>Kaecilius was also selected because his story could elegantly, and economically, be folded into Strange’s origin. But intriguingly, there seems to be a darker force working through Kaecilius in the movie. “What we wanted was a character that was rooted in the real. This is certainly what I was pitching from the beginning was an antagonist who was rooted in the real world who had, so that there could be an intimate relatability between Strange and his adversary. But who was empowered by something else. By something otherworldly. And connected to something else otherworldly, which comes straight from the comics. Another and I'll say this, another character straight from the comics, you know. And that was, that became interesting to me.
>“I always loved, I mean, the Sauron-Saruman idea in Lord of the Rings, even though you never see Sauron except I think in the prologue. I think that's the only time you ever see him in that trilogy, but what a presence and what a power. And we do more than that with this other dimensional power. But it, I like that idea. So that Strange wasn’t combating something huge and fantastical all the way through the movie that had no human relatability. That the one every version of that that we would visit felt strained and felt like too high of a bar. That we wouldn't clear that bar given everything else that we had to establish in the movie. “
>The Ancient One dissolves Strange’s scepticism by revealing the underlying similarities between the mystic arts and scientific discovery. Feige revealed to us how she gets through to the man who doesn’t believe in chakras or the power of belief:
>“She starts using Eastern lingo in the way she’s describing the world to him. He immediately writes it off – he rolls his eyes, he doesn’t buy it, and she goes okay, and she starts talking about it in Western terms to try and make him more comfortable. She says it’s the same thing.
>"Whether you’re looking at the ancient study of acupuncture pressure points or you’re looking an MRI – she’s trying to say we’re talking about the same things here. And if you’re not comfortable with the word spells, let’s use the word programme.
>“It’s all the same thing.”
>Ant-Man gave us our first glimpse of the Quantum Realm, but Doctor Strange will take us much deeper, exploring not just parallel dimensions but entirely different realities. Strange even once had a prologue sequence set within the large hadron collider at CERN.
>But parallel dimensions in the Marvel Universe mean something more than alternate versions of our reality. “I think when comic book fans hear parallel dimensions or multiple dimensions they think of Earth 616 and Earth 617 and Earth 618,” says Feige. “That’s all possible. But what we’re playing with in this world is there are dimensions – that the other dimensions are not just parallel realities, although some of them are, but there are the Dark Dimension where Dormammu inhabits; there are dimensions that are so mind-bending that you can barely perceive them; there are dimensions where a lot of the Ditko images come from; there are dimensions that are just mind-trips that the human mind can barely fathom which is why it’s hard to turn them into something to show audiences in November.
Isaac Anderson
As long as we actually see Dormmamu in the sequel I guess this is alright.
Oliver Clark
From the sound of it we'll see more than a glimpse in the first movie. Director said he'd make more of an appearance than Sauron.
Angel Cook
YES >“She starts using Eastern lingo in the way she’s describing the world to him. He immediately writes it off – he rolls his eyes, he doesn’t buy it, and she goes okay, and she starts talking about it in Western terms to try and make him more comfortable. She says it’s the same thing. NOOOOOOOOO
Adam James
I think this means that it's the same thing in that there are laws and systems in place that govern what happens in magic much like there is in science. That's standard Doctor Strange.
Brandon Powell
While I totally know this wouldn't be the case but how cool would it be if it wasn't Dormmmamu but Shuma Gorath?
I mean he would be a pretty big step up above Thanos in terms of threat too. But it's definitely dorm but fun to think about.
Jace Murphy
Honestly, I'll be fine so long as they don't magitech anything. It's fine in Thor but I want none of that in Strange.
Andrew Johnson
Is that why his skin is cracking? Dormammu waiting to come out.
Brody Reed
That's a really cool effect
Jordan Garcia
Im guessing hes just a puppet and the the entire movie is Dormammu trying to cross over. That or he got a power boost from Dormammu and his body can barely take it
Gavin Nguyen
>yfw Mads ends up playing based Dorm in the sequels
Thomas Brown
Apparently he's seduced by what he finds on "the other side" and then tries to destroy the barriers between dimensions.
