Hey, everybody. I'm James Gunn.
I'm the director and co-writer of Guardians of the Galaxy,
and this is my commentary on the film.
Here at the beginning, we have a young Peter Quill,
and his Sony Walkman.
When I first started writing this screenplay,
Uh, 3 really... One of the first things I thought of
was using the Sony Walkman as Peter QuiWs attachment,
his emotional attachment to Earth and his mother.
And the songs, in a way,
I think are the character of his mother throughout the film.
Here we have Gregg Henry who plays Quill's grandfather.
Gregg Henry, who has been in most of my films.
All of my films, actually.
He was the mayor, Jack MacReady, in Slither,
and he was Detective John Feikner in Super,
and he is just a realty amazing guy
and wonderful actor who can do almost anything.
The kid is played by a boy by the name of Wyatt Oiefi.
Jeff. Who is a great kid,
and he loves to cry on film
and do what we call a "guttural wail."
He was always excited to do a guttural wail,
which you'll see in a second.
Laura Haddock is the mother
and she actually had a bit role in Captain America,
where she played a fan who wanted his autograph.
But there is no relationship that I know of.
Maybe that could be her grandmother or something, but she's too young.
She grew up in the 1970s.
We used a little bit of digital effects
10 make Laura look a time bit more sickly and thin than she is in real fife.
Um, and ifs a pretty strange way... l think,
that so many people come to this movie
because they want to see something fun, and different, and colorful.
And also at the same time we like to take people by surprise
and give them something different than what we expect.
So when they came to see the movie,
and there's this very sad scene at the beginning,
um, I think it gives them a little bit of the heart thaYs in the movie,
and starts us off on a rather serious path
and then we'll go into something a little bit more fun in a second.
We hear, Meredith Quill, his mom,
talk about his father as a being composed of pure light,
and there will be spoilers throughout this commentary,
and, of course, one of the spoilers is that
Peter Quill's father is someone from outer space.
In the comic books' he's J'son.
Pm not real fond of the name J'son,
and I think that the character is probably not the same
as who he is in the comic books.
I know who he is, but I can't give that away,
'cause mars saved for the next movie.
There's Dr. Fitzgibbon... Oh, there's the guttural wail, right there.
There's a character named Fitzgibbon in every single one of my movies,
named after my good friend, Larry Fiizgibbon,
and that's Dr. Fitzgibbon as he's credited in the credits.
It's hard to work in a name Fitzgibbon in a movie
that's composed of almost entirely outer space scenes.
Here we have him run out.
He's about to get abducted by a gigantic spaceship.
And this gigantic spaceship is something we call an M-ship.
That's the type of ship it is.
It's actually the exact type of ship that the Milano is, a Ravager vehicle.
There are two different types of M-ships,
the larger cargo M-ship, which is what the Milano is.
And the smaller M-ship, which Rocket's Warbird
at the end of the movie is, is that.
Here we have the Marvel logo coming in after the opening,
and that actually was an idea by Kevin Feige.
Kevin Feige is the head of Marvel,
and he's probably my biggest collaborator throughout this entire film,
along with a bunch of other people,
but he's probably my number one collaborator on this movie.
And it was his idea to have the Marvel logo come up
after the kid was abducted,
um, which helps 10 ease us into a completely different environment
so that it's not too jarring.
And it's very interesting, 'cause early test audiences saw it,
where the Marvel logo wasn't there, and they thought I! was very jarring,
uh, this change, and all we did was change just where the Marvel logo was,
and they found it a lot easier
10 move from one place in time to another.
And we have the names of all my friends who acted in the movie,
who I've become very close to.
I often say that, you know, there's a (at of oddballs in this movie,
and this is a movie about oddballs.
And it's about oddballs who become a family
and ail of us became a pretty close family over the course of this movie.
Lee Pace, for instance, who plays Ronan the Accuser,
is just about the nicest guy.
There's Michael Rocker.
Michael Rocker, who's been in ah' of my films.
He plays Yondu in this movie. He's fantastic.
Karen Giiian.
Here we have a holographic map device, which Peter Quill has.
This map device was given to him by The Broker.
There's some backstory to what's happened here.
Here it shows him the location of where the Orb is,
because somebody obviously had this map device
10 show {hem where the Orb was from years past.
Many many years past.
Um, the backstory that was in the script, that we cut some dialogue from the film,
is that this is an ancient planet, Morag,
that had a pretty advanced civilization many thousands of years ago.
That's my dog, Dr. Wesley Von Spears right there,
who was playing with the little girl.
He was a very good actor.
And my assistant, Simon Han, was wearing a green jumpsuit
right behind him while they were doing that.
Um...
Anyway, so this ancient planet Morag had a pretty advanced civilization,
and it was destroyed probably through some sort of global warming,
and is covered by oceans, but the oceans recede every 300 years.
And, so, Peter Quilt has been waiting tor this time to go and get this Orb.
And Yondu found out about I! from The Broker.
And here, Peter Quill is ripping sf! Yondu
and going to find the Orb.
The Sony Walkman, which hooks us up back to Earth,
(UPBEAT POP MUSIC PLAYING)
and here we have Come and Get Your Love by Redbone.
Fantastic song. Probably the song I've heard the most.
And this is the biggest tonal shift in the movie,
which I think helps to give the audience
a sense of the different saris of emotions
we're playing with in the movie,
and helps to ease them into the tonal shifts throughout the movie,
which are a little bit more mellow than this one.
These are Orloni.
There are two small creatures in the movie, Orloni and F'Saki.
F'Saki are the ones that later eat the Orioni.
Orloni are amphibious creatures that have gills,
but can also breathe out of water.
And so, they're some of the only creatures that survive
the towering of the seas of Morag.
Peter Quill is going to Morag sooner than is safe,
um, which is {he reason why he's able to get the Orb before Yondu is.
Or before Korath is.
We have Jeremy Latcham, one of the executive producers.
And Victoria Alonso, who is the post-production producer.
Really important people to the making of this film.
Jeremy Latcham and Jonathan Schwartz
are the two producers I met with almost exactly two years ago
to talk to them about this idea for a movie
they wanted to do called Guardians of the Galaxy,
and that was, um...
And that was something that, when they first brought it to me,
I thought it was a pretty strange idea,
considering there was a talking raccoon in it,
and nobody knew who the Guardians of the Galaxy were.
And driving home from that meeting, I really didn't think I was going to do it.
But ail of a sudden I had this burst of inspiration
of what I would do with the movie to make it my own.
And I saw an opportunity there to create a movie
that wasn't necessarily the same as the movies that I grew up loving.
Like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back,
bu: ma! gave people the same sort of feelings
that those movies gave to me.
And to create something that was bright and colorful,
a true space opera in every sense, with music.
And, visualiy, t understood where the movie was coming from
with these colors, and still retaining some of the giittiness
of movies of the past 20 or 30 years
that have seemed to take out all the color from science fiction films.
This scene was actually really hard to shoot.
This was one of the very first scenes we shot.
So Chris Pratt, who plays Peter Quill, who's my very close friend today,
um, was getting into the groove of playing the character.
And we hadn't shot any of the talking scenes yet.
It was the first talking scene we had shot in the movie.
We'd already shot some of the exterior running stuff on Morag
that takes place in a second.
But this stuff took some kind of getting used to,
of exactly where we were with the actors,
and what kind of performances we were getting out of them,
and striking this balance between something that was comic,
but also something that was realistic.
Like, I remember talking about Black Hawk Down in this movie,
where he's being surrounded by the Sakaaran.
Also, as a bit of fun,
all those Sakaaran voices are pretty much me.
I'm doing almost all of the Sakaaran voices in the movie
except for my assistant Simon Hart,
who's doing a few of the Sakaaran voices as well.
There, you get it. That's us.
Sakaaran are trapped by the magnet.
(GROANS)
G UN N; Peter Quill doesn? have any super powers,
bu: I did say often while filming, ii he had a super power
it was the fact that he was able to screw up completely
and get messed up and {rip and fail,
and then regain his composure, you know, quickly,
to do something sort of heroic, which is what he's doing here.
He's going back and forth between something really cool
and something really not cool.
Because he's kind of an oaf at the same time as he's very cool.
There's a vulnerability to Chris Pratt in his performance
that I think makes him a little bi! different from other movie stars.
And he wasn't necessarily a movie star
when we starred shooting this movie, but he certainly is now.
This scene was a scene that I actually storyboarded.
This is one of me scenes in the original script by Nicole Pe?man,
and I, uh, storyboarded this sequence,
um, for my pitch to Marvel as a director,
and so those ave pretty much my storyboards that I did back in 2012
that have retained, you know, exactly that quality from the original.
This is a great woman by the name of Melia Kreiiing,
who is a really cool girl.
And who plays Bereet.
Bereet is a character from the Marvel comics.
A lot of the characters in the movie
have names of characters from the comics.
Sometimes they're very similar to them, and sometimes they're very different.
But Fm a big comic book fan,
and I like throwing all of those little Easter eggs in there
so people have something to play with.
This son of landscape backed by the 1970s music
is really something that was one of my original inspirations.
There's the troll do“, which we“ see at the end of the movie.
REPORTER ON TV: “protesting the recent peace treaty
signed by the Kree Emperor
and Xandars Nova Prime.
G UN N: Making the first act of a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy
is very difficult, because you need to explain to the audience
who all these different characters are,
what their goals are, and at the same time, you know,
explain that there are these alternate worlds and what those cultures are
and there's a bunch of gobbledygook names coming at them.
Yondu, and Xandar, and Moray, and Ronan,
and, you know, Kree, Bereet.
And it gets confusing for an audience.
So one of the most difficult challenges of making this film
was trying to make it as simple as I! could possibly be for the audience.
These are all my friends. That's my brother, Sean.
And then behind him is a guy by the name of Dave Yamvesky,
Dave Yarvo, who's one of my best friends in the world.
And the guy in that blue makeup behind Rocker...
That guy acting weird back there is my friend, Nick Holmes.
So all my friends just happened to look like Ravagers
(CHUCKLES) I suppose.
And this is their little piece of the movie.
And, of course, Rocker and 1 are good friends, for a long time.
Rookefs a crazy maniac, and when I created this...
When I wrote the role of Yondu... Yondu was not in the original script.
I added him to the script.
I wrote the mde specifically for Michael Rocker.
And I was really happy that Marvel let him be in the movie.
Rocker is often cast as someone who is
very tough and silent and stoic,
and I wanted to give him a role
that showed this, sort of, maniacal part of himself that he has.
He's a big iaugher, and I often refer to him
as a 3-year-old in a 50-year-old buff body.
And that's what he is.
Here we're introduced to Roman.
Ronan's backstory is that he was...
Uh...
There have been many, many millennia of war
between the Xandavians and {he Kree.
They're very different cultures.
Xandarians are very progressive.
The Kree are very traditional.
And for years and years and years, they have been at war.
And recently a new Nova Prime came in,
who is the head of the Xandarian culture.
She's both president and, sort sf, you know,
the primary general on the planet.
They are militaristic, despite their progressiveness.
And she signed a peace treaty with the Kree,
so that they would no longer attack each other
after {his 1,000 years of warring;.
And Roman is a fundamentalist Kree
who sticks to the old ways.
