Hello, I'm Peyton Reed, director of Ant-Man and The Wasp.
I'll start by talking about this prologue we shot.
That's an actual shot
we originally shot for the first Ant-Man
of our Hank Pym location in San Francisco.
We decided we wanted to start this movie with a prologue that showed
Janet Van Dyne and Hank Pym in the '80s heyday.
Of course, that's the great Michelle Pfeiffer there.
And we have had our friends at Lola, the visual effects company
who really specializes in this "youngification."
We really felt it was important, emotionally, to show the audience
Hank and Janet in their prime, the original Ant-Man and the Wasp.
And also, to witness
the fateful evening where they are called into action
and they have their last moment together, Hope and Janet,
of course, not knowing it's the last time
they're going to see each other.
But it was important to set up this prologue
where we're emotionally connected
to the present-day mission to save Janet Van Dyne.
And here, now, we're witnessing
a piece of the flashback from the original movie
but from a different point of view.
We sort of see the moments before
and now we re-experience
this missile flashback from the first movie.
But we're privy to new information and really experiencing it
from a more emotional point of view.
This is a combination
of some visual effects stuff from the first movie
and some new shots that we did.
It's interesting, in the first movie
we see the original Wasp,
and we sort of just see her eyes through the mask
long before we cast Michelle Pfeiffer, obviously, in the second movie.
But I remember talking to Casting and to Visual Effects and saying,
"Well, her eyes, you know, that we see through the mask,
"she should look like Michelle Pfeiffer."
Michelle was always my dream casting for that role
and that was before we even knew that we would be making a second movie.
So, fortunately for us,
we went out to Michelle
when the time came for the second movie, and she said yes.
It was important also to set up the quantum realm.
What had happened to Janet in the quantum realm,
that she was lost,
and then, of course, reminding the audience
of the events of the first movie
where Scott Lang went in and was able to get out.
And, again, it was important to really have
an emotional underpinning for this mission,
particularly between Hank and Hope,
who are really joined at the hip in this movie
in a very different way than they were in the first movie.
They're working together as this team
of father-daughter, super-scientist, superheroes.
And we really wanted to see the emotional bond
and the moment that Hank talks to Hope
and says, "You know, now that Scott's made it out,
"I think it might be possible
"for us to build this tunnel and possibly get your mom back."
It struck us all from the very beginning as we were formulating the story
and the spine of this movie is obviously about Scott and Hope's partnership.
Are they gonna be able to be a successful partnership
both professionally and personally?
And in doing that, we really, really
were trying to figure out a way
to create an arc for that thing,
and we came up with the idea
that they were gonna be estranged at the beginning.
But this prologue was important
to really sort of reacquaint the audience
with Hank and Hope,
and also that it's gonna be a very different dynamic
between them in this movie.
They're not at odds as they were for the bulk of the first movie.
They're absolutely a team.
This, of course, is the Marvel Studios logo.
Special edition. 10th anniversary.
Ant-Man and The Wasp is the 20th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The original Ant-Man was the 12th movie.
They're making three movies a year now
and, again, these are all very big, colossal, visually-dense movies.
And there it is.
Michael Giacchino's score
and a red ten-year logo there.
Now, present day.
We knew we wanted to start this movie where Scott Lang was on house arrest.
We had to deal not only with the events of Ant-Man One
but also with Captain America: Civil War.
So this movie, in some ways, is a sequel to both those movies.
The events of Civil War were crucial to us,
because it set up a couple of things.
It set up the fact that Scott was in violation of the Sokovia Accords
and he'd have to do house arrest.
But it also set up emotionally.
You know, when I first saw the early cut of Civil War,
my first thought was, like, "Ugh, Hank Pym is gonna be pissed off
"and Hope Van Dyne is gonna feel betrayed."
And that gave us a great dramatic starting point
to start the characters where they're estranged.
It also struck us...
We liked the idea that Scott is continuing his quest
to be a good father to his daughter.
So, what he's done here, he's on house arrest
and he goes to these great lengths to keep her entertained
and we came up with this idea of doing a very lo-fi, tactile adventure
that he takes her on at the beginning.
Where she's been asking, "What's it like to shrink? What's it like?"
And he decides, "Well, I'm gonna show you.
"I can't shrink you down for real, that would be irresponsible,
"and by the way, I'm no longer Ant-Man,
"but I'm gonna build this thing
"and kinda give you an idea of what it's like."
And it sets up a couple of things for us.
It sets up the idea that maybe Scott misses being Ant-Man
and also that Cassie is very curious about it.
And one of the really fun things about this movie to me is
this dynamic between Scott and Cassie.
Abby Ryder Fortson, who plays Cassie,
of course, is three years older in this movie than in the original.
It's really fun to see her grow up before your eyes in these two movies
and she's such a sharp, focused, young actor.
And the stuff between the two of them,
I think, is really my favorite in the movie.
It really is the emotional core of the movie.
It was important to also continue this thematic
of fathers and daughters that we had begun in the first one.
I mean, 'cause it's a lot of security cameras.
I know what he needs. Who's the security expert in our business?
You are, but I'm running the company, right?
REED: Obviously, here's Michael Peña as Luis.
We're telling the story that Scott and Luis are roommates now.
And also, it was important as we figured out how to progress the movie.
I had never directed a sequel before, it must be said.
And one of the things I like in sequels
is when at the beginning of the movie you're not picking up those characters
just from where they ended up in the first movie.
You're progressing them
and the audience has to play a little bit of catch up
as to what's going on.
So we decided in this movie,
Scott and his friends are not just ex-cons
who are trying to avoid going back to a life of crime,
now they have their own business.
They're small business owners
and the success or failure of that business
becomes a crucial part of the story.
Here, of course, Scott has gone to really elaborate lengths
to create a flying ant scenario for Cassie
that goes all through the apartment and out the backyard.
This was shot in San Francisco
and a little bit in Atlanta to look like San Francisco.
Hey, I'm headed to the office, Scotty.
REED: So, one of the things I really like about the Ant-Man movies
and their place in the MCU, is that we can create a movie
where there are different levels and different acts of heroism.
