Paul Rudd, Peyton Reed, and Others Offer More ANT-MAN Details

On July 17th, Marvel's Ant-Man comes crashing into theaters and provides the antidote to the large scale, world-threatening action of Avengers: Age of Ultron. I was invited to the film's press junket last week on the Walt Disney Studios lot and you can check out all of my other coverage from the event, including what's going to happen in Ant-Man 2 and Evangeline Lilly discussing Marvel's female roles, as well as Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige confirming plans for Wasp in the MCU.

Today I'd like to share with you the rest of the best quotes from the press conference, including comments from director Peyton Reed (who wants to do a sequel or maybe a prequel), star Paul Rudd, and more.

Feige talks about the long road to the big screen for this character:

Clearly, Ant-Man in the comics is a founding member of The Avengers. I’ve said that we have a big giant poster of Avengers #1 has been in all of the various offices we’ve had over the years, and I love looking at that and checking them off. ‘That person’s been in a movie now, we made a movie about that person, that person.’ Ant-Man and Wasp were the two that had been the longest that we hadn’t done anything with, so it was always clear that we were going to assemble all of the Avengers eventually. It also was interesting to do a movie that plays with scale and action in a very different way than we’ve ever done before, and as I’m sure you’ve heard me say many, many times, I like it when all of our films are unique and all of them are different and all of them can surprise people. Now this is our twelfth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so it felt time to do something even more unique and more different, which I think these people have.

Reed mentions how Ant-Man was allowed to be a weird film:

There’s a high bar with these Marvel movies, and one of the things that I really discovered working with Marvel that I loved was, they have a creative hunger. They really don’t want to repeat themselves. They encourage these movies to be really idiosyncratic. One of the things I love about Ant-Man is that it’s a pretty weird movie in a great way. It was allowed to be weird and that was fantastic. There was a high bar there, and it kind of energizes everybody...
It was fun because it’s a heist movie at its core, and so instead of saying, ‘Here’s the guy who’s doing this and this and this,’ it was like, ‘Here are the ants who are doing this, here are the ants who are doing that.’ I guarantee that’s something you’ve never seen in a movie before. People talk about the shrinking when they talk about Ant-Man, but it’s the other power, the being able to control ants, that’s the weirder power that I think is going to really surprise people in the movie. One of the things I liked about doing research was all the things we have the ants do — for example, the fire ants are architects, and they can build little rafts and ladders — they can do that in real life. The kid in me was like, ‘Oh, I can go on the internet and look at these ants and they’re actually real!’ I think that’s a really cool aspect of the movie.

Reed on creating a realistic visual palette for when Scott Lang shrinks down to size:

In terms of the shrinking, I went back and watched all of the shrinking movies. There’s a long cinematic history of shrinking: The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Honey I Shrunk The Audience pre-show at Disney, all of them. But we were making the definitive shrinking movie of 2015, and the drum I kept banging was ‘It’s gotta look photorealistic.’ We can’t have a movie where when you’re in the normal world it’s realistic, but when you go down it feels like an animated movie. It had to look photorealistic. Jake Morrison, our visual effects supervisor, we spent a lot of time together talking about how we were going to achieve it and how we were going to shoot it: what lenses we use, what does the world look and sound like when you’re down there? When you see dust particles floating around, how does the light play? I’m really happy with where we ended up because in a movie like Ant-Man, it’s gotta look real.
And that applied to the ants, too. That was really one of the challenges: creating ants that looked photoreal, but also giving them some real character, particularly in the case of Antony. The idea that we were going to create a sort of Roy Rogers/Silver or Lone Ranger/Silver relationship with Ant-Man, because in the comics, that’s one of the iconic images, Ant-Man flying around on an ant, and I wanted to embrace that. So I was thrilled with where we ended up in the visual effects, and again one of the things about Marvel is you’re just surrounded by the top, top people in all the fields, but in visual effects, they just did some amazing, amazing work.

Co-writer/star Paul Rudd on the father/daughter dynamic of his character and his on-screen daughter, with a quick additional statement by Feige:

In regard to the father daughter aspect, it was the thing that I hung the whole thing on. You can have a movie that has amazing effects, and this certainly has that, and brilliant visuals, a lot of action, humor, whatever, but whenever you see something that you can connect to that’s emotionally resonant, it stays with you in a very different way. I think that’s the key to any movie, and that’s what I thought about throughout this whole film. This is what the movie is about.
Feige: We’ve never had a hero in any of the eleven films leading up to this whose motivation involved a child or involved a son or daughter. So that again felt like a reason to do this film now, which was very meaningful for us.

And finally, Corey Stoll and Rudd talk about wearing their suits on set:

Stoll: We tried to make [the Yellowjacket suit] a practical suit. We went through several iterations and it just was not working, so in the end, it was completely CGI. And of course, I’d been working out like a fiend to be able to look good in the suit, and in the end it just turned out to be for the behind-the-scenes footage of me in my pajamas.
Rudd: I’m biased because I love the [Ant-Man] suit and I think it’s the coolest looking suit of all of them. I loved wearing it. It was not that uncomfortable. It helped me feel the part. There’s something that happens when you get in that thing. It’s inevitable: I’d stand differently, I would feel different. I’d feel like Ant-Man in that thing.
Lilly: Even though he looked like a total dork. [laughter]
Rudd: As far as getting skinnier to try to get into it, I didn’t eat anything for about a year. Worked out all the time. I took that Chris Pratt approach, which is basically eliminate anything fun for about a year, and that’s a good way to prepare to play a superhero.

Ant-Man opens on July 17th.

GeekTyrant Homepage