BLACK WIDOW
Our Marvel extravaganza continues with Scar-Jo’s long overdue solo mission.
After her noble death in Avengers: Endgame, Natasha Romanoff was left without the one thing fans wanted: a standalone solo movie. As that’s finally put to rights in Black Widow,
Total Film joins Scarlett Johansson and the team for MCU’s action-packed Phase 4 lift-off.
The last time we saw Black Widow it was – to put it mildly – emotional. “Let me go – it’s OK,” she told Hawkeye, plunging to her death on the barren planet Vormir in Avengers: Endgame for the ultimate world-saving sacrifice. As deaths in the Marvel Cinematic Universe go – sorry, Iron Man – there probably wasn’t a more heart-stopping moment, as the ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. spy turned Avenger gave her life to retrieve the Soul Stone.
Still, it left the MCU in a bind. For years, a Black Widow film had been mooted, right back to 2004 at Lions Gate Entertainment before the rights reverted to Marvel. When Scarlett Johansson first appeared as Natasha Romanoff – the former KGB assassin with a very particular set of skills – in 2010’s Iron Man 2, it didn’t take long before questions were asked about a solo outing. Marvel Studios maestro Kevin Feige even held discussions with Johansson, who was then only 25. But there was a caveat, he said. “The Avengers comes first.”
While others – Thor, Captain America, Black Panther, even Ant-Man – had their moments in the spotlight, Black Widow was made to wait. And wait. And wait. Not that Johansson felt her character demanded the same treatment; if she was going to front a Marvel movie, there had to be a reason. “Is there something exciting to do creatively, as an actor?” she says. “Are we going to be able to make something extraordinary and strong? And something that stands on its own?”
It’s what makes the standalone Black Widow an intriguing prospect: a curtain-raiser to the MCU’s Phase 4, it promises to jump back in time before her dramatic death to answer those teasing questions still hanging over her life. Crucially, the script transports audiences back to events just after Captain America: Civil War, following that huge internal Avengers smackdown.
With no relatives or organisation employing her, Black Widow is alone, says Johansson. “It gave us the opportunity to really show her when she’s kind of off her game, you know? Because of that, anything was possible.” The actress was there “from the very beginning” in script meetings as they began to figure out how to delve into Romanoff’s origins. “You’re trying to map out all of this… which is actually extremely stressful,” she chuckles, “because there’s no guidelines.”
Fortunately, Johansson wasn’t alone. In yet another inspired choice for the MCU canon, Feige recruited Australian director Cate Shortland, better known for low-key dramas like Somersault and Lore. While she was taken aback, Shortland was emboldened by the creative freedom Marvel was offering. “They allowed me to be myself, and they encouraged me to make a movie that I was passionate about,” she says. “We were allowed to be really nuanced, and to make a character-driven movie.”
After numerous Skype sessions with Johansson, who also takes a producer credit, Shortland worked with a Russian researcher to flesh out Romanoff’s murky history: “the red in my ledger” as she famously told Loki in 2012’s The Avengers. As she intones in the trailer, “We have to go back to where it all started” – the teaser promising clips of Romanoff as a youngster (played by Ever Anderson, daughter to Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich) in a childhood that looks far from idyllic.
It’s what makes Black Widow a family reunion the likes of which only Marvel could have the guts to conjure. Joining Romanoff is Yelena Belova, a sisterfigure and fellow assassin who trained alongside her in the so-called Red Room, the punishing Soviet facility that produced the ‘Black Widow’ spies. “Their stories intersect,” promises Shortland. “They crash into each other.” Played by British Lady Macbeth star Florence Pugh, Belova is more than a match physically for Romanoff.
Still, emotionally is where it really counts. “What Yelena does is to kind of point out Natasha’s pain,” says Pugh. “She’s part of Natasha’s history. And I think that’s why we get this opportunity to look into Natasha’s history, because Yelena comes knocking, and says, ‘Yo, let’s deal with this pain.’” As Johansson comments, Belova is not just a carbon-copy of her own character.
“She stands completely on her own. She’s strong and different. She’s so different [to] Natasha.”
Alongside them are Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) and Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), two parent figures whose own histories intertwine with Natasha and Yelena. “This is the coolest thing with this entire group of people. They’ve all had parts of their past where they are regretful,” says Pugh. “They are older. They have had more life experience. They know more things about the system, about this world that they’re all living in.”
Harbour, the Emmy-nominated Stranger Things star, got to put an indelible stamp on the muscle-bound Shostakov, better known as supersoldier Red Guardian, the Russian equivalent of Captain America. “There is this gangster quality to him,” the actor grins. “And he’s covered in tattoos. He’s got this beard and these gold teeth. He’s insane.” But after years of making the wrong decisions, he’s also full of remorse. “He’s in a bad place,” adds Harbour. “And he needs redemption.”
