10 years ago, the cast and crew of Captain America: The Winter Soldier told us they wanted to change the MCU forever with the sequel

Steve Rogers is angry. Hunted by the very government he’s sworn to defend, the living WW2 legend is on the run. Tearing down a Washington D.C. freeway in a sedan driven by his new-found friend Sam Wilson, with fellow Avenger Natasha Romanoff – aka the Black Widow – in the back seat, the man called Captain America is under attack from his former best friend, the long-thought-dead Bucky Barnes. Now a cybernetic killing machine known as The Winter Soldier, he’s jumped onto the side of Cap’s car and climbed atop its roof, ready to cause chaos.

“Brakes!” shouts co-director Anthony Russo above the roar, and the car shudders, catapulting Widow (Scarlett Johansson) from the back seat into Cap’s (Chris Evans) lap. The two stare out the windscreen, Evans scowling, Johansson all grim determination. Wind whipping her hair, she grabsher pistol and aims it at the glass. “Smash!” Russo screams. The car shakes violently. Clutching his shield, Cap pulls the Widow close with his right hand and draws Wilson (Anthony Mackie) near with his left. He’s about to go ballistic...

“Cut!” says Russo. The shaking stops. The wind machine is turned off. The trio catch their breath, and smile goofily into the camera. In so doing, Evans, Johansson and Mackie release hours of tension from within their tiny cabin, silhouetted by an enormous greenscreen on Marvel Studios’ Manhattan Beach soundstage this hot afternoon. Fittingly, for a bust-up with an all-American hero, it’s the day before the Fourth of July. But if there’s one Marvel Comics superhero most resistant to big-screen character arcs, it’s Captain America, since Cap’s very nature is as unwavering as the principles in his country’s Constitution. And dour Cap’s arguably the least fun Avenger in a superhero outfit featuring charismatic Tony Stark, angry Thor, slinky Widow and Hulk, who’s just, well, awesome.

So how to make Cap’s second outing a worthy and essential successor to Avengers Assemble while also powering the universe onward to 2015’s much-anticipated The Avengers: Age Of Ultron? The key was progression. His debut film, The First Avenger, worked by setting him against a backdrop as patriotic as his uniform in WW2, letting him discover his place in the world like a newborn testing his environment. But its abrupt finale saw him put on ice for 65 years, only to be thawed out and, with no time to look back, returned to combat in the BO monster Avengers Assemble. As a member of Nick Fury’s team, Cap developed further and found a new purpose with a new posse. Now, in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, he feels fully formed, confident and strong – but is struggling with life in the 21st Century, and fighting authority in the shape of the US government. Like any maturing guy, Cap is brooding, moody and ready to kick ass. And now he’s got some (deadly) growing pains to deal with...

The good, the bad, and the ugly

“With the first one you were establishing the character,” explains Evans as he strolls over to join Total Film for a quick chat between set-ups. Clad in Steve Rogers’ civilian clothes, a blue jacket and black t-shirt, he’s decidedly relaxed for someone carrying the weight of a tentpole franchise upon his shoulders. “With Avengers you got a lot of characters you had to address. With this one you can really focus on Steve adjusting to how things are right now. In that regard you can kind of play with his moral compass.”

With hitmen coming for him from all directions, the straight-arrow Cap is struggling to know who to trust and could go off the rails if he backs the wrong horse. That’s a lot to deal with when the world’s under threat. “His demons I don’t think are ever gonna come from within, because he’s not built that way,” reasons Evans, warming to the subject of Cap’s psychology and his realisation that he may have to go off grid to fight fire with fire. “But there are gonna be challenges in terms of where he fits. In this movie they kind of explore how the world has changed.

Steve is used to the ’40s, where it’s very clear who’s good and who’s bad. The way things are right now with our technological advancements it’s gotten to a point where in order to preserve safety and freedom and liberty, you may have to go to some extreme measures that infringe upon people’s civil rights. So it’s a grey area for Steve. It’s a hard time for him, trying to figure out where he fits in and who is good and who is bad...”

Evans should know by now – after 13 weeks of principal photography on The Winter Soldier, only two remain – but of course, he’s not saying. And neither are co-directors and newbies to the Marvel universe, siblings Anthony and Joe Russo. Best known for comedies like Welcome To Collinwood and Arrested Development, the brothers were nabbed by Marvel Studio’s chief Kevin Feige after he saw Joe Russo’s action-genre-pastiche episodes of Community: ‘A Fistful Of Paintballs’ and ‘For A Few Paintballs More’.

“We grew up on Scorsese,” says Joe in explaining their appointment when he and his rother join us. “We grew up on Coppola. We studied The French Connection 50 times. And we’ve been waiting a long time to find a project like this, that would allow us to explore those interests.”

What? So, Winter Soldier will be super talky? Fear not, assures Joe. “There’s a lot of action in this movie, as much as Avengers, if not more. But there’s also a lot of character work. So it sort of goes between the two. It’s very important to us, when there’s an action set-piece that it’s driving the story in some way, that there are stakes involved. Just like in a ’70s thriller.”

