Murphy's Multiverse

Tag: Interviews

  • Pixar’s New Short ‘TWENTY SOMETHING’ Is Pure Brilliance

    Pixar’s New Short ‘TWENTY SOMETHING’ Is Pure Brilliance

    Growing old gets old fast, as anyone past their mid-20s would know. The grass of adulthood isn’t as green as we all thought it would be as naive kids. There are lessons to learn, pressures to deal with, bills to pay, and norms to live up to. Growing old isn’t easy and Pixar’s latest short, Twenty Something, captures the pains of growing in the most meaningful way possible.

    Directed by Soul artist Aphton Corbin, the short follows Gia’s first night out as a 21-year old. In true Pixar fashion, the night doesn’t quite go well for her as the crippling anxiety adulthood brings soon takes over. And in truer Pixar fashion, there’s a conceit within the short that elevates it to a whole new level; Gia is made up of three kids walking under a trench coat – 1-year old Gia, 10-year old Gia, and 16-year old Gia. In the press junket, Corbin elaborates:

    I just love this idea of all these kids and what they’d look like stacked up in a trench coat.  Trying to navigate through life.  It felt like the perfect metaphor of trying to steer through life while hiding your insecurities.

    Through the eyes of Gia’s past selves, Corbin puts the perils of adulthood in focus; an insurmountable hurdle we must all jump over. Part of being an adult means being in control of yourself, both physically and emotionally, which 1-year old Gia is unable to do. For 16-year old Gia, it’s that yearning for social acceptance but being ill-equipped to handle socializing. All of this is beautifully realized by Corbin and her team and its powerful messaging cuts through the whimsy of it all.

    There’s even an added layer of complexity behind the cute representations of Gia as Corbin purposefully based them on psychoanalytic theory. In our interview with her, she said:

    I kind of based it on the subconscious. The id, ego, and super-ego. I tried to break the character down in that way. 1-year old Gia is the id; what does it want? Eat, sleep, and drink. 16-year old Gia is the super-ego who is super insecure all the time. 10-year old Gia is the level-headed one, the most confident of them all. Those three felt right.

    What makes Twenty Something stand out in an era of sleek, fancy, 3D Pixar shorts is that it’s in 2D. As I put it while speaking to Corbin, the short has a very nostalgic Saturday morning cartoon vibe to it, which only underlines the child-like yet complex messaging of it all. Corbin cited budget constraints as a driving reason but also referred to vintage cartoons as sources of inspiration.

    It was really inspired by older vintage cartoons specifically in the 60s and 70s.  We tried to get some of that charm and appeal into the design that we have there.

    With a short as evergreen as Twenty Something, it didn’t come as a surprise to hear that the story was somewhat autobiographical for Corbin, who took the plunge of directing something for Pixar for the first time with the short. Like a true artist, Corbin took all her fears and worries over something as monumental as directing and turned it into a beautiful piece of art.

    The whole thing is absolutely autobiographical. Gia was just me in my twenties, especially with the insecurity of directing for the first time. All those feelings came over me of like, “Oh my god. I can’t do this. This isn’t going to be a good movie.” And so it was fun to take those insecurities and put them into a film. It was very fun to put parts of me into that one character. I’ve never had anything quite as embarrassing as what Gia does in her first night out though [laughs].

    Twenty Something is out this Friday on Disney+ which I highly recommend you guys check out. It’s a beautiful short with a heartfelt message told in a really fun story.

  • EXCLUSIVE: Fala Chen Talks Tony Leung and Being the Heart of ‘SHANG-CHI’

    EXCLUSIVE: Fala Chen Talks Tony Leung and Being the Heart of ‘SHANG-CHI’

    Shang-Chi and The Legend Of The Ten Rings features plenty of action. Each action set piece is bigger than the last until the film’s explosive third act. Now everything that leads into that action is surrounded by the heart of the movie: Jiang Li, mother of Shang-Chi, played by Fala Chen. Murphy’s Multiverse was fortunate enough to talk with Chen recently about her role, working with Tony Leung and more.

