Infinity War: Thanos has almost told a nonlinear writing

With a film as big and complex as Avengers: war in the infinite, clearly find the last story and the structure of the film was a process. But last night, when the film premiered exclusively by Collider, the co-director Joe Russo revealed how different War of Infinity could have been sure they had followed a very different path.

Russo and his brother and co-director Anthony Russo After our screening of the film, we participated in a large two-hour Q & A session hosted by Steve Weintraub of Collider, and during the discussion, Joe revealed that a draft of War of Infinity followed a non-linear story and was told by Thanos (Josh Brolin) himself:

"We wrote three radically different versions of this project. A rough draft involved Thanos as narrator of the film. It was a nonlinear structure, there were backstories for the Black Order, and they were all introduced in very cool sequences. But it turned out to be a 250-page script and we thought, "All right, we can not do everything to tell stories."

However, when the Russos and the writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely decided to change direction, they did not just throw away the 250-page script. Instead, this longer, much different project has illuminated their refined approach to saying War of Infinity story:

"Often, when you're working on a movie of this magnitude and you end up with a draft of 250 pages, it's the movie bible. You gain a lot of information. You write characters so that you begin to understand what they want. I think Thanos' storytelling helped us understand who he was and what we wanted him to do in this film. It was so much easier, once we started extracting all that, giving it a subtext as a character and creating a more linear structure. "

So, how did the Russo decide that a linear approach was the right way to tell this story? Believe it or not, they say they found inspiration in movies like Out of sight:

"We worked a lot on this, but at one point we thought," It's really a heist film, and Thanos is doing it. It must have some structure that reflects a hold-up movie. So if you watch the movie, it's a bit like Two days in the valley or Out of sight where there are several McGuffins that Thanos pursues and that all the other characters try to reach first or prevent him from getting it. So it's a very simple structure. We thought we had so many characters in the movie that we needed to simplify the structure. I think that's really what pushed us to move from this 250-page draft to what the film is now, it's simplifying the plot, keeping it linear and letting the character moments pbad. "

Indeed, the Russo said before that they approached War of Infinity as a hold-up movie, and we now know how they landed on this idea.

Watch Joe Russo talk about the first draft of War of Infinity in the video player above, and look for a lot, a lot more of our Q & A on Collider soon.