Joe Russo

“I find that when I watch films where the villain is more complex, I find that it makes the heroes more complex and ultimately, in the story, more interesting.”

“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.”

“There's always loose points that people bring up, which is great, and I think that's why you read criticism is because you want to see what worked and what didn't work, and certainly you have to filter it because there's a lot of people who just love to troll.”

“I always say one of the great scenes from 'The Dirty Dozen' is where Jim Brown has to get grenades in the chimney.”

“Being a global citizen makes you a more interesting person.”

“I've had emotional experiences in VR that I haven't been able to have in two-dimensional experiences.”

“In 'Winter Soldier' - in terms of character-based, 'Winter Soldier' was so specifically for us: everything in that movie was designed around that version of Captain America that we wanted to see, that we wanted to explore. Everything in that film, all of the stylistic choices just flow from that.”

“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.”

“I've been collecting comics since I was 10 years old. One of the first books I ever got my hands on was a Captain America-Falcon team-up.”

“We get excited by ideas, and we're more excited by being surprised by ideas than we are in dictating the course of events. We've found that leads to more interesting storytelling.”

“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.”

“What we love about working at Marvel is they'll have a crazy opening for a movie like 'The Avengers' - like, a record-breaking all-time opening - and you get to the office on Monday, and they don't even have a pizza; it's back-to-work time.”

“We took a very interesting journey from being really extreme art house filmmakers. But we find that working in commercial filmmaking and creating a brand on that high level affords us a lot of interesting opportunities.”

“I was a comic book nut. For real. I still have a collection in my closet.”

“Chris Nolan went through Slamdance a year and a half after us, and he went on to direct 'The Dark Knight.' So the joke now is if you want to make superhero movies, that's where you have to go.”

“Marvel is a very streamlined studio.”

“I think there's a lot of people in their dingy boats in the middle of the ocean pining for the days of closed-ended narrative.”

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

“If you look at what we did with 'Winter Soldier' with the Cap character in terms of bringing him into the modern world, trying to ground the movie tonally into something that was a step toward real-world, at least to the degree you can do that in a superhero movie, that's still the tonal universe that we're playing in 'Civil War.'”

“What's interesting about the fans is, fans are very fickle. They all have their own opinion.”