It's not just fighting villains and all that stuff,
it's these smaller moments of heroism.
About a guy really trying to be a great father,
and also that we give equal dramatic weight
to whether their company, X-Con, succeeds or fails.
Sorry, Scott, but rules are rules.
REED: Here, of course, is Randall Park who plays Agent James Woo. Jimmy Woo.
A character from the comics, who we reinvented for the tone of our movie.
Randall is someone that I had worked with briefly in television,
and he's gone on to do so many different amazing roles in film and television.
He's always funny
and he's very different kinds of funny in different movies,
and I was thrilled when he said yes to this role.
It was important to create a character
who worked as the enforcer of Scott having to stay on house arrest.
You have to buy that he's good at his job
and he's a formidable foil for Scott.
But also someone who is a very straight-laced character,
and maybe even wants to be friends with Scott Lang. (CHUCKLES)
Randall is someone who can absolutely go toe-to-toe
with Paul Rudd in terms of improv.
This conceit, also,
we knew we were gonna have to explain to an audience
who maybe hadn't seen the first Ant-Man
or hadn't seen Captain America: Civil War
and get them up to speed on what was going on,
the rules of the Sokovia Accords and house arrest.
This struck us as very funny.
A guy who's explaining it to a kid
and has no idea how to relate to kids
and just goes on this long-winded rant
of all the particulars of the Sokovia Accord.
Wow. You're really great with kids.
Thanks. I'm also a youth pastor.
REED: It was also important to set up that it wasn't only Scott
that had gotten in trouble.
That Scott getting caught in Civil War
suddenly put Hank Pym and Hope Van Dyne and their technology on the map.
So now, they've had to go underground and are on the run from the FBI,
and, of course, that's what Agent Woo is asking about here.
This apartment set is based on an actual apartment in San Francisco
that we shot our exteriors in San Francisco
and then rebuilt our movie's version of the apartment
on stage at Pinewood in Atlanta.
And out the window, we shot giant photographic translights
which worked out well,
so there's no green screen out those windows.
It's all practical stuff there.
Here, of course, Judy Greer and Bobby Cannavale.
Reprising their roles from the first movie as Scott's ex-wife, Maggie,
and her husband, Paxton.
In talking about how we were gonna progress these characters,
in the first movie, Scott Lang makes a promise to his wife
that he's gonna get an apartment and get a job
and do everything it takes to be in Cassie's life.
So we really wanted to forward that here,
and we liked the idea that both Paxton and Maggie
are extremely supportive of Scott Lang
and his attempts to stay clean and stay straight.
We also liked the idea of, coming in,
Scott has three days left on this two-year house arrest,
and we really loved the idea that...
We looked at movies like Midnight Run and After Hours
and these things that had these strong ticking clocks,
what we kind of called a "one crazy night movie."
And it struck us tonally that,
that was something that would work for this movie.
Now, of course, we cue, Come On, Get Happy!
The Partridge Family theme, by the Partridge Family.
Something I loved as a kid
and it just struck us as the right tone for this movie.
(UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING)
Snap your fingers. That gets them to look over there.
REED: We also established many things here on house arrest.
He goofs around. He's studying online close-up magic.
Paul Rudd doing karaoke.
That seemed like a no-brainer to all of us.
Absolutely his sweet spot.
But this was also sort of like showing how it's, "Oh, this is gonna be easy.
"Three more days. I'm gonna do these ridiculous things around the house
"and I'm also gonna work on this
"Karapetyan Apartment deal that we're working on."
We're sort of setting the seeds here
for what's gonna be going on with Luis, and Kurt and Dave and Scott,
and their new company.
Here, of course, is the contractually obligated shirtless hero shot.
Any actor who signs on for a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie
has to be in shape and do a shirtless scene.
(SOFTLY) That's not true. None of that's true.
So here, now, we revisit the quantum realm.
Scott is having this thing that at the time we don't quite know what it is.
Is it a dream? Is it a vision?
But it's beginning...
It's the beginning of us starting to visualize
this notion of quantum entanglement.
It struck us, as we were formulating the story,
that we knew that this was gonna be centered around
the potential rescue of Janet Van Dyne from the quantum realm.
Now that Scott got out successfully in the first movie,
Hank Pym and Hope Van Dyne's wheels have started turning.
"Is it possible? Could she be down there?"
They've built this tunnel and they don't know her location.
They don't have proof positive she's alive,
but they're not gonna give up in their quest.
And now, here's this wrinkle.
Scott Lang has this vision which he's confused by.
And this is really where we start to thread in the idea
that they're estranged and he's really not in their lives.
And the circumstances of this mission bring them together again.
That seemed like a strong way to deal with
both the Scott-Hope relationship in the movie
and also the journey.
We refer to this throughout the writing process
as the psychic breadcrumb,
that, in the first movie, we actually planted the seeds,
which, if you go back and watch the DVD or Blu-Ray of Ant-Man,
the original Ant-Man,
when Scott is down in the quantum realm, you can briefly see a reflection
in the Ant-Man helmet of something
that looks like an angel or perhaps the Wasp.
And we set the seeds that at some point, he had an encounter,
which, clearly, he doesn't remember.
But the idea that when he was down there, they had some sort of contact,
and she planted some information in his head.
And this was us dramatizing quantum entanglement.
So, essentially, Scott becomes a crucial piece of the puzzle
that Hank and Hope need if they're gonna pull off this rescue.
Here is a little clip from Animal House.
As we were talking about the quantum realm
and the idea that there could be
worlds upon worlds down there in the subatomic realm,
I remembered that scene from Animal House
where they're talking about, you know, (CHUCKLING)
"entire universe could exist in my fingernail."
So, we were able to license that clip from Universal
and just have it as a little Easter egg in the background.
Here, we've just seen, rather obliquely,
the first appearance of Wasp in the movie.
She tranquilize-darts Scott Lang in the neck and kidnaps him here.
We loved the idea that he is brought into this mission against his will
and playing with this kind of crime genre thing that we...
In formulating the story, we talked a lot about Elmore Leonard novels.
And creating a movie where, yes, there is a main antagonist,
but there's also lots of other-level antagonists and things,
sort of like an Elmore Leonard novel.
