Remember when the original plan for Avengers 3 & 4 included the idea that both movies were going to be filmed at the same time? After the Avengers: Infinity War production wrapped, everyone even expected the second movie to be a direct sequel called Avengers: Infinity War Part 2. Now Collider reveals some new information while interviewing the Russo brothers where they state it was pretty much impossible to film both movies simultaneously. The brothers claim that they broke the film up into two parts because during the pre-production planning they realized that the two films were too demanding in their size and complexity to be managed concurrently.

“Because these movies are so big and so complex and there are some characters who are involved in both, there was an idea that we would mix both movies and would cross-board them in a way,” Anthony Russo explains. “But as you get closer and deeper into production, the movies were so complex and hard to wrangle just for our own process and everybody’s process involved on a creative level, we needed to separate the two…They’re really different movies and we wanted to treat them as very different movies, separating them.”

Despite the separate shooting schedule, sitting in the director’s chair still remained an enormous challenge. Anthony Russo talks about how they shot both movies back-to-back in the span of one year with no breaks in between. Joe Russo also brought up that production meetings would last around nine to ten hours “because you’d have to talk about one movie and you’d have to talk about the next movie. And once we were doing that, people were getting confused about what scene was in which film. It was draining everyone’s energy and resources.”

Suffice to say the entire crew of these massive blockbusters work themselves to the point of absolute insanity to produce the films that Marvel fans anticipate years in advance of their release. It is extremely comforting to  know just how much work is going into these films, and that the directors and crew are willing to push themselves to their absolute limit. Their effort shows with the overwhelming success and praise of Avengers: Infinity War, and with the upcoming release of the trailer for Avengers 4, the hype for the Russo brother’s next film shows no signs of slowing.