Could be either, he could also be a vessel for Dormammu and that's also slowly destroying his body.
They've been hinting at this for a while. It seems like a pretty sure bet, based on things Derrickson and Feige have said, that the climax of the film will take place in the Dark Dimension and Strange will confront Dormammu while there.
Jacob Scott
>yfw he looks like Ghost Rider
Michael Miller
...
Luke Rodriguez
>yfw you're ghost rider
Blake Price
Dormammu doesn't have a skull head.
Matthew Baker
>tfw you're scarred for life but at least you're in a sick photo
Lucas Carter
please. PLEASE.
i need this.
Asher Fisher
No shit.
Doctor Strange only has like 3 villains people can remember.
Baron Mordo Dormammu Shuma Gorath (only because of MVC)
>I have a super specific question. Are there any Bob Dylan songs in this movie?
Scott Derrickson: Are there any what?
>Bob Dylan songs.
Scott Derrickson: Oh God, I hope, I hope so. That’s my answer to everything. I hope there are Bob Dylan songs in every movie. So yeah. No, we are, we’re looking at specific songs and some of them classic songs. We’ll see which ones we’ll get. Which ones we can afford and which ones we can get the rights to.
>When you come onto a movie like Doctor Strange where Marvel obviously has an idea of what they want it to be, how much development are you doing from the start? Like how much are you building this movie from the ground up compared to a movie that you’re doing outside of this kind of thing?
Scott Derrickson: In terms of adapted material, which I’ve done before a couple of times, the development process was even more from the ground up in this case. Yeah, they, because you have a large body of stories and material from the comics. And when I first met with them, they had certain thematic ideas they liked. And not a lot of story ideas, which was great. And I think it was my connection and interest in the thematic ideas that got me the job. And the whole process was starting with all ideas on the table. And so I was involved in it from the very get go. Yeah.
Joshua Cox
>How has it been so far? Has it surprised you?
Scott Derrickson: It’s been incredible. It’s been the most incredible filmmaking experience for me by far. Yeah, it’s, I mean, for a variety of reasons, you know. The experience with Marvel, you know, I can only speak for myself. I know every director has their own stories. But my experience with Marvel has been really good. And I really enjoy the intimacy of the collaboration because it’s all been just myself and Kevin and my producer Stephen. There are no middle men. It’s that and my crew. And there’s… that’s it. There’s no one else working on the movie. And that’s new for me and unique for me. And the ambition of the movie, I’m surprised that I’m getting to make it. You know, the because I keep feeling like these set pieces are someone’s gonna say, it’s too bizarre. It’s too weird. We can’t, it’s too, we’re going too far. And I, this, I feel as though we crossed a line at some point in the process, which the comics I think were the inspiration to try to go past certain boundaries. But we crossed a line and after crossing that line we just kept going. It all kept getting stranger and stranger not to be, I didn’t mean that as a pun, but it all just kept getting more bizarre. And in a good way, in a way that as a viewer I think I would be satisfied by.
Michael Thomas
>Kevin Feige said that one of the hardest nuts to crack with the movie was to figure out how to make the action sort of believable and different because you’re just sort of conjuring spells and things of this nature. Can you talk about what the action will look like and how you sort of cracked that?
Scott Derrickson: Yeah, it was the idea of magic, preserving the idea of magic was really important to me that we didn’t try to explain it away or root it all in something scientific that by definition is not magic to me. And we, the, there’s also the burden of popular magic movies, the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings, which appropriate magic in a very familiar, traditional way. And the comics had a few ideas in them that were to this day still very original. Those ideas we’re using and the rest of it was also was very traditional in the use of spells and even some of the imagery. So my, for me the starting point was what kind of things have we not seen in cinema? That we could, was almost working backwards. What kind of imagery, what kind of action could be created in cinema that we haven’t seen and I started from that place and looked for a way to tie that in to magic. And some of those ideas didn’t tie in well and some of those ideas tied in surprisingly well. The ones that tied in really well, those became the major set pieces for the movie. Yeah.
Caleb Morgan
>We asked Kevin what sort of subgenre this movie falls into and he said “supernatural,” which feels very vague. But just from what we’ve been able to sort of see, it looks like sort of like a martial arts movie in a way.