And this is our nod to The Big Lebowski.
Scott Lang in a bathrobe passively being yanked into this adventure.
Here, of course, we reveal that they're shrunken the whole time.
The giant pigeons.
I should mention here Steph Ceretti, our visual effects supervisor.
There he is, opening a door in the background.
That's actual Steph Ceretti.
That's his Hitchcock cameo in the movie.
Steph did visual effects
for the first Guardians of the Galaxy and for Doctor Strange
and just knocked it out of the park for us in Ant-Man and The Wasp.
Doing all sorts of things, creating giant ants, small ants,
the quantum realm, shrinking and growing.
We decided we really wanted to go nuts with the Pym Particle in this movie.
And not just confine it to shrinking and growing Scott and Hope,
but also vehicles and buildings and really just go nuts with the conceit.
So, here, when we talked about the idea of Hope kidnapping Scott,
it made sense to us to have them in the car
and then slowly reveal, "Oh, they're shrunken down
"and she's driving this miniature car through the city."
My biggest mandate, I think,
about the visual effects in this movie is photorealism.
Again, same thing in the first movie.
Which is, we're not in outer space, we're not on Asgard,
we're in the real world.
We're in the city of San Francisco
and it's the mundane world we all know and take for granted,
so that when there is shrinking and growing activity going on,
it has to look as photorealistic as possible.
It has to feel like if you're in a coffee shop in San Francisco
and you look out the window,
and there's Giant-Man trying to stop a flatbed truck,
what would that actually look like?
So, that was the mandate, really, photorealism.
And then when we get to the quantum realm later,
I'll discuss how that ties in to that as well.
This we shot in Oakland.
It's a combination of stage and Oakland and creating this,
what was supposed to look like a rundown,
really, kind of personality-less office building.
And the idea that maybe, having gone underground,
that Hank and Hope have hit on hard times,
and Scott is just piecing things together.
Scott Lang, of course,
in addition to being the ultimate everyman in the MCU,
he's really the audience's eyes and ears throughout this adventure.
He's always asking the questions that the audience would ask
and he's maybe a half-step behind here at the beginning.
But now, we see they're not, in fact, living in a rundown building.
They have created this entirely new laboratory
in which Hope and Hank are working on this amazing quantum tunnel.
The quantum tunnel,
I should do a shout-out here to Shepherd Frankel, our production designer.
This is the largest physical set that's ever been built for a Marvel movie.
It's a little counterintuitive that Ant-Man and The Wasp
has the largest physical set.
The inspiration for the quantum tunnel,
one of the things I mentioned to Shepherd early on
was the old Irwin Allen TV series, The Time Tunnel.
I loved it as a kid, watching it in reruns.
And so that was really the initial inspiration
for this design of the quantum tunnel.
Here, Hank and Scott are reunited for the first time.
Doesn't go very well, and that was something when we landed on
the idea that these characters would be estranged at the beginning,
that really felt strong to us
in terms of the overall arc of the relationship
and giving them something to play.
- Can we start? - HOPE: Yeah.
So, while you were relaxing at home...
we were building this.
It's a tunnel. To the quantum realm.
To my mom.
REED: I also am going to talk a lot about Evangeline Lilly
and Hope Van Dyne.
One of the big thrills of doing this movie in the first place
and it being called Ant-Man and The Wasp
was to finally give her her day in the sun.
We'd obviously really told her origin in the first movie,
that she's extremely powerful and smart and capable,
a super-scientist, the daughter of two superheroes.
And that she's sidelined in the first movie
because her dad is being overly protective
and doesn't want her to meet the same fate as her mom did.
But, obviously, she's the person who trains Scott Lang
to be Ant-Man in the first movie.
So, when we knew we were gonna be making this movie,
there was a huge responsibility I felt to, like,
"Okay, this is Wasp's coming-out party,"
and working closely with Evangeline from the very beginning
about creating a dimensionalized character for Hope.
And how we were gonna progress that character
to make her a little different from the Hope of the first movie.
She and her father have reconciled
and the weight of that has really been lifted from her
and, how does that affect her as a character?
I did, I destroyed it, I swear.
I can't believe you destroyed my suit!
REED: So again, working on this set was really fun
because it was a massive, massive set down at Pinewood in Atlanta
that we could move around in and choreograph and block all these scenes
and move through these sets.
The quantum tunnel was a physical thing,
this quantum array they've just been up talking on,
which is the location device for the quantum realm,
that was a gigantic set that Shepherd built.
It's really fun to look all throughout the set for visual cues.
There are things like these plastic things
you use to tie together loaves of bread,
and there are light bulbs, and there are volume knobs from speakers,
and clothespins, and all these things that are found objects
that he's grown or shrunken to help construct the lab.
You'll see pieces of Erector Sets, and things all throughout.
And, of course,
as they pass by a window, you see giant Duracell batteries
that are, at least in part, helping power the tunnel.
We liked the idea of keeping the audience off balance
about when they were small or when they were large.
It's where I hid every time that we played.
REED: Here, of course, he's dropped some hints about this vision that he had
and they start to recognize the details of this mission.
That, yes, in fact, this seems to be Janet Van Dyne
trying to communicate through Scott Lang, using him as a vessel.
So now, we really start the forward motion of our story here.
They have the proof that they need in their minds
that, "Yes, she's down there."
They need Scott, reluctantly, they need Scott
because he's got this information in his head,
and of course, Scott just wants to be in his apartment
living out his last three days of his house arrest.
So, our characters are in conflict from the beginning here.
And now, we just start to go nuts with the shrinking and growing.
We introduce the Hot Wheels Rally case.
A toy, which, by the way, I had as a kid and used all the time,
and that was really the genesis of that idea,
was, well, "If they're underground..."
In most movies, when you're trying to keep ahead of the law,
you switch cars or license plates to throw off the FBI.
And here, it occurred to us, that,
"Well, he could just shrink the cars down,
"and put them in a Hot Wheels Rally case
"and switch cars and grow another one."
That seemed like a really fun idea.
Then we introduce, of course, the shrunken lab.
