The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
More “Cherry”:
‘Avengers’ in the rearview Joe and Anthony Russo returned home to make Northeast Ohio-set, ‘Cherry,’ a dark, challenging drama
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo discuss the challenges in making the film.
It seems as though making the top-grossing movie of all time may not be enough to earn you carte blanche in Hollywood. ¶ Brothers Joe and Anthony Russo — who grew up in Cleveland and Mayfield — are the directors of not just the film holding that honor, 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” (about $2.8 billion worldwide gross) but also its Marvel Cinematic Universe predecessor, “Avengers: Infinity War,” which sits at number five on the list with $2 billion and change. ¶ The brothers — whose other big-screen directing credits include 2002 Cleveland-set caper comedy “Welcome to Collinwood,” 2006 comedy “You, Me and Dupree” and earlier MCU entrants “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) and “Captain America: Civil War” — have made something quite different from those movies in their new film, “Cherry.”
Based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Nico Walker, the drama stars MCU vet Tom Holland (“Spider-Man: Homecoming,” “Spider-Man: Far From Home”) as a young man from Cleveland who finds love, then heartbreak, goes to war and returns with post-traumatic stress disorder and becomes a drug addict.
“Even though we were coming off ‘Avengers: Endgame,’” Joe says during a recent virtual roundtable with Anthony and three Northeast Ohio-based journalists, “when you want to make a movie about PTSD and drug addiction, it’s not the kind of subject matter that movie financiers come running at.”
The film was independently produced in part by the Russos’ company, AGBO, and is getting a very limited theatrical release in Northeast Ohio and a few other markets. After what is slated to be a two-week exclusive run at Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights, the film is set to show March 12 at Atlas Cinemas Great Lakes Stadium 16 in Mentor and Cinemark’s Valley View 24 + XD.
On that same day, it also will be available to subscribers of tech giant Apple’s streaming platform, Apple TV+.
“Of everybody who watched the movie, Apple responded most passionately,” Anthony says when asked about how the film landed with the company behind the iPhones and myriad other popular products. “A lot of people, sure, responded strongly, but Apple just seemed to really love the movie.
“You want to partner with the people you’re feeling the most love from because that means your movie works for them for some reason,” he continues. “Apple really felt this film would be important for their platform and important for their audience, and they were extremely passionate and extremely aggressive about getting the movie.”
Acquiring the rights to the book and making the movie was a personal project for the Russos, they say.
“We have people very close to us in Cleveland — family members — who are struggling with addiction, others who have died from addiction,” Joe says.
Walker’s book, he adds, is challenging, beautifully written and unique to Cleveland.
“We identified with it,” Joe says. “He grew up in the same area we grew up in, ran in the same neighborhoods we ran in, and so we knew everything he was talking about in the book and understood it visually.”
In late 2019, the Russos brought the production to Northeast Ohio, and numerous shots of Cleveland and its suburbs help form a character of sorts in the film.
“The texture of the city has always been very meaningful to us and very resonant on both an emotional level and a psychological level,” Anthony says, “so to be able to use those associations we have with the city and tell a story that can hopefully be universally accessed by people around the world, that’s a very unique opportunity.”
“Shooting in Little Italy was fantastic,” Joe says. “We spent a lot of our youth there. Shooting at La Dolce Vita, where I used to work and Nico used to work, (was meaningful).”
For the home Holland’s titular character shares with his young wife, Emily (Ciara Bravo), they used a house on Cleveland’s East 127th Street — the road where they spent about the first decade of their lives.
“Shooting on the street where we grew up was a pretty remarkable and profound experience,” Anthony says.
Considering the movie’s subject matter, the Russos knew “Cherry” would be challenging to make, and finding the right tonal balance was high up on their list of priorities.
“There are parts of the movie that are very dark and difficult,” Anthony says. “We didn’t want to shy away from those parts of the film. We didn’t want to sugarcoat them. We didn’t want to romanticize them. We wanted to portray a stark reality in terms of (what) the brutality, the violence can bring to the human experience — the brutality that drug addition can bring to the human experience. we wanted to be unflinching in how we approached that.”
On the other hand, he says, “Cherry” couldn’t lose itself to that darkness.
“In order for the movie to be seen, people have to come to the movie and not just be brutalized. They need to go to the movie and they need to be entertained. They need to be excited. They need to laugh. They need to laugh. They need to be able to walk out of that experience and (say) to other people, ‘Hey, you should watch this film.’”
He and Joe regularly talk about finding balance in their filmmaking, saying they strive for “movies that give you the entire range of the human experience in a single film,” that scare you, excite you, make you laugh, make you think, make you cry and that challenge you.
“We really like the widest variety of experience within a single film and tone is elemental in how you achieve that,” Anthony continues. “Joe and I often describe our process — we feel like alchemists because you’re mixing these things together in a way where you’re trying to include a lot of different things in the experience without undermining any of them.
“It’s really a process of experimentation as we execute on the screenplay level, as we execute on the shooting level, as we execute on the editing level.”
The pair of box-office kings says streaming platforms such as Apple TV+, as well as Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu and others, are making it possible for a huge number of less-mainstream films to be made and be seen that otherwise may struggle mightily to find an audience.
“First of all, you have to have a story to tell, which is what compels you to become a filmmaker in the first place,” Anthony says.