Bassam Tariq has been pretty gracious about the whole “Blade” debacle, but every time he opens his mouth about Marvel, he (politely) tells us exactly how the machine works. His latest comments, made to EW, alongside Mahershala Ali, while promoting their new film “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” might be the most revealing yet.
According to Tariq, Marvel is upfront about it. They tell you, politely, that what you're making is "a Marvel film directed by a person." They crop your shots. They change things. "And that's fine, right?" he said. Ali, laughing, added that your name "might not matter."
Of course, we already knew all this. Over at Marvel, the director is a hired hand. The studio is the author. It gives a whole new definition to the term “auteur cinema.” The brand comes first, the filmmaker second, and "a person" could be anyone, interchangeable and replaceable, like a contractor.
Thing about it, Tariq, if he had directed the damn thing, would have shown up, shot the footage, and handed it over to Feige who would have recut it, reframed it, added scenes, droped scenes, and slapped on the usual third-act VFX extravaganza that was probably storyboarded before the director was even hired. This, precisely, us why MCU movies feel like they were made by the same person.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Feige actually operates as the director. During Marvel's 2010s heyday, he'd send lower-level executives to babysit the shoot, then take over in the editing room, rework scenes, and order new ones. His longtime deputy Louis D'Esposito had a running joke: “any movie can be fixed if you shoot it again.”
Feige controls the process to the point where directors are barely directing. Remember Victoria Alonso reportedly telling a Marvel filmmaker on set, back in 2023, that "we direct the movies"?
This more or less correlates with yet another report that tackled Feige’s obsessive nature in controlling every part of the creative process, to the point where directors are barely in control of directing MCU movies, and with Feige dictating all the shots.
It’s been seven years since Alma Har’el’s feature debut, “Honey Boy,” which was written by and starred Shia LaBeouf — she is now set to direct her next film, with a very talented cast.