BLACK WIDOW

Director Cate Shortland tells us to forget what we think we know — the long-awaited Natasha Romanoff prequel is full of surprises

How are you doing? You should have been done and dusted by now.

We were one week off finishing the edit [when] we had to stop, and then it probably took another two weeks to get the technology together so we could keep editing. The music’s all done. Almost there!

Have you talked to Scarlett during this time? We text each other really silly jokes. Her partner, Colin [Jost, Saturday Night Live writer], bought a metal detector, and was walking around the living room [with it], and all I could hear was her saying, “Oh. My. God. It has come to this.”

Well, you have to keep busy. So you’re starting Phase Four of Marvel with the prequel, going backwards to go forward. Is that contradiction something that you talked about in making this?

Yeah, it was. Kevin [Feige, Marvel boss] is always interested in the unexpected. He realised that the audience would expect an origin story so, of course, we went in the opposite direction. And we didn’t know how great Florence Pugh would be. We knew she would be great, but we didn’t know how great. Scarlett is so gracious, like, “Oh, I’m handing her the baton.” So it’s going to propel another female storyline.

So you see this as more a handover than just a farewell to Scarlett? Yeah. In Endgame, the fans were upset that Natasha did not have a funeral. Whereas Scarlett, when I spoke to her about it, said Natasha wouldn’t have wanted a funeral. She’s too private, and anyway, people don’t really know who she is. So what we did in this film was allow the ending to be the grief the individuals felt, rather than a big public outpouring. I think that’s a fitting ending for her.

That’s a really interesting approach as well, given that there’s such a sense of solitude about her. Putting her with a quasi-family is really counter-intuitive.

Totally, and again that’s Kevin, insanely smart. These people have known her since she was a child, so straightaway the mask has to come off because otherwise they call her out. It’s a side of her that you’re unused to seeing and I think it’s a particularly feminine way of looking at a story. Often, men look at things in a big mythic mural, right? The great heroine who’s going to slay the enemy. What we looked at was, who is she when she’s alone? Who is she with the people who know her best? That’s the detail we were after.

Was that an acting challenge for Scarlett? This character has been so defined by her privacy that when you open her up, it could

feel like a completely different person.

She’s always going to be guarded, but I think what Florence Pugh did as an actor was reveal herself so completely that [Natasha] has no choice but to do the same. So you have this really beautiful… almost a romance between the two girls. It’s the story of sisters. I’m proud of what they both did, because it’s really subtle but emotionally it’s got so much heart.