Adam McKay On Rewriting ANT-MAN; Reveals How Much Of Edgar Wright's Work Remains
Anchorman director Adam McKay talks here about being drafted in to rewrite Ant-Man, revealing that he worked with Paul Rudd on the screenplay and confirming that new action scenes have been added as well ass how much of what Edgar Wright did remains. Hit the jump for details!
In the above video interview with Collider, Adam McKay talks in detail about his work on Ant-Man, revealing that it was in fact Paul Rudd who got him to join the Marvel Studios project for one final rewrite after some of Marvel's own in house writers tampered with Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish's draft, resulting in him departing the movie he had been attached to for a number of years. "[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."
That explains why he didn't direct then, and he goes on to reveal in the interview that he and Rudd actually spend a couple of months working together and completely rewriting the screenplay, adding: "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. We added some new action beats. I grew up on Marvel Comics so the geek in me was in heaven that I got to add a giant action sequence to the movie; I was so excited. So we did, we added some cool new action." Now, the big question! Just how much of Edgar Wright's original Ant-Man vision remains? Peyton Reed is obviously directing now, but many fans hope it will still have the Shaun of the Dead director's unique approach in there somewhere. "There’s a lot that’s already in there from what Edgar did, there’s a lot of dialogue and character still in there. “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.'" What do you guys think about these comments?
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