LOS ANGELES -- As nerd god Joss Whedon, Robert "Iron Man" Downey Jr. and assorted movie stars made their way down Hollywood Boulevard to the El Capitan Theater for The Avengers' world premiere Wednesday night, a tweener girl spotted Chris Hemsworth, leaned over the protective barrier and started shrieking, "I can see him! I can see him! I can see him! It's Thor!" Snapping a smartphone photo, she gushed, "It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing."
At a press conference Thursday, Whedon seemed to be feeling the love, and with good reason: With long-awaited superhero team-up The Avengers, which opens May 4, the writer-director weaves together a funny, soulful and even thoughtful action romp that balances big 3-D fight scenes with banter, back story and attention to comic book detail.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator's gift for writing gab shines especially brightly in the interplay between members of the dysfunctional Marvel Comics team.
"The stuff between the characters -- that's just candy," said Whedon. "Booze and candy all day."
More difficult, he said, was navigating the dense thicket of narrative information required for The Avengers' unusually large ensemble of important main characters.
"The hardest part was structure," Whedon said. "How do you put that together, how do you make everybody shine? How do you let the audience drift from character to character? It's very complex, structure. It's not necessarily particularly ornate or original but it had to be right.... That was exhausting and was still going on in the editing room after we shot it."
Whedon sweated the details so audiences can make sense of the complicated aliens-invade-Earth saga at the heart of the movie. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America (Chris Evans), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) join S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to protect the world from Thor's power-mad half-brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and his alien hordes.
Ruffalo, who plays the Hulk's alter ego Bruce Banner in the latest big-screen incarnation of the Marvel character, said watching Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk TV series (at Whedon's behest) helped him get inside the head of the green giant.
"I rented those with my 10-year-old son and after the third episode, he turned to me and said, 'Papa , he's so misunderstood!'" Ruffalo said. "So I basically based the Hulk on my 10-year-old boy, who has all the forces of nature screaming out of his body while everybody around him is telling him to fucking control himself."
The study paid off: The Hulk made the biggest impression on audience members at Wednesday's world-premiere screening.
Downey, whose Iron Man launched the stream of Marvel movies culminating in The Avengers, praised his castmates and underscored the film's ensemble aspects.
"It was a relief not to have to carry a movie by myself," he said. "Joss did a good job finding everyone's frequency.... I would give credit to Joss' wit, whether it's being funny or whether it's coming up with a whole myriad of ideas that hold together for The Avengers not to be bunk."
