How Depression Became the Villain of Thunderbolts*

Jake Schreier expected at least some pushback from Marvel Studios for wanting to portray characters struggling with feelings of worthlessness, depression, and isolation in Thunderbolts*, a Suicide Squad–esque comic-book caper in which members of a ragtag band of mismatched superheroes seem to flirt with thoughts of suicide.

A journeyman director of quirky cable TV (Kidding, Lodge 49), music videos (Kendrick Lamar, Haim), and a 2015 movie adaptation of the John Green coming-of-age novel Paper Towns, Schreier had first come to the attention of Marvel head honcho and Cinematic Universe architect Kevin Feige in 2012 with his directorial debut, the Sundance-award-winning sci-fi drama Robot & Frank. And while certainly accomplished, nothing in Schreier’s filmography presumed he’d have fluency with superhero punch-ups, extensive VFX work, or the kind of $180 million production budget Thunderbolts* (whose ensemble cast includes Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, Lewis Pullman, and Hannah John-Kamen) would be getting.

As it happened, however, in 2022 Schreier showed Feige early dailies from the limited series he had been executive-producing and directing immediately prior to landing the job: Netflix’s phantasmagoric Ali Wong–Steven Yeun anger-management dramedy, Beef. Not only did Marvel ultimately allow the director to keep the superhero-depression stuff in the movie, but studio execs encouraged him to lean into a tragicomic exploration of humanity’s existential “void” with help from Beef screenwriter Lee Sung Jin (who is also known as Sonny Lee) and a rewrite by Joanna Calo, showrunner–co-creator of FX’s The Bear (itself no stranger to characters in the grip of isolation and despair). “I kept expecting there to be more resistance,” Schreier tells Vulture. “But we never heard ‘Take this out of the movie!’”

Over its opening three days in theaters this past weekend, Thunderbolts* took in $76 million domestically — $162.1 million worldwide — to top the box office and finally dethrone Ryan Coogler’s Sinners from its two-week run at No. 1. That’s a qualified win: While nearly recouping its production budget (not including Disney’s $100 million prints-and-advertising spend) in the span of a single weekend, Thunderbolts* undershot February’s Marvel precursor, Captain America: Brave New World, which took in $192 million over its first three days. But industry analysts say that Thunderbolts*’s A-minus CinemaScore, healthy word-of-mouth buzz, and overwhelmingly positive critical notices mean the movie has a good chance of continuing to pack in audiences through Memorial Day.

Video conferencing in from a car parked outside his Los Angeles–area home (which was undergoing noisy construction), Schreier talked Vulture through Marvel’s arduous, monthslong hiring process; his surprise inclusion of “meth chicken”; coming up with the “Thunderbolts* is Marvel’s A24 movie” marketing campaign; plotting a key sequence around the movie’s chief villain named the Void — a living embodiment of both negative space and limitless, godlike power who also happens to be depression in caped-crusader form — and how Schreier escaped the studio’s signature style of director micromanagement thanks to some key advice from his college roommate, Spider-Man trilogy director Jon Watts.

Warning: Spoilers for Thunderbolts* ahead.

Marvel has a long history of hiring indie filmmakers, whether that’s Ryan Coogler, or Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, or Taika Waititi. How did you wind up directing this movie?
Ever since my first movie, Robot & Frank, I have talked to the Marvel guys on and off. Jon Watts was my roommate in college. So there’s this group of guys — like Chris Ford, who wrote Robot & Frank, then wrote Cop Car and Spider-Man: Homecoming with Jon, and created Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, which I also worked on — that group of guys, I feel like whatever I know about making movies, I learned it from them. I directed second unit on the L.A. portion of the first Spider-Man shoot and got to see what a set within that context was like.

Maybe, also, just as you get older, it becomes less about charting a particular career path and more about what experiences you want to have. The email was “There’s a movie called Thunderbolts* and it has Florence Pugh in it.” I mean, if you have a chance to work with her, you should do it. And then it was a seven-month pitching process.

How do you pitch the MCU? You’re probably not going to get a look at the first draft of a script. So I would imagine it’s kind of nebulous how you go in and even present your vision.
It’s a long process. The first meeting in this case was just a discussion with executive producer Brian Chapek about the ideas involved, and they sounded exciting. Before the second meeting, I got a look at the script. I knew from Jon that part of the pitching process with Marvel is they expect you to come in with a take and with ideas of how to shift things. It’s not “Here’s the script” and they dictate the terms and you go make it. Kevin and Lou D’Esposito would be very disappointed if you did not come in and attempt to improve it.

