Marvel Studios: Assembled

I'd been trying to get my dirty, little fingers into Marvel for years,

so I go in, I meet with Brad Winderbaum for the Black Widow movie.

I loved She-Hulk so much even then, that I put her into my Black Widow pitch.

At one point, he even said like,

"Kinda feels like you're pitching a She-Hulk story with Black Widow in it,"

and I said, "Guilty."

So, when I didn't get that job, my parting shot to them was,

"If you ever do do She-Hulk, you better call me, because if you don't,

"I'll burn this building to the ground."

Kevin makes the announcement that they're gonna do She-Hulk

as a series and I'm furious,

because I look at my phone, I'm like,

"I don't have any missed calls from Marvel Studios.

"I told them what would happen."

And my fiancé was, of course, like, "Chill out, dude."

And then literally the next day, I got a call,

you know, from Marvel to see if I wanted to pitch on She-Hulk

and of course I was like,

"I think I heard something about an announcement?"

I was actually a huge fan of She-Hulk as a kid.

She was, kind of, in my mind,

the only really badass female superhero who had her own comic books.

In her actual pitch to get hired,

Kat had a picture of her

as a "scrawny teenager,"

you know, reading the She-Hulk comic.

She used to go every week and get it,

and it was this exciting, formative thing.

It was right as everything was going down with the pandemic,

I had my first meeting, and it was, kind of, you know, horrible for the world,

but great timing, because my husband, Rhys,

actually owned all the old comics,

and we went to his mom's basement and pulled them up,

and I got to, kind of, go back through all these comics that I'd loved,

and really remember what was so exciting about She-Hulk.

And what was so exciting about her is that she broke the fourth wall,

and she was so irreverent, and she was so big, and strong, and bold,

and so many of the things that she did are, kind of, groundbreaking.

What I love about Jen's story is, she's this young woman

who spent so much time working,

and hasn't really had the chance to grow her life romantically,

to spend time with her friends,

to just, like, live a fun life as a young adult woman, and then,

this huge thing happens to her and it's like,

how do you, sort of, navigate just your everyday life,

trying to be good at your job, trying to be a good friend,

trying to figure out, sort of, what you want as a person,

and then as a Hulk.

What are you talking about? I'm not gonna be a superhero.

What else ya gonna do as a Hulk?

Return to my career.

What I love most about Jen, Jen/She-Hulk

is just her contradiction.

She's just so completely fixated on work, and yet she also has this huge heart,

and just wants to fall in love, and all of that.

And also that she, in one sense,

loves being She-Hulk and at the same time resents it.

She's kind of directly in that contradiction.

We just started a superhuman law division,

and I want you, well, the She-Hulk, to be the face of it.

Oh.

There was conversation even in the methodology

about how we shoot this.

At one point, we talked about,

are we gonna go old school and do it like Bill Bixby,

and, and Lou Ferrigno, and find

you know, a great actor who's of a certain height,

and then have a bodybuilder playing She-Hulk.

There were so many different discussions,

we went down so many different paths, and at the end of the day,

it really landed with, "We need to find the best actor for this job

"who's gonna bring the most to the role," because ultimately,

she's going to be a six-foot-seven, green computer-generated image,

and we all need to feel like this is a real human being,

and buy what she's selling.

These dodos never had to deal with this on the first day of the job.

I hope they die in a fire.

Not really, they can die of old age, but like, tomorrow.

I always thought of this as a comedic role,

and so I always thought like we need a very comedic actress.

You know, has to be a very, very comedic person,

who has a ton of comedy experience,

but when we cast Tatiana, it was like,

she made me change the way I think about this character.

Like, she turned Jennifer Walters and She-Hulk into a real person.

I'm a Hulk. Why don't I just smash our way in?

Because they have weapons, Jennifer.

Yeah, well, good thing She-Hulk is indestructible, Matthew.

Not only am I, like, stepping into, like, being a superhero for the first time,

but I'm also, like getting to do a flat-out comedy,

which is just so exciting.

And like with, you know, writing like Jessica's,

it's just so easy, and all of our day players are like amazing,

all of the guest stars, like, it's just an incredible group of people,

so it just feels really, for the first time, like, total play, um,

which I've experienced in little doses,

but this feels like totally a different world.