His traditions are very old, he's filled with a lot of rage,
because his father, and his father before him
and his father before him, have ail died in this Kree-Xandarian war.
And there's a lot of backstory there, you know,
and he's not happy about this.
He thinks that the Kree are just letting the Xanda?ans
get away with it by not murdering,
not continuing this wan.
So he's angry.
And probably not completely unfounded, in certain ways.
Probably there are things that we don? know
that the Xandarians have done
that have not been completely great.
And there we meet Zoe Saidana as Gamma for the first time,
who's become a really dear friend,
and Karen Gillan as Nebula.
They're sisters.
They have complicated relationships, and I really...
I love the character of Nebula.
Nebula's a character who was designed early on,
and I needed an actress to fit exactly how the design looked,
because I loved the design by a guy by the name of Charlie Wen,
who did a lot m' the vis-dev work,
visual-development work, on this movie.
Here we have Bradley Cooper as Rocket.
We hear him for the first...
There's Stan Lee, who, of course, was my hero as a child.
The godfather of all Marvel characters,
and was my biggest hero that I ever had in my entire life,
and it was a great joy to be able to work with him
and put him in this little role in this movie.
Here we meet Grout for the first time.
Groot is the soul of the movie in a lot of ways.
He's the only one of the Guardians that has any son' of sweetness to him.
The rest are all pretty damaged and...
This scene was very difficult to get right, actually,
um, with Rocket and Groot.
Ifs the firsi time we see Rocket, and the first time we see Grout,
and "rt was difficult getting them both
to a place where they looked, you know, good enough.
Pm a stickler with visual effects,
and with prosthetic effects, as well.
This is a guy by the name of Chris Fairbank,
who plays The Broker,
and he just turns in an amazing performance.
I wish he would get noticed more for it.
And I hope that we get to use him in future Guardians films,
because he is just the easiest guy to work with.
Such a sweet, loving man and British guy.
We shot Guardians of the Galaxy
over a period of, like, five months in London, England, in a few studios.
Sheppenon Studios, Pinewood Studios, Longcross Studios.
This set was actually...
I cam even remember which studio it was at.
Probably Shepperton.
It was at Longcross, I just looked at my assistant and he told me.
Anyway, yeah, Chris is a fantastic actor.
Farewell, Mr. Quill.
GUNN: And here we have Chris meeting Zoe for the first time.
Quill meeting Gamma.
It was another very difficult scene to cut together.
They're both really good in this scene.
But this day was rough.
And it was very, very ho! on these days.
It was nearly 100 degrees in London. Just burning hot.
We shot over a period of a few days.
We had, you know, couple hundred extras,
which you see a lot of them in the background,
all in this alien makeup.
And on the first day, they'd all keep all their big costumes on.
On the second day,
pads of their costumes started coming off.
And by the third day, on this set,
we'd walk over to where all the extras were being held,
the extras holding area, and they'd all be in their underwear.
That's no joke. They'd just be in their underwear
with their yellow faces and prosthetics on.
Ah!
G UN N: The whole idea of this scene was,
you know, ifs our first true action scene in the movie, I guess,
besides the chase and the Wane getting hit by the fountain.
And it was just to have each of the characters
having one up over each other.
One after the other.
Theyve ab? pretty smart and pretty good in their own ways.
They're all good at fighting.
And they're also kind of doofuses in their own ways,
so this is about them each, you know, being able to triumph,
and then get their comeuppance, one after the other,
as they meet each other for the first time.
There's a girl up there in blue, Sameera,
who's a really cool actress.
And she was one of the coolest looking characters in the movie.
And we unfortunately cut her role from the film,
as we did a (at of the smaller characters,
because it just seemed to slow things down.
But there was a moment where Chris stopped in the middle of all this,
and son' of came onto her and she liked it.
You gotta be kidding me.
Ooh. Hey!
GUNN: Here we have Gamora
sort of being very, very mean to Grout and chopping off his arms.
She's kind of a jerk.
And you'll see in later scenes that
Groo! really holds it against her,
and doesn't like Gamma for a while in the movie
because she beat the crap out of him.
Like how much this is gonna hurt.
-(YELLING IN PAIN) -(ELECTRICITY CRACKLING)
(ROCKET LAUGHING)
GUNN: That always made me laugh,
when Chris was doing his wobbly falling thing.
-(GROOT WHIMPERING) -it'll grow back, you d'ast idiot.
GUNN: Vin Diesel plays Grout. He's amazing.
He only has five words that he says throughout the entire movie.
And yet he says them with such aplomb.
And he is a fantastic, fantastic voice actor,
who really inhabits this character, and...
We had a iot of different people in early versions of the movie,
do '1 am Groot."
There's John C. Reilly by the way.
And I did "I am Groot."
We had one of our visual effects artists who had a deep voice do "I am Groot. “
We had Krystian who played Greet on set doing "I am Groot. ”
We had my brother Sean doing "I am Grooi."
And, you know, they were at! fine,
and the character was really compelling to look at.
But it wasn't until Vin Diesel came in
and started doing the voice
that that character seemed to completely become himself
and to fill up completely.
And it is due to the fact that there is just some magic in Virfs voice
that tits so well with that character.
And I think, at times, HS an undervalued pan'
of how beautiful that character is,
and there's a reason why Grout is many peoplek favorite character,
if not most people's favorite character, who sees the movie.
One of the great joys of this movie, for me, was working with Glenn Close.
She is such an intense actress.
I say she has 10,000-pound eyeballs. I love working with her.
And she's such a warm and wonderful human being.
There's Peter Serafinowicz, and the pretty girl
is one of my best friends in the world, Mikaela Hoover.
Those were fun days, shooting that stuff.
Peter Serafinowicz is a really funny guy.
You may have seen him in Shaun of the Dead,
or some of his online stuff which he does, which is very funny.
We actually followed each other on Twitter
before he came in for this movie,
and that definitely was part of the reason
that I was so interested when he auditioned.
What the hell?
G UN N: This sequence was something that we cut from the movie for a whiie,
because we didn't know we needed all of it,
but we did, in the end, need alt of it.
It explains a lot of stuff. It used to be a little bit longer.
This thing with Peter giving the finger is very interesting,
because that was something that...
A 101 of the funniest moments in the movie
are a back-and-fonh between me and Chris Pratt.
Um...
So Chris Pratt did the finger thing one time when we shot it,
and he did the winding of the finger, and the finger comes up
and then he made this sort of surprised look on his face,
and, you know, we took a break
and J talked to him and I said, "Let's do that same thing,
"where you wind up your finger and be surprised,
"and then comment on how you're so surprised about,
"you know, your finger having gone up and then apologize for it."
And that's how that came about.
And there's a lot of moments like that in the movie with Chris.
He's very, very good at improving.
"Aim nothing like me Rzept me,"
is one of the most quoted things to me in the movie.
In the original, uh...
When we originally shot the movie,
Quit! starts singing the Tigger theme to Rocket there.
Bu! for some reason I! just didn't work very well.
Yeah, we know who you are.
- Who is she? - I am Groot.
Yeah, you said that.
I wasn't retrieving the Orb for Ronan.
I was betraying him.
I had an agreement to sell it to a third party.
GUNN: Here we have Gamora explaining that she is betraying Ronan.
She wasn't getting the Orb for Ronan.
Well, he don't know talking good like me and you.
So his vocabuiistics is limited to "I" and "am" and "Groot."
Exclusively in that order.
G UN N: The iron y there is that Rocket is explaining
that Grout doesn't speak so weil, and yet,
Rockers own vocabulary is completely wrong.
His grammar is wrong,
he's making up words like "vocabufistics. "
-(GRUNTING) -(STATIC CRACKLING)
This is the mean guard played by Spencer.
Spencer was fantastic.
We couldn't believe, like, we got this magic
out of this great big dude that came in.
Um...
And we cast him because of his face, frankly.
He's a big huge guy that had a great face.
And it's hard casting guys against Chris Pratt,
because Chris Pratt is huge.
It was one of the difficulties we had in casting Drax,
because Chris is, you know, aver six foot two,
and he is just an incredibly big guy.
So casting other actors around him
that look as if they're any threat to him whatsoever is very difficult.
And so, when we found Spencer
we kind of cast him because he was so big
and he just is really funny in the movie, and we like his performance.
This is a really important moment for me.
This is when Chris sees for the first time
that Rocket has been tenured, he's been messed with. His back.
Something terrible has happened to this character,
and he's more than just a funny talking animal.
And it's a very, very important moment in the movie.
And Chris' performance is very, very good there,
and the animation by Framesiore,
the CG! animation, is just some of the best in the movie.
Framestore were the company that developed Rocket and his look,
and just some of the stuff is just wonderful.
Wonderful.
Here we have a shot of Lloyd Kaufman next to my assistant, Simon Hart.
Lloyd Kaufman is the founder of Troma Studios,
the world's oldest independent film company.
They created such movies
as Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'Em High.
And they gave me my first job. Ever.
He hired me for $150 to write a movie called
Tromeo and Juliet, and that was my first film ever.
And it taught me a lot about filmmaking,
everything about the brass tacks of filmmaking
from writing a screenplay to location scouting
to casting to actually directing actors, and filming love scenes
and then afterwards actually having to put a movie into theaters,
and work on the poster an and all of that stuff.
I just learned everything about filmmaking from Tmma.
That is Nathan Filiion doing the voice of this character.
Nathan Fi?ion is known by many fans,
from his roles in fire?y or his tote as Castle on ABC,
and also as the character Bill Pardy in my film, Slither.
Like Gregg Henry and Michael Rocker, and the voice of Rob Zombie,
Nathan Fillion has been in every sing!e one of my movies,
and so this one is no different.
R got out very early that Nathan Filiion had a cameo in this movie,
and a lot of people hoped he was Nova,
which he isn't, or some other big role, which he is not.
He is simply the monstrous dude.
But one of the great things about casting Nathan
as this monstrous dude, is that he will...
At a later time, we could potentially put him in a bigger role
within the Marvel universe,
where he doesmjust get his nose ripped apart by Grout and then is done.
(GASPS)
I love how Gamorais green skin looks against the red in the cell.
The production designer on this film is a guy by the name of Charlie Wood.
He is another one of my biggest collaborators in the film.
He's a fantastic talent.
And he really understood where I was coming from
and what I wanted to do with this movie from a visual sense.
This is a scene inspired by the TV show Locked Up Abroad.
I'm a big fan of the TV show Locked Up Abroad,
and I noticed a Io! of times
when people are actually locked up in other countries,
they don't have their own cells.
They actually have to sleep surrounded by a bunch of other people,
which seems much worse than having your own cell to me.
So I thought that would be funny for Peter Quill to have to sleep.
That is mush-faced Rocket.
That is based on my dog, Dr. Wesley Von Spears,
who gets mushed-faced a lot of times when he steeps.
And it took a long, long, longtime to get that visual effect shot right.
And Framestore mus! have done, you know, 50 iterations of it.
Here we have Dave Bauiista as Drax the Destroyer,
and Dave is just...
He came in and auditioned for the first time,
and I couldn't believe how much he was able to do with the character.
Drax is such an interesting character, because he is completely humorless,
but he's also very funny because of that,
so {herds a lot of comic timing you need.
And at the same time he is such a physical presence.
And he also has a lot of rawness of emotion.
And Dave Bautista came in and just knocked it out of the park.
