Eternals: Chloe Zhao Reveals Her Initial MCU Expectations

Being a part of a Marvel film can be a daunting thing. The wildly popular franchise has brought in billions at the box office and propelled many actors and filmmakers to new levels of success and fame. And while director Chloe Zhao has an Academy Award under her belt for her work, making a Marvel movie is its own experience, but according to Zhao, her expectations for working with Marvel Studios ended up lining up nicely with her actual experience. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Zhao said that she felt supported and protected by the people she worked with making Eternals and it let her really “play” with her work.

“I had this feeling being a fan of the MCU and having a good friend in Ryan Coogler and having friends who’ve worked with them,” Zhao said. “It’s actually a lot smaller of a team than you think it is. There’s about three people I speak to on a daily basis. They make big decisions and are one text away. So most of the time, I felt like I was working with the same 25 department heads as I did on Nomadland. The incredible technicians and artists and the thousands of people who helped make this film really, really protected me from the big world out there. They knew how I work best and then they created a really nice bubble for me. If I wanted to fly and go crazy, they’d let me, but if I fell, I knew they were there to catch me. That’s why I could play so much in this.”

One of the ways Zhao was supported by Marvel and Disney was with the inclusion of the film’s love scene between Sersi (Gemma Chan) and Ikaris (Richard Madden). Zhao even said that when it came to that scene, she was its biggest critic, not the studio.
“That has been in the treatment that I read from the beginning,” Zhao said. “We knew that to tell a mature love story, a love story that spans thousands of years, to not do any kind of intimate scene felt unnatural to me. And everyone was on the same page. Once we filmed it and edited it together, we did show some folks to see their reactions. And everyone, Disney as well, said, ‘That is a beautiful display of love,’ [regarding] the way our actors played it together and the way it fit into the mood and where it is in the film. So everyone was like, ‘Let’s do it!’ If anything, I was the one who was like, ‘Is it okay? Can we do this?’ But everyone was supportive of that.”

Eternals enters theaters on November 5th while Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings will be available for Disney+ subscribers to stream on November 12th.