katikat | Alan Taylor on His Rumored Feud with Marvel

So, there had been rumors going around about Alan Taylor's, the director of Thor: The Dark World's, feud with Marvel. They said that he fought with Kevin Feige and with Marvel in general about the movie's length, that he was forced to do reshoots etc. and so on. And that made a lot of people apprehensive about the movie's quality. Now, Alan Taylor set the record straight:

"We're in the crazy, chicken running around with its head cut off phase, which I think is not an uncommon procedure at Marvel," Alan Taylor said when asked about Thor: The Dark World's post-production stage. "They're amazing. They will work down to the wire. Kevin Feige is always trying to make the film better, seeing if he can push it up. I saw them do it on Iron Man 3, The Avengers. It's like they sort of have to pry the film out of Marvel's hands and put it up on the screen because he never wants to stop improving things. That's the phase we're in now. We are almost done cutting, partly because we have so many visual effects that you can't go on forever. At a certain point, you have to take your hands of it, and let them do their magic. But we're literally shooting some things this week. Anthony Hopkins is back in town; we're gonna be getting some stuff from him. So, we continue to, what Kevin Feige calls, 'plus' the movie. There are new scenes being added even now. And I'm sure if there wasn't a release date, we'd just keep on making it better & better," he said.

"Marvel seems to have a process where you make the movie, test(?) what they got, and then they're totally open to rewriting... even after production," the director continued. "And they sort of preserve time and money for that. Reshooting, in my case (thank God), is not like you screwed something up and you have to do it again. It's additional photography because it's 'oh what if we had a scene like this so that would make this happen over here.' And they sort of find the movie... through that process. And it's hard to get used to because that's not [how it works] where I came from, but watching them... they are really good at what they do as we've all noticed."

"There's a rumor out there that I was hanging on to a long cut and that Marvel wanted a shorter cut. Hilariously, that was never an issue because I don't know what the running time is. The change it's going through now had nothing to do with running time. There're some tonal pushes and shoves. We have relationships [in the movie] that we need to end the right way and there're new ways of branding them than we had before. The one fall-out I had with Marvel was over music. I had a composer that I really wanted to go with, and it didn't work out with Marvel" Alan Taylor admitted, referring to Carter Burell, who's been replaced by Brian Tyler. "So, I was unhappy with that, but I heard the rumor about running time. Not true, I have no idea how long the movie is now. It's all about making the movie better and better and arm-wrestling over what 'better' means. But there have been no running time issues."

Concerning some additional photography that took place recently at Raleigh Manhattan Beach Studios that involved Tom Hiddleston's Loki, Alan Taylor says, "We were doing full scenes; scenes that were not in the movie before, we're adding scenes, creating scenes, writing scenes for the first time. The one [involving Loki] was a fun connective scene that was just... we realized how well Loki was working in the movie. So, we wanted to do more with him. So it was that kind of thing; it was like 'oh we could do this or jam this in here' because he's just a wonderful guy to watch do his stuff. And boy do [the fans love him]."

Source (with a vid)

That's good to hear. Thor: The Dark World and Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug are the two movies that I'm looking forward to most in the following months.