He's just a fantastic actor,
and also happens to be one of the nicest guys in the world.
Former wrestler.
When he auditioned, I had no idea who he was.
I don't know anything about wrestling,
so 1 did not know who Dave Bautista was.
Zoe was often having to say the name of Thanos in the movie,
and for some reason she couldn't get it straight.
She kept saying “They-nos” or some other pronunciation.
(CHUCKLES) And I had to remind her before...
It became like a mental block,
and I had 10 remind her before every take how to pronounce "Thanos."
I don't think this is the best way to go about it.
GUNN: Here we find out that, in a second, that Drax is completely literal
and doesn't understand any sort of. ..
Anything outside of... Other than just exactly what you say.
He doesn't understand metaphors or similes or anything.
Gestures.
I was trying to get information.
You ever see an Naskavariian?
They have tentacles, and needles for teeth.
If you think I'm seriously interested in that, then...
GUNN: There were more A'askavariian jokes in this scene
that I cut from the scene,
and sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake or not,
because Rocket would be very...
Rocket became sort of distracted by the fact
that Quill had slept with an Pdaskavariian,
which seems very disgusting to him.
Oh, no, it's a symbol.
And there we go. Dave doesn't get what's going on.
In all honesty, to me,
ihis scene is where the movie really gets going.
We've given the audience their medicine.
We've taught them who these characters are, where they came from,
what the basic planets are, what the basic, you know...
Who ave the good guys, who are the bad guys.
And at this point in time, it's also where the group is together,
or at least we meet the last member of the group for the first time.
And this is where the movie really starts,
and really starts to take its form.
And from here on out,
I'm always happy when Fm sitting in a theater with people,
and this scene happens,
because from here on out, I! just is a fun ride for the audience.
That's a character by the name of Moloka Dar,
who's played by Alexis Rodney, who is a fantastic actor.
And the, uh, “That was my favorite knife“ line
was not in the script, but it was something that I thought of
when t was sitting in the tent and went and whispered in Alexis' ear.
Moloka Dar is also a character from Marvel comics,
and I think he was in the Kyln actually, as a prisoner.
That Orb is my opportunity to get away from Thanos and Ronan.
If you free us...
We had a lot of problems setting up the fact
that Gamora was betraying Thanos and Roman.
It was something we had problems with in early test audiences.
So trying to get it right in the edit was a difficult process.
We had a few great editors on this film, including Fred Raskin,
and Craig Wood, who really were just two more fabulous collaborators.
That's The Other, played by Alexis Denisof,
who is in The Avengers,
and he's one of the only things that connects us to The Avengers,
along with Thanos in a second,
who we'll see for the first time.
Thanos is voiced by Josh Broiin,
who came in and did a terrific jot;.
Josh Brolin also motion-captured the character of Thanos.
Here we see Roman is about to kill The Other,
which shows you how intensely powerful Ronan is,
because The Other was able ta push around Loki at times.
So the fact that Ronan kills him so easily is intense, although we...
Here we have Karen Gi?an.
This is probably my favorite Karen GiHan-as-Nebula scene,
because she's definitely not too happy with this.
First ever appearance of Thanos in the Marvel universe.
It was pretty fun to write this character and help to create him for the screen,
because I know he will be a larger pan' of the Marvel universe in the future.
At the same time, we also kind of had to shoehorn him into this film a little bit
because he doesn't have a whole lot to do with the plot.
But, you know, we're setting up a larger universe here.
We're not just telling one story.
And I think for the most part, we stick to our story.
I love Karen right here.
She's funny and sexy and nonchalant,
and you get a lot about who Nebula is there.
Let's head to the Kyln.
I love Thanos' smirk here.
Like I said, Josh Brolin is motion-capturing Thanos,
and a lot of times people bring up
the motion-capture of Rocket and Groot.
And it should be made clear that neither
Rocket or Groot were never motion-captured.
And they can't really be motion-captured.
Rocket has a face that is very different than a human face.
And if you tried to motion-capture a human's face onto Rocket's face,
it just ends up looking very strange.
So, Rocket's actions are a combination of a few things.
Number one, we have a... You know,
hundreds and hundreds of animators who worked on Rocket,
and they're actors because they are creating this character.
Secondly, in a scene like this,
my brother Sean Gunn played Rocket on set
And he's a very, very important pan' of the overall filmmaking process,
because he set down the energy
and the dynamic for Rocket between the actors.
The other actors treated Sean as if he was a member of the team.
And in a scene like this, there's a lot of Sean's actions we...
We shot and motion-captured.
Not motion-captured,
motion-referenced everything that Sean did on set.
And a to! of this acting is Sean's.
And we also videotaped everything that Bradley Cooper did
when he was reading the character, and a lot of that we used in the movie.
And then if those guys didn't do anything
that was exactly what I wanted,
I would just video-tape myself with my iPhone and send it to the animators.
So, there's a lo! of people that go into creating Rocket and Grout.
And it is, they are... I think it's one of the reasons
why I love the characters so much and feel so attached to them,
because they do, in a way, become their own organic selves.
Because they are {he combination of so many people's works.
They become themselves. It's a strange thing.
This is the Kyln escape sequence.
I think I should point out Tyler Bates' marvelous score here in this scene.
He did such great work on this movie.
And people talk a lot about the wonderful soundtrack in the film,
and there's great '70s songs in this movie,
and just last week, it was number one on iTunes.
But Tyler Bates' score is just majestic.
And I wanted a score that had a great theme, which we'll hear in a second,
which son' of harkens back to the movies I loved as a kid.
Again, like the Superman theme, or the Star Wars theme,
or the Jaws theme.
Themes that you went home humming and you could really remember.
And I think the Guardians' theme is like that.
Here, we have one of my favorite moments in the movie
where we really get what we want,
a raccoon with a big machine gun shooting robots.
And an angry Grout,
pissed off ma! they've been shooting him.
And that's one o? the best shots in the movie, by the way, animation-wise,
when Rocket's laughing.
(GRUNTING)
- I'll need this. - Good luck.
It's internally wired.
I'll figure something out. (GRUNTS)
(GUARD GROANS)
Drop the leg!
You know, my experience on making movies
is there's always one scene or sequence
which comes out fully formed.
It's not necessarily the easiest sequence in the film,
but it's usually the one that...
It's where I really feel like I've got a hold of the screenplay.
And, when I wrote the prison escape sequence in the script,
this scene was that. It just came out.
It has changed almost not-at-all since my very first draft of the screenplay,
where this scene was written for the first time as a prison escape sequence.
There was an escape from prison in the original script,
but I don't think it had a...
They didn't really escape. I think they somehow...
I can't remember what happened, bu! it wasn't this escape,
and it was none of Rocket figuring this way to get out of the movie,
or get out of the Kym.
And then, while I was writing the sequence,
1 was... I draw little storyboards.
I draw lime pictures of what the shots will be,
and I had my script with the little shots of the prison escape in there
and a 101 of those are still what is in the movie.
Here we have Tyler Bates' Guardians theme, which I really dig.
There we go.
First appearance of the Guardians together,
not so together yet.
So, from there we took the We drawings that I did,
and then we had a fabulous storyboard artist
by {he name of David Krentz
come in and do actual versions of my drawings,
which other people could understand, and also add his own ?avor to it.
David Krentz is one of the storyboard artists
I, uh, really liked working with the most.
And he drew out the whole sequence,
and then, we animated the whole sequence
with pre-vis.
DRAX: How are we going to leave?
And that's what this scene is.
The scene really hasn't changed much from that time.
It's almost exactly the same.
Cease your yammering...
The Kyln itself is an amazing set.
This is a huge, huge set.
It's composed of over 350,000 pounds of steel.
And the only way we could afford to make a set so big,
it actually went all the way around, um,
was to, you know,
create it and then melt all the steel down and sell it back,
so that we could afford to make this set.
But it's a fantastic work of design by Charlie Wood and his team,
production design team.
Probably only bettered for me by the Milano set,
which is really probably my favorite set.
The most beautiful work of art in the whole movie,
the interior of the Milano.
Their ?esh was quite delicious.
Not helping!
Number three!
And here, we have the moment where Rocket escapes,
definitely one of my favorite moments in the movie.
Spent a lot of time just perfecting this sequence
to make sure it worked exactly right.
And people seem to really like it.
And again, this is when things are really cooking in the movie.
That shot of Rocket is just one of the best
Framestore of his little eyes smiling.
It just looks completely real.
That's my friend, Emmett,
and he is an old buddy of mine.
Emmett and I, who plays the main guard, uh,
we met on a double date (CHUCKLES)
many years ago.
We were dating roommates, and we went out to dinner one night,
and he was with his roommate, and I was with my roommate,
and we found out that he was an actor, and I was a writer and director,
and we became friends.
And I think my date lasted one more date.
And his date lasted maybe two more dates.
But we're still... Emmet and I are still friends today.
And so, when I came to England to shoot the movie,
he was living there, shooting a soap opera,
or had just gotten done shooting a soap opera
and we decided to give him a tittle cameo,
fun rote.
This sequence is a real combination of planning,
and just the great work of a bunch of people.
There are parts that are completely CG},
pans that are...
Those are all CGI shots. That's completely practical.
That's mostly CGL.
We have a little bit of them in there and that's all CGI.
That's practical, of course, with a little bit of CGI in the background.
For me, when you make a movie,
you really create the film before you ever set foot on set.
And so, it is about actually knowing exactly every llllle bit of the film
that you're going to do before you get on set.
Um, so that at least as your base, you have something that you can trust.
You can always add improv-ed lines or other things like that,
as long as you have something good to begin with,
that's going to work whether or not
you come up with a better improv-ed line or not.
And a tot of times, you know,
a lot of people think that there's a lot of improv-ed lines in this movie,
and there really aren't too many. There's a few.
Um...
But the truth is, you know, when I'm writing dialogue,
the whole thing is to try to get I! to feel as natural as possible.
And one of the fun things about dealing with the Guardians of the Galaxy
is that they're a bunch of aliens who talk like real people.
And to create that sort of natural conversation
between these characters is one of the things that makes it funny,
and adds a lot of humor to it.
And you get a great amount of,
just, fuel just fmm the fact
that they're in outer space and they're aliens.
ROCKET: Well, how's he gonna get to us?
GAMORA: He declined to share that information with me.
Well, screw this, then!
I ain't waiting around for some humie with a death wish.
You got the Orb, right?
Yes.
GUN N: The Guardians don't trust each other yet, so, of course,
Quill kept the Orb with him, so that they wouldn't have it.
I love this hallway, the colors in it and the grittiness of it, it's fantastic.
And here we have Quill meeting with Spencer.
Once again, the mean guard.
And a great song, the Rupert Holmes song,
Pifia Colada Song, which...
Or it's called Escape (The Pifia Colada Song).
Sorry, "Pifia Colada Song" is in parentheses.
Definitely a catchy song,
ifs a song I loved a io! when I was a little kid,
and ifs a great opportunity to put it in the movie.
It's a very sad song, actually, if you listen to the lyrics,
or a very weird song,
because ifs about a guy who puts
a personal ad looking for a woman, even though he's married.
And he meets this woman in the personal ads of this newspaper,
um, who is also looking for a man
who wants all the same things that the man wants,
pifia colada songs
and making love at midnight,
and, you know, sand dunes, or whatever they do,
and they at! want these weird things. And they meet up and they find that it's
each othefs husband and wife, or boyfriend and girlfriend, whatever.
