It starts with the script. And that includes R-rated blockbusters. “Deadpool & Wolverine” (Marvel/Disney) didn’t get to $1.3 billion worldwide without entertaining a ton of global moviegoers. As dense, action-packed, hilarious, profane, meta, and chaotic as “Deadpool & Wolverine” may seem, someone developed the script and characters and plots that wound up on the big screen, from the dynamic between Hugh Jackman’s angry Wolverine and Deadpool’s wise-acre joker to jumping into the MCU with star cameos from Marvel movies past.
It wasn’t a cakewalk. In the video above, I sat down with 21 Laps producer Shawn Levy, who also co-wrote and directed, and Ryan Reynolds, who is the star and producer and co-writer (along with frequent “Deadpool” writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells). I asked Levy and Reynolds, who collaborated on “Free Guy” and “The Adam Project,” to explain why “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which landed a Best Comedy Critics Choice Awards nomination and Best Cinematic and Box Office Achievement Golden Globe nod, should also be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay by the Writers Guild and the Oscars.
This video interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity. See the video above.
Anne Thompson: Many people seem to think that this Marvel action epic, the second-highest grosser of the year, wrote itself. I want you guys to make the case for why this should be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars. Because it was written.
Shawn Levy: There’s this presumption, because the movie has a bouncy, naturalistic flow to it that, “Oh, we’re just finding it through improvisation, and we’re trying stuff out on set.” And certainly, there’s a little bit of that, but we refuse to go into production without a script that is honestly 95 percent reflective of the movie that everyone’s seen, and it really was the outgrowth of a long, long writing process.
Ryan Reynolds: Many of the alt jokes are written in advance. One thing that’s against it [in the awards space] is that a lot of people consider it a comedy. That’s fair, but it has a backbone that is emotion and warmth. Comedy and drama both subsist on tension. Certainly comedy is designed to set up an expectation and then come 90 degrees to it or subvert it. Somehow, you can do that so much more when you have dramatic stakes. When these two feelings are working in concert with each other, it allows you so much more leeway.
And going into the movie, we felt we had a lot to prove to Marvel and Disney. It’s the first big Fox property, after Disney bought the studio, to be R-rated. We had to write a movie that was a four- quadrant R-rated movie. That’s a hard thing to do. In order to do that, I’m not a big poetry person, but Keats talks about all the stitching and unstitching you do to make it feel like a moment’s thought. And that’s what is.
It took a long time to develop this, and the movie almost died?
Shawn Levy: It did. There were many moments before Ryan and I even met where there were talks between Ryan and Marvel and there was a desire, maybe, to make it. But once we made “Free Guy,” we made “Adam Project,” he said he would only do another “Deadpool” movie if we did it together. And that kicked off months with Zeb Wells and Wernick and Reese and the five of us as a screenwriting unit trying to come up with a story that is deserving of this estimable mantle, which is this “Deadpool” franchise in this MCU studio of Marvel.
Ryan Reynolds: Paul Wernick and I go back to the first “Deadpool “movie. But past that, 15 years back. And the first movie was recognized by the WGA, and I was gratified by that. We wrote “Deadpool 2.” And Shawn and I had been writing together already on “Free Guy” and we wrote on “Adam.”
Shawn Levy: We’ve spent seven months trying to come up with the story, because the jokes are the least of our worries.
Ryan Reynolds: We just write a drama with the stakes that a drama would have. We’ll work with comedy later, just need that narrative and that backbone to go from that canvas. And it’s counterintuitive, because everyone’s expecting us to find different ways to be subversive in comedy. And that’s later, that’s easier, once we have the emotional side of it, then you do the task of building in the comedy, which is so difficult to do and to get right, especially in the writing, because you have to write and rewrite and rewrite, and then you have to get on set and listen to the movie and see what it’s telling you, because it’s yelling at you. And then I’m in a Deadpool suit. He’s in a parka, in the winter, we got our laptop.
Shawn Levy: This almost didn’t happen, because finding the Venn diagram overlap between a movie that felt authentic to Deadpool, who is an earthbound anti-hero, raw and unvarnished storytelling, pretty gritty. And then you have the MCU, which is often shiny and galactic stakes. And we tried and tried, and we were on the cusp of failure. And I actually intended to tell Marvel and Disney, “You know what, guys, it’s not happening. Let’s put it to the side. We’ll punt.”
Ryan Reynolds: “We’ll come back to it later.” We had that Zoom that day, and you can’t make this up. Hugh pulled over on the side of the road and called. I’ve known Hugh. We’ve been best buddies for 16, 17 years. I picked it up, and he said, it was like this gut thing: He wanted to come back as Wolverine. Ironically, my first pitch to Kevin Feige five years before was a Deadpool and Wolverine movie, a Rashomon story. So much of these movies are timing. He had just finished “Logan,” and it was a beautiful masterpiece of a movie and a screenplay. He didn’t feel like it was right. And I respected that. But then five years later, it felt like the world is speaking to us in a weird way, right? We should maybe listen.
