Marvel Studios: Assembled

Doctor Stephen Strange, a neurosurgeon,

who, after a terrible accident, lost the use of his hands.

You might even say, his hands betrayed him.

And I can relate. If you catch my drift.

Anyway, this Strange guy couldn't cut it in the operating room anymore,

so what did he do?

Run home and cry to mama? No-siree-bob.

He picked himself up and trained to be some kind of fancy-pants wizard,

complete with a kooky cape, and a groovy goatee.

And yet, they still call him a doctor. Know why?

Because now, he's a doctor of kicking butt and taking names.

Strange has mopped the floor with cosmic conquerors, mad Titans,

and guys with really bad complexions.

But enough with the CliffsNotes recap already.

These days, Strange is up to his medallion-wearing neck

in psychedelic scary sauce,

and that is what we're here to talk about.

I'm Bruce Campbell, and I'll be your host

as we journey beyond the confines of our own humdrum reality,

and see what's really cookin' in the Multiverse of Madness.

After we finished the Infinity Saga,

we were looking at how to evolve post Endgame

and into phase four.

We wanted to explore entirely new characters

and entirely new sides of the Marvel comics.

One of the things we're exploring in phase four is the Multiverse.

And in the Multiverse, we get to see different realities and different outcomes

of characters that we all know and love in an infinite number of ways.

Some of them are tragic, some of them are horrific,

all of them are unexpected.

And that was always where we were headed with this sequel to Doctor Strange,

knowing that we wanted to explore the mind-bending,

frightening side of the Multiverse.

And this could only have been done under the direction of Sam Raimi.

I got a call from my agent saying that Kevin Feige and the Marvel team

were looking for a new director for the new Doctor Strange movie.

I was a big fan of the first one.

I thought that the director, Scott Derrickson, did a great job

and Benedict Cumberbatch delivered an incredible performance.

So when that offer came and I thought, "Okay, it's been a long time since I had

"made a superhero movie, I wonder if I can still do it?"

And that alone was reason enough.

Sam Raimi is one of the godfathers of the MCU,

if you think about it, with the Spider-Man trilogy.

To get to work with Sam is a dream come true,

not just for me, but for most of the people on this set.

That guy's movies are part of the reason I became a writer,

so, to have Sam Raimi come in a room and sit across from you and be like,

"All right, kid, what's the movie?"

Man, it's really a case of meet your heroes.

So, I was a very junior part of the creative team

on his original Spider-Man films, and now working so closely with him,

who would have guessed, certainly not me,

that nearly 20 years later, Sam Raimi would be working

on a Doctor Strange movie for us.

We are in the Sanctum Sanctorum, Doctor Strange's home,

his weird, haunted house that he lives in, and today's day one.

I think it was always in Marvel's mind

that this film would really open the door wide to the Multiverse.

The scale is epic. It's almost unfathomable.

That's part of the madness.

Madness of handling this many characters and this many storylines.

So, this Multiverse that everybody and their uncle

keeps yackin' about,

what is it anyway?

Well, I looked up Multiverse in the dictionary.

Yes, I cracked open an actual book, and this is what it said.

"An infinite realm of being or potential being

"of which the universe is regarded as a part or instance."

I don't know what any of that means, but I'll wager,

it has something to do with endless possibilities.

So, if you're aiming to tell a story

set in a world where literally anything goes,

how do you even begin to begin?

Yes, it's a maddening job, that can make you go insane

trying to figure all the stuff out, but it's a lot of fun.

Telling the story of the Multiverse was such a gigantic endeavor.

To not only paint an accurate picture of our universe,

but of another, and another, and another.

It took teams of really great artists and Michael Waldron's great script,

which I just thought was brilliant.

It was February 2020,

and Kevin Feige called me

and said "We'll go in a different direction

"on Doctor Strange Two,

"and we want you to come over and write it."

There were already sets being built and everything

so we really had to hit the ground running.

But I think I had, like, three weeks to try and write that first draft,

and that last week is when the NBA shut down, COVID hit,

and the world stopped spinning.

And so, it was an interesting month, to say the least.

The silver lining was production pushed from May of 2020 to November of 2020,

so it allowed us the time.

We said, "All right, let's blow this thing up entirely,

"let's start from scratch."

And that's exactly what we did.

And we threw that draft of mine out entirely

and said, "If we were in on day one of this movie with Sam Raimi,

"what is the movie we would make?"