They're cheating with each other.
I think I'd be... I think... It's a love song and they're happy at the end of it,
but I think I'd be a mile pissed oh'
if my wife was putting personal ads in the back of a magazine.
Even if I was doing it.
Which I wouldn't do, of course.
There we have Quill's gift
that his mother gave him, which we're setting up for the end of the movie.
Or if you wanna blow up moons.
No one's blowing up moons.
If you rook in the background of this scene,
you!) see Groot doing a bunch of goofy stuff.
He's playing around with stuff on the walls,
which I think is very funny.
There is a whom...
You know, one of the cool things about making this movie
and, you know, getting reactions to I!
on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter,
is so many people write to me about how they've seen the movie
two, three, four, five, six, seven times in a movie theater,
and that they have a different experience
every time {hey see the movie,
'cause there's so much going on.
There's so many different things happening.
You get to see a lot of it.
And you get to see a different movie every time you watch it.
And that certainly was one of the things
that we hoped would be the case when we were making this film.
While we were making this movie,
we all felt that we were creating something very special,
um, and we felt that we were creating something very different.
We fell in love with the characters.
We thought we were creating something different visually.
And we definitely did...
Made this film with our hearts and souls,
and tried to create something that was different.
And it was great when the movie came out and performed so well.
If I had a black light,
the place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Well, there's the line that a lot of people talk about.
Probably more than any other. The Jackson Pollock fine.
It's another case of Chris Pratt and t bouncing off of each other.
It was an improved iine_.
Chris Pratt said that black light...
He said, you know, “If you put a black light up in here, you...
"It would be a mess."
And then, I went in and I ran on set and I whispered into his ear,
“Say that it looks like a Jackson Pollock painting in here."
And then he added that element to it. And he did both of those lines.
It was something that we never thought we would put in the movie,
because it is a little bit risque', and we kind of did it for ourselves.
But when we were in the process of testing the movie,
we added...
I said to Kevin Feige, I'm like,
"Let me just put that in one time,
"and add it to get a laugh out of it for one audience,
"even if we take ii out the next time, which we?! probably do?'
And we put it in the test screening and it got the biggest laugh in the movie,
and men we were trapped. We had to keep ii in, which we did.
That's my brother, Sean Gunn, there as Kraglin.
He also played Rocket on set, as I said earlier.
And here we have Michael Rocker acting like a nut.
That really ls Hacker's personality.
God, we have some great outtakes from this scene,
because that's all pretty much impmv noises,
and there were a lot of times when 9 was...
I have... l have on set what I call a “God mic,“
which is a microphone that I can speak out over speakers to the actors.
And through the God mic, I kept saying those different sounds,
and then Rocker was trying to copy what my sounds were,
and then I'd say something else, and he was copying the sounds,
and it all sounds very ridiculous.
The God mic was a new experience for me,
because I have a very close relationship with my actors,
and even though I like action sequences
and big, you know, big movies,
I really believe in the intimacy of working closely with actors,
and really trying to create real characters and real moments.
Um, and...
Normally, that means on a movie set that you do a take
and then you run in to the actor
and you whisper in the actor's ears
some son of notes that you give them about, you know,
"Think of your mother dying," or something like that.
And ifs a very private {hing.
But with a movie like this,
which was much bigger than other movies We done...
My last movie cost $3 million.
1 had to get used to working on much bigger sets.
And actually, the amount of time I would waste
having to run from the tents to the set
would be a lot,
so I just set up a big God mic,
where I could talk through speakers to the actors.
And we all got used to me giving them very intimate directions
that the entire crew could hear.
But the crew was so supportive
that it became a very trusting environment because of that.
And I also though!
that it made the crew feel more involved in the making of the film.
And more of a closeness with the film,
and it became more than just a job to so many crew members on set,
because they loved what they were doing,
and they felt close
to so many of the people that were in charge.
The actors are all such nice people in this movie.
I've always had movies where...
it's very important for me
to choose actors that are easy to work with.
Life is too short.
It took me two years of my life to make Guardians of the Galaxy.
I didn't do much else for that two years besides work on this film.
And to work with an actor that's difficult isn't worth it.
This is a sweet moment with Grout and tms little child.
Grant's flower, it is probably inspired
by Frankenstein, the James Whale film,
and that sort of sweetness that Frankenstein has.
But Grout doesn't
throw the child in a river afterwards and murder her.
That's something we chose not to do.
Here's the F'Saki~Orl<>ni race, which was originally much longer.
And we cut it down, simply because...
There's Marama Corle?,
who is the one who is announcing the Ononi race.
And she's a really, really fantastic actor.
She plays the pit boss and I was so sad to cut her role.
Mostly, she's standing next to Drax there.
Because she did such a great job, but these things happen sometimes.
Those were probably my favorite days on set
with the Ladies of {he Boot of Jemiah.
Wonderful, fun days.
This was actually one of the hardest scenes
in the whole movie to shoot.
Just this scene between two people, on a balcony.
And, in fact, the scene was much longer originally.
And I started doing
the whole long scene between the two of them,
and I was dying on set.
I just knew that I hated it.
So, on set,
I actually just changed ail the dialogue around,
and I cut most of the scene
and turned it into a much more simple scene,
and I changed all their dialogue at the last minute,
which was one of the wiser things I think I did on set,
because it would've been a waste and it WOURTVE all gotten cut,
and t think it works much better as it is.
The backgrounds by Framestore are really beautiful here,
our sort of version of the romantic sky,
and instead of fireworks in the background,
we have the machines welding around them
with the sparks ?ying that do something really beautiful.
Chris and Zoe are both really good in this scene,
but it was still very difficult.
This is another version of Chris and ! working off of each other.
This was all in {he script,
but it was in the script because Chris came into my office one day
and he said,
"I bet he loves Footloose,"
and, "What if he thinks of that as a legend?"
And t thought that was great,
and then I added the stuff about the great hero Kevin Bacon.
Kevin's a friend of mine.
He was the bad guy in my last movie, Super.
So I was really excited for Kevin to see the movie,
which he saw a few weeks ago and tweeted about,
and seemed to really love, which is great.
I love this shot of Zoe.
That's just one of my favorite shots of Zoe's acting in the whole movie.
She's just so amazing in these small moments,
and how she's able to use her eyes
and just portray so much emotion with the smallest actions,
I really love.
And here we have the welding.
1 really like this stuff.
I think it's very sweet and romantic and I like it quite a bit.
And then, like we do so much throughout the movie,
we like to take these conventions that we...
We enjoy the conventions, but then we tum them on their heads.
And, in this case, we turn it on its head
with Gamora accusing Quill of pelvic sorcery.
Your pelvic sorcery!
It's another line ma! survived from my very first draft.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING)
We did cut a big scene here, from this sequence,
that's in the deleted scenes.
And it was simply because we needed to move the plot along,
and I feel bad about it.
It was a real nice scene where
Drax talks about his tattoos and what they mean to him,
and they're all about family,
and he ends up becoming very touchy, and he and Rocket start fighting.
And so in the actual cut of the film,
I'm hoping that it's not too confusing that they've been fighting off screen.
'Cause we did explain it when we shot it,
and then I decided to cut I! to make it move faster.
There's a lot of sadness in this scene.
I thought this scene was very, very, very important to the movie.
Because from the very beginning,
when Marvet first came 10 me with the idea of this film,
I thought the only...
There's Rocket's lip quiver, which I really love.
But it's a movie about a talking raccoon.
And for me, it was about creating a situation where,
if there was a talking raccoon,
how could that talking raccoon be real?
What would make him veal?
And it really was, a little...
He's this little innocent creature, just an animal,
who was experimented on and nun' and changed and manipulated,
for the benefit of someone else.
And he's very, very alone because of that.
There really is nothing else like him.
His consciousness and his being is different
from any other creature in the entire universe,
because he's one of a kind.
And he's very alone because of that, and very sad.
And a' think that's what works for Rocket,
is that he's so funny, and he has all these
humorous asides,
but at the heart m' it an,
hes a very, very, very sad creature,
and he definitely is the most wounded of all of the Guardians of the Galaxy.
And then, beside him is the character who is the least wounded,
who is Grout.
That's Ophelia Lovibond, who plays Carina.
And then, my friend, Benicio Del Tom, who plays The Collector.
Benicio is an actor unlike any other.
He is truly, truly in the character. He goes very, very deep.
All of the other actors on set worship Benicio.
He is a very serious guy,
but also, at the same time, a very laid-back guy
who hangs out in the tent with the extras,
and chats to everybody on set.
My set PA was a girl by the name of Brittany,
who was the daughter of one of the members of Iron Maiden.
And Benicio happened to be wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt on set,
and I said, "Hey, you know, Brittany is the daughter
"of one of the members of Iron Maiden."
And he was so excited over that,
and had to take pictures of him with Brittany
to send to his friend,
so ma! he could share this great moment
of meeting the daughter of one of the Iron Maiden guitarists.
And she was ?ipped out, of course,
because Benicio Del Toro was wanting to take a photo with her.
Let us see what you brought.
This is interesting. Chris is about to drop the Orb.
This is totally real. This was not planned.
Chris actually dropped the Orb.
And then he, of course, recovered it with humor.
But he actually dropped the Orb. That was not planned at all.
This is my best friend, Stevie Biackehart,
who Drax is about to attack.
Stevie has been in a few of my movies,
and he's been a friend since my first film, Tromeo and Juliet.
He played Benny Que.
He runs a bar called the Edendale, bar and restaurant, in Silver Lake,
and he truly is my best friend in the entire world.
I like to work with actors that I care about.
And so whether ifs Stevie, or Michael Rocker,
or Nathan Fillion, or Gregg Henry, my brother Sean...
Filmmaking can be a very lonely experience at times,
it's very difficult.
You have a thousand people coming to you a! all times with questions.
Very, very lime rest.
It takes a lot of mental energy, a lot of concentration.
And to have people on set
that you can occasionally just walk over to
and put your arm on their shoulder and be like. ..
(EXHALES)
"Take a deep breath,"
Makes all the difference in the world to me
to just have a few close friends around me at all times.
And I always pick up new close friends.
On this movie, Chris Pratt and I became such good friends that he...
I had a home that was right next to the river in London,
and Chris Pratt came out and visited one day,
and he liked it so much that he rented the home next to me.
My brother Sean lived with me,
so we'd have a {oi of late nights
hanging out on the deck with me and Chris and my brother Sean,
and Rocker would often come over
and that would be son' of our crew while we were making the film,
and my assistant Simon.
Carina, even though she has been warned
that this thing kills you,
I guess is hopeful that she could use it to kill The Collector.
And I think, in a way, she's probably committing suicide.
She'd rather be dead and kit! Collector than be living and be a slave.
Oh, I forgot to talk about all the cool stuff
in the background of The Collector's sequence.
Like the worms from Slither,
and Howard the Duck is back there when we first walk in.
And just all sorts of neat stuff in the background.
These are my favorite shots in the movie.
This makes me laugh so hard.
1 just love {he look on Rocket's face right there.
(LAUGHING)
it makes me laugh every time.
Many people here think that Chris is saying the F-word...
What the...
