CraveOnline: Are you pigeonholed as a comic book writer?
Zak Penn: I might be F’ed it they become unpopular because you never know how people are going to judge you. I wrote a lot of films that were not comic book films before I wrote a couple of comic book films, but I think it’s worth just for the sake of discussion making a distinction. Really when we talk about graphic novels and comic books, what gets really confusing is clearly nobody means History of Violence. Nobody means Road to Perdition when they complain about comic book movies.
CraveOnline: Or when they praise them.
Zak Penn: Right, either way. Nobody’s saying, “Oh, those were giant, really fun popcorn movies” because they’re not. The point is, why has sequential art become such a dominant force for making movies? To me, that’s the real question that’s worth getting at. Yes, there’s the obvious, for the big comic book franchises of course it has to do with these are characters that are built up, these are things people know and that’s incredibly important for marketing. But I also think that sequential art is the closest formally to cinema of any of the art forms. The storyboarding process, the animation process particularly, which I think a lot of the best movies that Hollywood has made in the last 25 years have been animated. The reason why that lends itself to good storytelling, which is in animation you can retell the story over and over again until you get it right. You can keep recutting your film. You don’t have to be Stanley Kubrick to get 50 reshoots on your film. That’s how the Pixar guys [do it]. It’s not a mystery, it’s a bunch of really smart guys working on it over and over and over again until they get it right. That’s why something like 300 is easier to translate, because you’re all talking about the same thing. If you say, “We want the frame to look like this,” the studio can look at it and say, “Oh, I get it. That’s what it’s going to look like.” It’s not the same as reading a novel and trying to interpret it. I hope my career doesn’t get hurt by it.
CraveOnline: How do you start writing The Avengers before Captain America and Thor are done?
Zak Penn: My job is to kind of shuttle between the different movies and make sure that finally we’re mimicking that comic book structure where all of these movies are connected. It used to drive me crazy at Fox not being able to interweave. Why couldn’t we have Fantastic Four in this movie? Why couldn’t we do this? Now we will. Thor and Captain America will lead right into the Avengers movie, and Iron Man 2 as well.
CraveOnline: Do they give you a place to start or do you have to wait to find out where you pick up?
Zak Penn: We are learning it as we go and it’s pretty complicated. I have a meeting at Marvel this week to catch up on continuity. There’s just a board that tracks “Here’s where everything that happens in this movie overlaps with that movie.” It’s just what they do in the comic books. Think how complicated it is when you’ve got all the titles those companies do. Someone’s got to keep track of all that. What’s Wolverine wearing this week? Are his claws bone or [adamantium]? Yeah, it’s going to be really difficult. The only thing I can say is I’m pushing them to do as many animatics as possible to animate the movie, to draw boards so that we’re all working off the same visual ideas. But the exigencies of production take first priority.
