Joss Whedon, director of billion dollar hit Marvel's The Avengers , discusses the important role that Nick Fury played in bringing the team together, going into detail about the shadier side of Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. we caught a glimpse of during the film.

On the movie side of things, I'm going to be the twelve billionth person to tell you this weekend that "The Avengers" was great, it was so much fun, I saw it twice. I took my mother. She laughed and then she was confused about things, then she laughed again.



[Laughs] That's sort of what it was like to me. Funny, I didn't really know what was going on.



Well, one of the threads that really struck me as I was watching the film is that all the Marvel movies ended up being a play on this idea of militarization of technology and that we have something that's introduced into the world and we have opposing sides trying to weaponize it in some sense. Your really seemed to want to take that thread in some sense and kind of run -- not unknowingly -- but just a facet of the world and push it essential to the conflict. What for you made that a story that worked for these extraordinary characters coming together.



Well, I didn't really think about it in terms of what they had done for the other movies, except as useful to me. I didn't think about it as a thematic thread, I thought, "Oh, this is a piece I can use is that they're interested in this stuff" -- because why wouldn't they be? The idea that they were going to weaponize the cube, for me, was about playing more of the reality in terms of "The Ultimates" or "The Authority" -- that kind of thing where -- or Straczynski's book --



"Rising Stars?"



Yes. No, it's not "Rising Stars."



Oh! "Supreme Power!"



Yes, sorry. Sorry, J. Michael. But they all deal very poignantly with the reality of "Superman's here and he's in a bad mood. What do we do? We're humans! We've got nothing. We're in trouble." To lay that on the table was such a perfect thing for this because it made Fury seem Machiavellian, but I think he's totally right. I mean, absolutely they need to protect themselves. There's aliens now. Thor's an alien and he's stronger than us. It brought up issues that would help everybody's point of view coalesce and it would also help separate the Avengers from S.H.I.E.L.D., which is the other really important thing -- making sure that people didn't think, "Oh, it's a group that these guys run." It was very important for them to kill daddy in order to become their own grown-up family. That's the other thing that I like to raise. Fury even knew that. He knew he had to get them together as a team and then take himself out of the equation.

Marvel Studios presents in association with Paramount Pictures Marvel’s The Avengers--the super hero team up of a lifetime, featuring iconic Marvel super heroes Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye and Black Widow. When an unexpected enemy emerges that threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, Director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins.

STARRING:



Chris Evans as Steve Rogers/Captain America

Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Iron Man

Chris Hemsworth as Thor

Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton/Hawkeye

Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Ramanoff/Black Widow

Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk

Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury

Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson

Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill

Tom Hiddleston as Loki



RELEASE DATE: September 17th, 2012 (UK) September 25th, 2012 (US)

In an interview with Comic Book Resources at the San Diego Comic-Con earlier this month, Joss Whedon discussed both(that can be found by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page) and Nick Fury's "Machiavellian" approach to assembling Earth's Mightiest Heroes in. This was somewhat controversial with fans, although his duplicitous actions were arguably justified in that he was eventually responsible for getting the team to come together by themselves, as Whedon describes below. Check out the interview here and be sure to sound off with your thoughts in the usual place!