DOCTOR STRANGE Writer Debunks Claims That Marvel Doesn't Let Their Directors Direct Action Scenes

Much ado has been made about reports that, while in discussions with Marvel, when the subject of action scenes come up, Marvel is alleged to have told people that they would "direct that for them" or that they wouldn't have to worry about it, in particular with one of the potential candidates for Black Widow before they finally found a director in Cate Shortland. However, Doctor Strange co-writer C. Robert Cargill (who is speculated to also be reprising his role as writer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) had this to say while talking about how Marvel crafts their fight scenes, and work with their writers and directors to do so, during an episode of his podcast Junkfood Cinema, during an episode discussing the movie Ghost Dog which came about from discussing the action scenes in that movie.

For example: If you love Marvel movies, you need to at some point pay homage to the stunt teams that work for Marvel, because what they do, they literally - once they know what they're doing and where the scenes are in the movie, they start crafting action scenes. And what they do is they sit down and go "What haven't we done before? What haven't we seen before? What would we like to see? How could we make this character's powers interesting?" and they start playing around with that. And then they work it out in advance just sitting around a table and then they go "Okay, lets go try it.", and then they go in on the mat and they start practicing, and they start throwing each other around, and they start improv-ing and they go "Oh, oh oh, what if we did this, and what if we did this."

The character of the Cloak evolved from the stunt team. The stunt team was like "The Cloak of Levitation is a really cool thing, what if the Cloak actually started getting involved in the fight themselves", and they brought it to us, and me and the stunt team sat down and talked it through and they started showing us demo video of it and Scott [Derrickson] of course loved it and I'm like "Oh this is great". And they're like "How can we weave that more into the story?" and so I was actively going in and coming up with concepts of "Hey, here's how we do this with that" and so you end up with the writer working with the stunt team evolving this scene and that's exactly how Marvel works. It's why some people have - a couple people in the press have said "Oh yeah, we met with them and they said 'Don't worry about the action, we'll take care of that' and they took that on themselves as if Marvel was saying 'We're not hiring you to direct action, someone else is going to direct them', which is not what it is, they misunderstood: the thing is they have these geniuses that come up with these great sequences and that bring them to you and the director and the writers work over that with them, and craft a scene.

So it seems that the complaints that Marvel strongarms directors out of directing action is incorrect, and just misunderstood on the side of the director up for the job. On a smaller point, in another episode, when the subject of the Sony divorce is brought up, Cargill says it's his belief that things can still be worked out until Sony actually begins production on a Spider-Man movie without Kevin Feige.