Tag: Jeremy Renner

“The Avengers” will fill the sky with Marvel icons – that is, if the summer’s most crowded film doesn’t remain earthbound under the great weight of its teeming ensemble. That challenge is why Joss Whedon was brought in as the director and screenwriter. He’s a true savant when it comes to snappy dialogue and scenes that become sly symphonies of angst, bravado, love, lust, doubt and deceit. With all of that in mind, we asked Whedon to talk about the major characters and what each brings to the group dynamic. Today: Hawkeye. Jeremy Renner portrays Clint Barton, a.k.a. Hawkeye, who has trained his body and mind to become a world-class marksman. In the process, he also became a world-class loner. “I love him because he really could not be less of a team player,” Whedon said. “He’s a sniper. That’s ...

Brad Bird won two Oscars for his animated accomplishments at Pixar, but taking on “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” for his first live-action feature film was, in its own way, just as audacious as the aerial stunts Tom Cruise executes in the new spy thriller. Bird knew that to succeed he would need to draw on his experience — and that meant reaching for a sketch pad and a pencil at every stage of the project. “I would never claim my skill set is unique in all the world, but when you come from animation, you have to know how to represent things visually,” Bird said. “If you have a thought, you don’t have to just talk about it, you can sit down and draw what you have in mind…. There’s so much wiggle room in the way we interpret ...

It’s a big day in the Marvel Universe — principal photography is now underway in Albuquerque, N.M., on “The Avengers,” the film that will bring together the superheroes from four separate film franchises and, perhaps, launch a few new ones. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans) and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo stepping in for the banished Edward Norton) will be joined by Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, reprising her slinky S.H.I.E.L.D. spy role from “Iron Man 2“) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner, who makes a cameo with his bows and arrows in “Thor,” which opens May 6) as well as Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), the representatives of S.H.I.E.L.D., the secret-ops government agency that appears to be the glue holding much of the upcoming mythology in place. As expected, Tom Hiddleston from “Thor” will be the ...