Peyton Reed Reveals Which Parts of ANT-MAN Were Edgar Wright's
I have to be honest, when Edgar Wright dropped out of Ant-Man and Peyton Reed took over, I was not happy. I was really excited to see Wright's vision of the character, and I closed myself off at that point. However, after all that I have seen of what Reed is bringing to the table, I can’t wait to see the movie.
Uproxx got the opportunity to sit down and talk with Reed about how it was to take over the project after Wright's departure and what he kept from Wright’s original script and what he added. Here are some of the best parts of the interview.
SPOILER WARNING! There are no devastating revelations in these answers, but they do give a look into the movie including parts of the final battle. So, if you want to know nothing ahead of time, then stop reading NOW!
When asked what it was like to take over the project after someone dropped out and if it was a tough decision, he explained,
"I think I just had to really think it through in terms of, regardless of who had developed it before, was just that someone else had developed it for some time. For me, it was really only a question of do I have the time and is there a willingness on the part of Marvel to let me make this movie my own. I read all of the existing drafts that Edgar [Wright] and Joe [Cornish] wrote. It was clearly Edgar and Joe’s idea to make this a heist movie and to sort of loosely base it on Marvel Premiere “To Steal an Ant-Man” that introduced Scott Lang. It was also their idea to create this Hank Pym/Scott Lang, mentor/mentee relationship. And, also, their idea to kind of do a Marvel movie where the third act battle take place in a little girl’s bedroom. Genius. It was great"
When asked what he added to the story, he said,
"Well, I came on about the same time that Adam McKay and Rudd were doing rewrites. And I’ve known McKay for some time and we talked on the phone and we were both really jazzed about the idea of, in the third act, in a movie in which we will have seen shrinking a bunch, let’s take it even further in the third act and introduce what, in the comics, was the microverse, in what we call the quantum realm. Creating this moment of self-sacrifice where he has to go into the quantum realm to save his daughter, that was something that was never in those drafts that Adam and I brought to it."
Then he revealed a nice little nugget about the movie,
"So, I love that as a science fiction concept and, of course, Richard Matheson wrote The Incredible Shrinking Man, so I love the Richard Matheson aspect of Ant Man. And Adam came up with the idea that in every heist movie, there’s a trial by fire and they’ve got everything in line for the heist, but we need this one thing. Adam pitched that idea of sending Scott on a mission for which he’s not quite prepared and he comes up against another Marvel character. That blew my mind, and particularity with that specific character."
From recent trailers, it looks like that character is Falcon. Still, I am happy with Reed’s responses and what we are going to get in the upcoming movie. Are you as excited as I am?