...which he isn't. (LAUGHS)
I know He's just saying, "What the..."
And then there happened to be that spark on set,
which really was a mistake.
That's Cosmo the Dog.
In the comics, he's actually one of the Guardians.
People often...
Right here, this shot with Rocket,
where he's putting down his eyelids and you see the pinks of his eyes,
that was something that was very important to me
from the time I wrote that scene,
that we see the pinks of Rocket's eyelids.
I always thought that was funny.
Anyway, Cosmo the Dog is somebody
who people wanna see in the Guardians movies,
because he is a Guardian in the comics.
But to be completely honest, it's a difficult feat,
because Cosmo is a lea! dog with real fur, um,
and to have a real dog with real fur next to a CG! raccoon with CG! fur,
it's not a very helpful thing to do for the look of Rocket.
So he's actually a difficult character to incorporate into the Guardians,
as I say, to the sadness of Guardians fans all over the world.
- Oh, no. - DRAX: At last!
(LAUGHING)
GUNNi Drax is a nutjob who has called Roman,
and thinks he's going to win this war because he's a maniac.
And then we have Yondu and my brother, Kraglin,
come to gel them at the same time.
Ronan the Accuser!
You are the one who transmitted the message?
GUNN: In a minute, we're gonna have what we call the pod chase
because ifs a chase with pods and Necrocrafi,
and it was one of the more difficult scenes to do in the movie.
And one oi the more difficult things
about making a movie with this amount of visual effects
is that when you screen the movie,
you test the movie to see if audiences like the film.
But when you have two characters who aren't there
and you have huge sequences, like this pod sequence,
which are largely CG],
um, it becomes very difficult
10 see if audiences really like the scene.
Because we didn't get the pod chase done
until not too long before the movie was going to be released.
So this was always a scene that people didn't react to as strongly
as other scenes in the movie that were more practical.
So we just had to go on faith that this scene would be fun.
And at the end of the day,
HS really one of the more fun sequences to see,
and ifs especially one of the more fun sequences to see
when you're watching {his movie in 311.
It makes I! a lot of fun.
And I love these lime pods.
They may be my favorite
spacecraft or ?ying craft in the film.
Ah!
(GRUNTS)
We looked a! a lot of different references
for our ?ying scenes in the movie.
Everything from, uh, Star Wars to Top Gun to The Right Stuff,
and we wanted to create our own sort of ?ight scenes.
But I will say that The Right Stuff was a big influence to us.
Not so much in this scene,
but in the stuff at the ending of the movie
with the way that the spacecraft moved.
We wanted to take something from the 1960s Apollo spacecraft,
uh, which is not the things that people normally think of
in?uencing a science fiction film.
Rocket gets a lot of the best moments in the movie,
and this is certainly a pretty cool one,
where he just smashes through this guy.
(YELLING)
Those bad guys in the movie are Sakaaran.
We get to see their faces later in the movie.
They're pretty disgusting looking;.
They're a mix of practical and digital effects.
As much as possible in movies, I like to mix practical and digital effects
because it makes it much more difficult for audiences to know
what is real and what is not.
That shot there is...
This shot is very largely practical, believe it or not.
And then a lot of these shots, that's practical, that...
The inside of that spacecraft is real,
Chris is in a real, uh, pod that he's driving.
That's veal.
So a for of this stuff is very, very real,
and when you mix it in with something that's digital,
like, that sho?s 100% digital.
And that's both.
It becomes more difficult to tell what's real and what's not.
(GRUNTING)
(BONES CRACKING)
(SCREAMING)
It's actually not my favorite shot in the movie,
but, oh, well. (CHUCKLES)
You have a few that you don't like.
But that stunt of twisting him around didn't work that well for me.
Again, I gotta really praise Karen Gillan.
She's such a great actress,
and you do get a 101 of emotions that are happening,
and for me, Nebula's not...
She's a pretty bad character,
and she's definitely a sadistic character
who enjoys the pain of others.
But I don? know if she's 100% evil.
Ronan is pretty close to 100% evil.
But in a second your" see Karen blow up Gamma,
and km her.
Or she thinks she kills her.
And you'll see the look on her face, and it's really...
She has mixed feelings about it.
And it's one of the nicer shots in the movie.
That's our producer Lows favorite shot in the movie,
is that shot there, ifs ms favorite shot in the movie.
Throughout this sequence,
we have another great musical piece by Tyler Bates.
And, um, one of the things that I do that other directors normally don't do,
although, I will say I originally got the idea from
Sergio Leone and Ennis Monicone
who worked together on great Spaghetti Westerns,
such as For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
uh, Duck, You Sums“,
Once Upon a Time in the West, which is my favorite.
And Tyler wrote big pieces of music before we ever shot the film,
so that I could actually shoot the scenes
to those pieces of music.
I think that in fiimmaking,
music is just a vastly underrated pad of the puma.
People think a lot about the visuals,
and they often make entire films and cut them together and finish them
and then give them to a composer,
and say, “Hey, go write some music for this,"
and expect those composers to do great work.
But with me, I really think
that music is an important pad of fueiiing the film,
and I! you write the music first,
you can create whole sequences around that music,
and really do something wonderful with it.
And that's what this music is here. It drives the scene.
And we play some of the music on set so that
the cameras can move to the music and the actors can move to the music
and they know exactly what to expect,
and they instantly gel the tone of the scene.
For instance, in this scene,
if you didn't ever hear the music, you might think
that the scene is gonna be played more like an action sequence
or in a different way than it's played,
but it's actually a very emotional sequence.
This is a scene in which Peter Quill is actively sacrificing his life.
He's going to die if he saves Gamma.
I want to talk for a second, too, about the science of this scene
because there were a lot of things...
When we were doing test screenings,
people came and said that Peter Quill would die in this situation.
And scientifically, that's not true.
Uh, people actually could survive in space in the proper conditions
for short amount of times.
Um, A, without having their skin covered,
or while having their skin exposed,
and B, if you emptied the air from your lungs,
for a very short while out in space,
you could survive.
The myths that people either burst into ?ames
or explode as they do in Total Recall
are just completely not true.
Um, and we, uh, consulted with a NASA scientist
throughout the entire creation of this movie to make sure that,
although it is a space opera, and fun is the most important thing,
that we could adhere to the laws of science wherever possible.
Now, you may ask why they're clean here.
And the reason they're clean is, because there is
a regenerative system they go through
when they go through the intake into the Edecmr.
My assistanfs smiting and laughing at me right now,
but that's what I say.
I was gonna have them come out in ail this goo,
but I think we were near the end of the shoot by this time
and the last thing we wanted was two actors covered in goo for half a day
when we were trying to rush and get all of our sequences done.
Chris is great in this scene because he has to be very funny,
at the same time he's getting tears in his eyes
and he's really getting emotionally touched.
And he's so good in that scene, and so is Zoe.
And that's probably the grossest 3D shot in the movie.
If you see that shot in 3D IMAX,
we actually cut out the vomit that he's vomiting up
so that I! goes outside of the borders of the frame of the film.
And that's a very interesting experience,
I! makes ii feel like it's going right in your face.
They're all idiots!
(GRUNTS)
Quill just got himself captured.
None of this ever would have happened if you didn't try to single-handedly
take on a frickin' army!
(SIGHS)
GUNN: Here, we have Dave really do some great work,
and you can see the rawness of his personality
and that he's really in the moment in this scene.
These days were so hard for Dave
because it was actually very cold on these days,
he was freezing cold, he had to walk around shirtless,
we had to cover him in goo,
he was gelling over a pretty bad sickness.
He was screaming at the top of his lungs the day before,
so he was losing his voice,
and then he has to do this scene,
which is the emotional center of his character.
And then be mocked by this little raccoon.
But I love... Again, we have some fantastic CG! work by Rocket
in this scene, where he's really just a fantastic actor.
And that's, uh, due to Framestore.
Bradley: great in this scene, his voice is great.
My brother Sean was magnificent on set.
1 have to say this was some of his best acting
in the entire movie this day.
And Dave relied heavily on my brother Sean
10 create a lot of the dynamics between Drax and Rocket.
And ifs interesting, Drax and Rocket have
a very special relationship in this movie and I don't know why.
That is, a pan' of it is because of their moment at the ending.
But! like the dynamics between the two of them.
Groot takes a leadership role here.
Again, some really great voice acting by Vin Diesel.
There was a lot of debate on
whether we should just cut on! after Drax said, "Three,"
or whether we should have the Rocket-beating-up-grass moment.
I was a proponent of keeping the beating up grass moment,
and so the rest of the Marvel folks went along with me.
I hope people like it.
This is a...
Ronan's story is pretty simple. He's a pretty simple bad guy.
But this is one of the moments I really like for him,
in which he has some real balls, actually,
and he decides he's gonna betray Thanos,
and it makes him a little cooler than a lot of villains
simply because he is not just a yes-man.
He's actually a true rebel to the core,
and he does have his own set of beliefs,
even though those beliefs are pretty evil.
There was a lot in the original script about Ronan's religious beliefs
that got cut lime by time (mm the film.
And I miss them in a lot of ways, I think, but we did it to simplify things.
But Ronan's religious beliefs are basically
that strength is virtue and weakness is sin.
Um, and so, his moral vision of the world is...
it's very moral,
but it is something that would be considered evil
by most people on plane! Earth.
But that is where his morals lie.
So it makes sense that he's going to want to km Thanos,
who kind of pushed him around a little bit.
If you kill him, I will help you destroy a thousand planets.
- YON DU: You betray me? -(PETER GROANS)
Steal my money?
Stop it! Leave him alone!
When I picked you up as a kid,
these boys wanted to eat you.
They ain't never tasted Terran before.
I saved your life!
Oh, will you shut up about that? God!
Twenty years, you been throwing that in my face,
like it's some great thing, not eating me.
Normal people don't even think about eating someone else!
Much less that person having to be grateful for ii!
You abducted me, man.
You stole me from my home and from my family.
You don't give a damn about your Terra!
You're scared
because you're soft in here.
Here, right here!
GAMORA: Yondu!
Listen to me.
GUN N: This scene was actually very, very easy to shoot.
I had set apart a lot of time to shoot this scene
and it went pretty quickly
because it was near the end of the shoot
and all the actors were really in the pocket with their characters.
They knew who their characters were.
Quite honestly, Rooker just never, he just never lets me down.
Every single take of him always is good.
He just never ever lets me down.
And Chris was just the best he was in the entire movie here.
So everybody was just, just great.
Captain's gotta teach stuff!
GU N N: That's a fine that gets a 1oz' of laughs.
“Captain's gotta teach stuff.“ (CHUCKLES)
There's also that rack focus to Kraglin a second ago
after Gamora's talking about the Power Stone,
which, to me is possibly
that Kraglin is from Xandar, the planet they're talking about.
The Ravagers are basically outer space bikers.
They're just bad guys from all over the place
that are out for themselves and they smuggle and kidnap and steal,
and they're basically bad guys.
But they're not evil, because they don't do what they do to hurt other people,
but they're certainly not good.
But ifs one of the reasons, again, why 3 chose Rocker.
I think if Rooke?s specialty is anything,
it's playing characters who are morally ambiguous,
who seem bad 10 begin with, but they have something good in them.
This goes all the way back to his first film role,
which was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,
about a serial killer who is a very evil bad guy,
but still had some vulnerability to him.
