Joe Russo Talks Citadel Working With Amazon CEO Jennifer Salke And His Plan To Challenge Cannes At The Sands International Film Festival

The Sands International Film Festival, Scotland’s fastest growing film event, opened its second edition this weekend with the world premiere of citadelthe award-winning Prime Video series from Marvel writers Anthony and Joe Russo.

Two episodes of different lengths, but both well under an hour, were played on opening night as a surprise show for the packed audience. The reaction from the audience, which was made up of a mix of industry professionals and students from the University of St Andrews, a co-host of the party, was filled with laughter and sobs at the surprisingly funny , but mental spy thriller.

The ambitious series is directed by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden, who play members of a secretive global spy agency called Citadel. After a deadly attack, the agency is disbanded and the elite agents’ memories erased. With Citadel out of the way, a powerful new syndicate, Manticore, rises from the void. And now it’s up to former Citadel overlord Bernard Orlick, played by Stanley Tucci, to reform the agency and stop Manticore from establishing a new world order.

The AGBO production team of Anthony and Joe Russo created the series for Amazon, and the brothers serve as executive producers along with Mike Larocca, Angela Russo-Otstot and Scott Nemes, while David Weil serves as showrunner and executive producer. Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, Newton Thomas Sigel and Patrick Moran also serve as executive producers. Alongside the Mothership series, helmed by Chopra Jonas and Madden, citadel also has local language cognates in India and Italy.

The opening night screening was introduced by Joe Russo, one of the main contributors to Sands with Screen Scotland. Shortly after the premiere, Russo spoke meeting about the creation of citadelin collaboration with Amazon CEO Jennifer Salke and his plan to make Sands an annual pre-Cannes stop on the festival calendar.

MEETING: How did they citadel going to the show? And why are you bringing the series here to Sands?

JOE RUSSO: We are here to support the festival. Sands is a festival about emerging filmmakers in an incredible academic environment in a corner of the world for which I have a strong love and family history.

MEETING: This family history, did your daughter graduate from St Andrews?

SOOT: She has. She graduated a few years ago. But later a nephew and two nieces came here. And a very good friend now sends his children here. So we have a strong link with the university.

MEETING: And what place does cinema have here in St Andrews? What is the purpose of Sands?

SOOT: The ultimate goal for me would be to expand the festival further and add other forms of media. My brother and I are technologists and futurists. We care about the future. I think there are a lot of developers emerging in the social media space that are compelling. They are self-starters, and Gen Z has a very different philosophy about what media is and where to get information. To them, a story can be a 30-second TikTok, and I’m not here to judge. I’m here to celebrate interesting work I see. I want to start by bringing in emerging voices from all forms of media. Not just in movies.

MEETING: How much dedication to citadel did amazon do it?

SOOT: The most important thing about this project is that Jennifer Salke came to us with a very bold and noble idea, which is, hey, why don’t we tell a story rich enough that we can fragment it into series and other markets. where we can find the best artists and storytellers in these regions to tell their own version of the story in their own language. It was an incredible idea. And as people who have interacted with the global audience with Marvel for a long time, we were excited about the idea.

We love working with people. We like to hear from different voices. We get tired of hearing the same voices over and over again. So if we can leverage our platform and Amazon’s resources, and Jen is willing to leverage Amazon’s platform to help artists and other regions around the world tell their stories at scale, we’re all for it.

MEETING: The first two episodes of citadel Directed by Newton Thomas Sigel. Are you and Anthony behind the camera at any point?

SOOT: We definitely could. It’s just a function of planning for us. But we are very invested. I was on set with Tom [Sigel] for most of the recordings he made. Tom is brilliant. He has been in the business for a long time and has one of the most incredible resumes. We continued to work with him withdrawal, which was a difficult recording. He even acted as a de facto producer withdrawal because of his experience. After that he continued to work for us cherry. He has the ability to tell big and very experimental stories. We wanted to give him a chance to direct because we could see it in him and he crushed it.

MEETING: How did you get involved with Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden?

SOOT: We met Madden because we loved him bodyguard. We sat down with him and joked about the possibility of him playing James Bond. A few months later the concept of citadel is born. We called Madden and said forget what we said about Bond, we think we have something for you. with Priyanka, citadel is built for international appeal, and few stars have her pedigree and ability to cross markets. Jen Salke even recommended them and we thought it was a great idea.

MEETING: Was there a particular moment while working on the Marvel projects that influenced your desire to tell cross-cultural stories?

SOOT: If you work in this industry and you spend most of your time in Hollywood, you can become isolated from many points of view. You may lack understanding of how the rest of the world thinks. The world market is undoubtedly the most important market for the future. This is theatrically significant, and for streamers it will be the starting point for their expansion.

So when we teamed up with Marvel and this giant advertising machine, we were lucky enough to spend months traveling the world promoting these films where you would meet fans and fellow filmmakers. We were exposed to new cultures and film industries where we found relationships that opened our perspective to global stories. As a man with children I worry about the world going forward and without a global connection we are in trouble. Based on that experience, we turned our eyes to other markets to try to support them in a way that Steven Soderbergh did for us all those years ago.

MEETING: With that philosophy, what would the best version of Hollywood look like to you?

SOOT: Certainly a more diverse version and one that is more international. Bollywood, for example, is one of the most important film companies in the world, but has an extremely small presence outside India. Thank God for movies like RRR, using a level of technical genius, visual effects and mythological storytelling to appeal to a much wider audience. We get to know other cultures from such films. So, I think our goal will be empowerment. We want to support other markets as much as possible so that their stories get a wider distribution.

MEETING: This is Sands’ second year. What is it like to direct a festival? What did you learn?

SOOT: I love it. The goal should be to expand slightly each year and grow organically over time. Every time I come to St Andrews I can’t get over how amazing the setting is for a film festival. It’s a city built to support a festival and it has a lot more infrastructure than we use now.

MEETING: Should the festival become a market?

SOOT: A market always helps support a festival. This has been useful for Cannes and other festivals around the world. So I think we can support a market, but it’s about how we can create a future market. It doesn’t have to be a huge market, just an attractive market that attracts the right material.

MEETING: Are you holding Sands on this date in April?

SOOT: Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to delay it.

MEETING: Last year was earlier, wasn’t it?

SOOT: Yes. We deliberately pushed it this year to get closer to Cannes. And maybe next year we’ll even bring it closer to a weekend.

MEETING: Why this? It’s hard to compete with Cannes for movies.

SOOT: It’s hard to compete with Cannes, but there’s always room for counter-programming. If you look under Sundance, there was Slamdance. And if you look at the filmmakers who came out of Slamdance: us, Chris Nolan, Rian Johnson, so pound for pound, you have a range of filmmakers who had a significant impact from this festival. So there is always a way to program against it.

MEETING: Now look at all the festivals on the calendar, is there a template you’d like to follow?

SOOT: I think South by Southwest is the most progressive festival in the world. I love how it embraces all the different aspects of media and brings them together for conversation. I want to follow a similar path, because this is what a modern festival looks like. We have to start somewhere. But as we slowly expand, I want to involve creators of music, video games and social media content to create a hub where people come together and talk about what’s going on in the arts.