Scott Derrickson: Yeah. There’s definitely a martial arts influence on the movie. Because that is the action that I like for starters. It is also the martial arts, martial arts is the kind of action that does tie in well to the supernatural. There’s a whole, that is a whole subgenre within martial arts cinema. The supernatural martial arts movie. Particularly within Asian cinema. And I felt like when it came to fighting in the movie that just made sense, you know, to certainly to go in that direction and stay away from, you know, gunfire and things like that. And to avoid having fighting be the casting of bolts of light. I just, you know, that was another thing where I feel like I really feel like magic has been, we’ve been drawing on the Emperor in Star Wars for over 30 years, you know, and so we gotta start doing this some other way. You know, the magic power, the utilization of magic power. But yeah, it’s there’s some good fighting in it. But that fighting is again, always within a context of something I think more fantastical and more surreal and more mind trippy than just the supernatural action of combat. That’s I think that’s it’s always supernatural action, combat, fighting within a larger surreal canvas. That was the thing I always wanted to preserve so that we’re never just watching fighting. Yeah.
Blake Mitchell
WOOOOW CONGRATS Cred Forums YOU GUESSED THAT DORMMAMU IS IN Protip:it has been known since MvC3 was released years ago, Marvel only pushed for movie characters like Deadpool, Avengers, Dr. Strange, etc. So get ready for M.O.D.O.K soon.
Grayson Russell
>I’ve seen on your Twitter feed lots of great art, a lot of appropriate Steve Ditko art. When you’re adapting a story like this with so much lore and so many visual cues from the comics, what is the most important to pull from for you personally? What did you really want to make sure what was in this film?
Scott Derrickson: That’s a great question. That’s a really incisive question. For, I mean, my love for the comics I think is probably I’ll start by saying this. I think that ’cause I love the comics so much and I grew up reading Marvel Comics. And Doctor Strange is my favorite comic book character probably I think honestly the only comic book I would feel personally suited to work on. And for me it was my long standing love for Doctor Strange comes from first of all, the fantastical visual imagery of all the comics, particularly the early Ditko stuff, Into Shamballa, The Oath, a lot of the images that I have picked are from those three sources. And then individual issues. Thematically the loneliness of that character, I always really liked the idea of a character who had gone through so much trauma and was placed into a position between our world and other worlds, other dimensions literally. That’s a lonely position. I like that. But I think my that as I’ve gotten older, my continuing love for Doctor Strange has been that he is a character who transforms through suffering. He goes through this gauntlet and for me that’s kind of the most powerful thing. He goes through this gauntlet of trauma and suffering, going all the way back to his childhood in the comics. But then he appropriates that suffering in a certain way that limits him. And then he goes through the loss of everything in a really painful, you know, unbearable way. And eventually finds self transcendence in something mystical. That’s Doctor Strange.
Leo Lopez
You know, and I love that. And I think that again, in getting to why I think I got the job, I think it’s my genuine love for that. That was that somehow connected to what I didn’t know it at the time, but I think it really connected to what Marvel wanted the movie to be. And when I came in, I talked about Doctor Strange in those terms and for me it’s like that’s the only way I could make the movie. You know, that and I had set piece ideas already about how to make the movie as weird, as visually weird in this day and age as the Ditko comics were at their time.
>Is there a sense of humor to it as well?
Scott Derrickson: Yeah.
>Where does that–?
Scott Derrickson: It’s Benedict, how can it not be funny, you know?
Hudson Bell
>By playing it straight it’s funny or is he–?
Scott Derrickson: I mean, it’s he’s yeah, I mean, he’s just he is a funny guy. And there’s funny lines in the script. You know, there’s comedy in it. But it’s not Guardians. It’s not that tone by any means. It’s closer to The Winter Soldier, which has comedy in it and has some really funny lines in it. That I love, I just named my two favorite Marvel movies by the way. And part of my love for Winter Soldier is the high impact, grounded nature of the action in that movie. And the subversive grounded ideas of that movie within what is just one of the great kickass action movies. Like that’s what I love about Winter Soldier in a nutshell. So we have a lot of humor, you know, spread throughout, but it is a very grounded, realistic movie about a guy who suffers a lot. And transforms, you know. So there’s also it’s also very dramatic. Yeah.