If you see him as Merle on The Walking Dead,
he plays a racist jerk
who also has a mile bit of something you like about him,
there's something good in him.
Um, and I think Yondu takes those same types of characteristics
and really brings them to the forefront,
because Yonduis obviously... He's not evil, he loves Quill.
And I think if you see the way
Rocker plays the performance throughout,
he is always rooting for Quill ta give him a reason not ta kill him,
whether it's at the end of this movie or in that last scene.
This is a scene we call the 12% scene.
This is the scene...
When I first wrote the screenplay, I gave it to Marvel,
and Marvel really liked the screenplay,
and Joss Whedon read the screenplay,
uh, who's the guy who gave me my first job ever in Hollywood,
and We known for a long time,
and he said, “I really liked the screenplay,
"but I think there needs to be more James Gunn."
And I said to the group who was sitting there,
Kevin and Joss and Lou and Victoria,
that I was afraid to add too much humor to the movie
because I didn't wanna have a movie that was too much of a comedy
and confuse people about what the genre was.
And Marvel said, "No, we think the humofs great. Add more humor."
And, uh, I said, "Okay, it's your funeral."
And I went and I wrote this scene right after that.
And it's a 7-page scene of characters arguing.
And here's one of my favorite lines. Probably gets...
Which is Drax... This line. All right, not that one, this line.
I wasn't listening. I was thinking of something else.
(GROANS)
GUNN: Which I think is really what this scene is about.
It comes a! a strange place in the movie
where they're gonna come together,
and instead they spend the whole time arguing in a real infantile manner.
And yet, ifs a lot of peoples favorite scene in the movie,
and I think it really speaks volumes about who the Guardians are.
And also volumes about what the film is,
because it goes from being
this very lighthearted, dumb, like, arguing scene,
and at the end of the scene, Chris brings real emotion into it.
This scene, we shot for...
We had 11-and-a-half hours of footage shot for this one scene.
I worked very, very hard,
because I knew to get this movie right, I really needed to get this scene right.
We needed to really like the characters in this scene,
and it needed to work dramatically
and it needed to work comedically, as well.
And it was a difficult balance to achieve,
um, but we did it.
Right here, where Chris is giving his speech,
is an interesting thing,
because during filming, we shot Chris first,
and he gave his speech and he did a good performance,
and then I turned around
and did all the other characters and an the other actors.
And at the end of it, Chris came to me and he said,
“I really think I could do better than what I just did. I really...
"Now that I have gone through ii so many times,
"I mink that I can give ii everything it takes.“
And so we shot him giving the speech again,
and he really nailed it the second time around.
And I remember saying one thing to him in particular
during this sequence,
and I hope it's not giving away too much,
but Chris was going on and on
and he was giving this speech to the other guys,
and I said, "Okay, Chris,"
and I'm on the God mic and I said, "Okay, Chris, just, just stop now and..."
Fm gonna stop real soon 'cause mars
my favorite shot of him saying, "You're asking us to die."
I always think that's funny, that look on Rocket's face.
Nobody else does but me' Kevin makes fun of me all the time.
Anyway, so Chris is giving the speech and I stopped him and I said,
"Okay, Chris, now, iust stop and give the speech as yourself.
"Just give the speech as you.
“What would, you know..."
Not to change the words.
To use the dialogue that was in the script.
'Cause all of this scene was 100% scripted.
Every bit of this scene was scripted.
Uh, but to say, you know, "Just say it as yourself "
And he did, and it was just this really magical moment,
and that's the version we used to screen the movie.
Zoe was very sick on this day, I remember,
so this day was a little bi! more difficult on her.
There was a ?u going around, and I think, uh,
Dave got it first and then Zoe got it. And then, Chris and I got it.
And we had to spend the last three days of shooting
being very sick.
And after we were done shooting,
Rocker and I, we took a bromantic trip to Paris.
Which neither one of us had ever been there, so we went to Paris.
I was still sick, but at least I got to see Paris.
Oh, Fm wrong.
There is, uh, one bi of the scene that is improv-ed,
that was not in the screenplay,
and that is "the jackasses" line coming up,
which was improved by my brother Sean.
And it's, uh... All this stuff was...
That 'jackasses“ line was improv-ed by Sean.
(ROCK MUSIC PLAYING)
Here we have Chem; Bomb by The Runaways,
which I thought was an interesting song choice.
All those colors back there,
if you look at the colors of those screens,
those are all colors from 2001, the Stanley Kubrick film, (CHUCKLES)
which, I liked those coiors, so we put them in that scene.
And it's a little homage of sons,
or a ripoff, depends on what way you wanna look at it.
I wanted to make these screens look very cartoony,
and use a different, sort of, technology,
where we have these screens that we move back and forth,
with these flat 2D images to create battle plans.
And that's the Ravagers' way of doing things.
One of the things that, you know,
when we're creating different cultures for the film,
it was about creating
what is the priority for that culture, technologically.
Like, on planet Earth,
all of our technology is pretty much geared towanis
either making things easier or being fun, making things fun.
So that's really what our technology is about.
But if a different culture has a different priority,
that would be something different.
For instance, the Ravagers,
their priority is really a sense of touch, of feeling things.
So, ail of their technology is very,
you know, when they have a spacecraft,
sure, you could probably make a spacecraft
that didn't have a rumble of the engine below your feet.
But in this...
But because they're making things they wanna feel,
they have more control over it that has to do with touch and feel.
And so all of their technology is based around feeling something,
including those screens.
And it's also 'cause I love muscle cars, and I drive a muscle car,
and their cars, their spaceships, are a lot like Dodge Challengers, really.
Here we have the, sort of, iconic
walking down the hallway together in slow motion scene.
But we mess with it by having
a Raccoon grab his crotch and Gamora yawning
and Chris scratching his nose.
There's a little frog and all of Yondu's little collection
of cute little figurines that he likes that come in.
It plays into the very ending of the movie.
This is a terrible plan.
Hey, you're the one who said you wanted to die among friends.
Nova Prime.
GUNN: Then we have the technology of the Xandarians,
which is much different,
ifs much more advanced in certain ways.
Um, I really wanted to create holograms
that were not completely, like,
that just looked pretty much like the real thing,
if that makes sense.
He says that he's an
"a-hole."
But he's not...
GUNN: There's a great line by Peter Serafinowicz
where, uh, John C. Reilly said, "He says he's an a-hole, "
and Peter Serafinowicz turns to Naomi, the girl that's standing next to him,
and says, "Asshole,"
explaining to her what he's saying, that we cut from the movie.
And every time I watch this scene,
I mildly regret having cut that moment, and wish it was still in the movie.
Ronanis ship is the Dark Aster. It's miles and miles across.
With the Dark Aster, I really wanted to create something that felt very heavy.
Like, there's nothing about that thing that should be able to ?y.
You know when we look back at the pyramids in ancient Greece,
we think, "How did people from that time make those giant things?"
it almost seems frustrating
how difficult it would be to create something so enormous.
And J think the Dark Aster is the same way.
It's just totally huge, I! doesn't look like it should ?y.
It looks like it's made out of stone and concrete,
and it's a paradox in that way, but somehow it's able to take off.
Here we have the Guardians theme again,
which I, as stated before, really love.
We actually had a really hard time coming to the Guardians theme.
Tyler wrote a lot of different versions of the Guardians theme.
1 really wanted something really thematic.
And he would send me little things he had written
that sounded like they were performed on a Casiotone.
And he'd send them to me on my iPhone
and 1 would listen to them and kinda strike them down.
And then he sent me this theme for something else.
And it was a very, very simple little theme
and it wasn't even for the Guardians theme.
But I heard it and I was like,
"Oh, my God! That's it. That's it. That's the Guardians theme."
And I took his little Casiotone version and put it over the scene in the Kym
when the Guardians first appear together.
And Must sounded perfect.
Um, and I told Tyler
and then he developed it further to make I! what I! is today.
Come on!
GUNN: Here we have my brother being a hard-ass.
Again, a lot of these fight scenes, they're fighting in day...
These are much more like, uh, aerial battles
than they are like spaceship fighting scenes.
These are not spaceships, they're much more...
They are spaceships, but they're much, we wanted...
They're in Earth's atmosphere, or not, in Xandafs atmosphere.
So they have a different feel to the battle sequences.
That's actually a little bit more like Top Gun or The Right Stuff,
or has elements of those types of movies more so than say,
space movies that you're familiar with.
And I wanted it to be very chaotic and difficult.
Seems overwhelming.
We'll never make it up there!
GUNN: And here we have the Nova Corps saving the day,
coming to the rescue!
Peter Serafinowicz as Denarian Saai.
Denarian Ganhan Saai.
His first name is Ganhan, although we don't say it in the movie.
This is Denarian Saal of the Nova Corps.
For the record, I advised against trusting you here.
They got my "dick" message!
Prove me wrong.
G UN N: I really like Peter Serafinowicz as an actor and as a guy,
We call this the "fishing with dynamite“ sequence,
'cause originally there was a line about fishing with dynamite,
which is what he's doing;.
He's basically just plowing down a bunch of Sakaaran (CHUCKLES)
with the guns made to shoot down other ships.
So they don't really stand much of a chance.
I love, uh... That's, that was, uh... Dave Bautista laughing was not in...
That's obviously one of the things
that gets the most... I don't know, obviously,
bu: the Kevin Bacon tine is one of the things
that gets referred to the most to me.
People talk about it a lot.
But when Dave was laughing,
that was something that I thought of on set
and talked about while we were shooting.
And just went up to Dave and said, “What if you found this really funny'?
“That you love the fact that you're in this great danger
"and that Quill is shooting all these things
"and just laugh the whole time hysterically like a mad man."
And he started laughing and we had a very hard time keeping ii straight
'cause it was so funny to us.
'Cause there is something about Dave Bauiista
when he's sitting there laughing,
that's like a big, giant baby laughing in his seat.
The girl next to Glenn Close, again,
is Mikaela Hoover who is one of my best friends.
She was in my web series, HumanzeeL
and my web series, uh, Sparky and Mikaela.
She was also in my movie, Super.
NOVA CORPS PILOT 21 Locked in.
GUNN: Here we have the Nova Net sequence. This is something.
This sequence I actually drew before I ever wrote it. (CHUCKLES)
Which was, I was trying to figure out
how we could make the Nova Corps seem
a little bit more powerful and impressive,
and yet still technologically unique.
And t came up with this Nova Corps sequence.
And then, and then drew it.
And we had a great company working with us who did them...
Great company by the name of Third Floor,
who helped me to
animate this sequence and put ii in action
and they helped to design the sequence for me.
This is what we called the Greet spores sequence.
Um, it's another really beautiful sequence done by MPC,
which is another terrific sequence in 3D.
Maybe my favorite moment in 3D actually.
And there is something really beautiful about the character of Groot.
Ifs also... This score is also just one of my favorites here.
Tyler Bates' music is just completely beautiful.
The first time I heard it, I got teary-eyed,
and 1 remember looking over at my assistant, Simon Han',
who we call Simon "Cry-Baby" Hal!
because he cries all the time when we show him scenes from the movie,
and he had tears in his eyes.
It was very sweet. But I think ifs beautiful.
And of course we undercut it with Drax being an idiot.
