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How Depression Became the Villain of Thunderbolts*
“I kept expecting there to be more resistance,” director Jake Schreier tells Vulture. “But we never heard, ‘Take this out of the movie!’”
A journeyman director of quirky cable TV ( Kidding, Lodge 49), music videos (Kendrick Lamar, Haim), and a 2015 movie adaptation of the John Green coming-of-age novel Paper Towns, Schreier had first come to the attention of Marvel head honcho and Cinematic Universe architect Kevin Feige in 2012 with his directorial debut, the Sundance-award-winning sci-fi drama Robot & Frank. And while certainly accomplished, nothing in Schreier’s filmography presumed he’d have fluency with superhero punch-ups, extensive VFX work, or the kind of $180 million production budget Thunderbolts*(whose ensemble cast includes Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, Lewis Pullman, and Hannah John-Kamen) would be getting. Video conferencing in from a car parked outside his Los Angeles–area home (which was undergoing noisy construction), Schreier talked Vulture through Marvel’s arduous, monthslong hiring process; his surprise inclusion of “meth chicken”; coming up with the “ Thunderbolts* is Marvel’s A24 movie” marketing campaign; plotting a key sequence around the movie’s chief villain named the Void — a living embodiment of both negative space and limitless, godlike power who also happens to be depression in caped-crusader form — and how Schreier escaped the studio’s signature style of director micromanagement thanks to some key advice from his college roommate, Spider-Man trilogy director Jon Watts.
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