I had the chance to sit down with
Ant-Man director Peyton Reed and thought there was no better time to release the interview than now, thanks to the film hitting theaters this week. Reed is probably best known for directing the comedy films
Yes Man and
The Break-Up. He has also directed episodes of
New Girl,
Grosse Pointe and
The Weird Al Show. It was an absolute blast to sit down with him and I think you'll learn a thing or two that may surprise you both about film and the people behind it.
What did the filmmakers have to say about bringing Peyton Reed on to bring the story and the new franchise to the forefront of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? They thought he was the perfect choice! "I've been a fan of Peyton's for a long time," says producer Kevin Feige. "I have met and spoken to him many times over the years and we have always gotten along really well. Peyton was always high on our lists, and so when this opportunity came up, he was someone who I thought would be great for this film. He really hit the ground running and infused some great new elements into the story and ton."
High praise from the head of Marvel, but based on my review (
Is Marvel’s ANT-MAN The Best Marvel Film To Date?), Peyton Reed certainly deserves it. He did a great job with the film and I'm hope that we're lucky enough to see a sequel.
Make sure and let us know what you thought about the film and interview below and
BEWARE OF SPOILERS!
Nate Best: You’ve worked quite a bit in TV, you’ve done documentaries, you’ve done comedies; how did Ant-Man compare to your previous work?
Peyton Reed: Ant-Man I think weirdly combines a lot of elements of the work that I’ve done before. I don’t think that it’s a secret that it’s the kind of movie that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I had developed the Fantastic 4 in 2003 at Fox when Kevin [Feige] was a junior executive at Marvel, so I’ve known Kevin for a long time. I actually came in and pitched on Guardians a few years ago. I had a pretty elaborate pitch on Guardians. So when the opportunity for Ant-Man came up, Kevin called and I came in and met and any sort of reluctance I might have had about taking over a movie that had been developed by somebody else for a while quickly went away because I had been an Ant-Man and a Marvel fan since I was in elementary school. I was one of those Marvel nerds who just read comics from the beginning. In like fifth grade my only interests in life were Planet of the Apes, Marvel comics, Famous Monsters of Filmland and stuff like that. I was pretty obsessive about it, so I could talk about Hank Pym and Scott Lang and all of the iterations of Ant-Man and I read all of Edgar [Wright] and Joe’s [Cornish] drafts and then Adam McKay and Paul [Rudd] came on to screen write as I came on to direct. Adam, whom I had known for a while, and we all know how funny Adam is, but he is also a massive comic book nerd. A really smart structuralist in terms of screenplay.
There were a couple of elements right off the bat that we talked about that had not been in previous versions that we wanted to do. One was that we’re going to see a lot of shrinking in the movie, but in the third act we wanted to introduce the microverse or the Quantum Realm. It was an element of the comics that we both loved and let’s just take it that extra level and also create this moment of self-sacrifice where Scott knows the potential dangers, but he has to save his daughter. It was Adam’s idea to create this “trial by fire” scene. In the structure of a heist movie there’s always like “OK, the heist is ready, but there’s one more element that we have to get! How do we do it?” and that was Adam’s idea and I loved it because I loved the particular character that Ant-Man goes up against in that scene and the kid in me loved the idea of any time you see these two Marvel heroes going up against each other, that’s sort of the child-like wish fulfillment of “This guy’s got these powers. He’s got these powers. How’s this going to work?” That was fantastic. Then as we got into shooting, I wanted to increase the heist language, the visual language, of the movie. Peña turned out to be such an amazing character in the movie that Paul’s got to come in and ask “I’ve got to get in my daughter’s life. Things aren’t working out. Tell me about that tip.” He’s very reluctant and Peña is so excited that we wanted to tell the story through his point of view and how he rambles and digresses and stuff. That was something that I came up with the idea and our production writers wrote these tip montages that were insane and also really enriched Peña’s character - he’s a connoisseur of wine and he’s into expressionist art – all of that stuff. That was stuff that we added and there’s a lot of that kind of stuff that we sort of found during prep and during shooting.
NB: That answered my next question – “Are you familiar with the comics?” – But you nailed it.