This giant lab that he's constructed and shrinks down
and it's like a roller case that you'd take through an airport.
Again, just sort of going nuts
with all the shrinking and growing technology.
Here, as they leave the site of the shrunken lab,
we also introduce our chief antagonist, Ghost.
One of the things I really wanted to do in Ant-Man and The Wasp
was get out into the city of San Francisco more.
To really open up the movie
and have the city be a character in the movie.
And to also design action sequences that were very specific to the city,
to the topography, and to the landmarks in the city themselves,
which you'll see later on.
There, we just set up the Altoid gag which will pay off later on.
And now, we introduce Sonny Burch,
a character also from the comics,
but who is in this movie inhabited by the amazing Walton Goggins.
Walton is somebody that I have loved
ever since I saw him in The Apostle, the Robert Duvall movie.
I remember seeing him in that years ago and thinking like,
"Okay, that guy. Is that guy even an actor? He seems like a real guy."
I'm from the South. Walton's from the South.
He felt authentically Southern to me.
He's gone on to make an incredible career for himself
and I was thrilled we got him in this movie.
Sonny Burch is a...
He's the guy who is getting them
these super-specific components they need to build the tunnel.
They've had to go underground, and get them through the black market
because, of course, Hank and Hope are wanted at this point.
And they've been lying to him about their identity.
And, of course, he's on to them here so the stakes are increased.
We liked the idea of this character who was kind of a wannabe.
He's got his hands in all these different criminal enterprises.
He runs this restaurant, he procures this black market technology.
But he really wants to move up to the next level
and rub shoulders with superheroes
and powerful people like Tony Stark or Hank Pym.
So, he becomes a real fly in the ointment.
And, again, this is in keeping with the Elmore Leonard-esque vibe.
As I said, Midnight Run was a big influence to us
where, in that movie, you have a very simple goal.
Robert De Niro's gotta bring Charles Grodin in and collect the bounty.
But there are rival bounty hunters, and there's the FBI agent
and all this double-crossing
and all these complications that come between them,
and that seemed like a great tone for us.
The first movie, of course, tonally, was a heist movie.
We wanted to stay in the crime genre,
but kind of do a bit of a different thing.
And we liked the idea of this shrunken lab being almost this MacGuffin
that it falls into the different hands,
and there's Sonny Burch, and of course there's Ava Starr/Ghost
who we're about to see in a few minutes.
...of arranging some buyers for your lab.
Starting bid...
one billion dollars.
REED: There was a huge onus on this scene for me at the beginning
in designing the first time the audience is introduced to Wasp.
And it felt to us like we wanted to see Hope Van Dyne in action.
We wanted to see what this movie's Hope Van Dyne was.
The fact that she's very capable, and she's tough,
and she's going there to make a very aboveboard deal.
They're trying to get this part. She's upheld her end of the deal.
She's brought the money, and the transaction goes south.
He doesn't give her the component, and he keeps the money.
And it was important that she
do everything in her power to not have to put on the Wasp suit
and to just deal with this as aboveboard as possible.
But, of course, he doesn't allow that,
and what that allows us, the storytellers, to do
is to introduce Wasp, and watch her kick ass.
We chose this location.
This giant hotel-like restaurant in downtown San Francisco
which is actually in downtown Atlanta,
but it gave us the real estate to create this thing
where we could choreograph this ongoing fight scene
in the restaurant that spills into the kitchen,
and very quickly demonstrate how powerful she is as a hero.
Hold on, you gave her wings?
REED: It also doesn't hurt to have Scott Lang comment
and be a little resentful of the fact that,
clearly, Hank has been spending more time developing the Wasp suit
and the quantum tunnel,
and maybe the Ant-Man suit has been left behind as an afterthought.
Which we also have fun with
with this work-in-progress Ant-Man suit
that Scott is forced to wear in the movie
which still has some bugs to be worked out of it.
Not my turn-of-the-century chandelier!
REED: It was fun to storyboard and work with our previs team
and the people at Third Floor
to really, really plan and map out these action sequences in great detail.
It was also important to really design these things
where they're fun action sequences.
There is a comedic vibe to most of these action sequences,
which, I think, is inherent to the Ant-Man movies anyway.
But the idea of, like, "Okay, she's gonna be fighting in a kitchen
"and shrinking and growing
"and what sort of obstacles could we use?
"Knives and meat tenderizers, and salt shakers and all
"and just having fun with all the things you'd find in a kitchen."
That was another thing to me, was, in designing all the action sequences
is that, again, they come from character, like character comedy.
And really, with both Wasp and Ant-Man and Giant-Man,
that they should feel almost Buster Keaton-esque
Right? Where it really is like how they would approach silent movies.
You'd have gag writers coming up with these various gags,
and how to make it escalate and everything.
So this was... The goal of this was just to announce,
"Okay, Wasp has arrived
"and she has been waiting for this and earned this for so long,
"and now she has it, and she's not wasting time.
"She's quick, she's decisive, she's smart,
"and she's ready to kick ass."
It was a pleasure doing business with you, Sonny.
REED: Here we have the introduction of our main antagonist,
which comes as a surprise to both Hope and Sonny Burch in this scene.
And there she is. Ghost.
A character who was a villain in the Marvel comics
and really not an Ant-Man villain, actually an Iron Man villain.
When we were figuring out
who the main antagonist in this movie was gonna be,
we looked through these gigantic Marvel encyclopedias
that have every hero, every villain, every ancillary character.
I love the design of Ghost.
Just the visual look of Ghost in the comics.
That seemed really striking to me, and also the power set.
In the first movie, we'd done a villain, Yellowjacket,
who had similar powers, right, who could shrink and grow like Ant-Man,
which was great for that movie,
but we wanted to do something different in this movie.
So, this idea of phasing
seemed like there was something there
that could seem formidable for this partnership
of Ant-Man and Wasp to go up against,
and different than what we did in the first movie.
So what we did... In the comics, Ghost is a man,
and he's a computer hacker, and sort of an anti-corporate vigilante.
We basically just took the basic idea of that character
and adapted Ghost to our story.
