“Cherry” is a low-budget opioid-crisis drama from an independent studio, telling the story of an Iraq war veteran’s PTSD-fueled descent into addiction and crime. However, this is not an art house film where its creators worry might slip through the cracks.
The studio is confident because it is owned by the film’s directors. And those directors are Anthony and Joe Russo, whose last four films — two “Captain America” movies and especially the final two “Avengers” chapters — had budgets and box-office totals on a scale unmatched in Hollywood history. (That history also afforded them the star power of “Spider-Man”’s Tom Holland.)
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The Russo brothers don’t really distinguish between their studio blockbusters and “Cherry,” arguing that they inserted timely political themes for the Trump era into their Avengers movies, while infusing this message movie with the kind of commercial appeal that earned so much bank for Marvel and Disney. (“Cherry” had a limited theatrical release due to the pandemic and debuts on Apple TV+ on March 12.)
“You can tell profound stories using commercialism and populism to do it,” says Joe Russo, 49. “People won’t even know they’re getting a message. It can be influential because it’s pervasive with millions of people seeing these things. I’d call our films subversive in that regard.” (The brothers spoke from separate locations via Zoom late last month.)
The Russos believed in this mission enough to build AGBO, the independent studio behind Cherry, trying to prove you can capture massive audiences while changing the world for the better.
“We have a really strong agenda for the types of movies we want to make and see get made,” Anthony says. “We know we have a unique opportunity and, with AGBO, a platform for ourselves and for other filmmakers and artists.”
The goal, says Anthony, is to get away from “an American-centric point of view” and make movies that bring people together as part of a “global community,” he adds. “We believe in movies as a means of human communication and connection.”
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The Russos’ approach to moviemaking comes from their childhood. Part of a sprawling Italian clan in Cleveland, Anthony, 51, says they didn’t grow up planning to be filmmakers. Both were English majors in college. “We didn’t start messing around with cameras till we were in our 20s,” he says. “We grew up film geeks. We had a voracious appetite, for comedy, drama, multiplex and art house movies, for everything.”
The Russos’ origin story pivots on a meeting with Steven Soderbergh. The brothers had completed their first movie in film school (Anthony was at Columbia and Joe at UCLA) and it showed at a minor festival before a tiny audience, but one that included Soderbergh. The indie film legend’s own career had been floundering, but he was just mastering Hollywood by mixing high quality commercial fare — “Out of Sight” (1998), starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez — with more challenging films like “Traffic” (2000).
“We took that lesson to heart,” says Joe, the more talkative brother.
So the brothers brought what Joe calls their “twisted sense of humor” to their films but also to the mass market of broadcast network television. While their first film, “Welcome to Collinwood” (2002), vanished rapidly and their second, “You, Me and Dupree” (2006), was panned by critics, the Russos earned acclaim on TV, most notably with “Arrested Development” and “Community.” The flair they flaunted with the celebrated paintball episodes of “Community” caught the eye of Marvel executives, who handed them the reins for “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2015). The rest is box office history.
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“Cherry” is a dark film, and Joe says the duo feels “liberated and bulletproof” after the Avengers success, adding that they don’t need to work, so they can choose projects carefully. “This was a personal film for us,” Joe says. “It’s set in Cleveland and we’ve lost family members to the opioid crisis and have others who are struggling with their sobriety. This was a timely piece of material to instigate a conversation. In a lot of ways we made this movie for our children.”
The brothers have always lived “in their own ecosystem,” reinforcing each other’s ideas,” Joe says. Freed from the corporate “groupthink” of studio work, he adds, “we could make any choices as storytellers that we want. This is the first film we didn’t screen for anyone. We just weren’t interested in other opinions. We didn’t think we would react well to those opinions or that they would help the movie.”
“Cherry” is based on an autobiographical novel written while in prison by veteran Nico Walker. The Russos take their time through different chapters of the movie, following the protagonist through a romance, basic training and war, before the most intense and memorable section, when he and his girlfriend descend into drug hell.
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The Russos’ love of ’70s thrillers is apparent in the latter section, while Joe says the experimentation in structure and style (such as shifting palettes and camera lenses) reflects the influence of French New Wave directors. He even likens “Cherry” to Francois Truffaut’s classic “The 400 Blows.” That said, the Russos, who repeatedly use words like “commercial” and “populist” as a positive, want “Cherry” to be seen by a broad audience.
It features a heavily stylized approach — lots of narration, slow motion, and other directorial flourishes — in the hopes of grabbing younger viewers. “We’re targeting a Gen Z audience because they’re the most vulnerable to the crisis,” Joe says. “They grew up with a phone in their hand and everything on it is visual information broken up into bite-size chunks. So we said, ‘What is a new visual language that would appeal to them? How can we use style to keep them invested in what is otherwise a very intense, difficult piece of material?’”
Beyond this movie, the Russos believe AGBO is their way of wielding the great power they’ve earned with great responsibility. Anthony acknowledges that a $250 million investment from China to launch their company raises questions but he defends the choice. “The world is a complicated place and censorship is a real thing,” he says. “But trying to reach audiences in those countries is our number one agenda. And simply walking away from a country and the audience there isn’t the right answer.”
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Anthony says the company has a clear vision of what types of movies they want to help get made — even if many are violent action films, there is more to them than meets the eye.
The Chris Hemsworth thriller “Extraction” they produced for Netflix last year was viewed by 99 million households in its first month, a record for a Netflix original. There was some backlash about excessive violence and the “white savior” motif but Joe, ascribing loftier motives, says the movie was “meant to subvert that — the white ‘hero’ was an emotional coward. I think people missed that.”
The duo are directing an even bigger-budget Netflix film, “The Gray Man,” starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans; it’s meant to start a new Bond-like franchise but Joe also says it will explore ideas like misinformation and the modern role of covert intelligence. Both movies feature international casts, and inclusivity is central to AGBO’s mission, whether it be giving women directors an opportunity like Natalie Erika James, with “Relic” (2020) or a new kind of movie star: “Mosul” (2020) was another militaristic action movie but the heroes are Iraqis (both the characters and the actors portraying them). The Russos were producers on both.
“We make bigger films so we can make ‘Mosul,’” Joe says. “We knew we’d lose money on it but its intention was to subvert Arab stereotypes in Hollywood. The actors were telling us they’d never been given the opportunity to play a hero.”
The brothers will continue this approach with each outing because they see commercial films as “a powerful tool and an agent of change,” Joe says. “And if we don’t do it, who will?”
Stuart Miller can be contacted at stuartmiller5186@gmail.com.