The brothers’ commitment to both action and character is evident in today’s scene, the start of a sequence that ends the film’s key second act. Like the six weeks of shooting they’ve just completed in their hometown of Cleveland (standing in for Washington D.C. where production closed down a three-mile stretch of highway), it’s an adrenaline junkie’s dream. But the emphasis, as per Marvel tradition, is always on character; and rarely have these characters appeared so desperate, so human. Mnnnn, intriguing... Like Evans, the Russo brothers appear unphased by audience or industry expectation.

“We haven’t felt a great deal of pressure and I’ll tell you why,” says Joe. “The movie’s so tonally different from everything that’s come before, it’s a bit of its own animal. I would feel pressure if there were a lot of similarities between our film and some prior Marvel films, because all you can do is try to outdo a movie that’s in the same tone. That’s very difficult to do. Kevin Feige, in his brilliant guidance of the Marvel universe, knows that you have to mix things up. Because people can tell you they love chocolate ice cream, but if you give them too much chocolate ice cream, pretty soon they’re gonna be sick of chocolate ice cream. We get to bring some vanilla ice cream to the table.”

Frozen treat metaphors aside, Feige plus screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely – working from Captain America comic scribe Ed Brubaker’s Winter Soldier storyline – have crafted a sequel that’s intended as part action movie, part conspiracy thriller in the vein of ’70s classics like Three Days Of The Condor (even going so far as to recruit that film’s star, Robert Redford, to play S.H.I.E.L.D. mastermind Alexander Pierce). All very cool, but will audiences, amped up on the spectacle of Avengers Assemble, buy a ’70s-style conspiracy?

“If you look at Skyfall, that’s one of the most internal Bond films that’s ever been made,” Joe reasons. “It certainly has its action set-pieces and scope to it. But I don’t know if you could say that it’s of any greater scale than any Bond films that have come before it in the last five or six years. But it made a billion dollars. It just happened to tell a good story and it had really good character work in it. That’s what the audience responded to. So at the end of the day, yes, audiences are after that 40-minute action scene at the end of Avengers. That sets a very high bar for fireworks in the third act. But fireworks can be emotional as much as they are spectacle.”

Within its cast, The Winter Soldier promises enough fireworks to fuel a dozen New Year’s Eve celebrations. In addition to returning Marvel movie vets Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, and – if the rumors are true – Hayley Atwell (as Peggy Carter), it offers a smorgasbord of Cap’s longtime comic-book enemies, including Batroc (UFC champion Georges St-Pierre), Crossbones (Frank Grillo) and The First Avenger’s Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), whose experiments on a captive Bucky Barnes result in his alter ego.

There’s also the introduction of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Agent 13 (Emily VanCamp) as a potential love interest for Cap. But at the film’s heart is Evans’ performance as a man out of time who finds himself questioning his place in a world of drone planes and NSA surveillance. “It’s about trying to figure out where you fit in,” says Evans. “It’s trying to figure out who you are and how you belong and what’s right and what’s wrong and who you’re going to be in the face of the situation around you. They have a great line in the movie, that S.H.I.E.L.D. ‘takes the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be.’ I think that’s a tricky thing in adolescence, where you have to recognize that’s not gonna be the thing you want it to be. It is the way it is, and how are you going to adapt and how are you going to fit? That’s what Steve’s going through.”

Widow's Peak

Widow’s peak Fortunately, Cap has the help of Johansson’s Black Widow. With a sleek new hairdo replacing her Avengers curls, wearing a pair of knee-high brown boots that look like they’ve kicked their share of asses, Johansson slides out from what’s left of the car to chat to us. 

“I don’t spend a lot of time in my catsuit in this one,” she confesses straightaway in that trademark husky drawl. “I take it to the streets in a different way. There’s a real kind of Big Brother aspect to this film. All that Cap and Widow know to be true, everything that they trust in – as much as they trust in anything – is sort of ripped out from underneath them in a way that we haven’t seen before. Everything is not as it seems. It’s not so black and white, it’s not so cut and dry, it’s not good versus evil. The stakes are much higher. It brings them closer together because they find themselves in a vulnerable situation and they’re in it together.”

“We certainly have to trust one another in a way we never trusted each other before,” nods Evans. “I think Black Widow’s whole arc is coming to terms with her history – that she’s been a spy, and spies aren’t necessarily trustworthy. That’s kind of Cap’s struggle as well. He works for an agency that deals in secrets, and trust is a big issue. That’s always been his issue with Nick Fury, and that extends to anyone who works with S.H.I.E.L.D. at that level of confidentiality. He and Black Widow don’t exactly approach things the same way, but... they’re both going through a very similar ordeal. She’s in her adolescence as well. She’s learning what it means to be a good person and a good friend, and not just a good spy and not just indestructible.”

Cap himself, however, has been substantially reinforced for the film, and he’s enjoying his powers a little more. Cap may have been a dude before but now he’s properly kick-ass. A year has passed since Avengers Assemble’s Battle of New York, and the super soldier is now an expert in the latest fighting techniques, which he’s practiced on frequent S.H.I.E.L.D. missions. “He’s throwing himself into all the modern training,” says co-director Anthony Russo. “In the first movie, he was charming because he was raw, because these abilities were new, because the war was such a surprise. In this movie, it’s very focused, deliberate, everything is very intentional – in his style, in his costume, in his moves. He understands techniques like Krav Maga, things that soldiers use these days in all kinds of fighting scenarios. He’s a supremely trained modern soldier who has the benefit of everything we know today versus a guy who was motivated by his desire to stop Hitler.”