    Chen’s Jiang Li makes a big impact as the moral center of the film. Chen addressed how she stepped into that central role:

    I feel it was very natural for me to step into that role. I got to spend a lot of time with the cast prior to the beginning of filming. We trained together for so long that we hung out after our training sessions. We got to really know each other so well and we became best friends. So I think that really helped me to imagine some of the character I didn’t get to play with on screen but have a relationship with that was really helpful.

    Chen gave director Destin Daniel Cretton credit for not only helping her create what is an entirely original character but also creating an authentic vibe for Ta-Lo, they mystical realm from which Jiang Li hails.

    Then Destin (Director Destin Daniel Cretton), I have to give him so much credit for spending so much time with me to map out the journey of my character. He explained the backstories, and asked me what ideas I had for the character. There are imaginary backstories that we mapped out together. I feel like I was very lucky to not only play the character but have a lot of personal input as well. Here’s a small example particularly with the language. My character spoke Chinese in the film, and there are so many dialects in the Chinese language. Even with Jiang Li coming from Ta-Lo, which is a mystical village we wanted to be very specific about every word that she was using. It’s precise, it’s part of the spirit. The language we used is such an ancient, nuanced language we wanted to make sure it’s authentic. In order to do that we spent a lot of time with a translator. I had a lot of personal input in the translation of that. It was a lot of collaboration amongst us all.

    Chen absolutely stole the show in her role, a role, as it turns out, she never auditioned for as Marvel Studios was eager to work with her.

    I was offered the role and never had to audition for it, which was like, “What? “I was so honored and so happy. I almost didn’t even get the call that came through, because they’ve been tracking my availability. For a long time we didn’t know what the project was about. I had heard in the news that Shang-Chi was in the making, so I’ve been tracking it. We never know because they (Marvel) have been so secretive. I then went on a honeymoon with my husband. Then suddenly, my agent was trying to reach me and I didn’t hear from them for the longest time. Eventually we got a call from a satellite phone as we were literally out of this world, and they made an offer.

    Jiang Li’s tragic story was such a necessary part of this movie. It provides the context for Shang-Chi, Xialing, and specifically Wenwu’s journeys. The opening scene between Chen’s Jiang Li and Tony Leung’s Wenwu was a beautiful homage to Asian cinema. Chen talked about that scene and working with Hong Kong legend Leung:

    I have to say that was the most difficult scene to play but also the easiest thing to play. The difficult part obviously being the physical fighting. It was the intricate choreography and also being 50 feet in the air flipping around. Doing all that physically is really difficult as well as pretending to be such a master of a high power. At the same time the easiest part is looking into his eyes and just being a fan girl.

    Chen also echoed the sentiments of much of the film’s Asian and Asian-American cast when asked how she felt being a part of the production that brought Marvel Studios first Asian hero the big screen

    While I was a part of making this, I’m still kind of in disbelief that I’m lucky enough to be a part of this amazing story that’s going to be an historic film. Obviously not only for the Marvel Universe, but for especially the Asian-American community.

    Marvel Studios Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings is in theaters now.

  • EXCLUSIVE: ‘SHANG-CHI’ Producer On That Trevor Slattery Comeback

    EXCLUSIVE: ‘SHANG-CHI’ Producer On That Trevor Slattery Comeback

    Wherever you’ve landed on the Iron Man 3 villain twist that saw the menacing and powerful “Mandarin” turn out to be an eccentric and incredibly goofy actor named Trevor Slattery, one thing was never in doubt: Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Slattery was an absolute gem. Given the popularity of Kingsley’s Slattery, the character’s counterfeit connection to the Ten Rings, and the recent marketing of his All Hail the King one-shot on Disney+, fans were overjoyed to see Trevor Slattery return to the Marvel Studios big screen in Shang-Chi as the same lovable, strange, and hilarious character we met back in 2013.