And part of that was doing a gender swap,
and it just made sense for our movie
where we have this strong thematic of fathers and daughters, you know,
whether it's Hank and Hope, or Scott and Cassie.
In this movie,
even though Bill Foster and Ava Starr are not father and daughter,
there is this figurative father-daughter relationship there.
So it felt really smart to do the gender swap for that reason.
It just felt it fit in with the thematic of our movie.
We also like the idea that, for Hope particularly,
going up against a female villain seemed fun.
- Are you okay? - No!
He got the lab.
No.
Come on!
REED: So then, we set about designing the movie's look of the suit.
Andy Park is our head of visual development on this movie,
and who did so much great work on the movie.
I really do credit him with Ghost and the look of Ghost.
The suit is incredible,
and, of course, Hannah John-Kamen, who plays Ava Starr/Ghost, in this movie,
knocked it out of the park as well. We'll talk about that in a bit.
So really, this movie, we really wanted to have
a lot more forward momentum than the first movie.
I was very aware in the first movie,
we spent a lot of time in Hank Pym's house
and a lot of time in Pym Technologies in the first movie.
And I really wanted to get out and about in the city
and have a lot of forward momentum to this movie.
Not me.
REED: Here, of course, we see Luis, and Kurt and Dave.
And now, this is their new company, X-Con.
What better job for ex-cons to do than to start a security company?
And they're working on this big contract
to get the Karapetyan Apartments, which becomes a big part of the story.
But here, Hank, Hope, and Scott go there
because they have to figure out a place to lay low
where they're not gonna get caught.
And it gives us an opportunity to revisit the dynamics of the guys here.
These guys have been working in their office
in a kind of seedy part of town in San Francisco.
Scott, of course, has been on house arrest.
He's been working for the company from home,
but this is the first time he's actually been in the office,
and, of course, seeing the card table
(CHUCKLES) that Luis has picked out for him for his desk.
It's always fun to have these guys in that dynamic.
I think it's a really essential part of the Ant-Man movies.
And also in keeping with our theme of family,
that there is this, sort of... In the first movie,
we set up Luis as almost this patriarch of the ex-cons.
He'd make them waffles in the morning,
and here he's... He's running the company,
and the idea that this is Scott's family as well.
There's a bond between these guys
because they've been through so much together.
And there was something that really felt right
about furthering it in this way in this movie.
Dr. Pym, you're the smartest genius I know.
REED: Always fun to put Michael Douglas up against Michael Peña here.
This genius scientist having to deal with these guys,
and there's a genuine affection between those characters,
but obviously, there's a big mission at hand here.
And it remains to be seen how Luis and Kurt and David
are gonna figure out, or figure into, the adventure.
Can we modify a quantum spectrometer and track it?
REED: Now, we're also laying the groundwork here
to introduce another character that I loved
from the Marvel comics, Bill Foster.
Bill Foster was,
I believe, introduced in some of the early Avengers issues,
and he worked alongside Hank Pym
doing the shrinking, but mostly the growing technology.
He went on to have his own comic in the '70s,
which, of course, I had every issue of, Black Goliath.
(CHUCKLES) And I liked the idea of giving Hank Pym a foil in this movie.
Another super-scientist
that, when they're together, they're both alpha males
and think they're the smartest guy in the room.
And when we got Laurence Fishburne for that role, it thrilled me.
More on that later. Here is Hannah John-Kamen.
The first time we see her out of her Ghost helmet here.
We liked the idea of creating this...
I refer to her as an antagonist more than I do a villain.
But a character who is incredibly powerful
and has these powers that are tied in to the quantum research
and what Hank and Hope are doing in this movie.
But also that she views, and we treat, her powers more as an affliction.
So this is setting up this chamber that she has to go into
to be bombarded by this quantum energy.
Her dilemma in this movie is that it is literally an existential crisis.
She is phasing and can't control the phasing,
and she's about to phase out and disappear.
And it puts her on a collision course with our heroes
because she has figured out
she needs that tunnel to help save her life.
This was shot actually on the Berkeley campus.
The one shot we shot actually at Berkeley,
which was important, because I wanted it all
to tie in to the city of San Francisco.
Here, we introduce the great Laurence Fishburne as Bill Foster.
I first met with Fish at the offices of Marvel Comics.
The two of us sat in there, and just talked about
who this movie's version of that character was gonna be,
how I wanted it to differ from the versions in the comics,
and how he was gonna be a major foil to Hank Pym.
These two guys clearly have something in their past,
and also continuing this thematic
that Hank Pym, who, of course, is the mentor figure in these movies,
but he's also a bit of an unreliable mentor.
He's got some anger issues,
and we like to continue in this thematic
that he doesn't always play well with others.
And in this particular movie,
that idea of him not playing well with others
really jumps up and bites him in the ass.
The idea that this thematic of the sins of the father
come back to revisit the daughter in this case.
BILL: It's incredible. You're linked to Janet.
It's quantum entanglement between the quantum states
of Posner molecules in your brains.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
Do you guys just put the word "quantum" in front of everything?
REED: When we were constructing the origin for Ghost,
we liked the idea that it was tied in to Hank Pym's story.
That there was a personal vendetta there from Ghost.
She really holds Hank Pym accountable for her condition
even though that's not entirely the case.
This scene here was really a great opportunity
to pit these two together
and start to show a bit of the backstory.
For Bill Foster, I needed someone like Laurence Fishburne
who really has this gravitas and can hold his own against Michael Douglas.
In first meeting with Fish, I didn't realize he was such a comics nerd.
He's incredibly well-versed on Marvel comics, as well as DC,
and also, he'd be around the set
reading some graphic novel I'd never heard of,
but his nerd roots run deep.
Plus, I got to ask him lots of Apocalypse Now and Matrix questions
which is always a great time.
- 65 feet. Yeah. - Whoa!
- Huge. - 65.
REED: Here, of course, Scott and Bill Foster,
comparing notes about growing
and comparing sizes.
Goliath and Giant-Man sizes.
I liked the idea, too, of creating this character of Bill Foster
who is ultimately a heroic character.
He's another person who may have gotten sidelined
by Hank Pym in the past.
