In a recent interview with Forbes, S.J. Clarkson, director and co-writer of the upcoming Marvel movie Madame Web, revealed more about the film.
Keep reading to find out the interesting and startling revelations made by her about the thriller.
Madame Web is a superhero action adventure film directed by Clarkson, who has also worked on hit films like Marvel's Jessica Jones and The Defenders, Heroes, Bates Motel, and Succession.
Unlike other typical superhero films, Clarkson wanted Madame Web to be different in the sense of being a psychological thriller.
Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson as the main lead, who plays an orphan woman who is a paramedic by profession. Her life takes a turn when she starts to have vision and gets driven to save three strange girls she has no connection with. Why she has to protect those girls from a mysterious enemy and what the enemy is after is what the thriller is about.
Clarkson described her experience of making Madame Web as a healthy balance, with sometimes feeling intimidated by the amazing visual effects put in it while just feeling like another day on set on the other days.
Madame Web is one superhero who has not had her own movie, unlike other superheroes, and Clarkson called it “a travesty and weird.”
The writer-director defined her as an enigmatic character, saying that we often miss what’s on the side, and that’s where the major interest lies.
She further revealed that before Johnson signed up for the film, the duo had a good discussion of the film where she explained her vision of the character to Johnson. Though Johnson initially felt the film to be too fantastical, at the end she boarded on.
When it came to the source of inspiration for the filmmaking of Madame Web, the director and writer said that she didn’t want to focus on making a superhero film, but she wanted to embrace a different genre.
She tried to make the film like a psychological thriller, taking inspiration from hit films from the past like The Conversation, Inception, and more.
Her upcoming thriller is set in 2003, and she explained it by saying that the period is most familiar to her, including the soundtracks from that time.
She called Britney Spears' Toxic an apt choice for a spider-bite movie.
The period of 2003 shown in the movie also justifies the absence of any surveillance capitalism, which is displayed through the lack of any such technology in the storyline. Only the villain gets to use the tracking technology.
Clarkson also confessed how hard it was to keep a big-budget superhero film under wraps while shooting at a public location. They used the code words “Peru" and "Clair” to misdirect the fans.
At the end, Clarkson revealed how tightly packed the film schedule was, recalling it as a race against time.
Madame Web releases on February 14, 2024, in theaters.
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