Shawn Levy: The zoom that was intended to be the end of that development moment was the birth of this movie. So instead of saying, “Kevin, let’s put it to the side,” we said, “Kevin, we got an interesting phone call.” And from that phone call onward, this pairing unlocked the story for us, and it instantly became not only a “Midnight Run,” “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles”-inspired two-hander road trip, but also a movie about legacy and about two characters haunted with regret, who need each other to find redemption. And that really unlocked the writing process for us.
Ryan Reynolds: For me to write Wolverine dialogue was a terrifying process. There’s a specificity to the character. Obviously, he’s very Clint Eastwood, less is more, he’s a non-verbal character. But we’ve also capitalized on Marvel’s pre-existing multiverse format to find a viable way to bring back a Wolverine that is maybe different than the one they knew in “Logan.” Not only that, we brought back what, contextually, is the worst Wolverine— this guy is a loser. So these are all problems you have to solve over and over again. When the first thing we said to Hugh, “You’ve got it, you got to be in the yellow suit.” And we have to wait. We can’t just put you in it. They’ll clap when they see it. They’ll love it. But we have to find out why you’re wearing it. There’s got to be a reason. And then the other thing is that the character, traditionally, at least, from the core comic books, is a guy who cannot control his rage. He has a berserker rage. He doesn’t just kill the bad guys. When he goes into that state, he kills good guys too. And that is like a sickness for him. The suit, we wrote it as a hair shirt, or a penance, or this thing that he carries with him out of shame.
Shawn Levy: It’s this symbol of his self-loathing and his conviction that he is beyond forgiveness, and the movie is a journey towards him forgiving himself.
Ryan Reynolds: And I always thought of it like an unorthodox totem, a visual item for an audience to track. And in that final scene, he’s not wearing it, and you feel like he’s found whatever sense of peace, or at least a piece of peace that he was looking for.
Once you figured out that the two of them anchor the whole thing, then you could spin off into all this crazy plot.
Ryan Reynolds: The thing I’ll never take for granted, particularly when you’re writing with stakes like this, is having an actor like Hugh Jackman, who’s incomparable. I love watching him. We wrote this sequence that I don’t think there’s a syllable he changed, in the van where he has a monologue that has more words in it than he had maybe in any entire Wolverine movie in the past.
Shawn Levy: And every writer understands this. I remember the day we wrote that scene, and it was just some days you come to work and you’re like, “OK, no one’s leaving here till we crack this.” And we just did version, version, version, and we spent hours until it somehow felt like Logan, but also expressed a dimension and a voice that we haven’t heard him speak in.
Ryan Reynolds: Hugh took that monologue and just devoured it. He chewed it, swallowed it, and delivered for us…and at the end, there’s a stage direction at the bottom that briefly says after he finishes that whole speech, “a flicker of regret crosses his pupil.” And Hugh, in the scene, if you watch it, there is the tiniest little feeling of “I went too far,” and if you blinked, you would have missed it. I get goosebumps even thinking about it, because it was an actor who is so in tune with his instrument and himself. I get to sit there, wearing a mask.
You’re also surrounding them with many, many Deadpools, many, many Wolverines. And you have all these characters that you’ve brought back, in that incredible sequence in the void, colliding with one another. And to get Channing Tatum and Jennifer Garner and Wesley Snipes, that’s crazy. You introduced that news at Comic-Con in Hall H.
Ryan Reynolds: Shawn always comes to the table with: “What’s our theme in the movie, what are we trying to do ultimately, can we distill that into a word?” And to us, it became clear that was redemption. And the expectation we’re trying to subvert…is that these two characters are entering the MCU, so they’re going to have to interact with Thor and with all these other guys. But instead of looking forward, we wanted to look back at this bygone era that was important to not just comic book fans, but to us. We cut our teeth at 20th Century Fox, Shawn and myself, Hugh, our crew. We owe our careers to the work that we were given and got to do at that studio, so we wanted to shine a light on that, and in doing so, it led to these other incredible moments, like when Wesley Snipes crosses the frame and enters the movie for the first time. I’ve never felt the power and energy and elation, and even elements of sorrow in a crowd of 6,000 that was just so overwhelming. I was crying. The audience was crying. People were wailing! It’s because they’re seeing someone that they desperately missed, but they didn’t know they missed.
It’s a rare thing that you kept it a secret.
Shawn Levy: But it’s worth it to tie that off. When you join the MCU, you have unlimited availability of characters, Easter egg lore. So for us, we had to enact our own discipline, and that was what supporting characters or cameos would feed into the theme? And if the theme is legacy and redemption, then those are the characters we’re going to.
Ryan Reynolds: But also the great thing I learned over and over again, is that constraint is one of the best creative tools you could possibly have. I’m not saying we had what we needed in terms of the budget to make the movie, but it was modest in comparison to a lot of films. And we had a lot to prove as an R-rated film. We had a lot to prove as newcomers into that world. They trusted us, gave us autonomy and some control.
