Joe Russo

First favorite character growing up was Spider-Man, second was Wolverine.

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.

Our job with Thanos is to make him the preeminent villain in the Marvel Universe. That is his role in the comics. That's his role in these movies.

The feature space is a spectacle space. It's about getting people out of their houses to go to theater when we all have a lot of things in our home now that occupy our attention.

The Infinity War' is meant to be a culmination film. It's meant to join together all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe against an incredible universal threat - Thanos.

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.

My feeling is that it's important that you show kids reality.

If you're a comic book fan, you know that any epic book, you would open it up - as a kid, I would just go through and look at who was fighting who. I'd stand there in the store for 15 minutes until the guy told me to buy the book or get out.

The template that 'Infinity War' is following is a very different, complex template because you've never seen so many characters in one film. It obviously has to be a multi-perspective film.

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.

We always try to make each film different so they don't get repetitive.

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.