    Fans weren’t the only ones happy about Kingsley’s return. When asked about the actor’s comeback, Shang-Chi Producer Johnathon Schwartz had this to say:

    “We love having him back. He’s an amazing actor, he’s an amazing presence. And he was just sort of a cool, funny, unique character who just fit organically in the story we were trying to tell. We always sort of wanted to bring him back and bring him back in maybe a bigger role than maybe people initially imagined he might be…I think was very exciting.”

    Kingsley’s triumphant return to the MCU highlights Marvel Studios’ ability and potential to tell long-running stories with characters from extremely different properties and time periods. The fact that Shang-Chi was able to pull off Trevor Slattery’s reintroduction with such ease and joy is a fine tribute to Marvel’s attention to detail, as well as its love and appreciation for all of its work both past and present.

  • EXCLUSIVE: How Kevin Feige Assigns Projects to the Marvel Studios Parliament

    EXCLUSIVE: How Kevin Feige Assigns Projects to the Marvel Studios Parliament

    We’ve previously written about the Marvel Studios Parliament, the group of executive producers who marshall the shared universe of the MCU alongside Kevin Feige himself. While talking with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings producer Jonathan Schwartz, we asked him a bit more about how Parliament works. and specifically how each producer joins the film or series they work on from conception, hiring of writers and directors, to production and release. 

    It’s not really a genre thing or a speciality thing. We all sort of go off together and talk about who wants to do what and what’s coming up, and we all kind of end up working on stuff we’re excited about. I just like martial arts movies and Shang-Chi felt like the right character to bring a martial arts movie to life, and so that was that I put my hand up and said I wanted to do Shang-Chi. That’s more or less the way it tends to happen, there’s a character we all want to do, or there’s a character one of us one of us wants to do, and we just talk about it and divide it up and things generally work out where people get to work on things they’re excited about.

    Schwartz went into a little more detail about how some of those group talks play out, hinting at a very collaborative atmosphere under Kevin Feige‘s purview.

    There definitely is a camaraderie for a lot of us who have been around for a long time just throwing ideas back and forth […] It’s great when you have people who have been through the process, and who you trust, and whose creative taste you trust, and everyone’s taste is different, and that’s part of what’s really useful about it. Not all of us see movies the same way, so we’re all able to bring something a little bit different. 

    The long-term togetherness and mentions of process and trust suggest the hallmarks of a high-performance team. Through Marvel Studios’ results and the way members of the Parliament talk about it, it’s clear the studio’s producing process is both organic and managed in a way that keeps things fresh and diverse. With the streaming TV and film combination creating new shared universe narratives, and new media formats on the horizon for Marvel Studios to adapt to, it will be exciting to see how the Parliament evolves. 

  • EXCLUSIVE: Why Marvel Studios Created New Characters For ‘SHANG-CHI’

    EXCLUSIVE: Why Marvel Studios Created New Characters For ‘SHANG-CHI’

    The MCU has had its fair share of original characters created for the films prior to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Once upon a time, before he starred in his own 7-season series, Phil Coulson was an original character they made for Iron Man. Darcy Lewis, one of the runaway stars of this year’s Wandavision, was created for Thor.

    Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has the distinction of being the MCU film with the most original characters and for good reason. Producer Jonathan Schwartz shared with us why and whether it’s something we will see more of as they adapt obscure characters.

    I think it will always be case by case. Some of those characters, even if they’re obscure, have either a cool supporting cast or a supporting cast where you can find some cool element and update it. I think Shang-Chi in particular was in need of a refresh due to some of the comic elements that are a little more problematic. So we took more liberty to invent a little and bring more to it.

    Interestingly enough, Shang-Chi originally has a notable supporting cast in the comics in the form of certain MI6 agents. Schwartz elaborated why they scrapped the MI6 characters saying, “It would’ve loaded the movie up British Caucasian characters rather than having a movie that is primarily Asian.” Nonetheless, it’ll be interesting to see how they reinvent lesser-known characters for future properties.

