“When you’re with mates, you’re not embarrassed to make a fool of yourself” Shawn Levy says about Deadpool & Wolverine. It’s the biggest film of the director’s career, but working with familiar faces made it easy, as Travis Johnson writes.
Shawn Levy is definitely a veteran filmmaker, the 55-year-old Canadian having made his directorial debut in 1997 with the family films Address Unknown and Just in Time. Since then, he’s had a fairly prolific and certainly successful career directing broad appeal crowd pleasers, being best known for the Night at the Museum franchise. Of late, he’s frequently worked with Ryan Reynolds, directing his fellow Canadian in Free Guy and The Adam Project. Now they team up for the third time for Deadpool & Wolverine, which also sees Levy reunite with his Real Steel star, Hugh Jackman.
Levy stresses that the three are firm friends in real life, and that friendship made tackling the latest Marvel blockbuster—and one that sees Jackman reprise the role of Wolverine after seemingly saying farewell to the character in 2017’s Logan—much less daunting.
There is a tremendous comfort in the fact that we’re such good friends,” he says. “So we’ll do the script and we’ll always be open to ideas that come up on the fly in surprising ways. When you’re with mates, you’re not embarrassed to make a fool of yourself.”
In practice, that meant a lot of improvisation and collaboration on set. “So, if Hugh had an idea and he wanted to try something? Alright, try it. It might suck, you know, I might have an idea and it might be crap and I might be mortified, but not that much. ‘Cause I’m with my buddies and the truth is, when you’re loose enough to risk failure, you’re also loose enough for discovery. Many sections of this film benefit from that work process and environment.”
You might think that loose, shoot-from-the-hip approach might not jibe too well with the Marvel monolith, whose carefully structured, interwoven continuity seemingly needs constant attention to avoid snarls. Add to the that the fact that, the last few offerings from the Marvel Cinematic Universe haven’t exactly set the world on fire, and you’d expect a lot more executive oversight. There’s a lot riding on this one.
So, with that in mind it’s surprising when Levy says that he was more or less left to do his own thing, with only a few continuity-connected caveats. “The great news is we were not asked or obliged to service a bigger arc. Like, I couldn’t even tell you what Phase were a part of!” he laughs. “This was always a standalone movie.
“We respect the mythology, but we weren’t telling a story that requires homework and we’re not telling a story that is just existing to set up a sequel. We’re telling this journey, this story of two characters foisted together reluctantly and who end up frankly finding their way to a relationship that’s really different than either one of them expect.”
If you’re not across this latest slice of marvellous Marvel entertainment, Deadpool & Wolverine sees Ryan Reynolds’ wisecracking Merc with a Mouth shanghaied by the time-tampering Temporal Variance Authority before his universe is destroyed.
Not wanting to see his universe destroyed (he keeps all his stuff there) Deadpool shanghais another Wolverine from an alternate timeline—our one still being unequivocally dead. This one is still played by Hugh Jackman, though, and the pair quip and kill there way through what appears to be a veritable cavalcade of cameos, puns, fights, guns, and existence-ending threats.
It’s a big ask, juggling the anarchic tone of Deadpool with the vast moving machinery of the MCU, along with reintroducing Hugh Jackman’s fan favourite Wolverine (and seemingly introducing mutants into the mainstream MCU), but apparently not an intimidating one.
“I guess I should have been more nervous, but I was mostly excited.” Levy recalls. “Probably because, yes, I’m jumping into the MCU, but I’m jumping in with a Deadpool movie.
“So right out of the gate, it’s presumed that this is going to be something different. It’s going to be something subversive. And it doesn’t need to abide by the typical rules of that subgenre. Because with Deadpool, frankly, the DNA of that franchise is defined by the defiance of rules.”
Ultimately, Levy saw his job being to make a movie that could rope in casual viewers and the hardcore fans alike. Or, as he puts it, “The goal was to make a movie that my mom and wife can enjoy with zero fluency, but the many of us who are fans of the comics will feel like, ‘oh, wow, okay, they see me!’ because this movie is littered with references and Easter eggs that I think fans will enjoy.”