But as you'll see later on in the movie here,
he's a guy who's got a very heroic heart
and really took it upon himself to take Ava in when she was young
and try and find a cure.
And now, it seems he's a bit in over his head
and has had to make some sort of morally dubious decisions.
But I like the idea that those characters
have some real gray area to them.
That it's not just this standard villain idea,
and also that the audience is able to sympathize
with both Bill Foster and Ava Starr and their dilemmas,
and what they're going through.
But that, ultimately, he's got a very, very noble countenance about him.
In some ways, Bill Foster is oddly like the moral center of the movie.
Here, we're keeping the audience guessing
as to who he is, and why he's in this movie.
Is he gonna be a hero? Is he gonna be a villain?
Is he gonna be somewhere in between?
Here, we see Agent Woo again. Randall Park.
And then we set up our other FBI agent, who turns out to be Sonny Burch's mole.
Just giving this guy a couple of scenes to set up that he...
(CHUCKLING) I think he's credited with Smarmy Agent.
He's Agent Stoltz really, but we refer to him as Smarmy Agent.
One of the things I promised Michael Douglas in this movie
as opposed to the first movie was,
he wasn't gonna be just a walking exposition machine.
I wanted to give Michael more to do in this movie,
in terms of just jokes, but also giving him some action.
There's a point later on in the movie where he suits up,
and the plan was always for Hope to go down and rescue her mom,
but, of course, the plan has to change when Ghost is introduced
and Scott and Hope have to stay up and protect the lab,
and Hank is forced to go down.
So, it was fun to give Michael stuff to do here as well.
And also, to further these characters and this idea
that Scott has put Ant-Man behind him,
but here, in this scene, we realize,
"Well, okay, he says he destroyed the suit,
"he really didn't destroy the suit. He's hidden it."
And, of course, it's hidden in the trophy
that he and Cassie were playing with at the beginning.
What, the trophy? No, it's not here.
What do you mean it's not there? Where could it be?
I looked everywhere. It's not here.
- (CHITTERS) - Hey, get away from the plant.
(WHISPERS) But I put it back after Cassie and I...
REED: We liked the idea as we were formulating the story of...
We'd done a ton of shrinking obviously in the first Ant-Man,
and there'd been a bunch of Giant-Man in Captain America: Civil War.
We knew we wanted to feature both in this movie,
but we also hit upon this idea of the malfunctioning Ant-Man suit,
which we first see here in the school heist.
They have to go into Cassie's school and get the suit out of the trophy.
But Hank just has not spent any time developing the suit
between the first movie and this one.
He's developed it, of course, but he has not ironed out all the bugs.
(CLEARS THROAT) So, Scott gets stuck in these variable sizes
and it struck us as very funny early on
as we were doing pre-production artwork and designs
to create this malfunctioning suit.
So, in this scene, he's two feet tall,
he's 20 feet tall, then he's three feet tall.
But the idea that how weird visually it could look if you did it...
Did a photorealistic version.
Because he's the size, roughly, of a three-year-old,
but three-year-olds have big heads.
And if Scott Lang's gonna shrink down proportionally,
he's got a very tiny head, and it's just a very odd look.
And these scenes here, we've got a giant Paul Rudd head
and a normal-sized Evangeline Lilly head.
These really, to me, harked back to all those Ant-Man and Wasp comics
where you would see real-sized or tiny-sized Wasp with Giant-Man.
Those were always very exhilarating comic panels for me.
I loved it, so I wanted to do some of that in this movie as well.
This school sequence,
though it appears relatively simple when you see it in the movie,
was really, I think for me,
the most complicated visual effect scene to do.
We shot in a real school in Georgia.
And the higher mathematics
that went into the visual effects of this were mind-numbing
because we had to figure out exactly how small
we wanted Scott Lang to be in these particular scenes.
There's Brian Huskey by the way.
Very funny gentleman who I've worked with before
and wanted to bring into this movie.
This is Mrs. Broadwell's class.
Mrs. Broadwell was my eighth and ninth grade English teacher
who I loved, so I paid homage to her.
Shout-out to Mrs. Broadwell.
But this stuff here, we're doing motion control stuff.
So we had to design our shots very specifically before,
and this is the only sequence
where we used motion control cameras in the movie.
It's an older technology,
but it was really necessary for what we were doing here,
to get all the scale right.
But this was very, very tricky,
to get the Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly scale correct here.
And again, as you see it, it's not...
Nothing's exploding,
and there's not a ton of shrinking and growing,
but it's just the size differential which is very, very tricky.
It was about 100 degrees and 100% humidity in Georgia those days
as they were both wearing the suits
and were sitting around waiting for motion control cameras to be programmed.
Here, one of my favorite shots in the movie.
We shot this, obviously, at the school exterior.
And then we built a gigantic, oversized green screen staircase
for Paul to go down and hold on to the railing.
Maybe some of that green screen footage will appear on the disc somewhere,
but it's hilarious.
And just the idea of him going down the stairs
like a little kid would,
both feet on each stair as he went down.
Here again, I made good on my promise to Michael Douglas.
Michael, if you're listening, you're welcome.
Michael gets some jokes in that scene.
These movies are filled with lots of technology.
And it was important for me in the first and the second movie
to delineate between Hank Pym's high technology
and Tony Stark's high technology.
There's always this guy-tinkering-in- his-garage quality to Hank Pym's stuff.
So, you see him cannibalizing this old Ant-Man suit
to help build this tracker to find the lab here.
And design-wise, it was fun to play with that.
Here, of course, is Ghost's lair.
This is an actual concrete modernist building
that exists in the suburbs in Newnan, Georgia.
And we wanted this section of the movie...
Obviously, our character's name is Ghost, so we did a few little homages.
Like, it's literally a haunted house.
Our movie's version of a haunted house out in the middle of the woods.
And we even added a wolf howl (CHUCKLES)
so that it really almost has a Scooby-Doo vibe to it
complete with our heroes being tied to chairs in the next scene.
But I do know one thing.
What?
REED: Obviously, it was important in this movie,
and one of the things, again,
that I like about Ant-Man and Ant-Man and The Wasp
is that we're not having to deal with 20 or 30 hero characters
and our movie can take time for these character moments.
