The Russo Brothers Comment on the TV vs. Film Debate
Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War directors Anthony and Joe Russo see the film landscape as a place of dramatic change over the course of two-three decades, deviating from the 80's and 90's golden age of indie filmmaking, while believing it hasn't closed off those voices completely.
Speaking with Deadline, the duo admit that television has overtaken feature filmmaking in these areas. “I think it’s very apparent now but at the time we could sense that the independent scene that we loved in the 90s was actually transitioning to television,” said Joe Russo.
“I think when you look at content now you’ll see that the TV space has much more adventurous and quirky, left of center content than the feature space does right now.”
“The feature space is a spectacle space,”Joe Russo continued. “It’s about getting people out of their houses to go to theater when we all have a lot of things in our home now that occupy our attention.”
The pair don't regret their move to film, of course, though mark their work in television as critical to their current careers. “It ended up serving us very well,” Anthony Russo said, “because we’re also producing so we are still connected, while we’re also directing individual episodes. It’s been a nice way for us to handle these things.”
