Shooting the airport battle was almost a mini movie say Civil War directors

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Much of the marketing campaign for CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR has focused on the giant brawl between Team Cap and Team Iron Man at the Leipzig Airport, which Joe and Anthony Russo have called their "splash page" sequence. As I haven't seen the film yet I can't comment on just how awesome it is, but our own Paul Shirey has said that "the battle at the airport is, hands down, the biggest and best superhero battle we've seen on film to date, surpassing both Avengers films in that department easily. It's graceful, exciting, and at times humorous, which fits the tone and style perfectly. It doesn't matter what you've seen in the trailers or clips; you haven't seen anything yet." While speaking with Deadline, the CIVIL WAR directors discussed the sequence in question and just how hard it was to pull off.

Here’s what’s complex about that sequence. Number one, the number of characters. So you’ve got an over-arcing story that you’re telling in that sequence where it’s one side versus the other, but then you’ve got individual stories you’re telling, about every character. Joe and I always say that our guide through action is always story and character. We’re always driving right at the character beats, or else the action beat doesn’t work. So it’s dealing with that number of characters, the number of sub-stories playing out of that sequence.

And then on a physical level, the execution is very hard because it’s set at an airport. We did a little bit of shooting at Leipzig Airport in Germany, but most of it in Atlanta on a big slab of concrete with green screen all around it. Some of the characters were there, some are CG. We had to use so many different techniques to realize that sequence. Some of the what you see is our classic hand-to-hand stuff, and some of it is a mile away from that classic hand-to-hand stuff. This was almost like shooting a mini movie, that sequence. We prepped it for months, everybody on our team knew that was the centerpiece of the movie, and what our expectations of that sequence would be, and that we had to just keep bettering it, and bettering it. That was the process.

Make sure to check out Paul Shirey and Eric Walkuski's reviews of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR as well as the CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR editions of From Page to Screen, Awesome Art We've Found Around the Net, JoBlo Movie Trivia Quiz, and Face-Off. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR will finally hit theaters tomorrow, and most signs seem to point to it being well worth the wait.