SINGAPORE – As Marvel characters, the Eternals might be new to many, but what is not new is the idea of the superhero team.
Eternals director Chloe Zhao, speaking to a panel of journalists online, describes how Marvel movie hero teams – such as X-Men (2000 to 2020) and The Avengers (2012 to 2019) – influenced her film, but also lists other less obvious choices.
They include anime series she loved as a child, such as Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon.
She is not alone in dropping left-field influences into Marvel work, says Zhao, winner of the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for her 2020 drama Nomadland.
She mentions writer-director Joss Whedon, creator of the influential supernatural drama series Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997 to 2003), who was tapped to direct the first and second Avengers movies (2012 and 2015).
What Sailor Moon, Buffy and X-Men have in common is the “Scooby gang” idea of individuals with different abilities pulling together in a crisis.
“There’s something about finding your place within a group, a family. It’s a warm feeling to watch people who don’t agree with one another find something worth fighting for,” says Zhao, 39.
The film-maker was born in Beijing and moved to Britain for school at the age of 15, before settling in the United States.
Eternals, which opens in cinemas on Nov 4, is based on a Marvel comic book series launched in 1976. It tells the story of beings of the film’s title, sent to Earth 7,000 years ago to fight Deviants, monsters created by the same powerful alien race that created them. After destroying the enemy, the Eternals separated and went incognito, their vow of non-interference keeping them out of human events. In the present day, an emergency causes them to reunite.
There has been talk about how Zhao was an unusual choice to helm a superhero movie, given that her resume consists entirely of intimate, low-budget dramas loved mainly by critics and festival audiences.
She jumped at the chance to direct Eternals, she says. “I wanted it so bad. I loved the movies, but also this particular story. I felt I had something to offer.”
During her pitch meeting with the Marvel producers, she gave a spiel about making a movie that contains “the meaning of the cosmos within the smallest things”, such as a grain of sand, as expressed in the poem Auguries Of Innocence by English poet William Blake, first published in 1863.
The producers’ warm reaction to her literary ideas surprised her.
“I was allowed to stay in the room,” she says. “So the vision of the film is to capture that scale – something as large as the creation of the sun and as intimate as the whispers of lovers.”
The actors playing the Eternals include those of major celebrity status, such as Angelina Jolie (who plays Thena, a master of weapons). Jolie rubs shoulders with actors such as Gemma Chan (as Sersi, a manipulator of matter), Scotsman Richard Madden (as Ikaris, who can project energy beams), South Korean Don Lee (as Gilgamesh, who boasts fighting prowess) as well as American deaf actress Lauren Ridloff (Makkari, who has super speed).
The power imbalance between Zhao, a relative newcomer to Hollywood, and a veteran such as Jolie is not as much of a handicap on set as people think, says the director. Neither is the gulf between her and non-American or disabled actors.
She has bridged bigger gaps, she says, such as on the production of Nomadland and her previous film, the western drama The Rider (2017).
For the sake of authenticity, she had cast many non-actors, hired because they lived in the rural, blue-collar settings of the films.
She says: “It’s hard to direct someone who has never acted before, who doesn’t even care if they show up on set.
“What’s beautiful about this cast is that they can build their characters by themselves. So my job is just adjusting what they bring me. I don’t need to be with them 24/7 to get it right.”
English actress Chan speaking at another online panel, says she was “very lucky” to have two bites of the Marvel apple. The 38-year-old, who gained global attention as the moneyed Astrid in the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians (2018), was super-soldier Minn-Erva in Captain Marvel (2019).
While on the awards circuit promoting Crazy Rich Asians, she bumped into Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, who asked if she was keen to do more.
“I thought that was nice, but who knows if it would ever happen, or perhaps it would happen in the distant future. I wasn’t expecting to be called for the screen test for Sersi – quite late. I think everyone else had been cast.
“It caught me by surprise and I was really, really happy to get it.”
Eternals opens in cinemas on Nov 4.
