![]() ![]() “I think that’s something that she did incredibly well.” “She mentioned how important is was to create a fully realized character - a fully realized woman - who has evolved over the years, and really understand her on a beautiful and intimate level,” says “Black Widow” co-producer Brian Chapek. “You want to strip all of that stuff away - all the suit stuff, all the beauty, everything - and you want to just see inside them.”įrom Day One, when she first walked into the Marvel offices, that was the mission Shortland championed. If characters have been unknowable, the first thing a director wants to do “is to peel all that back and basically work out who they are as human beings, and what it is they’re scared of,” she says. Natasha knew the power of how much you let people know you.”įor Shortland, that inscrutability became an inviting challenge. “She is also surrounded in Marvel and in this MCU by a lot of (male) characters who love to hear themselves talk. “She’s unknowable because she chooses what to present,” he says. “Black Widow” screenwriter Eric Pearson says that Natasha, as one of the team’s wiser characters, speaks only when she has to. “That comes from the comics - that idea of her sexuality being dangerous, that she’s unknowable.” “When I first looked at the character (across) all the films, what I felt was that she was a femme fatale and she was using that,” she says. Out of that darkness, Shortland was determined to paint with narrative light - for a story set between the events of 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” and 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War.” Yet even as she bonds with such teammates as Hawkeye and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), much of her backstory remains shrouded. And when not ogling her, Stark is Googling her: Who is this mysterious woman of powerful self-possession? (Johansson told a group of reporters during a 2019 set visit that her character in that film was “so sexualized,” according to Collider.)Īcross the next decade, we discover shards of her dark past - her inhumane training for young women forced to live at the Red Room Academy, her pain over her murderous missions as a mind-controlled Widow - as the Avengers become her found family. From the moment she appears, she comes under the leering male gaze of Stark and Happy Hogan (the film’s director, Jon Favreau), which is played for laughs. Natasha entered Marvel’s movie universe posing as an assistant to Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr.’s wealthy industrialist turned Iron Man superhero - while working as a spy brought in by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and deployed as a S.H.I.E.L.D. (The film’s theatrical release was delayed more than a year because of the coronavirus pandemic “Black Widow” will simultaneously be available streaming on Disney Plus’s Premium Access.) The filmmakers - including Johansson, who serves as an executive producer - were nodding to the zeitgeist of the #MeToo movement and wanted to tell a story about female empowerment. Shortland and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige discussed the theme of standing up to bullies and how, “in a general way, we’re saying to people: Use your voice,” the director says. In the new film “Black Widow,” another trained assassin, played by Florence Pugh, accuses Johansson’s world-famous warrior of being a hair-flipping, play-to-the spotlight “poser.” Shortland says the point beneath the good-natured, touch-of-envy dialogue was for someone to needle and grill Johansson’s spy by asking: “Who are you really? Who are you under that artifice? I know you.”īehind the scenes on the set of "Black Widow," from left: Scarlett Johansson, director Cate Shortland, Florence Pugh and David Harbour. She’s under the gaze.”īut how to pierce this armor of observation? Shortland settled on a sharp bit of conversational meta-commentary. “Every time she’s moved, she’s being watched. “We’re talking about the armor that she’s put on for the last 10 years as this kind of femme fatale,” Shortland says during a recent Zoom call. The filmmaker perceived a pattern: Ever since Black Widow’s debut as a lethal agent in 2010’s “Iron Man 2,” Scarlett Johansson had constructed another costume of sorts - a second skin of self-awareness. Instead, the first woman to be solo director of a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie looked at what her superstar had stitched together psychologically across a decade. She focused first not on the fighting attire. Australian auteur Cate Shortland entered the world of billion-dollar cinematic Spandex with a unique eye. ![]()
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