CHERRY
By making a small, dark human drama! THE RUSSO BROTHERS on Cherry, their return to directing after Avengers: Endgame
How do you follow up the biggest movie of all time? Luckily, we asked two guys who know — Joe and Anthony Russo.
STRANGE AS IT may seem, directing the biggest film of all time can have its drawbacks. For example, it opens so many doors that you don’t know which one to go through first. Paralysis of choice can result. George Lucas didn’t direct a movie for 22 years after the original Star Wars. “We were acutely aware of that calcification,” says Joe Russo. “But we have a very existential point of view, which is that the value is in the work, not necessarily in the response to it. We like to throw ourselves into the things that excite us. And we didn’t want to take too much time, where we started overthinking our next move.”
And so, less than two years after Joe Russo and his brother, Anthony, directed the biggest movie ever, Avengers: Endgame, they’re already back at it with Cherry, an adaptation of Nico Walker’s memoir about a young ex-soldier who develops an opioid addiction, and robs banks to pay for his habit. “The novel spoke to us very powerfully,” says Anthony Russo. “We’ve been touched by that crisis in very personal ways. We have people close to us who have suffered from it, from addiction, and even died. So it seemed like a movie we wanted to make right now.”
It’s a huge left-turn for the brothers, but there’s a more serious, indie side to the Russos. Their first movie, Pieces, which isn’t currently available, cost just $7,000, caught Steven Soderbergh’s eye, and set them on the way. “It’s a companion piece to our first movie,” says Joe Russo of Cherry. “It’s riotous, it’s an attempt to disrupt, and it takes chances. It’s a high-risk, high-reward approach to filmmaking rather than a risk-averse approach.”
The Russos have been setting up their Marvel exit strategy for some time, constructing their own company, Agbo, and recruiting MCU stalwarts Chris Hemsworth and the late Chadwick Boseman. Cherry continues that trend with Tom Holland — the kid they cast as Spider-man for Captain America: Civil War
— taking the title role. “Our understanding of who Tom is, and what he’s capable of, is really intimate,” says Anthony Russo. “We could see the connection between him and his character in ways that probably nobody else could.”
Meanwhile, the exit strategy continues apace. By the time Cherry opens, they’ll have started shooting their next movie, action flick The Grey Man (starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans). After that, they’ll shoot sci-fi thriller Electric State next January. “It’s that Cleveland blue-collar thing,” says Joe Russo. “Keep your nose down, and keep going.” Directing the biggest movie of all time can open so many doors, you don’t know which one to go through first. The Russo brothers’ solution is ingenious: they’re going to go through as many of them as they can.
CHERRY IS ON APPLE TV+ FROM 12 MARCH