Weisz’s character Melina is another to have experienced the rigours of the Red Room, a place which brought her into contact with Natasha and Yelena. Marking her first dip into the MCU, Weisz acknowledges that the film broaches the idea of discovering your family of choice. “It’s definitely about finding out where you belong, and where you’ve come from, and what your origin story was, and who you really are, and what matters to you – your ideology, I guess.”
Along the way, Feige referenced
The Kids Are All Right – Lisa Cholodenko’s 2010 movie about a same-sex couple raising two teenagers. “Which is so weird,” Johansson laughs. “You would never expect that from a Marvel film.” It wasn’t the only strange movie nod. Harbour talks of Shostakov in terms of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theatre professor in the black comedydrama The Savages. Or even expressing
“the pathos of a small-town, indie, family-driven, weird movie… like Little Miss Sunshine”.
More understandable cine-references included “things like Logan and Aliens and The Fugitive,” says Shortland. “We looked at films like that.” Certainly, it’s easy to see comparisons between Sigourney Weaver’s resolute Ripley, from James Cameron’s masterpiece Aliens, and Johansson’s Romanoff, an Avenger who doesn’t have superpowers. “We saw that as a strength,” says Shortland, “because she always has to dig really deep to get out of shit situations.”
According to the director, everyone on the production was invested in digging deep into Romanoff – even Scottish composer Lorne Balfe (Pennyworth, His Dark Materials), who replaced original choice Alexandre Desplat. Balfe looked back at the character’s origins, says Shortland. “He said, ‘I want to earth her, because she’s been unearthed in the movies in the past. I want to give her this flesh and blood.’ And he’s created this soulful score that is really Russian.”
Yet perhaps the real coup here is recruiting Shortland, the first female director to take on Black Widow (and only the second, following Captain Marvel’s co-director Anna Boden, to enter the MCU). “This film wouldn’t be what it is without Cate Shortland,” says Pugh. “I think having her eye, and having her mind with this script, it took it to a whole different realm.” Johansson agrees. “You can feel that it was made from a female perspective… baked in there.”
While the casting of Ray Winstone as Red Room overseer Dreykov (whose daughter contributed to the abundance of red in Romanoff’s ledger, according to Loki) adds more to the psychological battleground Black Widow will explore, it also deals with victimhood, a topic all too pertinent in the current climate. The Red Room itself is where female trainees are brutally sterilised. “You’ll see these women kind of strive and be strong, and they’re assassins – and yet they still need to discuss how they were abused,” says Pugh. “It’s an incredibly powerful piece.”
Judging by the 2020 Oscars, where Pugh and Johansson had their very own private bonding sesh on the red carpet, the two actors got on famously. “She has a really beautiful career ahead of her… she’s a very special person,” says Johansson, glowing when Pugh’s name comes up. More to the point, Pugh may well have more Marvel to munch on, if rumours are to be believed that her character will take up the ‘Black Widow’ mantle for further adventures.
Learning Parkour, kickboxing and knife-fighting for the role, Pugh can assuredly cut it physically, though she’s reluctant to claim Black Widow is merely a setup for future outings. “Even though that’s obviously where everybody wants to go and wants to think about – to think about what’s next – this film never really felt like that was what it was trying to underline.” According to Johansson, though, test audiences who have seen the film think otherwise. “Her character and her performance is so beloved.”
Now, after more than a year of pandemic-related delays (the film was bounced from May 2020 to October 2020 to July 2021), it won’t just be a lucky few test viewers who get to see it. Black Widow will even be the first Marvel movie to simultaneously bow on streaming site Disney+ (with a ‘premier access’ fee), an understandable move considering the uncertainty that still exists across the globe. And, indeed, following the success of Marvel TV shows WandaVision and The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, it doesn’t feel so alien a home.
Johansson believes fans will respond to Black Widow, with this flashback to an earlier part of her life bringing added poignancy to her Endgame denouement. “Our goal was for them to feel satisfied with this story; that they could maybe have some resolution, I think, with this character’s death, in a way. It felt like people wanted that.” Shortland agrees. “We did feel that we had to honour her death,” she says. And honour it Black Widow surely will.
BLACK WIDOW IS IN CINEMAS AND ON DISNEY+ WITH PREMIER ACCESS FROM 9 JULY.
‘THEY ALLOWED ME TO BE MYSELF, AND THEY ENCOURAGED ME TO MAKE A MOVIE THAT I WAS PASSIONATE ABOUT’ Cate Shortland