>We heard a little bit about some of the weapons and artifacts and how deeply connected they are because they work in certain dimensions and don’t and that’s about all we heard. So what can you tell us about that and how much of those are being pulled right out of the comics? ‘Cause obviously the Eye of Agamotto is there, but…
Scott Derrickson: Yeah. You have to – there was a lot of discussion about how much to use, because you can obviously get into an overload of those things. But I think the Harry Potter movies are proof that audiences love that stuff. They love the idea of magical objects and they like learning the rules of those objects and what they do. I think everything that we do, I think all the names of everything and I think all the things that we use in the movie are drawn from the comics. I can’t think of one at least offhand that’s not drawn from the comics. Yeah.
Austin Gomez
>What about the Sling Rings?
Scott Derrickson: That okay, there’s that yeah. Well done. But the gateways, the forming of the gateways that are used for that, that’s straight out of the comics. Yeah. I just needed an object for them to carry it on. Yeah, okay. Well done.
>You’re sitting in a room full of people who are like professional nerds.
Scott Derrickson: Yes.
>And a number of us had to look up your main antagonist, Kaecilius, in this movie.
Scott Derrickson: I love that.
>He is a not very well known character.
Scott Derrickson: Yeah.
Zachary Bailey
>Can you talk about the decision to use that character and why you guys ended up there and what to expect from him?
Scott Derrickson: Yes. I’m trying, I don’t know how much I can give away about this, so what I’ll say is that I’ll, I’m gonna answer with a tease. Is that fair?
What we wanted was a character that was rooted in the real. This is certainly what I was pitching from the beginning was an antagonist who was rooted in the real world so that there could be an intimate relateability between Strange and his adversary, but who was empowered by something else. By something otherworldly. And connected to something else otherworldly. Which comes straight from the comics – and I’ll say this, another character straight from the comics.
And that became interesting to me. I always loved the Sauron-Saruman idea in Lord of the Rings, even though you never see Sauron except I think in the prologue. I think that’s the only time you ever see him in that trilogy, but what a presence and what a power. And we do more than that with this other dimensional power. I like that idea. So that Strange wasn’t combating something huge and fantastical all the way through the movie that had no human relateability. Every version of that that we would visit felt strained and felt like too high of a bar, that we wouldn’t clear that bar given everything else that we had to establish in the movie. Does that make sense?
Chase Ramirez
And I think it’s working really well. And the thing I’ll say about Kaecilius that is my favorite thing about him is he is a man of ideas. And that to me what always is compelling about villains, you know. I am much more interested in how they think than in what they even do. My favorite villain being John Doe in Seven who does this extraordinary things and is so scary, but the scariest scene is when he actually – for me – the scariest scene in that movie is the ride into the desert when he articulates why. I got terrified, I felt nauseous watching that movie, because I was like oh my God, he makes sense. Oh my God, how can this be?! You know, and it was that watertight logic of what he says. Same thing with The Joker in The Dark Knight. The watertight logic of his anarchistic philosophy in that hospital bedside table scene with Harvey Dent – Is awesome! So I’m not saying our villain is as great as John Doe or The Joker, as Heath Ledger’s Joker [laughs] but he is a man of ideas and to me that’s what makes villains compelling.
>You mentioned your passion for the character and his history, but you guys all seem to be making some interesting evolutions in storytelling in terms of the characters of Wong and Baron Mordo. Can you talk a little about the decision there to have them sort of not playing their sort of typical comic book roles?
Scott Derrickson: Yeah, in the case of Mordo, in the comic books, that character was just really arch. You know, just really arch and he’s in the origin issue and even in reading through – and I’ve read the entire body of Doctor Strange now – it was a difficult character, very difficult character to adapt. Because of the very basic archness that he plays all the way through there.