You, Quill, are my friend.
Thanks.
- This dumb tree, he is my friend. - GROOT: Mmm.
And this green whore' she, too...
Oh, you must stop!
(NEBULA GRUNTS)
Gamora, look at what you have done.
You have always been weak.
You stupid, traitorous...
GUNN: People ask me how long I! takes Nebula to get into makeup.
I think it was about a little over four hours.
By the end of the shoot, Drax was a little longer than that.
Um, he had to have his arms up the whole time.
And Zoe was actually not that much shorter.
Her makeup was simpler,
but Zoe, uh, doesn't sit still, so she's running around all the time.
It takes her a mile bit longer. She's a very fiery personality.
Um...
This scene is definitely our Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western scene,
and Yondu is our Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western character.
That's my voice, by the way, doing the Sakaaran.
mmsnas
Yeah. I like this scene a lot. This is a...
Yondu's a very powerful character.
One of the reasons I picked Yondu from the comic books
is that
his super power is so interesting;.
He's a little bit different in the comics.
He actually has a bow with his arrow, but I just went with the whistling thing,
and took away the bow, which didn't seem as necessary.
Here we learn that
because of her cybernetics and modifications
Nebula has healing powers,
and makes he: a pretty formidable foe.
This is actually one of the more fun sections of the movie for me.
It just really moves very quickly
and there's a bunch of things happening all at one time.
It took a lot of love and care to get this sequence to the fight place,
both in terms of the shooting of the sequence,
and in terms of the editing of the sequence.
(ALL CLAMORING)
Here we have the suicide bombers, the Sakaaran,
who obviously love Ronan, and are willing to do anything for him.
That's Bereet, actually, from the beginning of the movie,
saving that young girl, which a lot of people miss.
And coming up we have that little girl and her morn,
that's actually, we learn at the end of the movie,
that's Rhomann Dey, John C. Reilly's wife and daughter.
They have big eyes.
Rocket's doing something heroic.
ROCKET: We'll take care of the people down here.
I can't believe I'm taking orders from a hamster.
G UN N: People have brought up the fact
that there probably are not hamsters in outer space.
And here's how that works.
If you look closely in the mug-shot scene,
there is a translator in Peter Quilfs neck,
which means that all of the characters are not necessarily speaking English,
but they are able to have a common tongue because they have implant...
They have, uh, translators implanted in them.
So, whatever is a hamster-like creature
is probably what Denarian Saa! is talking about there.
Also, it was funny so I kept it in the movie.
I really like this shot.
Everybody shoot them before they hit the ground.
G UN N: This is definitely inspired by Space Invaders,
and was described as Space Invaders in the script. (CHUCKLES)
Where the characters are all shooting down the aliens
before they approach the planet.
(BOTH GRUNTING)
(ROARS)
GUNN: Nice fight scene by Tommy Harper.
Tommy Harper and James Young
were the guys who did the fight coordination of this scene,
they also did all the fight coordination for Captain America 2.
Really great guys, very talented guys.
And they helped to make this, give this scene a lot of energy.
Finger to the throat means death.
GUNN: Djimon Hounsou, by the way, is great in this moment
where he's... (CHUCKLES) going out of whack.
Metaphor.
GUNN: People love that line. Uh...
Oh, no.
GUN N: Djimon Hounsou plays Korath.
He's a fantastic actor and another really, just great guy
who we were lucky to have do his piece in the movie.
Here we have Grout, uh, kiiling people for an awful long time.
People kept trying to get me to cut it down,
bu: then I {bought it was funnier when it was longer.
Sometimes I wish it was a lime Ranger.
But the smile was really what did it.
And, uh,
that is one of the nicer moments in the movie.
Here we have the Nova Net failing against the power of the Dark Aster,
which is just a tittle stronger than them at the end of the day.
Not to mention when Roman uses the Power Stone against them.
My friend Nick, about to get kitted. He's dead.
There will be no Nick Holmes as a Ravager In the sequel, unfortunately.
And here we have the sad demise of Denarian Saai,
who reaches out to his new friend Rocket
for one last moment before he dies.
(GUNN CHUCKLING)
They have a fantastic relationship that they've been
talking over the intercom for a few minutes.
Anyway, I really like how this looks.
I think it's a beautiful moment.
Quill, you gotta hurry.
The city's been evacuated,
but we're getting our asses kicked down here.
GUNN: So here we have the... We've set up very, you know,
very specifically what's supposed to be happening.
All the guys are trying to get to Ronan to kill him with the Hadron Enforcer,
that's what we believe is going to happen
and that's the goal of our team.
I love this scene. Zoe's skeleton.
Here we have Nebula's...
It's not her demise, but her escape.
Nebula has a strange out in this movie
where she just sort of decides to leave, um, which I like.
She says, "I know you're both crazy."
There! Chops off her own hand, which makes her pretty hardcore.
That's my friend, Dave Yarvo, as a Ravager, who she throws out.
The Yarvom We ca?! that scream the Van/o.
We use it earlier in the movie as well.
And here are the guys
gelling closer to their goat.
They face Roman.
(GUN POWERING UP)
This is a moment that! hope
you're having a nice home theater while watching this scene,
because in a movie theater ifs one of the comer moments,
'cause you realize how loud everything has been for a long, longtime
and then suddenly things get really quiet.
And it's...
Nothing has worked at all like it's supposed to.
I think it's a fun thing to do in movies, is we set up a goat for our characters,
our goals... There's... Our characters fulfill that goal,
and then it just doesn't work a! all as expected.
I do it, the same thing, in my movie Slither.
There's a grenade that the lead character gets
that is supposed to blow up.
They wonked, spent a tot of time getting this grenade,
and then it just doesn't work.
Goes of? in a swimming pool.
And this is the same sort of moment in this movie.
(SCREAMS)
But we've got a crazy raccoon on our side here.
One of the difficulties, of course, with {ms movie was
I realty wanted to love these characters
and share with the audience the love that I have for these characters
and that I believe that they have for each other,
and that they find with each other.
And so this moment is really that moment of sacrifice
on the par! of Groofs where...
Here he's making {he choice and you can see him make the choice
here in his eyes for a moment, where he decides to do something.
He's seeing what happens and {hen
he decides to sacrifice himself right here in this moment.
And it really is, uh, one of my favorite moments in the movie.
And again another, uh...
This is the Groot Spore theme, just played a little bit more grandly.
Uh...
Tyler Bates' music which really helps to fuel the scene
and shows where I! is.
And Zoe is just so great in this scene. I just...
The way she uses her eyes and the love she had for Groot.
And it was very strange, because we had the music blaring on set
while we shot this scene,
and Zoe looked up at Groot and she just started crying
when we were shooting this scene, because she knew what he was doing.
And Groot wasn't really even there, um,
but she felt it.
And I think that Zoe's performance with her face
is just, especially here,
it just, it tells so much of the story
of what's happening with Grout and who he is.
And then we have this moment,
which to me is one of the more touching things in the movie.
Why?
GUN N: And this moment here with tears In his eyes,
and it's really very, very, very touching.
We
are
G root.
When I first, uh, was working on the screenplay,
I came up with the "We are Groot” fine,
which was going to be...
It was a completely differem situation, in which Grout was going to go up
and give this speech
where he was going to say, "We are Grout" at the end of the movie,
or near the end of the movie. And instead this moment happened,
um, and created what we call the Grout Cocoon,
which is what he uses to save those guys.
And the Grout Cocoon sequence became the We Are Groot sequence.
(POP MUSIC PLAYING FAINTLY)
Here we have O-o-h Chm by the Five Stairsteps,
um, which is, of course, just a wonderful song.
Bu! in this movie we use some songs as they were intended
and some songs, such as Fooled Around And Fell In Love,
that plays on the balcony,
uh, and it really is saying what's happening, you know,
Quill footed around and fell in love with Gamora in a way.
And here we have the movie... The song plays almost ironically,
because it certainly doesn't things like. ..
Seem like things are gonna get brighter.
It seems pretty dark and awful.
And we have the, uh, citizens coming out.
There's The Broker,
who has changed a tittle bit since the beginning of the movie.
And then we have this... Another great piece of music here,
with Tyler Bates coming over as Ronan is totally fine.
(SCREAMS)
There's a lot of questions here when Rocket runs at Ronan,
whether he is running at Ronan to actually try to hurt him
or if he is actually trying to get Ronan to move him over to this spot
where he knows that they have a chance to do something else.
Here the characters look from one to the next.
...the time has come
to rejoice and renounce
Your paltry gods!
GUNN: And then we have one of, uh...
What often people talk to me about is one of the riskier moves in the movie
where Peter Quill begins to sing and dance.
And it was risky and the reason it was risky
is because it was in the screenplay and it was funny in the screenplay,
but never great.
Just kind of funny.
But I really felt like if Chris could do a great performance in the scene,
that the scene would be great.
And this is truly the magic of Chris Pratt,
because we just gave him full rein and he went and took it.
And we kept throwing stuff at him and he kept taking that.
And he added this lime bit.
Tossin' it to Gamora and then Gamora shaking her head.
And it really is just Chris Pratt that...
It's really, truly, a shining moment in the movie in a lot of ways,
because that is...
If Chris Pratt didn't work in the scene, the scene wouldn't work.
Other scenes in the movie. um,
you know, you can kind of fake your way through.
But that one you can't.
This is a piece of music we call Black Tears,
and "rt was called... Again,
this was music we played on set while we were shooting this entire sequence.
Sometimes with a Phantom camera at extremely high frame rates.
(EXPLOSIONS)
But it's, uh...
it was a scene that took a lot of work.
And it was something that we had to show many times in the theater
with absolutely no effects whatsoever.
Mom.
GAMORR Take my hand!
GUNN: And here we have, sort of, really what the center of the movie is about.
At the center of Guardians of the Galaxy, uh,
it is about a story of a son's love for his mother
and a mothers love for her son.
H's a mother/son story at the center of it all.
And this is the moment where Peter Quill accepts
that his mother loves him and takes her hand,
and has a shift within himself.
And the Guardians, in tum, each have a shift where...
They're all characters who, from the beginning of the movie,
each think that they're jerks.
They think themselves are jerks,
and they have beliefs about themselves that they're bad people
or bad creatures or whatever they are.
And, in this moment, they find out
that there's something more important to them than just themselves.
And that's each other.
And, in same cases, I think it's a deeper love for a society
ma! Peter has and Gamma has.
And with Rocket, I think it really is
just a love for Peter and Drax and Gamora and Gmot.
(GROWLS)
And there's nothing ironic there from my point of view.
It really is just...
It's about family, it's about love,
and it's about these characters that hopefully find something in themselves
that's a little better than what they thought was there.
And, if there's anything that comes out of the movie for people,
maybe they can see that within themselves.
(ALL PANTING)
YONDU: Well, well, well.
Quite the light show.
GUNN: Rockers shown up.
By the way, that shot of Rocket's little hand coming up to grab
Draws was one of my favorites in the mov?e.
We call that the Michelangelo shot.
Peter, you can't. Peter.
You gotta reconsider this, Yondu.
I don't know who you're selling this to,
but the only way the universe can survive...
G UN N: This is another interesting performance by, uh, Rocker.
Because, in a second, Quill gives him the Orb,
and Rocker, or Ynndu' he's not dumb.
