Avengers: Infinity War directors reveal footage shot would take 21 days to watch

'If you're going to take all this time and expense and put all these actors together, you might as well roll the cameras a lot'

There's one individual (or several) involved in Avengers: Infinity War that just can't get enough credit: whoever had to sit down and work out the filming schedule.

The charge of figuring out when Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Zoe Saldana, Chris Pratt, Chadwick Boseman, Mark Ruffalo, Letitia Wright, are all free - amongst many, many others? That's not exactly enviable.

So, when the (surely) impossible was finally achieved, it wasn't going to be an opportunity wasted. A lot of footage was shot between Infinity War and Avengers 4, which were filmed back-to-back. A lot.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo revealed to The Independent that, in fact: "I think our editor told us that on both movies, if you stacked all the footage in a row and wanted to watch it all at one time, it would take you 21 days."

"I mean, we have an adage that you can only make the movie out of what you bring into the edit room," Joe Russo explained. "So, you know, if you're going to take all this time and expense and put all these actors together, you might as well roll the cameras a lot."

"So we do experiment a lot, we do a lot of improvisation. A lot of the humour in the movie comes from our background doing improvisation on Arrested Development and Community. So, there's a lot of footage."

"Even just the process of combining these different characters from these different franchises with different tones, it took a bit of experimentation on set to get the right thing," Anthony Russo added. "So, Joe and I would play around with it until we found the right rhythm between characters."

However, one character we may not be seeing (to the internet's deep frustration and endless memes) is Hawkeye, though there may be a fairly crucial reason as to why.

All that hard work finally comes together when Infinity War hits UK cinemas 26 April.

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