  • EXCLUSIVE: How The Strange Supreme Fight Scene Was Developed

    EXCLUSIVE: How The Strange Supreme Fight Scene Was Developed

    This week’s episode of What If…? wowed audiences for a slew of reasons, not the least of which was the amazing fight Doctor Strange had with his evil self, Strange Supreme. With the fate of existence at stake, the fight delivered the same kind of thrills found in some of the biggest Marvel films like Avengers: Infinity War.

    We sat down and spoke with What If…? editors, Joel and Graham Fisher, on how exactly this amazing fight scene was brought to life in the production offices of Marvel Studios. Turns out the fight scene was the brainchild of showrunner Bryan Andrews and storyboard artist Aram Sarkisian.

    As far as the action sequences go, it’s all Bryan Andrews [director] and his right hand, Aram Sarkisian, who is now the Head of Story for the series. Bryan actually storyboarded that Infinity War sequence that you’re referencing. When the two of them are in a room, it’s amazing to watch. It’s a nonstop rapid fire of ideas.

    All the best fight scenes are dynamic; they tell a story through means of punching and kicking. In Doctor Strange’s case, it’s all about using the visuals of conjuration and sorcery as a storytelling device. This episode of What If…? has the two Stranges doing all kinds of things in all sorts of ways.

    Aram, as he was originally boarding it, was keeping the battle on the ground to a certain extent. And Bryan was like, “We gotta get elevation [gestures vertically]. This dance has to keep changing and can’t be all in the ground.” So they took Strange up and then took him down. All these different ways to make this fight scene flow in an organic way. And then there’s the capes fighting each other [laughs].

    With great action comes great stakes and the stakes for this episode are immense. Not only is the universe in peril in the fight but Strange’s humanity is at stake as well. The Fishers shared the production’s insistence on keeping everything about the story.

    It’s just an amazing collaboration between the director and the storyboard artists that drew it. But also the collaboration within the animation department is amazing because we got to a point where we went, “This is great but we’re gonna get battle fatigued if we keep doing action. We need to ground it within the story. What are the stakes?” So Strange needs to get into his head. We had that whole shadow moment that got storyboarded. He has to have that last temptation. Will he give in and bring back his love?

  • EXCLUSIVE: Why Abomination Was Redesigned For ‘SHANG-CHI’

    EXCLUSIVE: Why Abomination Was Redesigned For ‘SHANG-CHI’

    One of the biggest surprises in an MCU trailer has to be the shot of Abomination fighting Wong in a cage match in one of the trailers of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The appearance sent fans into a frenzy not just by the mere appearances and odd pairing of both characters but also the new comic faithful design of Emil Blonsky.

    Producer Jonathan Schwartz gave us a simple answer when asked why they decided to redesign the character after more than 10 years of absence.

    It felt time to update him a little bit and give him a refresh. We just like the new design better.

    The MCU has slowly leaned towards more audacious comic accurate designs over the years for the better. It’s always odd to watch comic book films from more than a decade ago and see how embarrassed the makers were of the source material’s design and aesthetics. As the MCU tackles crazier comic concepts, their designs get better and better. As Banner would put it, this new Abomination look is an absolute win.

  • EXCLUSIVE: Why The Classic MI6 Characters Aren’t in ‘SHANG-CHI’

    EXCLUSIVE: Why The Classic MI6 Characters Aren’t in ‘SHANG-CHI’


    Early last year, I shared the news that Marvel Comics characters Leiko Wu, Black Jack Tarr and Clive Reston, MI6 operatives and allies of Shang-Chi from the Master of Kung Fu comics, were set to be included in Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings. As those of you that have seen the movie will know, none of those characters appear in the film and there is no mention of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence service who, in the comics, was after Shang-Chi’s father.

    Our own Charles Villanueva was able to talk to executive producer Jonathan Schwartz and asked if those characters were a part of the early development process of Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings.

