Joss Whedon: Making Age of Ultron ‘broke me’ a little…

It’s no secret that Joss Whedon has been unhappy since Age of Ultron, he’s spoken in length about how Marvel fought with him over cetain things in the movie and how he disagreed with some things Marvel are doing in other areas of the MCU.

But he has really been honest in this latest interview about how the filming effected him on a personal level.

“The first time around [making an Avengers movie], my editor Lisa Lassek, Kevin Feige and myself, I think those were the people who knew what I was trying to do. There was one dolly grip who had read a comic book. … Even the actors sometimes were like, “We have no idea what he’s doing, but he seems to want to do it very badly, so we’re going to go with it.” And God bless ’em, they were very trusting, even before. And then they saw, and they were like, “Oh, that’s how that works.”

But it seems that trying to recapture that magic took its toll on the director: “The weight of the thing, the weight of the last thing, of this not just being the next thing that happens — I wanted this film to be its own movie. I wanted it to be better, if possible, than the first one — not that the first one was the best movie ever made, but I wanted to do better, just be better at shooting. I wanted to work harder on the script. I wanted to spend more time just really working every aspect of it, because why go again if you’re not doing something new? And I shot it very differently, and all of that became sort of a burden where I was like, “I want to make something great!” And then I heard that voice in my head every time, “But is this a great idea?” And suddenly I had doubt that I don’t usually suffer from. And meanwhile, the studio’s gonna have some too, because everything’s riding on this all of a sudden. And it became a problem in a way that nothing else has. And it was a hard movie to make on top of that. So being paralyzed by either indecision or the weight of responsibility? Not useful, don’t have time for your paralysis, son, snap out of it. This was the hardest work I’ve ever done. And if it worked, yay! But I’ll always look at it and go, “I don’t know, Joss, could you have done better? You could have done better.”

Regarding working with Marvel and Kevin Feige: “There are battles I lost, there are battles I won, but most of it was you know, was us just going, “We’re just going to keep working this, just keep working the problem and making it better.” And I had Jeff [Ford] and Lisa, my editors for the first one, who are just mavericks and are very responsible for the stories making any sense at all. Those two, they saved my life so many times. They’re storytellers. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

“It’s weird because the first one was very, very, very, hard. This one was much harder. It a little bit broke me.”

Going on, he’s having difficulty winding down even though it’s in the cinemas already: “I’m still in that phase of like, “But wait, I have notes!” I can’t let go. I feel like, “Oh no, everybody’s going to see my failure.” But I am proud. I worked really hard. I’m proud of everybody in the movie, I’m proud of everyone who worked on the movie. … This child may be insane, but it’s mine. It’s like Ultron. It may try to kill you all. But I love it.”

Sounds like Whedon really needs to settle down and do something smaller and more personal. Like, you know, Star Wars…

Source: LATimes