So I knew that that was sort of what they were looking for. I mean, it was a very good script and a good structure, a good idea for what a movie like this could be. It just felt like there were things we could do to make it stronger. At the second meeting, I put together a reel of scenes from movies that I felt like the movie should feel like. I had Ronin and Mission: Impossible 4 and Toy Story 3 and Reservoir Dogs and The Breakfast Club: “Here are scenes that really work in movies where you have people thrown together who don’t trust each other. And how can we make our movie feel more like this?”

In the next meeting, I would come in with storyboards for sequences that we had talked about. And then for the next one, it would be concept art. It took so long. Every month, I’d bring some new stuff. I was doing Beef at the same time, so I wasn’t sitting there waiting by the phone. It was kind of this thing going on in the background. If it felt like what I was bringing them lined up with what they wanted to do, then great. And if not, then that would be fine too.

Feige is quoted as saying he wanted you to “make this movie different” from other MCU movies. That could mean so many different things, like maybe addressing superhero fatigue? Or maybe making it like Beef?
Well, it was a little bit of both. I mean, Beef hadn’t come out yet. I found out I got the job the last week of shooting season one. But then in the development process, I would bring in scenes as we were editing and Kevin loved them. He would be like, “Oh, that’s cool. Can we do something like that?”

When we were figuring out that Void sequence — “If that’s your antagonist, then how are they going to beat him? It’s going to have to be resolved on some sort of internal level. How can we dramatize that externally so it doesn’t feel like a therapy conversation?” And Brian had this idea of “Could you go into the Void?” At first we were talking about it as this sort of Under the Skin, just black-emptiness thing. But that didn’t feel active enough, and we wanted to explore more backstory with it.

I had the idea of these interconnected rooms. I mean, I owe that, to some degree, to Christopher Nolan and definitely to Spike Jonze and Being John Malkovich with the Malkovich subconscious sequence. I also had Henrik Tamm, one of our concept artists, do a rendering of what it would look like if you zoomed out of that sequence. Picture those Void rooms: this very kind of hellish place where all angles are skewed and the different gravity rooms are glued to each other in the middle of black nothingness. It was a beautiful rendering.

Again, you would think that I would be the one pushing for this, but instead I showed those two things to Kevin and he looked at the chase sequence and was like, “That’s awesome. Let’s do something like that.” He held up the concept art and said, “If you give this to us, it will turn into some CG thing. It won’t feel real.” He’s like, “Could you build a model, or do we need to even zoom out at all? Can you keep it in this world?” And so there was this real encouragement on his part to go further than I think I imagined would be possible in trying to do a more kind of in-camera textured version of one of these movies.

It’s nice to hear that you had such a collaborative conversation with Marvel executives. As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, not everybody in the director’s chair on an MCU movie gets that.
Yeah. I know it’s a perception, because when I meet people, they’re like, “Wow, so did you get to do anything at all?” My barber was like, “Well, so you’ve got to do what they say, huh?” I mean, I can only speak to my experience, but you’re just in a room with Kevin and Lou and Brian and the writers. There’s not some giant room of executives you’re talking to all the time who hand down edicts.

Kevin is really collaborative. The one thing that I learned from Jon before I went in that was really good to know is you can’t go into that room and ever say that you’re done. Every meeting with Kevin, you’re going to bring in your script or some concept art, or if it’s an edit, and almost always he’ll say, “There’s a lot of good stuff in here — some things we can improve. Let’s talk about how to make it better.” And if you come in and you also have that perspective of “We have some good stuff, but there’s a lot that I already want to make better” and you have ideas already of how to do that and you can meet in the middle about what those ideas are, then I think it can be a really, really rewarding experience. That was the experience that I had.

So Jon was telling you, “Be proactive; don’t be reactive,” basically. I guess that would be the mistake that other directors might have fallen into?
And you can’t rest. You’ve got to always be pushing. I’m sure you could look at it multiple ways. But to have the resources to do that — to always be able to improve something, even if you’ve got a pretty good version of it — I don’t think I’ve ever had that. On most things you work on, you don’t have the opportunity to be wrong very much. You’ve got to really figure something out that you’re pretty sure is going to work. But to have a period where you explore 15 different designs of what the Void could be and you can go down these different avenues, that’s not usually the case. That is a really nice kind of position to be in.

The ‘A24’ trailer was something my assistant and I made during production as a joke. Then I showed it to Kevin. He was like, ‘That’s awesome. Send it to the marketing department.’

Eric Pearson wrote the original script draft. Then your Beef colleague Sonny Lee worked on it, and so did The Bear co-creator Joanna Calo. How much did the project evolve once you were hired as director, and what did you do to change the scope?
When I came in, Eric and Brian had developed this great idea of — as opposed to the expected Suicide Squad thing, it was more about operatives being sent to kill each other and to be discarded and this idea of obsolescence. And that structure really remained. That team was basically set. In the pitching process, Sentry got added to the movie, and that’s where it started to get really interesting, I thought.