“He’s got a full SEAL Team 6 training,” adds Joe, referring to the team that took out Osama Bin Laden and Captain Phillips’ kidnappers. “He’s the best SEAL Team 6 operative in the world. Also, the use of Cap’s shield is different in this. It’s less of a defensive weapon than it is an offensive weapon; and he uses it in different ways in the movie to achieve certain aims.” 

Cap’s shield, however, is up against an instrument of equal power this time around in the shape of the Winter Soldier and his fearsome bionic arm. As the soft-spoken Sebastian Stan explains when we catch up with him, “In terms of having this bionic arm for a weapon, the Winter Soldier’s a good match for the shield. His knife-handling skills are a little bit better than Cap’s. He’s a very worthy opponent.” He pauses. “He’s a problem.”

How are you going to deal with a problem like that? Try Cap’s most potent weapon, his new buddy Sam Wilson, a G.I. whose combat training has given him a pair of techno wings and a code name: The Falcon. And judging by the killer trailer footage, badass Falcon’s going to be a new fan favorite. Stepping out of his office to watch today’s filming, Feige elaborates on the screen debut of mainstream comic-book’s first African-American superhero. 

“We wanted to bring in Cap’s most famous partner from the books. It was something early on that we decided. Cap, outside of S.H.I.E.L.D., doesn’t know many people, doesn’t have the easiest time connecting to a lot of people, so who would he connect with? We thought, ‘Does he just hang around the VA and talk to elderly people that were in WW2?’ Maybe there’s some of that, and that’s fun, but that led us to thinking, ‘Well, he would probably connect to the veteran of any war, it doesn’t have to be the specific war he fought in.’ That’s what led us to making Sam Wilson a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s how they meet and find a connection.”

“The Air Force had a specialty group,” says Mackie, upbeat but aching from a fight scene he shot yesterday. “Like the Navy SEALs. But instead of giving them the ability to quietly go in and maneuver through hazardous territories, they gave them the ability to fly...” he smiles. “It’s a lot of me on wires screaming and them saying ‘Action’ and me flying around. Because I’m deathly afraid of heights, they always say, 'Oh, we’re just gonna take you this high.’ Then they take me and swing me.” But how high? The actor recalls one especially harrowing experience. “When we were in Cleveland, the Russos called me and said, ‘Alright, we’re gonna put you up on a bridge and we want you to jump down. You see you’re about to hit a car, so we want you to stop before you hit the car.’ I’m like, ‘Well, the cable guy is supposed to stop me, because these aren’t real wings.’ They’re like, ‘No, no, no. Just hit the ground and go to the car.’ So they pull me up and they let me go. In midair I realised, ‘I’ve never flown before. So I have no idea how to stop.’ I see the concrete coming towards me, and I realize the rope is gonna catch and I’m gonna swing head first into this car. So I put my feet down and I roll into this cab, hard, and everybody runs over to me and says, ‘Are you okay?’ I’m like, ‘I think I know how to land. Let’s do it again.’”

Doing it again is an occupational hazard for anyone joining the Marvel world – so Mackie must be prepped for call-up again in a future Marvel adventure? “I call all of them at Marvel every Monday,” he laughs. “I’m like, ‘So have y’all decided if I’m in Avengers 2 yet? I’ll get on the bus to Albuquerque tomorrow!’ I wanted to be a superhero from the first day that I started in this business, and to have the opportunity to be a superhero is kind of remarkable. If I get the opportunity to be in The Avengers 2, 3, 7 and 18, there’s no way I would complain or balk at any part of that...” Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh? The Winter Soldier has been referred to as Avengers 1.5, and Kevin Feige has big plans for The Age Of Ultron. 

In addition to introducing heroes like Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the Scarlet Witch, as well as the titular mad robot (James Spader), Feige confirms Avengers 2 will finally present the backstory of Winter Soldier co-star Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, as well as lay the foundation for a possible solo movie for the Russian superspy. “We start filming the next Avengers film at the end of March. Widow’s part in that is very big. We learn more about her past and learn more about where she came from and how she became who she became in that film. The notion of exploring that even further in her own film would be great, and we have some development work with that.”

“We wanted to change the dynamic of the cinematic universe with this film. We wanted Cap and really the entire cinematic universe to be very different at the end of Winter Soldier than it is at the beginning. Therefore when we meet the Avengers at the top of Age Of Ultron, it’s a very different landscape than when we left them at the end of the first film. Partially that’s because we love the rhythm that the comic books have developed – each of the characters appear in their runs, occasionally they get together for a big event or crossover series, they part again, and then they come back together again.” Bring it on...

This article first appeared in Total Film issue 217, back in 2014.

For more on Marvel, check out our guides to how to watch the Marvel movies in order and all of the upcoming Marvel movies and shows.