Film News
Doctor Strange Director Talks Tone of Film
The Doctor Is On A Trip
♦The summer is officially over, even though we have a final burst of hot weather this week in the UK and the next big superhero movie is Marvel’s Doctor Strange which hits the end of next month over here. Its director Scott Derrickson spoke to the Los Angeles Daily News to talk about bringing Stephen Strange to the big screen…
“It’s pretty psychedelic,” the filmmaker says. “If your love for the early Stan Lee-Steve Ditko comics was that visual, psychedelic ambition, I think you’ll be pretty satisfied. The primary resource for the visual design of the whole movie came from those comics.”
The director was a fan as a kid, and Derrickson says Strange spoke to him more than other comic books he read. When he was competing heavily for this job — there were eight meetings with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and others before he got the job — Derrickson emphasised how he wanted to use big-budget visual effects for creating other dimensions that felt innately suited to the world of Strange rather than the usual movie mayhem.
“I told them it should take a bold left turn, like the ’60s comics,” Derrickson remembers. “And I think they liked how I gravitate toward real actors, talented actors who are grounded in performances that are real, while dealing with the supernatural. That’s why I’ve had great actors in genre films, which they usually don’t do. And that was certainly the case with ‘Doctor Strange.’ ”
The director thought that Cumberbatch was the ideal choice for him.
“He is perfect casting,” Derrickson says of the English actor, who’s played everything from Sherlock Holmes to a Middle-earth dragon. “Myself and Kevin Feige and the other producers involved came to a consensus very quickly that Benedict was the right guy for the role. There’s just an overlap between his work and the comics that you can see and feel. You feel that he can play the intelligence, the arrogance, the unlikability and yet intrigue of Stephen Strange, and that the massive arc that the character goes through in those early comics is something that he would be able to portray.”
He responded to people’s criticisms of the movie casting Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One:
“Diversity in movies is absolutely the responsibility of producers and directors,” he affirms. “In this movie, we have about as diverse a cast as I think you can get, and that was a very conscious decision. Tilda was a way of adding diversity in terms of not just an ethereal, enigmatic, otherworldly actress playing an ethereal, enigmatic, otherworldly character, but we’re bringing a middle-aged woman who’s not 28 years old in leather pants into the Marvel Universe in a major role.
“I was very happy with that, but I was also very conscious that in doing that I was erasing a significant potential Asian role. I was going to leave Wong out of the movie at first; he was an Asian sidekick manservant, what was I supposed to do with that? But once the decision was made to cast Tilda, we brought Wong back because, unlike the Ancient One, he could be completely subverted as a character and reworked into something that didn’t fall into any of the stereotypes of the comics.”
Doctor Strange opens in the UK on 25 October and on 4 November in the US. Here is its trailer again:
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