kind of realized the paths that Steve

and Tony were on were crossing.

Captain America who was willing to jump on a grenade

is slowly learning to value things other than sacrifice.

He realizes that maybe there's more to life

than always threatening to lose yours.

And Tony was becoming wider in his view,

right about what he needs to do

and how he needs to save people.

We realized, oh for Steve to become

his best self, he needs to get a life.

And for Tony to become his best self, he needs to lose his.

And we went oh that's pretty good,

everybody should have a milkshake, that's a good day.

I'm Steve McFeely.

- And I'm Chris Markus and this is

how we wrote a Marvel blockbuster.

[dramatic music]

Our relationship with the MCU has been

largely based around Steve Rogers, Captain America.

It's been very satisfying, you rarely get

to take a character through that many changes.

It gave us a lot of windows that

we were able to reach through for Endgame.

It was always going to be Avengers three and four.

It was always intended to be two separate movies.

I mean that was from on high, from Kevin

he did not want to make a two parter.

They're very different structurally and tonally

and that was always our intention.

- I remember no one from Marvel ever

asked us to write these movies.

[laughing]

Kevin never called and said I want you guys to write these.

We just started negotiating.

- I think really all we were handed was Thanos

which necessitated the use of the Infinity Stones

which are this, this and this throughout the MCU

and, if you want to get rid of people you can

but you're under no obligation to just

kill them willy nilly and that was just about all.

- This is not to say we picked people at random to kill.

- Not anymore than we do on a daily basis.

- Good point.

- And there were a bunch of obvious implications from that.

Namely we could bring in the Guardians

because two of Thanos' stepdaughters were on that ship.

It could be anybody from anywhere and, in fact, should be.

The beauty of working for Marvel as compared

to the rest of Hollywood is, when you get a job,

you have, for the most part, a release date.

So you are working on a real concrete movie the whole time

and then that things are staffing up

and people are starting to make drawings

of things you're writing about.

- We spent the last four months of 2015 locked

in a conference room reading everything we could.

- Reviewing all the movies that we knew about.

- And then writing every ridiculous

or not ridiculous idea we had.

We're the ones that are locked in the room

and sort of being fed under the door.

- Some people are afraid to go into the room

and other people don't know how to leave.

- It's a big table where there's usually one representative

from Marvel, in this case it was a woman named Trinh Tran,

then it's Kevin as often as he can get in there

and Joe and Ant as often as they can get in there.

Our collective is really important to how these

last four movies that we've worked on have come out.

That's one of the delightful parts of that room

was they came in and said, "Here's all the baseball cards

"with little magnets on the back."

and we went oh, amazing and so we really did just throw up

every face of alive and dead people in the MCU.

On the back it said whether we had this actor or not.

- There were something like 60 or 70 names up there

and then just staring at them and going,

I've never seen those two people together that would be fun

or they are gonna hate each other let's put them together.

There were big ideas and little ideas.

Really did give them to Marvel and to the Russos

and just said circle things.

Let's start winnowing down the movie that we're all

thinking of in our heads but haven't talked about yet.

- It's research and development sort of that stage.

Once the circle's come back we go,

ah Cap picks up Thor's hammer, obviously

we all agree that should happen somewhere.

- It gives you little mile markers to make

you feel like you're not just in a vast sea.

If you say, when would Cap pick up the hammer?

Well probably pretty late, probably over there,

put that card over there we can work toward it.

- That's why the snap was really helpful.

It was always going to be the marker between the movies

but it's a really nice flag to sort of

plant in the ground and drive towards.

The four months in that room are us slowly getting

to that outline and people coming in and looking at

the sort of serial killer board, post it's everywhere and--

- There's white board and there's three by five cards

and sometimes there's action figures.

You're winnowing down possibilities

and you're killing ideas.

- You have plenty of days where you go,

just nothing happened today--

- What do we do for a living?

- All we did is eliminate possibilities.

Oh you're talking my language man.

- This is like a bedtime story.

- Again we were in grad school writing novels

and short stories so we didn't have a film class or anything

so we just bought a book by Syd Field called Screenplay

and he had sort of chartered out a lot

of blockbuster movies or just films.

Act one, there's a turning point.

