Eternals: Kevin Feige Calls Chloe Zhao’s Filmmaking Style “Really Impressive Stuff”

Black Widow is the first movie on Marvel’s 2021 line-up and it will be followed by Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and then Eternals. Folks are especially excited about Eternals after the movie’s director, Chloé Zhao, became the second woman in history to win Best Director at the Academy Awards for helming Nomadland. Marvel Studios President, Kevin Feige, has made it clear in the past that he’s a fan of Zhao’s work and he teased some beautiful shots in Eternals during a recent interview with Variety.

During the interview, Feige explains that Zhao “was really fighting for practical locations.” Feige recalls seeing a sample reel of Zhao’s footage and being impressed by how a sunset looked without a green screen.

“And I had to keep saying, ‘This is right out of a camera; there’s no VFX work to this at all,’” Feige shared. “Because it was a beautiful sunset, with perfect waves and mist coming up from the shore on this giant cliffside — really impressive stuff,” Feige explained that he began to get a better sense of Zhao’s style once he watched Nomadland. “Oh! That is not just what she wanted to bring to Marvel,” he recalled. “This is a signature style.”

While speaking with Rolling Stone earlier this year, Feige spoke about Zhao’s pitch for Eternals and said it was the best pitch he had ever heard.

“Not only does Chloe make remarkable, small, personal movies in a remarkable, small, personal way, but she thinks in grand, cosmic, gigantic terms, which fit perfectly with what we wanted to do. Eternals is a very big, sweeping, multimillennial-spanning story. And she just got it,” Feige shared.

Recently, Zhao spoke about why she wanted to work with Marvel.

“I have been a fan of the MCU for the last decade. So, I put the word out there I wanted to make a Marvel movie and the right project came to me,” Zhao said while speaking with director Barry Jenkins in a discussion for Variety. “I just wanted to work with that team. Again, back to world-building. It is my favorite thing. That’s why I love ‘Star Wars.’ There is a world that is so rich. I wanted to enter it and see what I can do. It’s the same as what you’re saying. Can I put a spin on it while still being true to the essence of it? That’s exciting to me. It’s not that different than me going to the world of rodeo cowboys and saying, ‘My spin on that is going to be this,’ and it’s a collaboration. The chemistry of that, when it’s right, it could be very exciting.”

Eternals is currently scheduled to hit on theatres on November 5th.