And we came up with something better and much more exciting.

Michael did a Herculean job with this project, in my humble opinion.

He had all the history of Marvel that he had to work into this.

Ready.

How he managed to balance all of that, I think, was extraordinary.

And, action!

Nailed that, that was sharp.

What's interesting in a story about the Multiverse

is exploring the other ways that things could have played out.

It's especially interesting with a character that we saw at one point

sit with his head going in a million different directions,

watching 14 million different outcomes in his particular universe.

Getting to work on a Doctor Strange sequel is really exciting

because the first movie really blew open the doors of the MCU

in ways that we couldn't even imagine, because you can't tell the same stories

with Captain America that you could with Doctor Strange.

Marvel comic books have always been excellent at painting complex characters.

It's how in the '60s and '70s they blew DC out of the water.

They're able to build upon these relationships with great depth,

and we're able to build upon them movie after movie.

He's been through a lot, he's lost the use of his hands,

become a sorcerer, assumed this mantle as master of the New York Sanctum,

fought in a war against Thanos,

gave up the Time Stone in this incredible gambit

that resulted in saving the universe,

and he's kind of been dropped back into normal life.

The first film did a great job of describing the journey of Doctor Strange.

This film, it's about what he's become, the price he's had to pay

to become this great sorcerer and savior of the universe.

I felt, I guess as much as the audience and the fans did, that, you know,

this extraordinary character seemed to be sort of

all-powerful and perfect, I wanted to know what it was about him,

how he'd got there as much as anything else.

I wondered what it was costing him or what it would cost him

to continue developing in that way, accruing power and ability.

Really, the film's an examination of that,

how far as a maverick and an outsider, and a chancer, and an ego

can he go before stuff really becomes undone?

It's always great in these solo flights, to kind of shake the snow globe up

and disturb the character

and throw stuff at him that really makes him question his purpose

and who he is and how to best be.

I never stopped caring about us.

But I had to make sacrifices.

I'm sorry.

It's quite an emotional place that he's in at the beginning.

Then he's sort of slungshot into this adventure.

We're in New York City.

A giant monstrous octopus has attacked New York, it's bad news.

Three, two, one, action.

This is where Doctor Strange meets America Chavez.

Look out!

Do I know you?

Through this adventure, he forms the unlikely partnership

with the young America Chavez,

the last person you'd expect Doctor Strange to work with.

America Chavez has been on a list for a long time of characters

that we wanted to bring into the MCU.

America Chavez was created in 2011, so she is a relatively new character.

Casting America Chavez was great,

it was such a highlight of this experience,

we did such a wide search.

We found Xochitl Gomez and thought unanimously

she was the best person for this role.

I did my first audition in March, 2020,

and I didn't hear anything for six months.

And then I got a call to do a screen test in London.

That's when I got told what character it was for and I was like, "Oh, my gosh."

We started with the comics,

the denim jackets in many of the comics,

and I designed these combat jackets which had red, white, and blue,

like, stars and stripes flag that was all kind of blended together

in this camouflage, so it was a camouflage jacket.

America dresses a lot like I do. I do wear black ripped jeans

and a T-shirt and a nice jacket over it, and a pony, I wear that all the time.

And so, when I first went in, I was just amazed with all these jackets.

There's so much detail.

I don't think you'll ever see it, but there's a bunch of poetry

and just the way the star is designed on the back of the jacket.

I had, like, 100 other versions of Mexican sort of folkloric art

and Day of the Dead references that could be part of the kind of emblem

on the back of the jacket.

But I'm really happy that we went with the star.

In the street scenes that we've shot with her running,

you see this white star going down the street,

and it's a really good focus point.

It was fantastic working with Xochitl.

I think she's probably gotta be one of the youngest actors in the MCU

and it can be quite scary, you know. I mean, it was scary for me to enter into,

and then someone so young with so much on her shoulders.

It's a huge responsibility to originate a character, a superhero.

It's crazy, it's really like, "Oh, my goodness."

It's good to kind of lift off the pressure with that.

We always have a bit of music on set, and she's big into, what is it, TikTok?

She tried to teach me some moves, but I think I pulled a muscle.

Benedict Wong, I mean, he is amazing.

He carries this mega-huge, like, boom speaker

and he just carries it around and just, like, bumps up and down.

He's like a walking rave party, it's amazing.

He's got some snazzy moves, but I think my moves are a bit snazzier.