And though Ant-Man and The Wasp is certainly not a romantic comedy,
that Scott-Hope relationship
and the arc of that relationship throughout the movie
is really the spine of the movie.
So, it's important that the movie slow down
and have these moments between the two of them.
And obviously, they're at great odds at the beginning of the movie,
but it was important to see that there's a genuine affection
between the two of them throughout this movie
in addition to them actually needing each other for this mission.
There's some kind of electronic disturbance.
Be careful.
REED: Again, in terms of the visual effects,
doing these shrunken shots are some of my favorite in the movie
where you really see these incredibly detailed
Ant-Man and Wasp when they're small like this, and seeing their faces.
We shoot everything with Scott and Evangeline
in this camera setup called the Array.
So, anytime they're Ant-Man and Wasp in the movie,
we shoot them with this five-camera setup.
to get all of their facial expressions and all the lines from the movie,
so that we put them in the mask of these miniature Ant-Man and Wasp
to keep the actors alive throughout and keep their personalities alive.
Oh, shit... (GROANS)
REED: Again, Shepherd Frankel has rebuilt...
This is a set that we built at Pinewood, that's the interior of the Ghost lair.
Keying very heavily off the real structure of that building that we shot,
but expanding it, and making it very specific to our movie,
but the idea was to do this very heavy, modernist house
that may or may not have been Ava Starr's parents' house.
But we liked the idea of this very severe concrete thing
that Bill Foster has brought all this rejuvenation chamber and his technology
in to try and keep Ava Starr alive.
Hannah, I think, is terrific as this character.
Hannah came in and she put herself on tape first
when we were looking for someone to play this role.
We wanted someone who was a relative unknown
so that there could be some mystery to this character.
And her initial reading, which was fantastic,
and then of course, later, we brought her in
to read for us and read specific scenes.
And she was just fantastic.
She has this very striking look, and there is mystery to her look.
And also, she was able to capture both the ferocity of this character
and the vulnerability of this character.
We really liked the idea of setting up this character
whose powers were a burden to her, and an affliction.
And that her prime motivation,
her only motivation in this movie, is to stay alive.
But she really does bring a lot of colors to this character,
and she's really, really terrific, and a very charismatic young actor.
Get up!
Come on!
REED: Here, this is a crazy scene
because we have our heroes tied to chairs,
and there's a lot that's going on
dramatically and comedically in this scene.
And here, we set up her origin here.
I don't know how many die-hard Ant-Man comics fans are out there,
but it turns out, not only Bill Foster is working with her,
but her father is Elihas Starr, a former colleague of Hank Pym's.
In the comic books, Elihas Starr is a villain named Egghead.
And it's exactly what you would think.
It's a guy in a lab coat with an egg head.
(CHUCKLES) So, we knew we didn't wanna do Egghead as a villain,
but we liked the idea that we do this nod to Elihas Starr
for the deep cut Marvel fans.
AVA: Quantum research.
REED: Once again, this idea
of forwarding this kind of father-daughter thematic,
whether it's literal or metaphorical, with Bill Foster and Ava was important.
And we ended up rewriting a lot of Ava's backstory here,
and splitting the narrative between Ava and Bill Foster here.
It was important that Ava be able to tell her own story,
and that we hear first-person
the emotional throughline of that origin story.
That she's very young, and was scared for her father
and didn't want him to be alone.
And obviously, she blames Hank Pym for his entire quantum experiment.
This was shot in a warehouse in Georgia.
We built this very remedial quantum tunnel
that also obviously echoes the design of the big quantum tunnel.
But that was something that Shepherd Frankel built.
We shot in this massive old metalworks in Georgia.
They've set up shop down in Argentina,
and these are the bomberos, the firemen, down there who discover her,
and, of course, see that she has this quantum affliction.
These guys were great
and actually taught me a tiny bit of Argentinian Spanish.
When I say "a tiny bit," I mean one line.
(SPEAKS SPANISH)
Anyone?
...and stitched back together.
Over and over.
Every day.
REED: When we shoot these scenes,
one of the things about the Marvel process
that is pretty incredible is,
we obviously get the script as tight as we want,
and I allow for a lot of improvving,
but there's built-in additional photography set in,
so that we can actually do some re-writing on film,
and it allows us to really, really effect change pretty quickly.
Here, I wanna stop and talk about our youngified version of Bill Foster,
which, again, Lola did incredible work on Laurence Fishburne.
I think I stupidly decided to do it
on three of the most identifiable actors in Hollywood,
Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Laurence Fishburne.
Anybody who goes to the movies
knows what these three actors looked like 30 years ago.
(CHUCKLES) So, it was extra...
There was a lot of extra attention paid to making sure that they looked correct.
We shoot it with the real actor,
we shoot it with the young versions of the actors,
and then they seamlessly blend it together.
And in Laurence Fishburne's,
that's actually his son, Langston Fishburne,
who is performing as the younger Bill Foster.
When S. H. I. E. I. D. collapsed, I took Ava in.
REED: The flashback stuff we shot here of Ava,
we wanted it to have a little different look from the rest of the movie,
sort of gritty found footage of old S.H.I.E.L.D. videotapes
and things from the darker part of S.H.I.E.L.D.,
experimenting on her, and trying to weaponize her technology.
That stuff was really fun stuff to put together,
and try and create this in a very short amount of film time,
this very dark journey that she's been on.
This felt like, in true Ant-Man fashion,
that as our heroes are tied up and listening to the villain's monologue
that it would get interrupted by a cell phone call.
And the idea that
we really want to keep alive this notion that Scott Lang...
(CHUCKLES) One of the things in this movie is
he's having some work-life balance issues.
And we really liked the idea of that being incredibly relatable.
He's tied up,
he's completely at the mercy of the villains of the movie,
he may die at any moment,
but he gets a 9-1-1 text from Cassie,
and the big emergency is she can't find her soccer shoes.
That feels like something, in terms of comedic conceit, dramatic conceit,
that really is the sweet spot of the Ant-Man movies.
Ava, I want to help you.
She doesn't need your help. I know how to save her.
