Joss Whedon Says Juggling All the Heroes in Age of Ultron Was a “Nightmare”

Every fan’s dream is Joss Whedon’s nightmare.

Until the MCU, assembling a ton of comic book heroes with an amazing cast and somehow tying it together properly in approximately 120 minutes to make a legitimately good Avengers movie seemed like an impossible dream. Then Joss Whedon made it look downright easy with how much fun The Avengers was, and our expectations soared even higher—and then came down and landed squarely on Whedon’s shoulders for writing and directing round two.

In an interview with UK magazine SFX, Whedon was pretty blunt about Age of Ultron being the hardest task he’s ever undertaken due to the sheer number and variety of characters included, saying (via THR),

Shoot me in the face! It is a nightmare. I long for the simple movies like Serenity! This is the hardest juggling act I have ever, ever tried to pull off.

They’re very disparate characters. The joy of the Avengers is they really don’t belong in the same room. It’s not like the X-Men who are all tortured by the same thing and have similar costumes. These guys are just all over the place. And so it’s tough. Honestly, this is as tough as anything I’ve ever done, and I haven’t worked this hard since I had three shows on the air.

And that says a lot, coming from a person who generally excels at portraying group dynamics on-screen. Truly, we are reaching peak Whedon, and I am excited.

He also mentioned that, as you may have gathered from the copious Hulk-busting and angsty-Ruffalo we’ve seen so far, there’s a lot more Hulk this time around.

There is more Hulk in this movie than there was in the last first [sic]. But what I’m excited about is we shot this movie very differently. I was running a lot of cameras, I was shooting long lenses, which I don’t usually do.

Still, because this is Whedon we’re talking about, you can expect the Hulk to feel more like a character and less like a CGI set piece:

What I love is we have the opportunity, because we went in with this mission statement, to shoot the Hulk like a character in a movie, and not like a ‘Look what we’ve got!’ We have ‘overs’—blurry ‘Hulk’s over there!’ Bits, very quick shots. Everything isn’t ‘We built the Hulk so for god’s sake you’re going to watch him in this long take, full frame, the whole time!’ We really got to make him one of the characters in the movie. And that was a gift.

And so it will be a gift to all of us when the movie hits theaters on May 1.

(via Geek Tyrant)

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?