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Thunderbolts*, despite a slow box office run, was a hit with fans and reviewers alike. And it was clearly a hit with Marvel Studios’ head Kevin Feige, who tapped director Jake Schreier to helm the next X-Men movie. Schreier, whose previous credits include the indie dramedy Robot & Frank, the YA adaptation Paper Towns, and the Emmy-winning series Beef, infused Thunderbolts* with darkly comic elements and the kind of sincere exploration of mental health that’s rarely depicted in superhero films.
The ragtag team of antiheroes known as the Thunderbolts — whether or not they want to be called that — are up against an ordinary but troubled guy named Bob who is gifted, or saddled, with the extraordinary powers of The Sentry. In the film’s climax (spoiler), the team has to confront Bob’s — and their own — traumas to prevent a supernatural darkness from overtaking the city.
With Thunderbolts* now available on digital and physical media, Rolling Stone caught up with Schreier to discuss the film’s themes and what scenes he hopes will stand out on rewatch.
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Mental health is a big theme in the movie, and that’s kind of an interesting take on the superhero genre. Did it feel like a risk when you were coming up with that approach?
It feels like a risk only in the sense that it’s an important topic, and the main thing we felt was that we just didn’t want to make it reductive. But it also felt like we had to, because once Sentry is in the movie, I mean, the character is so overpowered that his only real kryptonite is this dark side that comes in. So it was always going to have to be resolved on some sort of internal level. And then the question just became, “Can we find a way to dramatize that internality?” It’s still a big summer action movie. You want there to be a kind of external way that we view this. It has to function on internal terms as well, and so then it just became this kind of careful crafting of what that looked like and how to do that in a way that felt earned and didn’t make it feel too simple.
To your point about it being a big summer action movie, what was the approach when it came to balancing the tone in terms of the comedic moments, the action beats, and those human moments between the characters?
When I started on the movie, I was just coming off of working on Season 1 of Beef with Lee Sung Jin. We wrote multiple drafts of the script, and Anna Paola wrote many, many drafts afterwards. We worked on Beef together. Beef is very funny, at the same time as being about some pretty interesting, darker themes. I think just like in any movie, even when you’re approaching darker themes, you know, life is funny. Even when it’s darkly comic, it’s comic. And if it doesn’t have that sense of humor to it, then it won’t feel like life. And then the things don’t feel as deeply when you want them to at the end. So, you know, it was always an aim to weave those two things together.
Were there any other lessons that you took from working on Beef that you felt resonated working on this move?
In Beef, we really try to emphasize character perspective with camera perspective. So the challenge became balancing what times we wanted to be in whose perspective and carefully diagramming the positions to help emphasize that. Being far away from Bob at first, you can’t really see into the way that he’s feeling, until [Yelena] gets closer to him. The camera stays much further away from him. Even if it’s a tighter shot, it’s a longer lens. That is something that we really developed a lot on Season 1 of Beef that we brought to this.
We’re talking about the streaming release and the Blu-ray release; to that point, are there any moments that you think stand out from the movie, maybe more on rewatch than on the first watch?
I can say what I hope stands out. The close-up of Yelena at the end, with that little smile. There’s a kind of mnemonic through the movie that Florence [Pugh] built herself, in moments where she connects the most with the Void or a sense of impending death and kind of being at peace with that. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, opens them, and attempts to face it. And we see that moment replayed, I think four times in the film, in the opening shot, in the vault, when they’re about to be incinerated, when she steps into the Void and makes that choice, and at the very end, when it’s changed into a smile at that point.
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I think the incineration scene was the first one we shot, and I asked her, “Think about that moment on the roof, we haven’t shot it yet, but imagine whatever place you would be in. And do you think there’s a way that this moment might connect to that?” And she did. That was just something she did, it just came to her. And then that became something that we built and tried to put into each of those moments.
You have some more well-known characters that we’ve seen in some of the earlier movies, and maybe some characters that are going to be new to maybe most fans. How did you think about sort of bringing all those characters together?
Get Marvel to just give you the best actors, you know? Something Kevin [Feige] said at the beginning, he was like, “Please, please make it so that you can watch this movie if you haven’t watched any of our other stuff.” So that was this delicate balance of, obviously, the movie needs to work for people who have seen all of these things and care deeply about this world, but also try to find a way to bring an audience along if you were just showing up to watch a movie about a bunch of vigilantes.
Even with a world like this, where you have characters that you know, in good movies, those arcs get resolved to some degree. So there always needs to be a new journey to take them on, and it’s just about finding that with each of those actors, and what they felt like they hadn’t gotten to show before.
Then the chemistry they just brought. I mean, they’re just really great actors and you never really know with that kind of thing until you start. And I remember the first week of shooting, feeling like, “Okay, this is going to work. They really have it here with each other.”
You’ve worked on indie movies, creative original TV shows, things like that. And there was a lot of buzz around the marketing with references to A24. Can you talk a little bit about bringing any of that sort of indie sensibility to a big movie like this?
I don’t know that I brought an indie sensibility as much as I did bring some collaborators that have worked on those things. You know, people like Grace Yun who did Past Lives, Hereditary and Beef, and Andrew Droz Palermo, who did Green Knight but also did Moon Knight. It isn’t as divided. And I think, look, everyone starts somewhere. James Gunn did Super. I guess to me it’s all just trying to tell stories, and obviously this is a very large scale to try to tell them on. It really felt like a very supportive environment in which to do that. Any movie where you show up and the head of the studio right from the beginning says, “Do something different with this one.” That’s a really, really healthy environment in which to work.
You talked a little bit about getting advice from Jon Watts, who worked on the Spider-Man movies. Can you tell me a little bit about anything direct that he might have said, but also just what in his movies worked for you?
Jon and I were roommates in film school, so I mean, so much of what I know about how to make movies comes from just discussions that we’ve had. I think that the biggest help that Jon provided me is just having worked at Marvel, knowing the way that it works, and just this idea that you’re never done. Like, you never go into a meeting and say, “I think we’re good.” You always have to be pushing it forward. It actually is a very, very collaborative and open and inviting place to work, as long as you’re open to being pushed and you can push and have a way to respond to that.
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But there were so many little bits of advice along the way, and he would read drafts and watch cuts. I think in those Spider-Man movies, what I think about a lot is just the level of eyes and expectations on Spider-Man is much bigger than on something like Thunderbolts*. To work within that and tell stories of the scale and scope that he was telling stories, but also always ground it in very clear character arcs. I certainly know now, more than ever, having been through it on my own level, what a difficult juggling act that is. I found it impressive before, and I found it even more impressive now, having been through it.
