How ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Tackled Massive Action Scenes

The battle sequences of Avengers: Infinity War were no simple undertaking for the screenwriters burdened with balancing dozens of Marvel heroes and Thanos’ massive armies.

Speaking to ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview, Infinity War screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely explained the method to their battle sequence madness as their previous efforts on Captain America: Civil War‘s airport battle now feel “quaint” in comparison.

“Similarly [to Captain America: Civil War], in that it’s all about character,” Markus said. “If you’re cutting back to them punching somebody, you probably don’t have to write it. They’ll get plenty of footage of people hitting people, so what do we need people to overcome, or achieve, or fail at in the course of this battle?”

McFeely says it is important to be “reminding people of stakes all the time.” The characters have to carry the scene. “You get lost fighting a creature, but you gotta remember why they’re trying to fight these creatures to prevent them from doing X, Y, and Z,” McFeely said.

The final stand in Wakanda, however, will be drastically different from that of Captain America: Civil War‘s hero versus hero showdown. “I will say, different from the airport,” Markus started, “The airport battle… it seems so quaint, now. There’s about 14 people there, and you know all their names. Like in this battle, we have troops, and you don’t want it to descend into CG slashing, so you gotta like, ‘Okay, how do we treat a mass of people, give it a personality, give it an intentionality?’”

McFeely acknowledges such a description is reminiscent of some battles from Lord of the Rings; moments driven by character moments with splashes of humor and narrative advancements. “It’s a touchstone for sure,” McFeely said of Peter Jackson’s epic. “We would look at those movies and go, ‘Well, those are big.’ The watchword for this movie is epic. I mean, it’s epic. It’s really, really big. I can’t over state that. It’s really, really big. That was the ambition from the very beginning, is reach really high and see if you can get … give Thanos the stakes required.”

Markus and McFeely aren’t the only ones pouring artistic efforts into the action sequences. The sibling directing duo Anthony & Joe Russo pride themselves on giving their action sequences style and intimate moments.

“Well for us, it’s important that everything be defined, that each character be defined,” Joe Russo said. “It’s the way we grew up on comic books, it’s like imagining each character so distinctly. And that characters are defined through action and defined through movement and defined through the choices that they make in fighting someone. And there’s a logical and natural progression in the real world, the way that Cap and Winter Soldier, when he’s on the boat, it was very important to us that it wasn’t sort of an one punch and you’re done scenario. It’s a how does he tactically take someone down and leave them unconscious? And sometimes it’s a series of moves on his part. That’s part of our thinking and part of how we create roles around each character. In this film in particular, yeah, there’s a ton of different characters. You try to define what their skill sets are and then the important thing is, if they are working together in the movie, how they would work together in the film. But it’s always for us, action sequences are about storytelling and character illumination.”

“And I think because we have such a range of characters in this movie, I think you’ll find when you watch it, there is quite a bit of difference in terms of how that style, our cinematic style engages those sequences,” Anthony Russo said.

Avengers: Infinity War hits theaters on April 27, 2018. Have questions about ComicBook.com’s time on set or at the press events? Leave them in the comment section or send them to @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter!