Ryan Reynolds said a single, four-word line of advice from Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige has driven him – and haunted him – in the years since he first heard it.
Prior to the release of Deadpool & Wolverine this summer, Reynolds recalled, “It had been six years since I had done one of those movies because you can’t take your hand off the stick … Every scene has to do something or feel something.”
Reynolds, who starred in the film and also co-wrote and produced it, recalled an early meeting with Feige, head of Marvel Studios. “He said something that sounds very pedantic and is probably not the thing to say out loud, but actually, weirdly, served as a creative engine. He was like, ‘Make every scene great.’ And I was like, ‘Thanks, Kev. Sounds good.’”
Over time, Reynolds told the audience Tuesday at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York, the collaboration with Marvel thrived on “all those little tiny things.” Initially, he said, he had expected the company to be “like a red-line lawyer on every page.” Instead, it and parent Disney were “such great partners.”
As he got deeper into the writing process, Feige’s words “haunted me,” Reynolds said. “‘Make it great’ – that’s hard.” But facing that challenge yielded immense satisfaction.
Deadpool & Wolverine, Reynolds said, was “an apex moment in my life, in terms of the experience of both making something and not just the outcome of it, the box office and stuff, but the actual experience of the movie itself. Sitting in a movie theater with an audience where I’m hiding in the back, getting to watch those moments of surprise.”
Free Guy, The Adam Project and the three Deadpool movies “were engineered so that people walked out of the experience, at minimum, a little bit better than when they walked in, and at maximum, just walking on sunshine and feeling that audience delight,” Reynolds said. The dynamic of a live audience, he said, can be described as “collective effervescence,” he added, comparing the communal reaction to creative stimuli to “kelp underwater” moving slowly and in unison with the current.
Along the path of making Deadpool & Wolverine, Reynolds recalled, “There was only one line in the entire film that they asked me to take out.” As a murmur grew from the crowd, Reynolds headed off any attempt to get him to spill details. “No. No. No! And they were right!” he said.
When that kind of feedback comes in from any gatekeepers, Reynolds said it’s “my own fault” that he can’t absorb it passively. Adopting a deep baritone suited to Disney’s CEO, he continued, “As soon as somebody says something, like, ‘Ryan, Bob Iger here. Would love it if you’d take that one line out. It’s really going to make our life hard over here.’ As soon as they say that, there’s just something in my brain that goes, ‘Must keep line! Precious!’ And then as soon as the fog of war lifts and you have a second thought, it’s like, ‘Of course I can take that out. Can I say something about Pinocchio instead? And the answer is yes!”
Reynolds was ostensibly at the festival to discuss the advertising and branded content realm, in which he is a significant player as chief creative officer of ad tech firm MNTN and co-founder of creative agency Maximum Effort. He recounted a long and arduous process on one spot for Match.com, which hypothesized a “match” between Satan and the year 2020. Reynolds said he encountered a “layer cake” of approvals. “I was on my hands and knees trying to get that green-lit,” he said.
FX docuseries Welcome to Wrexham also was a topic during the 40-minute conversation. The show takes viewers behind the scenes of the operations of a lower-tier professional soccer club in Wales, which Reynolds and his actor friend Rob McElhenny acquired and aimed to improve. As the club has earned promotions, Reynolds said he has marveled at the depth of the bond between the town and its team. In terms of storytelling, too, he said it has offered no end of lessons. By design, Reynolds said he and McElhenny aim to not be on camera and instead let others from the club and community become the principal characters.
Landing in Wales without a clear narrative in mind for the show reinforced the importance of saying, “I don’t know” to the universe. Reynolds said that he considers a willingness to say that to be a strength of him personally as well as Maximum Effort as a company. “Being willing to suck at something in order to be good at it” is crucial, he said, as is “embracing the idea of just listening. When you get involved with a story, if you can really listen with every part of your soul, it will speak to you.”
That concept applied to Deadpool & Wolverine, Reynolds added. “I can’t tell you how many times we pivoted,” he said. “Just from listening to the movie. If you stick to the script and stick to your shot list, your chances of being f–ked are, like, 10x’d. Because you have different actors than when you wrote it, the weather’s weird. There’s something you didn’t imagine that just happened. You have all this room for amazing things to happen when you don’t go in with this concrete, inflexible plan.”