Who are the two least likely people to play Hulk?

She's actually hysterical.

-Well, I disagree, but I'm having fun. -You're really funny.

-You can do comedy really well. -This guy's the fun one.

I... I have never had the chance.

I know, isn't it... Don't you feel like, as a serious actor,

you get stuck doing serious things,

-when all you really wanna do is comedy? Yeah.

-What? -Don't make me angry.

You wouldn't like as me...

For She-Hulk we were really keen

on it being Tatiana's performance.

Our whole goal was to not keyframe her face.

She's amazing. You want all that performance.

And, so, she was wearing of course the full mo-cap suit

which gets her physical, her body performance,

and then she had what we call an HMC or a head mounted camera on.

And it's recording all those little dots

and then those dots are then piped into a system that can then read that in

and translate that into facial motion.

Scrunch your face left. Scrunch your face right.

Blink. Blink right. Blink left. Good.

So the gold standard for motion capture

is what we call optical capture,

that's what you would probably recognize as having the little like,

what looks like ping-pong balls,

what we call retro reflective markers all over at certain points on the body.

It also requires about 50 cameras set up in a volume,

and those all have to be perfectly set up and then calibrated,

obviously there's a big up time with hanging all those cameras,

and then any scenes where there's a lot of crowds,

she's sitting at her desk, suddenly her legs are blocked,

we can't see her pelvis anymore.

That's when we would use an inertial suit.

Inertial suits, they rely on little sensors that are built into the suit,

that also is just on a signal.

So there's a little station that we set up and it talks to all of the sensors.

The only tricky thing with that,

it's not as precise as the optical capture.

So the inertial tended to go with us on location,

for quick setup and tear down,

optical any time we were in a big set, we were gonna be there for a few days.

We did everything. We did mo-cap,

we did facial capture,

we did Tatiana doing all the takes

as well as doing a stunt double doing the takes as well as

animation trying to track the motion capture.

Tatiana has her frame,

and it's quite different to what She-Hulk is,

so Tatiana doing this is one thing.

When you have She-Hulk, it feels this!

And people don't talk this way! But that's how it translates

when you are the height that she is and the size that she is.

So we had to do a lot of, maybe, taming

the straight translation from what Tatiana did to She-Hulk,

so that it would feel within character,

and it didn't become a caricature.

Someone like She-Hulk is very time intensive.

She also has additional complications in that she's got long-flowing hair,

so she's automatically more difficult than other characters.

She also has 25 costumes, which is unheard of.

We only started from a core from the wardrobe department

and then we would kinda take it from there.

For the show, we also had an actress, Malia, who was 6'7,

and so she would wear a practical version of the costume

and that was really valuable reference for us in visual effects.

That was one of the funnest things about this character,

was getting to do both versions of these costumes,

what they look like on Tatiana, as Jen, and then as She-Hulk.

We actually had a body form made,

based off of what She-Hulk's measurements would have been,

and we had that as a reference

when we were making those costumes, so that we could see,

like the aftermath of the suit after she has her transformation.

We studied a lot of different transformations on camera.

There's so many different ways to do it.

And the truth is, with Jennifer turning into She-Hulk,

it's meant to be this very seamless, natural, easy thing.

Yeah. All the way down, small, impish.

One of the things that we really responded to in visual effects

was pulling up this reference material.

There was a time lapse video of a strawberry ripening,

and that was kind of, the biggest inspiration.

-See? -No, I'm doing this.

Okay, this is completely new territory.

We are in studio. We're doing the scenes where,

Jen has been cousin-napped by Bruce,

and taken back to his beach lab,

and she is undergoing, like, Hulk training.

Oh, my God, Bruce, what the hell?

It kind of feels like if I don't transform, I'm gonna die!

Learning to be a Hulk,

how to eat like a Hulk, how to dress as a Hulk,

how to control her transformations,

but what's so cool about it is that she's pretty great at controlling them.

Far better than Bruce is.

The triggers are anger and fear.

Oh.

Those are, like, the baseline of any woman just existing.

A lot comes more easily to her than it did for him.

It's a little frustrating, I'm not gonna lie.

Guess we could just...

skip all that then.