Caffeinated Clint
Marvel’s Kevin Feige was in London this week to show off a few minutes of the company’s “Guardians of the Galaxy”. While they had the opportunity, IGN asked Feige whether or not they should still bother with an Edgar Wright-less “Ant Man”?
According to Feige, despite a change in director (Peyton Reed has stepped in for Wright, who left over creative differences) and regardless of how many different writers the project has seen, the Marvel Studios boss claims that the film “is is as good a shape as it’s ever been.”
When asked why Peyton Reed (“Down with Love”) was the best man to direct the long-gestating superhero movie, Feige had a lengthy, well-worded answer :
“Number one – thank you for asking the question in that way, which is doing what we’re doing which is thinking about the movie and the end result of the movie. Peyton is someone that I’ve been a fan of for a long time. People may not remember, though probably your readers remember, that he was attached to Fantastic Four more than 10 years ago. We spent a lot of time together… and I got along with Peyton very, very well and he had awesome ideas and an awesome vision for the movie, and for various reasons he ended up leaving that movie…
“He’s come in to meet on a lot of our movies over the years, in particular Guardians. He had a lot of awesome things to say on Guardians. But James [Gunn] had a slightly more solid take that was of interest to us. But Peyton was always on our lists, and so when this happened and Edgar [Wright] said ‘Not for me’ we met with a handful of people, but Peyton was always one that I thought would be great.
“It was not a slam-dunk that he would just step into it and do it. He wanted to be sure that he was wasn’t just inheriting something or following someone else’s lead. Or wasn’t inheriting something that the evil studio had watered down to be something bad. I kept saying, ‘You can either read what’s online, or come in and talk to us and look at all this stuff.’ He looked at everything, he talked with us, and he said ‘Number one, I agree with the direction you’re going in. And number two, I can add to it.’ And he has – the movie is in as good a shape as it’s ever been right now.
“It’s still very much in the spirit of what Edgar’s original pitch was and the entire template of the movie is what Edgar set out and originally came and pitched us maybe eight years ago now. But it’s on its way to being the absolute best version of what that movie could have been.
“Peyton is really, really wonderful, and will be proving that soon enough. As I said to the Comic-Con audience a few years ago, ‘You might not have heard of [Captain America: The Winter Soldier directors] Joe and Antony Russo, but you’re going to be big fans of them soon.’ And I’d say the same thing about Peyton Reed now.”
“Ant Man”, which features a colourful cast including Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas, opens July 2015.
