Hayley Atwell, actrice britannique

CBR TV : "Agent Carter" Showrunners Fazekas & Butters on Season 2, Writing "Captain Marvel"

"Marvel’s Agent Carter" gave ABC a two-pronged television attack earlier this year, expanding the 1940s Marvel Cinematic Universe in the wake of Captain America’s death and allowing the network to deliver eight more weeks of Marvel programming while "Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." took a mid-season hiatus after heralding the arrival of Inhumans.

Hayley Atwell reprised her "Captain America : The First Avenger" role as Peggy Carter, who finds herself struggling to adjust to work as a glorified secretary for the Strategic Scientific Reserve before being recruited by Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) to clear his name and stumbling upon an even bigger Marvel mystery in the process.

RELATED : SDCC : "Agent Carter" Showrunners Promise Romance, Glamour and...the Darkforce ?

At Comic-Con International in San Diego, Executive Producers and showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas joined CBR TV’s Jonah Weiland on the yacht to discuss the series and preview its second season. Not content to just have a hand in the MCU, the duo will also be joining Marvel Comics for its "All-New, All-Different Marvel" relaunch as the writers behind the new "Captain Marvel" series drawn by Kris Anka this fall. Butters and Fazekas spoke with CBR about their ABC series, its new Los Angeles setting in Season Two, the mysteries the Darkforce and much more at SDCC.

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The first part of the conversation is all about "Agent Carter," with Butters and Fazekas explaining how they ended up running a Marvel TV show and what drew them to the series in the first place. They then discuss the new locale of Season 2, 1940s Los Angeles, the major role the Darkforce will play in the new season, and whether Peggy will ever be able to be happy. Addressing their work with the show’s supporting cast, they explain how they were able to make viewers care about certain characters and what it’s like to write what can be seen as over the top portrayals of sexism for a show that takes place in an era fraught with it.

On reading the pilot script and getting a full sense of the show’s tone and direction :

Tara Butters : We did a show called "Reaper" several years ago that had a lot of comedic turns to it, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we really responded to "Agent Carter" is because it has action, it has humor, and great relationships between Peggy and Jarvis and really allowed us to do a lot of different aspects of television that we like. There’s always a great mystery, and I love the serialized nature of the show.

On introducing the Dark Force to the Marvel Cinematic Universe :

Butters : Darkforce is something that is in the Marvel comic book universe. It’s an unknown property that we will find potentially our characters having to deal with.

Michele Fazekas : They don’t know, when they come into contact with it, they don’t know what it is. Is it a new element ? And it could be — we’ve put a lot of research into ’what is Darkforce ?’ and it could be a solid, it could be a liquid, it could be like smoke. So they don’t know what it is, they don’t know what it could do. It does, one of the things it does is it does sort of imbue with powers. There’s Blackout, there’s Cloak — it affects different people differently, which we liked, and we liked putting something like that in 1947. And actually, trying to give it a scientific explanation — what is it ? And Peggy wants to know the same thing, what is it¿

Butters : And also it’s at a time when atomic energy is being explored, so they’re all looking for this new source of energy and power.

Fazekas : Now that the war’s over, and all that sort of effort is — what are we gonna work on ? We’re gonna work on nuclear energy. And in the process of that they might find this.

On whether Peggy will find happiness in the second season :

Butters : The nice thing is, she’s starting in a very different place this year than she did in the first season. In the first season she wasn’t really appreciated, she had lost the love of her life. By the end of the eight episodes she has found sort of her mojo, her peers respect her, and you know what, she found a way to kind of move on from Captain America — not that she wasn’t the love of her life, just that she knew she needed to move on. That’s kind of where we pick her up and she will have some disappointments, obviously, in this season, but at the same time, you know, she will potentially meet new people that will surprise her.

Fazekas : It will be complicated. It’s not going to be, I’m gonna meet somebody and fall in love with them, it’ll be amazing." We’re gonna make it not so easy for her.

On walking the line between caricatures and characters who were simply products of the time period the show exists in :

Fazekas : I think it feels over the top to us now—

Butters : But I don’t know that it was then. There were very few women in that type of role, working alongside men and weren’t the secretary. We went back and forth — [Christopher] Markus and [Stephen] McFeely, who write a lot of the Marvel movies and who are amazing.

Fazekas : They wrote the pilot.

Butters : That was a discussion we all had of kind of, where do we — we don’t want it to feel like a caricature but at the same time you’re setting up where all these characters grew. Even [Chad Michael Murray’s Jack] Thompson grows as a characters, but they had to go through certain steps to get there.

Wrapping up their conversation, Fazekas and Butters discuss perhaps the most daunting project on their horizon — the new "Captain Marvel" ongoing series launching as part of "All-New, All-Different Marvel." The pair talk about adjusting to writing comics, following in writer Kelly Sue DeConnick’s footsteps and the advice they’ve gotten from other comic book writers. Butters also talks about her previous comic book foray, working on "Halcyon" with her husband, "Arrow" Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim.

"Agent Carter" Showrunners, Anka Take Command of "Captain Marvel"

On whether launching Marvel Comics’ new "Captain Marvel" ongoing series is more nerve wracking than running a TV show :

Fazekas : It’s a learning curve, for sure. Part of it is there’s so much history and our way of writing is like, when we were on "Law & Order : Special Victims Unit," we’re not cops, we’re not lawyers, but we did a lot of research on it. Now I’m kind of a lawyer. [Laughs] And a cop. You obviously, because there’s no — we signed on and then it’s like "Go !" and let’s have an outline right away, so you don’t have time to read every single thing ever written about Captain Marvel so you’re sort of jumping in. We read Kelly Sue’s runs, obviously, which we loved and was a great basis to build on for us. And Marvel had ideas — they wanted [there] to be a space station. They really wanted to find what is Captain Marvel’s mission within the greater Marvel Universe, but it’s a challenge.

Butters : It’s a different way of thinking, and we’re learning it as we go and Marvel’s been phenomenal at kind of helping us along, and of course my husband Marc is a good person to put it in front of and say, "What do you think ?" [Laughs] And even Chris Dingess who we write with on "Agent Carter," who has "Manifest Destiny" [at Skybound], so we have very good people—

Fazekas : He’ll come into our office and look at our board that has the issues and he’s like, "You got too much story." I’m like, "Don’t— I know !" [Laughs]

Source :Comic Book Ressources du 29/07/15