And I! you look at the way Rocker plays this scene,
and you'll ask... Have to ask him if this is totally true.
I'm not sure that he doesn't know
that that Orb doesn't have in it
what he hopes ii has.
And that he just doesn't wan! to kill Quill.
Ifs especially from this moment, right here.
See that'?
He knows. (CHUCKLES)
He knows.
Here we have...
We learn...
My brother Sean Gunn as Kraglin tells the audience what's going on.
And he did a great job in that scene, because that's just pure exposition
that Sean had to deliver in a way as if it was real dialogue.
And then we reveal what many people are not surprised to see.
Oh, I know.
But he was about the only family I had.
No.
He wasn't.
GUNN: This next sequence, uh, is a...
To me, it's my favorite moment in the whole movie.
And it's the one moment that really does move me when I watch it.
Uh...
Bradley is so good in this scene.
And Sean and Dave were so good in this scene when they first shot it.
And Dave really wanted Sean to be there for his acting
and so Sean is in most of these shots with Dave and we just took him out.
But, boy, ifs just...
And the animators, uh, did a great job.
Just in this moment here.
That's just one of the best acting of Rocket. (CHUCKLES)
And Dave's so good in that moment there.
That, to me, is the best moment in the whole movie.
PETER: Why would you even know this?
DEY: When we arrested you, we noticed an anomaly in your nervous system,
so we had it checked out.
I'm not Terran?
UN N: We almost didn '1' put this scene in the movie, actually.
We almost just went directly to Glenn Close thanking them.
Because we did have Kragfin and Yondu
explaining that his father was something else.
But we decided to keep it in the film.
We wanted to be careful not to have too many endings in the movie,
so doing all of the stuff after they save the day and destroy Ronan,
we needed to make ii as ?uid as possible,
because there were a lot of different things to tie up.
Here we have Rocket with lime Baby Gmot.
...he has something to show you.
Thank you, Nova Prime.
GUNN: Because we did have other scenes in this sequence
that I liked a Io!
that we just cut because it was just too many, too many things happening.
In the comic books, of course, Drax is out to km Thanos.
He's been created to kill Thanos, basically.
And so here we find that Drax
has at feast a little bit more in common
with his comic book counterpart than we initially thought.
And, of course, when you're making a movie like this,
you owe a great debt to the creators of the comic book characters
and the stories that they told.
And you wanna remain as true to the spirit of those characters as you can,
while at the same time creating a movie with characters
that work the best they possibly can
as a cinematic entity.
And I think that we found a good balance.
You know, we changed some characters a lot obviously.
Yundws much different than he is in the comics.
Drax is much different. Draws personality is a I01 different.
But there's a lot of what the...
I think we struck a good balance.
This was one of the worst days on set, actually.
It was just a miserable, miserable day.
Because we were on the roof of this actual building
in {he center of downtown London.
And there were... h was a Sunday,
so there were church bells ringing every 15 minutes.
And there were jets going overhead constantly.
And it was... The sun was changing,
so that one moment I! would be extremely bright
and the next moment it would be dark and in cloud cover.
And it was every single thing just didn't work together
to create something good.
And the fact that we got a decent scene out of it is truly a miracle.
And we have Peter Quilrs present from his mother.
And Chris is, uh...
Again, Chris proves why he is the only guy of his type in film today,
that he has this vulnerability to him, yet he has a masculinity
and he has a sense of humor and all of those things come together
to make what! believe is, you know,
the greatest movie star of today, which is Chris Pratt.
And this moment... This was dialogue, uh, by...
Laura was recorded in the back of a car. (CHUCKLES)
And I was sitting in the car next to Laura
as she was recording this dialogue.
Because we were on set, and we had her come in to record the dialogue
so that Chris could listen to it as he was...
We were shooting this scene on set.
And I was sitting next to Laura and I got tears in my eyes
when she was reading her letter Io Peter Quill
as I was sitting there next to hen.
Which we only did one or two times and used the one that touched me.
You have to trust your instincts a lot, I think, as a filmmaker,
and what is it that moves you.
Sometimes it can betray you, but sometimes... Usually it won't.
-(R&B MUSIC PLAYING) -(KNOB CLICKS)
And here we have {he true song of a mother singing to her son.
It was very difficult.
I wasn't sure I wanted to use this song, because it's been used a lot.
It's very familiar to people and most of the other songs have not been.
But it just told the story perfectly.
This moment here is just one of my favorite lithe bits in the movie.
Gamma says earlier that she doesrrt dance because she is a warrior.
And here she does this, which is very subtle.
But ifs one of my favorite moments in the movie.
And this is another one of my favorite moments,
which was more in the script, and it's Yondu,
who pretty much knows that there's not an Infinity Gem inside that thing
(CHUCKLES) by this point.
And men, he's been ripped off,
but he's been given the thing he loves the most,
which is a cute little character that he collects. (CHUCKLES)
That we've also seen earlier in Qui/Fs ship.
Of course, the Infinity Gem is safe.
And here we reveal that John C. Reilly's family
is the same family that Rocket saved earlier on the bridge.
I'm not sure how much people pick that one up, but...
Yeah, so the song is really just as...
ifs a song from a mother to a son and ifs hard to have a song about love
that doesn't necessarily seem like it's about sexual love
andAin't No Mountain High Enough seemed to work perfectly.
We have a special relationship between the two guys.
And then we have little Baby Grout coming back to life.
PETER: So, what should we do next'?
Something good?
Something bad?
A bit of both?
We'll follow your lead, Star-Lord.
GUNN: And we end with one of my favorite songs of all time,
probably the greatest pop song ever, in my mind.
Which is I Want You Back by the Jackson Five.
And it's hard not to be happy when you hear this song.
It's almost like cheating at the end of the movie. (CHUCKLES)
(GUNN READING)
We just needed something to work outwith the beat of the...
(CHUCKLES) The beats of the music.
We wanted people to stay in the theater for this, um,
which is a sequence that was in the script
but it was written as the end tag of the movie.
We were gonna put it at the very end.
But then we liked it so much that we were like,
“We can't let audiences leave without seeing this moment."
And it was just such a great way to end the movie.
People really are happy when they see this little Baby Grool dancing.
By the way, that's me dancing;.
That is me motion-referenced, dancing as Baby Grout.
That's my dance moves.
My buddy, Dave Yarvo, saw the movie with me and he was like,
“That's you dancing, isn't it?" Because he recognizes my,
my wonderful sweet dance floor moves.
And my unique dance style as Baby Gmofs dance style.
And that's... That's it.
- Do I keep talking during this pan'? -(MAN COUGHS)
(LAUGHING) I don't know. We gotta...
Jamie Christopher should be brought up. My first AD, man.
Because Jamie Christopher is just such a wonderful,
wonderful, truly talented man, to help put this whole thing together.
I think it's so fair... So unfair
that an assistant director is at the end of the film, um,
because they do such great work,
and they work as hard as anyone else on a movie set, uh,
and he just... He really helped put this movie together.
I also gotta...
Um, also, Ben Davis, the cinematographer.
His work should be pointed out,
because he was such an important pan of making this movie.
Stef and Susan, our visual effects supervisor
and visual effects producer.
They were so important in creating this movie.
Um, there are a billion names.
I actually, uh, saw the movie in a theater a little while ago
and was just surprised by how many people...
Because most of these people I honestly don't.“ I don't know.
Um, but they were all working for somebody
who was working with me, and...
There we go, Brittany Smith fight there, that was my set PA.
Brittany's job was to follow me around, no matter where t went, uh, so...
She was very good at it. I didn't even realize she was doing it
for the first part of the movie, but after a while I got wise
and Pd be m the bathroom and find out that Brittany was waiting outside.
Simon Hayes is somebody I want to bring up,
because he was the sound man on set.
He did an amazing jot;.
And of course, Alex Byme, who did the costumes in the movie,
is somebody who I'd like to point out because she does such great work.
Sarah Finn, our casting director,
and Reg, our UK casting director, did great work.
Sarah Finn, when she first brought to me Chris Pratt,
I thought it was a terrible idea,
because I thought of him as the chubby guy on Parks Am Rec.
And she was the one that kept pushing and pushing and pushing
until I would see Chris Praii audition.
And when I saw him audition, I knew within 20 seconds he was the guy,
so Sarah deserves a lot of attention.
David White, who did the prosthetic effects, um, did such marvelous work.
My assistant, Simon, is supposed to be writing down names
of people that I'm forgetting, but he's not doing a very good job.
He's just kind of looking at the credits like a lunatic, staring.
Being a maniac.
Who else did I forget, Simon'?
(LAUGHING) That's every...
Simon says that's everybody that matters.
There we go!
Bill Mantle. Keith Giffen, a"... Uh...
Jim Stafiin.
Al! these guys, the original guys
who created these characters for the comics.
Of course, Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett,
who created the 2008 run of Guardians of the Galaxy.
They ave the guys who really, sort of, laid the...
They planted the seeds of this movie, so I'm so grateful to them.
Um...
So many people. All these names of people
that do spend countless hours
doing little tiny things in the movie,
and I'm so incredibly grateful to all of the people
that put their time into this movie,
and put their hearts into the movie, and...
The people who worked on set.
And, of course, the actors.
Look at that Look at all those people.
Pretty amazing. Really.
It really takes more than a village, I think.
ll takes a mega-city to create a movie like this.
Well, I guess that's about it for me and this director's commentary,
uh, so I want to thank all of you guys for
either buying or stealing
or borrowing this DVD or Blu4ay
or whatever format you're listening to this.
Hello, people from the future that are listening to this on your brain implant.
I hope you guys are enjoying this director's commentary,
which I think will last for hundreds and thousands of years.
(GUNN LAUGHING)
But realty, thank you guys for watching the movie.
The interaction with the fans of {his film
all along the way has been such a wonderful experience for me.
This movie has touched people's hearts all over the world.
And, you know, every night before I went to bed I would think of that
while t was making this film.
Hoping that this movie could touch people,
maybe when they walked into the theater,
they'd like the person sitting next to them
a little bit more when they walked out of the theater.
Skywalker Sound.
Boy, Simon should have written them down.
But he didn't, because he's an idiot.
He's an idiot.
And Skywalker Sound did a marvelous job on this movie.
And there's our great soundtrack by all of our great, uh,
great pop artists of the 1970s.
Wow. I got an email from Eric Carmen, the other day, and the Raspberries.
So...
Thanks to Dave Jordan for being the music supervisor
who put all those songs together
and got us every single song I asked for.
All those songs were in the screenplay.
And every single song I asked for, uh, Dave Jordan got for me.
Which I appreciate.
He did a good job. And I! wasn't that crazy.
People keep thinking it's gonna be crazy, crazy expensive.
And, of course, it's expensive for a low-budget film,
but, you know, it wasn't too bad.
So thanks to all those artists far letting us use their songs,
and I hope they are reaping the rewards
of having that soundtrack at number one.
There's Cosmo the Dog in our tag scene
and Benicio Del Tom who did not know,
when he was shooting this scene,
mat he was going to look over and see Howard the Duck.
And that's Seth Green as Howard the Duck.
My good, good friend, Seth Green, who We known for many, many years.
And he came in and did us a favor as Howard the Duck.
And that doesn't mean that there's gonna be a Howard the Duck movie.
Although I know you're hopeful. Love you all.