When you're juggling a dozen different superhumans for a big, knockdown brawl at an airport, you need an organizational tech solution that's fit to the task. You need index cards.

"We killed so many trees."

That's Christopher Markus, one half of the Marvel Studios writing duo behind all three Captain America movies (among others). Markus and his creative partner Stephen McFeely sat down for a chat with Mashable on the eve of Captain America: Civil War's release.

"It's a lot of note cards, and starting with the biggest moments first," McFeely said of their process for keeping Civil War's sprawling story straight.

"We knew the end of Act Two, and we knew where we wanted the third act to go. [We asked ourselves] what's the dark moment? What's the darker moment? What's the twist and the revelation? Everything works backwards from there."

Image: Marvel Studios

It also helped that the pair wrote the previous two Captain America movies. They've had the big picture in mind all along.

"We can't work together or with Marvel without a really clear roadmap that everybody understands," McFeely explained. "That's partly why I think the Captain America movies hang together pretty well. They've known where they've been going from the first page."

Working with Marvel is a process unto itself, since at any given moment there are multiple scripts and/or shoots in progress. The studio isn't a third wheel in every creative conversation; there's simply a dialogue.

"We can't work together or with Marvel without a really clear roadmap."

"They will tell us [what's happening in other stories], and we will also go looking," Markus said. "In certain situations, we are forced just because of scheduling and the way movies are made, to be writing a sequel to a character who has not appeared yet."

The Ant-Man scenes in Civil War, for example, were shot before Ant-Man the movie even came out. Each production has to operate on its own schedule, for better or for worse.

"We have to [ask Marvel] for scripts to investigate where the rest of the universe is going," Markus continued. "And sometimes you have to leave it pretty loose [for a long time] until you find out exactly what they've done. Then you can tighten it up — hopefully — prior to shooting."

McFeely compares the process to creative development for television. "It's a very expensive, long-running TV series, in a way. Long-form storytelling and rewarding audience members who are invested."

Image: Marvel Studios

Going into Civil War, Markus and McFeely faced a lot of audience expectations. Part of it is the subtitle's connection to a notably political comic book arc in which Tony Stark spearheaded a "Superhuman Registration Act" that required U.S.-based metahumans to either register with the government or retire.

The strife around the comic book's registration act — that heroes unmask themselves — wouldn't work in the MCU, where most of the metahumans are known public figures. But incidents like the Battle of New York or the Battle of Sokovia caused a lot of collateral damage and innocent casualties.

That's how McFeely and Markus arrived at the Sokovia Accords turning groups like the Avengers into a U.N.-regulated task force. You get the same "enlist or retire" mandate that caused such strife in the comics, but it's tied directly to the story so far.

"Our Third Acts in Marvel movies have tended to be a little similar, which is we all band together to fight the bad guy who's raining stuff on our city," McFeely said.

"We wanted to address that, and make sure that not only did we not [repeat] that, but that we were addressing the third acts of the other movies."



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