FAST & FURIOUS isn’t the only game in town fixated on family. Cate Shortland’s Black Widow gives Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), the great loner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a family of her own, in the shape of the dysfunctional Russian spies and assassins with whom she grew up as a sleeperer agent in the States, and with whom she is reunited in the course of the prequel’s story. For Shortland, the question of family drove the film. “For me, as an adoptive mother, and for one of my producers, Victoria Alonso, who’s also an adoptive mother, the film was about, ‘What is family?’” says Shortland. “Is it biological or is it relationships and history and the time that we spent together?” The film answers that question, fairly emphatically: family is something that can be found, and moulded, and rekindled.ed. Here, Shortland talks us through Natasha’s new family unit.

NATASHA

Towards the end of the movie, with the dastardly Russian Red Room (and Ray Winstone’s errant accent) defeated, Shortland presents a shot of Natasha, proud and defiant, on a debris-strewn battlefield. It’s triumphant, yes, but there’s also an air of quiet sadness — even a tinge of tragedy — to proceedings, in that she’s finally found her surrogate family — the father she never knew she wanted, the mother she tried desperately to forget, and the little sister she never allowed herself to think about — but only has a few years left. But for Shortland, giving Natasha that family, even if only for a few years, was an important gesture. “We wanted to lift her out of shame, and out of this denial and questioning that she’d had about what she’d done,” says the director. “We knew she was going into Endgame, and that had to be resolved in her character. When you see her at the battleground at the end, to me I see resolve. She knows both that she has an Avengers family, and that these people she’s just been with are also her family.”