Eternals director Chloe Zhao was surprised by Marvel’s creative freedom

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

When you're dealing with a studio as immense as Disney and a universe as vast as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you would expect that you'd have executives peering over your shoulder every step of the way, but ETERNALS director Chloe Zhao recently told THR that she was surprised by the amount of creative freedom that Marvel gave her.

I shot exactly the way I wanted to shoot. On location. A lot of magic hour. Three-hundred-sixty degrees on the same camera as I did on Nomadland. Same rigs. It’s a bit surreal. I’m still waiting for the shoe to drop. It hasn’t. I think I got lucky in that Marvel wants to take risks and do something different.

ETERNALS is definitely shaping up to be one of the more unique movies on Marvel Studios' upcoming slate. The film follows the events of AVENGERS: ENDGAME as an unexpected tragedy forces The Eternals, a race of ancient aliens who have been living on Earth in secret for thousands of years, out of the shadows to reunite against mankind's most ancient enemy, The Deviants. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said that Chloe Zhao's initial pitch for the project was "fascinating" and "frankly one of the reasons we moved forward on the movie was because of the vision she brought to it." One of the ideas that Zhao brought to the project was her love of manga. "I have such deep, strong, manga roots," said Zhao. "I brought some of that into Eternals. And I look forward to pushing more of that marriage of East and West." Although AVENGERS: ENDGAME was pretty much the biggest movie in the MCU, Zhao thinks ETERNALS has a shot to be just as big; after all, it is about the history of humanity. "How much further and bigger can we go after [Avengers:] Endgame?" asked Zhao. "Because I’m not just making the film as a director. I’m making the film as a fan."

ETERNALS features a diverse ensemble cast that includes Richard Madden, Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, Lauren Ridloff, Brian Tyree Henry, Salma Hayek, Lia McHugh, Don Lee, Barry Keoghan, Angelina Jolie, and Kit Harington, and Chloe Zhao wanted to be sure that the film reflected the world we live in. "But also I wanted to put a cast together that feels like a group of misfits," said Zhao. "I didn’t want the jocks. I want you to walk away at the end of the movie not thinking, 'This person is this ethnicity, that person is that nationality.' No. I want you to walk away thinking, 'That’s a family.’ You don’t think about what they represent. You see them as individuals." ETERNALS is slated to hit theaters on February 12, 2021.