As is to be expected, director Joe Johnston was bombarded with questions about  The First Avenger: Captain America, as he appeared on the junket scene to promote his new film, The Wolfman. Collider, The LA Times, Shock and AICN collectively learned a bunch of bits about the next Marvel comic adaptation. I’ve included the highlights below, but click the links to read the full interviews on the respective sites.

• Casting: Captain America will definitely be played by an American actor, Johnston says he wants to discover a complete unknown and surround him with more prominent names. Johnson says he’s testing five or six guys, “The youngest is 23, the oldest is 32. Most of the guys in the war are just kids, 18 or 19, but we want to go a little bit older.” Casting needs to be complete by March 1st 2010
• Location/Shooting: The film will be shot in the UK as most of the story is set in Europe. It will be an origin story with “virtually the entire” movie set in World War II, aside from “the bookends.”  Filming starts in London at the end of June.
• Camera/Look: The film will be shot in 2D High Definition, with a visual style Johnston describes as “a bit different,” trying to interpret the visual style of the more recent comics “into a film in a way that I think hasn’t been tried before”
• Villain: The villain has been confirmed to be RED SKULL.
• Costume(s): They’ve come up with a reason to explain why the scientifically enhanced super-soldier wears a bright red, white and blue costume in the World War II battlefields: “After he’s made into this super-soldier, they decide they can’t send him into combat and risk him getting killed. He’s the only one and they can’t make more. So they say, ‘You’re going to be in this USO show’ and they give him a flag suit.” … “So he’s up on stage doing songs and dances with chorus girls and he can’t wait to get out and really fight. When he does go AWOL, he covers up the suit but then, after a few things happen, he realizes that this uniform allows him to lead. By then, he’s become a star in the public mind and a symbol. The guys get behind him because he embodies something special.” The USO outfit will look closer to the classic Jack Kirby-designed costume, but later he will be wearing “a sturdier, more muted version that he makes himself that is more like battle togs. The stripes across his mid-section, for instance, will be straps, not colored fabric.” Johnston says “He realizes the value of the uniform symbols but he modifies his suit and adds some armor, it will be closer to the Cpa costume in some of the comics in more recent years.”

Again, check out Collider, The LA Times, Shock and AICN to see the full interviews and read the full quotes.