    Not really. I think that very early on we decided that we wanted to move Shang-Chi in kind of a different direction and surrounding him with that cohort just never really felt quite right. It would’ve meant kind of loading the movie up with British Caucasian characters rather than having a movie that is primarily, or almost entirely, Asian or Asian-American characters, and that version just felt more exciting, fresher and cooler.

    As integral as those characters were to Shang-Chi’s development in the comics, their absence was certainly not noticeable in the film. Marvel Studios did an incredible job of creating an entirely new world for the character to inhabit and new characters to help shape and guide him along the way. With Kevin Feige indicating they already have plans for a sequel, it’s possible that we might see MI6 pop up there or in a potential Ten Rings project. As Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings proved (Abomination and Wong were certainly not on anyone’s list of characters expected in this film), characters can show up any place at any time.

  • EXCLUSIVE: ‘CAPTAIN MARVEL’ Producer Teases Ronan the Accuser’s Possible Return

    EXCLUSIVE: ‘CAPTAIN MARVEL’ Producer Teases Ronan the Accuser’s Possible Return

    Jonathan Schwartz has been involved in the MCU for over a decade, having served as an assistant to Kevin Feige before tackling the role of producer in a number of Marvel productions. Before Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, he was involved in projects that deal more with the cosmic side of the MCU, having produced both Guardians of the Galaxy volumes and Captain Marvel‘s debut feature. Having similar settings means that there are a few characters that appeared on both IPs, one of the most notable being Ronan The Accuser. This makes Schwartz, a member of Marvel Studios’ Parliament, the studio’s creative committee, a voice to be heard when regarding the Kree warlord.

    We saw Ronan’s apparent death in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy with the character being brought back in Captain Marvel as that movie’s plot was set 20 years earlier. Being a fan favorite it’s fair to say many would like to see Ronan returning in all his glory. We asked about that possibility and Schwartz had this to say:

    I’m a big fan of Ronan. I’m a big fan of Lee [Pace]. And I would say “Never say never.”

    With all current Marvel storylines having moved past the point of Ronan’s death, it might be fair to assume that if he does make a comeback, it won’t be the same Ronan we met in 2014. But with Marvel Studios introducing the Multiverse in their projects, with What If…? opening the door for many characters to return to the MCU after being killed off in the main timeline, Ronan should indeed be on the top of the list of characters that could return in order to fulfill their comic book potential on the big (or small) screen.

  • ‘GUARDIANS’ Producer on James Gunn’s Return to Vol. 3

    ‘GUARDIANS’ Producer on James Gunn’s Return to Vol. 3

    The Guardians of The Galaxy is one of those obscure groups of characters from the comics that many didn’t really have a clue about but found success thanks to the way James Gunn handled their story, managing to turn an unknown property into a billion-dollar franchise. But the future of that franchise became uncertain when Gunn was embroiled in a scandal regarding decade-old tweets and then later fired for them. However, it wasn’t all bleak as Gunn managed to find his way back to where he started when he was rehired a year later.

    Producer on both Guardians films and the upcoming Shang-Chi film, Jonathan Schwartz, recently sat down for an interview with our very own Charles Villanueva where he expressed how important and happy he was to have Gunn back for the third and final film in the trilogy.

    It’s great to have him back. It’s super exciting. I’m a huge fan of James. It would have felt very weird to try and do a Guardians movie without him because he is such an important voice when it comes to putting those movies together and I think you feel that when you watch them. They feel so specific to James and to what he wants to do as a director. So I’m very, very pleased and excited that he’s able to come back for Vol. 3 and complete that trilogy.”

    It’s safe to assume that the entire fandom shares the same sentiment with Schwartz. Gunn recently achieved the same kind of success he did with Guardians when his own twisted vision of DC’s Task Force X, The Suicide Squad, came out last month to incredible reviews. To have him be absent for the group of misfits that put him on the mainstream map would have been a travesty.