ATLANTA - "Captain America: Civil War," which opens at midnight, was filmed in and around Atlanta last spring and summer.
"The climate for filmmaking is excellent," co-director Anthony Russo told 11Alive's Jennifer Leslie. "Marvel's having a great run here."
Russo and his brother Joe spent two years developing, then shooting "Civil War."
Like "Ant-Man" before it, this Marvel movie was anchored at Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Fayetteville.
"I think it's like the best place my brother and I have ever shot, to be honest with you," Russo said. "It's a top-shelf production facility. We're lucky to be here."
One of the big action scenes was filmed near Philips Arena in an area of downtown Atlanta called The Gulch. It's was designed to look like a market in Lagos, Nigeria.
The Avengers headquarters is actually the new Porsche headquarters near Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
For the Civil War showdown, the Marvel team spent several days shooting on a tarmac in Leipzig, Germany, but most of the action was filmed at Pinewood.
"They laid down a massive concrete slab for us, and we surrounded it in green screen, because a lot of that stuff in that sequence you can't do at an airport," Russo explained. "It's too complicated. It's too dangerous."
The Atlanta Civic Center was chosen for several scenes.
It serves as the IBID (Infection Disease Development Laboratory) in Lagos. The interior also doubled as MIT University for a speech that Tony Stark gives, and a third part of the building was used for a scene in Berlin.
"To find a location that has so much flexibility is not easy to do," said Executive Producer Nate Moore. "It allowed us on the production side to get a lot more shooting done because we didn’t have to move around to multiple locations in one day.”
One of the biggest challenges of shooting in Atlanta was the summer heat, with temperatures in the mid-90s.
“It was extremely hot and uncomfortable in the suits with the hot sun beating down on you all day,” said actor Chris Evans, who plays Captain America. “But as hot as it was, I can’t tell you how great it was to see most of the Super Heroes all suited up in one scene, and it’s a storyline that’s going to be the jumping off point for the next chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
Filming for Civil War went so well that the Emmy-award-winning Russo brothers will be back in the Atlanta area in November to co-direct two more Marvel movies: Avengers Infinity War Part 1 and 2.
"This movie very much sets up where we are at the start of Infinity War," Russo added. "This is about a family falling apart, and we pick up that story, the broken family, in Infinity War."
Marvel is shooting "Guardians of the Galaxy 2" at Pinewood Atlanta now. "Spiderman Homecoming" is next.