Shawn Levy: When you have the availability of so much, it does help to enforce rigor and constraint. We didn’t go into this thinking, “Well, let’s throw everything at the wall because we can. Let’s spend all the money because we could.” We didn’t want that. We wanted to tell this story of redemption.
The movie is dense but while you’re experiencing it, you know exactly what’s going on.
Ryan Reynolds: A byproduct of that constraint where necessity becomes the mother of invention, you start thinking asymmetrically. Every piece of real estate in that script became valuable and important. You find ways to replace spectacle with character, which, in this day and age, at least to me, and I feel this as a movie fan, we are inured to spectacle a little bit. When you’re watching “Lawrence of Arabia,” there’s like 10,000 horses that are there. And that 10,000 horses in the modern era, you watch that, and you go, “Oh, you doubled over and over again.” And so I love that people remember character, and it’s a lesson I learned on “Deadpool 1” right away. It’s just the more they took away in terms of budget, the better the movie got.
How do you keep the audience’s attention? Sequels dominate the box office.
Shawn Levy: You’re talking to guys who made “The Free Guy,” original film, who made “Adam Project,” original. But with heart, and that’s the kind of movies we love, and it’s the kind of movies we love making. And our hope, and I hope our industry as well, charts a future that includes both streaming and theatrical movies, and includes, yes, sequels, because there’s a certain security to that, but it has to take swings on original filmmaking too. And certainly, we’re not done with that.
Ryan Reynolds: But also we live in this age when streaming is incredibly effective in certain ways, some of the best movies I’ve seen are on streaming, but there’s just nothing on earth that will ever compare to the emotional investment an audience makes in going to the movie theater. You know because you’re buying tickets and getting in a car and you’re driving there and you’re sitting down for two hours. You drive home, you talk about the movie, it is that different investment than having the movie come to you, and if that movie, in the first 10 minutes, doesn’t grab you by the throat, you have 50, maybe 60 options for your attention that can go elsewhere. And it’s difficult because you start creating something for an audience that isn’t necessarily a captive audience.
Was there a question of making it “Deadpool vs. Wolverine?”
Ryan Reynolds: There was, even before Shawn joined. I must have pitched Kevin a dozen, maybe 16, Deadpool movies, a Sundance Deadpool, which was like a road trip with Margo Martindale, shot on no money, no special effects needed, just character. I pitched “Deadpool Is Hunting,” the hunter who shot Bambi’s mom finds him, and they fall in love, become, like, Butch and Sundance and of course, I was told we don’t touch Bambi at Disney, and rightly so. “Deadpool vs. Wolverine” was talked about at first.
Shawn Levy: The title was “Deadpool 3” for a long time, then it was going to be “Deadpool and Friend,” and we had a late-in-the-process epiphany that the arc of the screenplay is they are pitted against each other until eventually, and frankly, for audiences, satisfyingly, are joined together. So it’s “versus” that transitions into “and.”
Ryan Reynolds: For some reason, we weren’t allowed to use the name Wolverine in the title. I’d have no idea why, some weird loophole thing, but at the last minute, we changed it to “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and they somehow pushed it through. But a lot of times, it’s persistence. We were told we couldn’t use Blade or Gambit.
Shawn Levy: A lot of things started with “no.” Not because they were micromanaging, but because the lawyers down the hall said, “That’s not part of the deal.” And yeah, we were hopefully respectful hammers. But for sure, we were hammers. If we felt that something was right for this story, if it became a had to have, then we just were a little bit relentless.
So what’s going to happen with the next “Deadpool & Wolverine”?
Ryan Reynolds: I can tell you that “Deadpool” works best on scarcity and surprise. So the character is a better supporting player than he is a central figure. And I say that because Deadpool works best when you take everything away from him. And in order to take everything away from him, you have to centralize him, and we’ve done that now. I can’t keep taking everything away from him. I would love to, if we’re in the future, have an idea for an ensemble where it doesn’t necessarily center on Deadpool, but includes Wolverine and some other interesting pair-ups within that. I always think simpler is so much better. Say very little. Very, very clean stakes right at the beginning, not plotty. And then we’re off to “My Dinner With Andre” mixed with “X-Men.” No, I’m joking.
Shawn Levy: There’s the headline.
You’re working on “Boy Band”?
Shawn Levy: That’s one. It’s “Full Monty” in tone.
Ryan Reynolds: Think broad comedy with middle-aged men from a formerly glorious boy band, but it’s a little bit more in that “Full Monty” feel, a “Waking Ned Divine” vibe. And it’s so fun.
Where are you on writing it?
Ryan Reynolds: Second draft.
Shawn, are you working on a “Star Wars” movie?
Shawn Levy: Because “Deadpool & Wolverine” was so fulfilling, I’m quite happily open to whatever’s next. And yes, there’s a “Star Wars” movie that I’m developing, actually with our “Adam Project” screenwriter Jonathan Tropper. You never know what’s going to become undeniable and get made next.
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