Filmmaking can be quite the nerve-wracking business. Just as with any profession, whenever doing any specific job for the first time, you’re never quite sure if you’re doing it right or if there are any problems that are specific to your own experiences for one reason or another. It’s because of this that having a brain trust of contemporary creatives can be helpful, and Hollywood certainly has its fair share of directors who help make each other’s work as good as possible.

This is also true for director Dave Wilson. Wilson has been in the industry for decades on the VFX side, and in fact, has worked alongside Deadpool director Tim Miller for nearly as long at Blur Studios. So when it came to his upcoming film Bloodshot, he decided to bring him in along with Avengers: Endgame director Joe Russo to screen a cut of his movie. 

I had a chance to sit down with Wilson himself at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con for an extended 40-minute interview along with The Comic Source host Jace Milam and ask him about the process of bringing in his director friends to give advice on the movie.

“You want to invite as many opinions as you can,” Wilson told LRM Online. “There’s no version where my ego gets in the way of the movie being the best it can be. Given it’s my first film I have no bar of where I should or shouldn’t be at any point in the process. So when I was five weeks into my director’s cut, Tim [Miller] came in, and Joe Russo from Endgame came in. It was just fabulous to have someone as seasoned as Joe that can sit in the room and go just to sort of walk you through the process of how the rest of you making this movie will go. To a first-time filmmaker, that’s gold. It helps boost your confidence and makes you think ‘Okay, I’m not horribly f**king this up.”

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But what sort of advice did he get? Specifically, what did Joe Russo give him?

“I remember Joe saying ‘lean into the sincerity of it,’” Wilson continued. “The tone of the film is often the hardest thing to find, and conversely the most important. Joe watched it and we talked about tone and music and sincerity of the film and all that sort of thing. That stuck with me for a while. More than anything, I remember breathing a big sigh of relief when Joe said, ‘It’s great. You’re on the right track. Just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re going to be fine.’ Which was nice because that’s all you really want to hear — that you’re exactly where you need to be. It’s great to know you’re on the right path, because you don’t know if you’ve taken a wrong turn one way or another…It wasn’t one thing he taught me about my film, but more everything he told me about the process you’re going to walk through that I thought was the most valuable to me.”

I really like the idea of “leaning into the sincerity of a film.” While this wasn’t a Joe Russo movie, one such film that does a great job with this is Deadpool. Miller’s film is one that could have been a hollow, joke-filled romp. However, as much as they leaned into the comedy, they leaned into the humanity of the character, and it really helped make the movie a much deeper experience. I think it’s a prime example of what Joe Russo talked about when speaking to Wilson about where he should focus on Bloodshot.

And as far as having someone to help walk you through how things are going to turn out…there are fewer directors more qualified than Joe Russo to speak on that subject. All in all, between Wilson’s willingness to learn, his experience in VFX, and his ability to bring in some proven talent to help give him some advice, one can only hope that we’ll be getting the best version of Bloodshot possible when it hits theaters this coming February.

Does any of this have you any more excited to see Bloodshot? Let us know your thoughts down below! Also, you can watch the interview in its entirety in the embedded YouTube video!

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