Jack Rodriguez
So we wanted to keep what were the interesting aspects of him (his relationship with The Ancient One) but the only way that Mordo who needs to be a presence in the universe of Doctor Strange and God willing, in sequels, I felt that we had to start by establishing who he was before he got into that arch villainy in the comics. And that’s a lot of what we’re doing in this movie is we’re sort of building a foundational understanding of who he was before the guy that you met in that comic so that that turn isn’t an arch turn.
Wong is another thing all together because there’s, you know, it’s a racial stereotype. I mean, let’s be blunt about it. As is The Ancient One. But Wong even more than The Ancient One I think was a character that there just wasn’t a lot that was fundamental about his character that was usable. And so instead of being a sidekick, he’s a master of the mystic arts. Instead of being a manservant, he oversees the library at Kamar-Taj and is an intellectual mentor to Strange. So we kind of flipped everything that he was. And that’s where it’s related to the comics in that we took the things that were in retrospect, insulting, and elevated them in just the same way and that became suddenly “ah, this is a great character.” And that seemed to work and has relateability only in that we basically inversed what his character was and then kept the name, kept him Chinese. You know, other than that, that’s about it I think to be honest.
Christopher Foster
I hope we eventually get Mephisto and the rest of Marvel's demonic entities.
That'd be neat, behind all that skin is a scorched head.
Blake Perry
This is going to be a bloody trip in omnimax 3D.
>Can't wait!
Josiah Cook
One Ghost Rider is already a part of MCU. They are going to announce Danny Ketch movie/ Netflix series pretty soon, methinks. And Blade. Definitely Blade.
Easton Edwards
>Danny Ketch Why Danny and not Johnny? Wheter we like it or not, Johnny is more iconic.
Noah Johnson
So they're copying BvS' Darkseid behind everything?
Oliver Lopez
what?
Elijah Hughes
Lex asked for Steppenwolf's help at the end of the movie, Darkseid hasn't even been hinted at.
Lucas Adams
>no dracula >no brother blood >no satannish
Nightmare at least has a chance.
Matthew Adams
>implying the first one isn't being saved for the eventual Blade reboot/netflix series
The others sound like z-listers, tbqhwy my sempfamalam.
Ryan Gutierrez
This reminds me, even though it's tangentially related...
How the fuck did Blade got a trilogy in a time where capeshit movies were brushed off by everyone?
Jack Johnson
Because it wasn't considered a capeshit, just a horror/dark fantasy action movie. No one I knew knew it was based off a comic book.
Gabriel Cox
Wow Shocking Who did not see this coming?
Elijah Ross
Blade was a complete unknown character. Late 90s/early 2000s were all about sunglasses, leather trench coats, and raves. Add vampires, Wesley Snipes, an R rating, and you have a massive hit
Carter Perry
Magic is a science in Marvel. I can't find the full collage in my unsorted folders, so here's the only example I can find.
Elijah Stewart
>The Joker in The Dark Knight. The watertight logic of his anarchistic philosophy in that hospital bedside table scene with Harvey Dent – Is awesome!
Justin Powell
I never tried shrooms before but now maybe a good time and see this imax 3D
Ian Flores
Only contrarian faggots think Ledger Joker is bad.
Cooper Bennett
It was a memorable and logical scene, dumb frogposter
Logan Garcia
scene concept and acting were unmistakably one of the all-time greats in cape movies, heck probably not only among those - the "logic" and actual text are pretentious and idiotic you fucking philistines
Asher Lewis
>The watertight logic of his anarchistic philosophy in that hospital bedside table scene with Harvey Dent – Is awesome!
Jackson Reyes
How can something be both idiotic and pretentious? You're just using adjectives randomly to describe you just nitpicking something.
Jason Collins
Well, aside from the Omega Symbol and parademons in Batman's dream
Ryder Jackson
>The tissue surrounding his eyes underneath the cracking skin is black
It's literally a mask.
If he takes it off, Dr Strange will die
Xavier Baker
Why would you want to see your character on the big screen get bastardized? No way he wouldn't be made to job in the MCU format.
Parker Russell
Did it ever occur to you that Joker was purposely bullshitting Harvey into going crazy or did you seriously believe that the Joker believed his own BS?
