, that it’s a lot harder to have an internal struggle with a family member than it is with an enemy.
DIRECTING FILM?
CE: Very satisfying. Lessons were learned and I think no matter how much you prepare yourself, you can never fully equip yourself to climb the mountains that are presented when you are directing. But I certainly feel more armed to tackle the next venture and I am incredibly excited about doing so and I want to direct again. And I do love the process and I loved from prep to post, it felt right, it felt like home. And it was not a huge success. But that’s okay. I think in this industry in general, there is a big worry stumbling, whether you are taking on something new or acting in something that you have done as a career. There has to be a room for messiness and there has to be room to take risks and make mistakes and fall a little bit, because that’s where growth happens. And that is where discovery happens and it’s an exciting time to be completely honest. And if it was always smooth and always great, I don’t know if it would be the same catalyst to incite the same evolution into something bigger and better and greater. So maybe I am putting a nice twist on a movie that didn’t do so well, but for me, I really did learn a lot and it didn’t in any way diminish my enthusiasm to tackle it again.
Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, spoke to the press about working with a continuously growing ensemble of actors.
“I’ve said it before, and it’s only getting more and more accurate as cast members keep joining, there has never been an ensemble like this in cinematic history. We had to break up into two panels today because everyone is a headline,” he said.
Binging Marvel’s biggest name, Spider-Man, into the film.
“We knew we wanted to tell a very complicated story between Captain America and Iron Man and we’re big fans of balance in storytelling, movies that make us laugh and cry,” Anthony Russo, who directed the film with his brother Joe, said of their approach. “We wanted to bring in characters that didn’t have the same emotional investment that The Avengers had. Bringing in characters like Spider-Man and Ant-Man, who don’t have that baggage, allowed us to bring new color to the film.”
