Joss Whedon: I Was Beaten Down by Avengers: Age of Ultron

Director Reveals Why He Walked From Marvel After Second Avengers

♦Over at Variety, director Joss Whedon just revealed why he left Marvel after Avengers: Age of Ultron …

In 2012, “The Avengers” closed the Tribeca Film Festival, and four years later, on Monday night, director Joss Whedon sat down with actor Mark Ruffalo, and confessed that Age of Ultron really bummed him out.

“I was so beaten down by the process,” Whedon said. “Some of that was conflicting with Marvel, which is inevitable. A lot of it was about my own work, and I was also exhausted.”

Whedon blames himself for the narrative that the project wasn’t perfect, and said he had failed.

“I think that did a disservice to the movie and the studio and to myself,” Whedon said. “It was not the right way to be, because I am very proud of it. The things about it that are wrong frustrate me enormously, and I had probably more of those than I had on the other movies I made. But I also got to make, for the second time, an absurdly personal movie that talked about how I felt about humanity, and what it means, in very esoteric and bizarre ways, for hundreds of billions of dollars. The fact that Marvel gave me that opportunity is so bonkers, and so beautiful, and the fact that I come off of it feeling like a miserable failure, is also bonkers, but not in a cute way.”

Ruffalo told the audience that after Ultron, he pleaded Whedon to do Avengers 3 and 4, Hulk 3 and Thor 3.

“I’ve been begging him, and he said ‘I’ll never do it again,’” Ruffalo said.

But Whedon is now back at work, so engrossed in a new project, he’s crying in restaurants while writing the script.

“I wrote all the way through to the end of the movie, and I was crying so hard in public, that the restaurant closed, the valet guy came to me and then turned around and turned away,” Whedon said. “I had to take off my shirt and blow my nose into it. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t stop crying. And I got in the car and — luckily someone else was driving — kept crying. I just wrote the end of the movie and I’m pretty sure it works.”

Whedon was working on a musical earlier last year, but said for now, he has put that to the side.

“I had a little hitch in my giddeup,” Whedon said. “Partially because after Ultron there were too many moving parts, and I needed to write something that I absolutely understand, and was going to shoot.”

He confessed his brain had also been scrambled by the hit Broadway play, “Hamilton.”

“It was only after the album came out and I was listening to it 24/7, that I can’t hear myself,” Whedon said. “I can only hear ‘Hamilton.’ So as soon as I stop listening to ‘Hamilton’ in 2021, I’ll get back to that.”

www.variety.com