Peyton Reed: Yeah, I was kind of insanely familiar. When I first came in and met with Kevin, and Kevin and I will geek out all the time about random stuff, we’ll talk about obscure Star Wars characters or whatever it is, but I didn’t want to be bound by that. One of the other things that we added that I was really adamant about was, in these superhero movies there’s always talk of superhero fatigue and I think Ant-Man at its core is more of like a science fiction thing, more of a shrinking movie. It felt sort of like a Richard Matheson thing, which it was kind of loosely based on The Shrinking Man in the comics’ era.
Wasp was important to me, whether it was Janet or Hope, to have a strong female presence in the movie. Hope was always a character from Edgar and Joe’s original draft, but Evangeline [Lilly] and I talked a lot about her arc in the movie, and I loved the idea from the beginning that it IS Ant-Man, it’s about Ant-Man, but the solution to Hank Pym’s issue is right there in front of him the entire time. She’s clearly the most qualified person, but in his mind he wants to save her from a fate like her mom’s and is being overprotective. Throughout the course of the movie there is this mutual respect that forms and they have to repair this relationship to succeed in the heist. Then when we get to the end of the movie, the very, very end of the movie, hopefully it’s very satisfying that Hope is finally going to get what she wants and it will be interesting to see how she uses that power.
NB: With that scene between Hope and her dad, when he finally tells her what happens and they have that moment where they finally connect and are back together, and then Scott (Paul Rudd) just ruins it… Was that in the script or did that just kind of happen?
Peyton Reed: That was something that McKay and Rudd and I came up with and there was another original version because we knew we wanted to have this reconciliation in finally telling the truth to Hope about what happened to her mom. There were different versions of what that sequence was going to be. It had to be a little bit impressionistic and from Pym’s point of view. There were different versions of sort of like “is she on a land mine?”, or whatever, and we finally ended on the missile version. It was really McKay, Rudd and I coming up with what we really wanted to see and it had to go by pretty quickly, because it’s a quick moment, but it also had to have a real impact.
The idea that Pym has spent a decade or more searching for his wife and was unsuccessful and by the time we get to the end of the movie Scott has successfully survived the quantum realm and there’s a scene at the end of the movie with the three of them in Pym’s room and Pym is obsessed with “What did you see down there? Did you see anything?” and he looks at this picture and he’s like “Is it possible?” The wheels are turning with Hank Pym at the end of the movie and there’s a hint that he might try and find her. Is it a good thing, or a bad thing, that his obsession has been reignited? Those are questions that hopefully, if we’re lucky enough to get to make a sequel, would be fun to explore.
NB: Cory Stoll’s performance as Darren Cross is fantastic. He was great. When did you know he was going to make a great villain and what was the tie-in with Hydra?
Peyton Reed: I was a fan of Cory since House of Cards and weirdly Midnight in Paris playing Hemingway in the Woody Allen movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it’s unbelievable because he’s playing Ernest Hemingway which could go into imitation or parody and he’s so compelling in a really short amount of time in that movie. But Cory is also a comic book nerd, which I had no idea. You can talk to him and he knows his $hit. I wouldn’t have thought that, but we met when we were down in Atlanta and had a long meal of fried alligator or something in one of these places outside of Atlanta and were talking about the idea that he, as Pym’s former protégé, all he ever wanted was approval and to be let in and to have that secret shared with him, but when Pym pushed him away, because he sensed that this is a potentially dangerous guy, there’s the Mitchell Carson character that Martin Donovan plays who we see in the opening SHIELD scene, who was complicit in trying to replicate Pym’s formula back in the day and now this guy shows up again. We never specify what happened, but the idea behind it is that somehow either Mitchell Carson has come to Darren Cross, or Darren has found out about his association, and there are those clips that he shows, almost Big Foot film-wise of like “Is this Ant-Man?” in this SHILED file footage.
In terms of Hydra we liked the idea of “What’s the status of Hydra now?” There’s this line that Cory has “They’re actually doing some interesting things now.” and sort of keeping them alive and not being specific about what their plan is, but that they’re still out there in true Hydra fashion. Cut off a head and there’s another one that grows. It’s a little connective tissue in there and I think it’s of note that Martin Donovan’s character does not die at the end. Mitchell Carson is a guy who exists in the comics.
The next evolution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe brings a founding member of The Avengers to the big screen for the first time with Marvel Studios’ “Ant-Man” when master thief Scott Lang must embrace his inner hero and help his mentor, Dr. Hank Pym, protect the secret behind his spectacular Ant-Man suit from a new generation of towering threats.
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