For any superhero movie fan, Russo Brothers – Joe and Anthony – are nothing less than guardian angels. The director duo have helmed 4 Marvel movies so far in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and each one is better than the other. Their latest outing, though not in the superhero genre, is an absolute entertainer and easily one of the best action films of the year. Titled The Gray May, the Netflix movie has Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas and Dhanush, among others in the lead role.
In previous interviews, the Russo Brothers have mentioned that they have been great fan of the Indian actor and that the character of Avik San was wrote keeping Dhanush in mind. In a recent round table conference, which News18 was also a part of, Russo Brothers talked about their admiration for Dhanush “While we were working on the Marvel movie, we were researching action sequences from other films for inspiration. We have a stunt team that we’ve been working with for years, and everyone brings ideas to the table. And I noticed that we started seeing a lot of clips of Dhanush in action. And after seeing two or three clips, I asked, ‘Who is this? They’re fantastic at this’. So, when we were working on The Gray Man, there were opportunities because it is such a global story. The concept is that assassins from all over the world get hired to stop the Gray Man, we thought it would be fantastic to get Dhanush to play the most deadly assassin of them all. We had written the part for him, so it would have been sad if he had refused it,” Joe Russo shared.
The Gray Man as a project has been in the pipeline for almost 10 years. When asked if it was a conscious decision to bring out the film this late, Joe said, “We started working on this project about 10 years ago. I actually wrote a draft in between takes on the sets of Captain America: Winter Soldier. We had not been asked to the rest of the Marvel movies. So, we were contemplating that this was our next movie. When did get asked by Marvel to do the rest of the movies, we had to put the project aside.”
There are nine set pieces of action sequences in the film and each one of them boasts of the Russo Brothers’ standards and quality of direction. Speaking about the same, Anthony said, “This was almost too ambitious. We wanted to challenge ourselves. We are huge fans of action. We designed this whole movie in a way, to be a non-stop gantlet. The characters are just pushed into extreme challenging situations one after the other. Yes, it is expensive to shoot action and we wanted to shoot the best version of action. We wanted to surprise ourselves and the audience.”
