PEYTON REED: This is a shrinking movie at its core.
And there's a long history of cinematic shrinking movies.
From The Incredible Shrinking Man, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,
but this had to be 2015's version of a shrinking movie.
Visually, there are things in this movie you've never seen before.
I mean, there's some of the technology,
and what they're doing has never been done before.
REED: The bar is very, very high, in terms of technology.
It's gotta look photorealistic.
We have to believe that he is shrinking.
And you just shrunk down. And...
How'd you do that, bro?
Look at your shoulder.
Ahhh!
Get off! Get off!
These films have two or three different crews going on.
You have your main unit shooting your actors.
You have your second unit doing some of the action sequences.
You have your green screen unit.
And then finally you have your macro unit
doing everything from the ant's point of view.
And it's amazing.
We used a combination of motion-picture macro photography,
still macro photography,
motion capture with the actors, motion capture with the stunt people.
And I think that's the big technological revelation of the movie.
We spent weeks and weeks filming the tiniest details within bank vaults,
within ATM machines, the tile work of bathrooms,
the tiniest of pipes,
the areas between the first floor and second floor between buildings.
We had these cameras that were full 4K digital cameras,
but had lenses this big
that could scope through and capture these things.
For every set we'd have,
we would build these miniature sets, these macro sets.
If you are down small with Ant-Man,
and he's running across the floor or running through a carpet,
I really wanted to feel those textures and make it really tactile.
To be able to have a starting point
that you go from a real object.
That to us saves hundreds of hours in trying to match.
REED: And using the technology the way we do,
we have the resources to make all those surfaces real,
but we can still move our camera around as much as possible.
It feels like a very interactive real space because it is one.
What we ran into were a lot of the same issues
that the comic book artists who drew Ant-Man back in the day had.
Having him small in the frame is always really exhilarating.
Having these points of reference for size in every frame
is really, really important.
We were constantly challenging ourselves about
"Does he seem small in that?"
"Does he seem small enough in that?" "Are we buying that?"
But part of it is
tricking the viewers' minds when they're watching it
and having all these things like...
Dust motes became our thing.
When he's down small, there's dust everywhere.
But when you're small, it's like there's these dust particles floating around.
What's great about the climax of the film is,
even though it starts in these epic landscapes,
as the intensity of the climax increases,
we end up in his daughter's bedroom.
So the most intense part of the battle
between Scott Lang as Ant-Man and Yellowjacket
takes place among toy trains and dollhouses
and these tiny toy environments
that just we blow up to epic proportions.
Any location, the inside of a briefcase,
the play set in a little girl's bedroom,
becomes an epic set for an action battle.
You know, it'd be much easier to hit you if you were bigger.
Yeah, great. Cut it.
There were all of these technical considerations
that we were constantly monitoring throughout.
It was originally designed to be 2.40 widescreen.
And the more we started looking at stuff,
I started thinking, "This feels like a 1.85 movie."
And there was discussion because it's like,
"Man, 2.40 is the epic aspect ratio."
And I said, "Well, you know, Joss' first Avengers is 1.85.
"And that's a pretty epic movie."
And it just made sense
because the actor shrinking is really, essentially a vertical act.
And when you're small,
the world you leave behind is really above you and around you.
So, we switched to 1.85, and...
I'm glad that we did because the visual effects stuff is just...
It's so much more compelling.
WINDERBAUM: We did a lot of research
of macro photography of ants
that has existed.
What happens when you're down at the level with these animals
is that they start feeling like they have personality.
It's very strange.
So, it was important to us to keep the designs photorealistic.
But we wanted to make sure
that their mannerisms and the way they acted
became more evident when you were down at their level.
A lot of these ants have never been seen
to this kind of degree or level of detail.
So we went through a lot of versions
in trying to figure out, "Okay, which one is the best?"
One thing that helped is that we thought of each breed of ant
as a different type of animal.
So you'd have the bullet ants, which are the biggest brutes of the lot,
and they're like the size of elephants.
They're these giant beasts that you can't hope to really control.
Then you've got the flying carpenter ants that feel like horses.
Regular carpenter ants that feel like giant dogs.
The fire ants, who are like engineers of the group.
They took on a personality more animalistic,
and they felt less like creepy crawlers
and more like actual living, breathing pets.
Good boy.
It was 1987.
Separatists had hijacked a Soviet missile silo in Kursk
and launched an ICBM at the United States.
She turned off her regulator
and went subatomic
to deactivate the bomb.
And she was gone.
The way the suit is designed, there's something called a regulator.
And the regulator makes sure you don't shrink
smaller than a pinky finger nail,
the approximate size of Ant-Man.
But if you took that off,
what would happen at the subatomic world, the quantum realm?
Is there a way that, we've seen shrinking throughout the movie,
and in the third act, can we take it up a whole other level?
We really liked that idea.
The quantum realm is every mind trip that anyone has ever taken and more.
It was a great discovery process for us to find that.
We've talked to physicists and they've told us about
when you get smaller than an atom,
you go into the nucleus and you get smaller than a quark,
suddenly, reality itself starts to shift.
It becomes a realm of probabilities
where an electron could be in point A or point B
or in both places simultaneously.
The quantum realm to me was important
as a moment of self-sacrifice for Scott Lang,
but also that it tapped into that kind of psychedelic aspect of Marvel
in the comics,
and whether it was outer space or inner space,
this sort of cosmic soup of it all.
I wanted to stake a little bit of a claim in that world, too, for Ant-Man,
and go into this subatomic realm.
What would that look like, and how do you get out,
and that was a really fun thing to be able to explore.
FEIGE: We've made a lot of movies at this point.
A lot of heroes have inhabited the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So it really felt like it was time to find a way to do something different.
It's different from just about every film that we had done,
and yet, I think it holds a little bit of that essence
of that Cinematic Universe.
As filmmakers, sequences where you'll size and scale
and see the world from new perspectives
and hopefully put something on the screen
that audiences haven't seen before
excites us as much as anything.