Not everyone knows the full story of how Joss Whedon came to be the director of The Avengers but it has been agreed to be a serendipitous move by Disney/Marvel. Whedon has now come forward to talk about exactly how he got the job in the first place.

In a panel discussion with the director yesterday (via The Playlist) , he started talking about his pitch to Marvel concerning the Avengers and how he saw the movie from the beginning.

“It unfolded slowly,” Whedon recalled. “But that might be because I’m slow. I had known Kevin [Feige, head of Marvel Studios] for a number of years because I had always wanted to make a movie of a comic book. But it felt to me sort of like a favor, which happens – people send me a script and I make comments on it. And it was like, ‘Well, this doesn’t work but if I was going to do an Avengers movie, this is what I would do.’ [The original draft was written by Marvel movie stalwart Zak Penn.] Gradually we started meeting again and again and I was like, ‘Is this a job interview?’ And the more I thought about it the more I wanted to do it. So it had been a courtship process the entire time but I was a little thick.”

Whedon is notorious for working with limited (or nonexistent) budgets – he had constantly battled the financial restraints on his various television series and made “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” almost for free during the WGA writer’s strike. So it must have been a dream to be blessed with the unlimited resources of Marvel/Disney? Right? Right? “It was good and bad,” Whedon said. “It’s lovely to have everything and be able to have wild fantasies where you can have a Hulk. But it’s also frustrating and daunting. Limitations are something I latch onto. It’s like genre. A genre writer doesn’t ever have a blank page. So that’s useful to me. When you can have everything, everybody wants to give you everything and then it’s very hard to make things feel real, to make things feel lived in.”

Another interesting tidbit that came out was Whedon’s feelings about the state of superhero movies and how he wanted to make that different. “I’m a fanboy,” Whedon said proudly, to much applause and the sound of asthma inhalers snapping open. “I want to see these guys do everything they can do, both physically and emotionally. All of those things have been in my DNA since I was a tiny child. I look at the Avengers and say, ‘This team doesn’t make any sense at all.’ But I work with that because it doesn’t make sense to them either. So it’s a story of isolated people who come together.” Whedon then commented on other movies of its ilk: ” ‘Watchmen’ or ‘Dark Knight’ are like ‘We’re past the idea of superheroes,’ but I’m saying, ‘Let’s not move past it!’ I’m not ready for superheroes to be post-modern.” This is an interesting idea from Whedon, whose work is incredibly heartfelt but also peppered with many winks, nods, and parenthetical asides.

Whedon’s take on the ultimate superhero team-up? Make it an entirely different type of movie. “I looked at it and the first thing I ever said to the people at Marvel was, ‘I want to make a war movie,'” Whedon said. “I felt like I had Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and… not much [of a] threat and I felt like a lot of these movies have a good set up but they’re always fighting a slightly bigger version of themselves.” (We detect more than a tiny barb in this comment, directed at his bosses at Marvel, who have seemingly every big movie end with Iron Man fighting another guy in a robot suit, or The Hulk battling another monstrosity.) “The feeling I get from a good war movie is the feeling I wanted to have.”

Awesome! It’s refreshing to hear that he was originally just offering notes before Marvel decided that his ideas were too good to not use. What do you think? Are you looking forward to the superhero war movie? Do you take peace in knowing that Marvel got the exact right guy for the job?