Joe and Anthony Russo on Cherry: ‘A Movie Can Live or Die By Its Tone’

Action Around Character

When Cherry returns home, develops an addiction to opioids, and begins robbing banks, the Russos tried to make sure the robbery sequences would reflect who he has become.

“We always design action around character,” Anthony says. “So the question for us in any sequence — whether it be a bank robbery or a fight in Winter Soldier — would be: What is the character going through at that moment? What’s the narrative conflict that the character is facing, the psychological conflict the character is facing? And we find ways to design action around that, and the bank robberies are very much an expression of that for the character as well.”

Joe is a trained actor, and the pair come from a comedy background, having directed episodes of Arrested Development, Community and other comedies, both television series and features. So they try to keep things loose on set and allow space for improvisation. Joe says many of the takes in the final edit came from moments when they kept the cameras running and let the actors search.

At one point, a teller questions Cherry’s attempt to come across as a “good guy” during a robbery. Holland delivered the seemingly out-of-character line, “Did you fight for this country?” — and the Russos kept it.

“He was losing a sense of himself as he was devolving into addiction,” Anthony says. “And it was nice to see him slipping into places that weren’t him in that sort of psychosis of addiction.”

Managing Tone

“The toughest thing to do as a filmmaker is manage tone,” Joe says. “Something that isn’t discussed enough with younger filmmakers, or in film schools, is that a movie can really live or die with its tone. And you have to manage tone from the first word of the script to the last edit in the edit room. It’s a constant process, and it’s based on an internal metric.

“Our metric is the chip we have on our shoulder being from Cleveland at a time when the city was decaying, and it was being made fun of every night on national television. Johnny Carson would make jokes about it: the mayor’s hair caught on fire, the river caught on fire — it’s a sense of humor born out of an industrial fatalism. It hasn’t left the Midwest, and it wasn’t intrinsic to only our generation. Clearly, it passed on to Nico’s generation, and seems to be even more significant.

Also read: How The Russos and Their Cherry Collaborators Told a Sweeping Story from One Man’s POV (Video)

“Gen Z is really on the frontlines of this opioid crisis. In ways that previous generations have had a struggle with a lack of forward momentum, that generation in particular is struggling to find their place and find a way to do better than their parents did, and feel like they have a real potential for their future. And I think people in those Midwestern states feel like they have their tires stuck in the mud a bit.

“So the sense of humor is really a way to release tension. We knew that if the movie were completely bleak and dour, and you leaned solely into the drama of it, it would become unwatchable at a certain point— it’s almost too much to process. And the value of movies, too, is allowing people to experience issues through a narrative that they wouldn’t normally in their everyday life, and they can come to terms with that issue. It was critical that we use humor to help the audience stay empathetic to the lead character and stay committed to the narrative.”

Cherry, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo and starring Tom Holland and Ciara Bravo, opens in theaters on Friday, from Apple.

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