Act two is sort of the most important part to get right

and there's usually a mid point.

In between act one and the midpoint there's a little pinch.

And in between the mid point and the end

of act two, there's a second pinch.

And then the third act is whatever it's gonna be.

And when I say pinches and mid points,

those are plot points where the movie turns.

Good examples are in Winter Soldier,

Cap is on the run and he doesn't

quite know who's chasing him.

And a number of clues lead him to Camp Lehigh

and he goes down in the basement and he turns on

a computer and it turns out to be his nemesis from 1945,

only now in computer form.

And he tells him that the entire time,

what he thinks he knows, he doesn't know

and that Hydra has existed this entire time

and has been shaping the century.

The movie now flips and the audience is like,

holy crap I didn't realize that

but I guess that makes sense.

- You know, there'll be somebody out there watching this

going like of course it's a formula.

It's a framework so you don't dive in to despair--

- Or waste people's

time. - Basically.

Its something you can hang things on so that

you can actually spend more time on the character work

and on the really interesting details.

- [Steve] A card might just say, Cap picks up Mjolnir.

Well that's not enough of a scene but we know that's

gonna be over there and that gets a thumb tac on the wall.

But then another scene might be

Gamora and Nebula hug it out.

That's sort of cheeky code for they're gonna have

a meaningful scene where they reconcile.

- And there are frequently cards that are entirely subtext

where it's just like Cap needs to find

a life, Tony needs to sacrifice his.

To remind us there is a through line for these people.

The cards come off and first you

literally type up the cards.

- It's like transcribing the collective

thought of the last four months.

We'll have talked about that scene a lot

but it still only says, Gamora and Nebula hug it out.

So that one of us has to describe that scene.

- It can have dialogue, it can

have jokes, it can have sound effects.

The outline and all the scripts after it,

we write them to be read.

- Yeah it's meant to be a pretty good read.

- So that you are getting at least a nominal

sense of the excitement or sadness,

the dynamics that we're trying to build.

- We revise the heck out of it and then it's numbered,

in this case probably one through 80 or 90

and then we send it off to be blessed

by Marvel and Joe and Anthony.

- There is what is called the Marvel Parliament,

I didn't name it, which is all their

primary producers from various projects.

They know what their characters are up to.

- So you know, we killed that guy.

- We have a scene in Black Panther

that literally says he doesn't do that.

- Remember we have a villain who has the power of a God,

he's omnipotent and omniscient.

So we're faced with telling a story where,

even if we don't defeat him, how do you even start

trying to solve the problem with a guy

who can kill you with a thought and can

see it coming from a million miles away?

And it was Trinh Tran, I think mostly because she was just

frustrated said, "I wish we could just freaking kill him."

And we stopped and went oh, 'cause he was serious

about what he said and all he wanted to do was balance

the universe and so he then got rid of them.

And that one frustrated comment went us down a road

that we probably should have been down before

if were honest with Thanos' character.

And then we jump five years and we still

can't solve the problem because the Stones are gone.

And yet Scott Lang, we just requested,

can you leave him in the Quantum Realm?

And with fresh eyes, look at our problem and go,

- Have either of you guys studied quantum physics?

- Only to make conversation.

- [Steve] Quantum Realm might have a solution

for you and it's time travel.

- In real quantum physics, the Quantum Realm

does have completely different time qualities

than out here in our world.

- Yeah how did you even figure that out?

- Google.

- No we had actual

physicists-- - Oh that's right

we had physicists.

We had experts come in and say,

"If it could happen, that's

one of the ways it could happen."

- No they said Back to the Future's [bleep]

- They did.

- And I went, "Oh how dare you."

- No offense to the makers of Back to the Future.

- And that was really helpful to us, clearly.

The holy grail of nerddom.

- First we shyed away from that.

We said, "Okay we're gonna time travel

"but we're gonna go to places we haven't been before

"because we don't want it to seem

"like we're patting ourselves on the back."

But then wiser heads prevail and go,

well there's a very satisfying thing to do

which is glance off what you already know

and go down a different direction.

Which allows Steve to say, "Hail Hydra"

in an elevator that vaguely resembles the elevator

from Winter Soldier so you're getting

all these different little tweaks of satisfaction