My last pitch was this idea that Bob be developed on a separate track, kind of in his own story line. I felt like the whole point of the movie was going to be about how you resolve a conflict like this. It’s going to have to be through some form of connection, putting him together with the team so that they could form those bonds. We pursued those drafts for a while and then Eric moved on to other stuff at Marvel and Sonny came in at that point and did multiple drafts of the script. Then he had to go on to Beef season two. We’re all friends, and Joanna had written on season one of Beef and also obviously co-created The Bear, and so she took over and picked up on where Sonny was going with those drafts.

The continuum of the story was really about How do we take some of those themes in Beef and see if they can work on a Marvel scale? Part of what Sonny really believed is that these ideas of emptiness and depression are not niche issues anymore. Those are actually universal ideas that at this point really everyone connects with, or can admit that they connect with, and you could make a popular show that explored those things. So then the question was, Could you make a Marvel movie that did, too?

Thunderbolts* wrestles with issues of self-worth and isolation, even suicidal ideation, in a way that is unique within the MCU. Was that a difficult sell? Did you ever get any reluctance or pushback to putting those ideas in the movie?
Oddly, not really. I kept expecting there to be more resistance. We’re cognizant that this is, at some point, going to be a summer blockbuster movie. So with that whole opening sequence, we were like, “What is our version of a Bond sequence?” And this idea that it could hint at a more emotional kind of action movie with this young woman who is in a place you imagine as a suicide at first and then, in fact, it’s just kind of disaffection. So I think that there was always that push and pull — where you’re hinting at that, but you’re not actually depicting true suicidal ideation. It’s in the margins of what that character is going through. And so we always knew there was a bit of a dance to be played. But we never heard “Take this out of the movie! Where’s this going?”

There’s meth addiction, too. A character passed out drunk in the bathroom.  
I was surprised at how much room we were being given to play. And, yes, it certainly has to be the first Marvel movie with — well, it was just “meth chicken” on the shooting schedule when we shot it. I think all of us were a little like, “Is this all right? Is this okay?” And, yeah, maybe there’s something in how it’s not the most anticipated group of superheroes. I think maybe we had that freedom because it felt like this was a set of characters that you could kind of take a swing on.

The Marvels came out in 2023 while you were working on Thunderbolts*. Its director, Nia DaCosta, publicly said the movie was not made the way she wanted it to be. Did hearing that scare you?
It didn’t give me pause because I was already working on the movie and I was already having the experience that I was having. If you don’t like something in this movie, that’s on me. But I had a very, very rewarding experience. I saw Kevin at the premiere, and we were talking about how it’s nice when you can look back on something and you don’t feel like there was some better version of the thing that existed previously. There are plenty of notes, there are a lot of edits, and you do show it to people and you do push it, and it’s not easy.

But I think we always found a way — whatever the note coming in was, or what people were saying we needed to make clear or respond to, we found a way to do that in a way that I hope feels like it’s honest to the kind of movie we were trying to make. I don’t look back and think, Well, in a perfect world, I would have left it like that, but we had to do this. I feel like this is telling the story that we wanted to tell.

Leading up to the release, there has been plenty of discussion about Thunderbolts* as Marvel’s “A24 movie.” Florence has called it a “badass indie.” How do you feel about it being sold that way and discussed that way?
The “A24” trailer itself was something that my assistant, Samara, and I made during production as a joke, just because we thought it was funny that our friends were here from all of these A24 things that we had worked on. Then I showed it to Kevin. He was like, “That’s awesome. Send it to the marketing department.” They made something out of it, and we put it out. And it wasn’t part of some big strategy.

So, wait, just to be clear, those IDs in the trailer — “from the cinematographer of The Green Knight, the production designer of Hereditary, the editor of Minari,” etc. — that was something you just sort of made with your assistant for fun?
Yes. And then they turned it into a real trailer, just to say it’s a joke. We know we’re not an indie movie. I mean, I don’t think that we meant to earnestly try to appropriate that title, but what I liked about it was those are the people who made the movie, and they’re great. And I don’t think it’s as much about trying to bring an indie sensibility to Marvel as much as it is, I hope, in anything that you make, that people bring their sensibilities to what they’re doing. I hope most people got that it was meant to be taken a little tongue in cheek.

I think that there was an incredibly literal reaction. But, hey, you widened the tent for the Letterboxd crowd in addition to the Comic-Con crowd.
Yes, yes, yes. Well, I mean, if Letterboxd fans want to watch the movie, I think they might enjoy it! It’s like a joke that’s also real.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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