After helming juggernaut Marvel movies including Avengers: Endgame, which went down in history as one of the highest-grossing films of all time, director duo Joe and Anthony Russo set their gaze on an all-out action-thriller – The Gray Man. The star-studded flick can only be described as one big flex from the filmmakers and by that, we mean sprawling combat sequences that pay homage to the over-the-top actioners that they grew up watching. The film features Ryan Gosling as secretive CIA operative Sierra Six who goes up against an unhinged Chris Evans as Lloyd Hansen with some help from Ana de Armas’ Dani Miranda. It also marks Dhanush’s Hollywood debut as the “sexy Tamil friend” Avik San. As the camera zips along an exposition-filled ride leaving behind a trail of destruction, it becomes clear that the Russo Brothers have gone in all guns firing with their creative vision.
In an exclusive interview with Filmfare, the Russo Brothers talked about the film’s most ambitious sequences, casting Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and everything that went into pulling off the incredibly “exhausting” (and expensive as the film reportedly cost $200 million USD) feat that is The Gray Man.
The Gray Man has all these exhilarating set pieces. Were there moments where you said “this is crazy, let’s do it!” and which one was your favourite?
Joe: Every one of them. It was an exhausting movie to make. We have said in the past that it almost killed us making this movie. Action movies are very physical. They’re very demanding and they require a lot of energy day in and day out. A lot of choreography, and safety because there are some very very big set pieces in this film.
Anthony: I love different things about all of them. On any given day, I’d probably give you a different answer to that question but right now I’m feeling like thinking about the final conflict between Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling. It’s one of the simple set pieces in the sense that it’s just a fight between two people. But it’s the emotional conflict that’s playing out within the fight that I find very complicated and powerful. The resolution between these two characters who have been on a collision course with each other throughout the film is very satisfying and climactic. So even though it’s a simple action set piece, I found it very resonating because of the characters and the actors.
Having Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling face-off is such an inspired choice. What was the brief you gave them and how much of it was improvisation?
Joe: Chris Evans was just in a really great space in his career where he wanted to take some risks so to get him to play a villain is highly entertaining. And Ryan is just an amazing actor who sits in a complicated character. He’s tough, he’s tense but he also needs to be vulnerable, warm, funny and very quirky. And Ryan just has all those elements. Lots of improvisations happened. Anthony and I come from comedy. It’s really important for us that the actors have ownership of their characters and help us find the tone. So many lines were improvised throughout the movie. I think Ryan is probably responsible for about 50 per cent of the jokes in the film, if not more. Chris had several improvs he might have even improvised the “Ken doll” line if I remember correctly.
You worked on this film for over 9 years while you were working on the Marvel movies. What was that experience like?Anthony: While Joe and I like all kinds of filmmaking, we’ve been able to do many different things in our career from very small independent movies to comedy television to big action films. We do love action and there’s something about this movie that came from the book that it’s based on [Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man]. The propulsive nature of the action, the relentlessness and inventiveness of how it plays out in the set pieces, and the intriguing central characters of it. This idea of a spy – if all spies are secretive and unknowable, this one is even more so because he’s been pulled out of prison because he’s in a covert programme within the CIA that they don’t even have a record of. It just pushed this person into an even more cloaked, hidden and secretive place. We found that interesting. It was almost supercharging the idea of what a spy is. So it was just a lot of interesting ideas in this that seemed like we were in the right place to make a movie at this point.
As filmmakers, you are now known for tentpole movies that come with big budgets. What was a new element or piece of tech you really wanted to play around with?Joe: Each movie requires a separate set of tools. We used a speed drone that travels at very fast speeds to create kinetic energy. Sometimes, we used it within scenes but mostly it was used in transitions to connect from one location to the next as if the movie is moving at a breakneck speed and we’re whopping you from location to location.
How much did your vision evolve from the initial idea by the time the film wrapped?
Anthony: One reason why we like working within the spy genre which has political dimensions to it is that it allows us to, on one layer of storytelling, address what’s happening in the world today. The kind of things that are giving Joe and me anxiety about what’s happening today. We tried to make The Gray Man feel very current in terms of its subject matter and the conflict at the heart of it. I guess that would be one thing that evolved – us texturing it to show the problems that have been increasing in the world over the past decade. We’re in a very different world now than we were a decade ago. There are more pronounced conflicts today that were not necessarily present a decade ago. And that kind of texture is probably the biggest part of its evolution.
The Gray Man which also stars Regé-Jean Page, Jessica Henwick, Julia Butters and more is currently available on streaming.