Paul Rudd Helped Adam McKay Rewrite Marvel's ANT-MAN
Adam Mckay was one of the first directors to meet with Marvel about taking the reins on Ant-Man after Edgar Wright left the project. McKay is the writer-director who brought us the hilarious Anchorman movies, and although he did not end up directing Ant-Man, he did rewrite the script. The film's star, Paul Rudd, is actually who brought McKay in, and then he and McKay worked on the script together. McKay recently talked to Collider about Ant-Man, and he shed a little light on how everything went down between him, Rudd, and Marvel. Here's what he said:
[Rudd] called me when Edgar Wright stepped away from the project and told me what was going on. I went and met with Marvel, and I was a little dubious just because I’m friends with Edgar and I didn’t know what the story was, and then when I kind of heard what happened, that Edgar had parted ways, and then I saw their materials, I was like, ‘God this is pretty cool’. Ultimately I didn’t want to jump in as a director, I had too many other projects going and it was too tight, but I thought, ‘You know what, I can rewrite this, and I can do a lot of good by rewriting it.’
About Rudd's writing he said,
I’ve always known Paul Rudd’s a really good writer from improvising with him on set, but I had no idea he was that good—he’s really great with dialogue. So the two of us holed up in hotel rooms on the east and west coast, and I think it was like six to eight weeks we just ground it out and did a giant rewrite of the script. I was really proud of what we did, I really thought we put some amazing stuff in there and built on an already strong script from Edgar Wright and sort of just enhanced some stuff.
He makes it sound like they almost did a complete overhaul of the script, but he went on to reveal that although in the process working on the script they added “a giant action sequence,” there is still "a lot that’s already in there from what Edgar did, there’s a lot of dialogue and character still in there." McKay then discusses what, specifically, they added to the script.
We just shaped the whole thing, we just tried to streamline it, make it cleaner, make it a little bigger, a little more aggressive, make it funnier in places—we just basically did a rewrite. Edgar had a really good script. But we just had a blast, and Rudd was just so much fun to write with. I walked away saying, ‘Hey, you and I gotta write a script together.’
That's pretty awesome. I'm still a little bummed that we won't see Wright's vision of this movie, but in the end I think it's going to be great. Ant-Man is set to be released on July 17th, 2014.