'Avengers: Age of Ultron': Joss Whedon and Kevin Feige on saying goodbye | EW.com 

Here’s how writer-director Joss Whedon and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige handled that as they prepared to finish

• And debated the merits of murky breakfast cereal.

In other words, they geeked out like slap-happy students who just pulled an all-nighter to get their final projects done in time. (This one hits theaters on Friday.)

, Whedon closes out his contract with Marvel Studios, having helped them assemble Iron Man, Black Widow, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye, Nick Fury, and The Hulk into an interlocked series of movies.

This risky plan by Feige changed the way Hollywood thought about film franchises, inspiring everything from DC Comics new series of connected films to the upcoming

Now Whedon says he’s out, and Feige has a superhero movie slate that will run through the end of the decade.

As they finished their latest film, the two sat down in an editing room to talk about some serious things, too: like making more room for women in superhero movies – and Whedon’s decision to say goodbye to a world he helped build.

Entertainment Weekly: During the Hulkbuster fight, am I picking up on the Hulk turning gray when he gets especially irate?

Joss Whedon: You’re not picking up on the Hulk turning gray in the sense of a Gray Hulk. What you’re picking up on is that we wanted to put a little spell on him. What we wanted to evoke was a sickly, out-of-control, diseased-brain Hulk. We deliberately took the green down and made him look unhealthy, but not in a gray-canon way. … That literally never came up.

Kevin Feige: It came up with consumer products and marketing! I think there might even be a Gray Hulk section of a [toy line] somewhere, which we kept saying, ‘It’s gray-ish.’

EW: As far as consumer products, why not Gray Hulk cereal? Who wouldn’t eat that!

Whedon: A cereal with the word gray in it! With real sadness! [Frown face, shakes head.]  ‘It didn’t sell as quite as well as we hoped.’

EW: James Spader performs Ultron through motion-capture. This tech keeps evolving, so what were some of the hurdles you faced this time? And what were the Holy Grails?

Feige: Are we going to be able to translate all the subtleties of his facial movements into a metal robotic face, the soulfulness in his eyes? [The Holy Grail…] to see Joss go from a place – well, we all were, which was biting our nails, to ‘Can you play it again? I love it.’

EW: When I interviewed him, Spader said Ultron is like a really a smart teenager, and no one hates their creators more than that.

Whedon: [Laughs.] That sounds like James, and he’s totally right. [Ultron] is definitely a child. Sometimes he’s a teenager, sometimes he’s an infant, sometimes he’s a very old man. He looks at Tony [Stark] like a father, brother—everything. It all gets muddled in there. At the same time, Spader can’t help but have a very nurturing, fatherly tone.

EW: Ultron also has a flair for the dramatic, hiding out in a remote fortress in the mountains of an Eastern European country.

Whedon: I always think of Castle Frankenstein. Definitely, he’s living in a Universal horror film. [Whispers to recorder] Don’t sue!

EW: Spader also said he was won over by early dialogue you sent in which this 8-foot robot quotes Emily Dickinson.

Whedon: Uh-huh. There was an early version of Emily Dickinson [“Because I Could Not Stop For Death”] that became the Pinocchio song, actually.

angry when that got cut. They were like, ‘What’s the

for Marvel fans!? Can we get some [T.S.] Eliot in there? ‘A pair of ragged claws’ or something?’

movie. The Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony are taking over

Whedon: I think the very words ‘one’ and ‘two’ would explain it.

Feige: He’s just done a ‘one’ and ‘two.’

Whedon: This has definitely been the hardest work of my career. Every movie I have ever made has been an ensemble piece of

enormous proportions. That many balls in the air, it’s only going to get bigger with

. I haven’t created something of my own in a long time, and I haven’t relaxed in a long time. I was like, I’m not going to be able to give it what I would need to. [Geezer voice] It’s a young man’s game.

Whedon: Even though it’s years off, those years go fast.

Feige: It’s been three years since the release of the first movie, and he had zero time off between them.

EW: Are you out for good, or will you stay in the Marvel family in some way?

Feige: Just when you think you’re out, you get pulled back in.

Whedon: [Al Pacino voice] They pull me back in!

EW: Let’s talk about the relationship between Black Widow and The Hulk. You decided to push them toward a tentative romance.

[Laughs.] For me, it was interesting just because they’re outsiders in completely different ways that match up really well. It made perfect sense to me. It doesn’t make perfect sense to everybody on Twitter, but I think when they see the film, they’ll see that there really is a connection.

EW: I always thought of her as more of a big sister to the Avengers. What led you to thinking the team needed a love story? Is there a danger of Yoko-ing the team?

Whedon: All of the descriptions—den mother, big sister, babysitter, Yoko – she’s an Avenger.

EW: What I mean by all that is she seems to be in more control than all of them.

Whedon: Yes, absolutely, which is why I’m interested to find out the person who’s the most in control with the person who has to be in control all the time, because he’s the least in control. Just to have that chemistry and to see how that would break them down a little bit and open them up just seemed logical to me.

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