REED: Paul and I talked a lot early on as we were formulating the story,
and Evangeline as well,
that that Scott-Hope dynamic had to be very, very clear.
It couldn't just be,
"She's the tough, serious one, and he's the bumbling idiot."
There had to be nuance to both of those things.
You had to understand that while Wasp is probably the more powerful of the two,
that Scott Lang is still formidable.
But that the essential drama with him is that
he's not really sure he wants to be Ant-Man anymore
and he has to, throughout the course of this journey,
realize that it does mean something to him
and that he is able to balance
being a hero with his duties as a father.
- HOPE: Dad? - Calm down, Hank.
So help me God...
The pills.
It's his heart! He needs his pills.
REED: So, here, we're about to see
the payoff of the setup of the Altoid tin.
This, apparently, is where Hank Pym's heart pills are,
and, of course, it turns out not to be that.
He has rigged these trap-jaw ants.
It was fun going through and furthering what we did in the first movie
introducing these different types of ants.
And these are actual ants that exist in real life. Trap-jaw ants.
They're not that big, of course,
but they do have these incredibly powerful jaws
which they can snap and cut things and attack things,
but also use them to flip and launch them out of danger.
Now we're back in the quantum laboratory with the quantum tunnel.
Again, I cannot say enough good things about this set
and the work that Shepherd Frankel did.
This is all practical set that we built here,
and the level of detail is just amazing.
And the fact that there was functional stuff in there.
We did, of course, green screen digital extensions of the set,
but the bulk of the set is real and tactile
and, I think, a very important aspect of this movie.
One of the fun things, again, on working on a movie of this budgetary level
is that you can really come up with crazy, crazy concepts,
and then have them built, or designed, or created in CG
to a level that is just unbelievable.
Again, we're the 20th movie in the MCU,
so they have this infrastructure built that's really, really incredible
in terms of being able to come up with an idea,
a handful of days later,
see it rendered in some way,
and not too long after that, see it fully, fully rendered.
It really is counterintuitive
and something that, in doing these two movies,
was a huge learning curve for me.
I think, specifically about the way Marvel does it
is that there is an incredible amount of fluidity to the process.
Here, again,
I am fortunate to have Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly in these roles.
Two really incredible actors
and the chemistry between the two of them in this movie is crucial.
It was just crucial from the beginning,
and in terms of the writing and, of course, the way we shot the scenes,
I'm really incredibly pleased with the chemistry between those two.
Here, we start continuing this juggling act that Scott Lang has to do.
And this is the real world problems starting to come at Scott Lang
in addition to this heightened
"trying to rescue Janet from the quantum realm" issue.
Here's our shot of the building in the middle of Muir Woods.
One of the things, again, when we started formulating the story
was just listing, "What do you wanna see?
"What do we wanna see in another Ant-Man movie, in Ant-Man and The Wasp?"
And that was one of the earliest images that we did.
Once we hit on this shrunken and growing building ideas,
"Let's put it in the middle of Muir Woods
"and let's put it down by the pier in San Francisco,"
and the juxtaposition of this giant building
in places where it shouldn't be.
Here's our X-Con guys.
This was a scene that I looked forward to shooting for a very long time,
putting Walton Goggins up against Michael Peña in this scene.
We knew that we had done these Luis-Tip montages in the first movie
and really, really liked that conceit.
And we wanted to find a place for it in this movie.
But what we didn't wanna do was, like,
"Oh, you loved it so much in the first one, let's do it again."
We really had to have a different point of view,
a different take on it.
So, when the writers hit on this notion of truth serum,
and maybe Luis, and Kurt, and Dave are tied up
and they administer truth serum
to try and get answers about Scott Lang's whereabouts,
that struck us as a fun, different way in.
And also, to not have
just Luis's friends and cousins doing it,
but to have our main characters
and actually have it tell some of the backstory
of what went on between the first Ant-Man and Ant-Man and The Wasp,
particularly between Scott and Hope.
When we hit on that idea,
it struck us all as funny, particularly with, of course,
Michael Peña and Walton Goggins at the center of it.
This is, I think, in terms of this set
and the way that our brilliant DP Dante Spinotti shot it,
feels very noir to me.
Like, this really does feel like the tone of our movie
and what we were after in terms of making it Elmore Leonard-influenced
and things like Midnight Run.
I mean, if it walk like duck and talk like ducks...
The truth serum.
Well, I have a lot of allergies...
so you might wanna think about that.
REED: So here, we check back in with Bill Foster and Ava.
I should talk about this phasing visual effect that we do for Ghost.
That was something that we did a lot of visual effects R&D on.
And the idea that visually, it wanted to tie in
with the quantum tunnel and the quantum realm,
and it wanted to have a prismatic quality to it.
But it also wanted to be quite subtle at times.
I mean, this is a dialogue scene,
and that visual effect helps tell the story
of what's going on with her emotionally.
In moments like that where you see a ghost image of
a different part of the same take or even from a different take of Hannah's,
it started to feel really, really interesting
and like something we hadn't seen before.
Early iterations felt maybe too glitchy or too digital
or felt like an episode of Max Headroom from the '80s or something.
So, it really took a long time to hit on this particular effect,
but when we did, we really loved it.
Particularly, where you see
the ghosting image move considerably before her or after her.
That started to be really exciting to us.
And also, when and how much to do it
because you didn't wanna take away from Hannah's performance too much
'cause she's terrific.
It needed to enhance that performance.
So here it is, the truth serum scene.
And the idea that,
I should say also, Divian Ladwa there who plays Uzman,
I'd seen him in the movie Lion,
which is an amazing movie if you have not seen it,
an extremely emotional movie, dramatic, not comedic at all,
but his performance in that movie was so terrific.
And he came in and put himself on tape for this role,
and proved to be incredibly funny, too.
And so, he's a nice addition
in this Elmore Leonard-esque thing of someone there.
There we have... We see Luis with his OutKast, Big Boi look.
(CHUCKLES) His Stankonia-era hairdo.
We liked the idea of seeing these glimpses
of these crucial moments in their past,
and also that this version of the story is a bit unreliable.
It's Luis's version of all these events happening.
And, of course, him getting side-tracked by telling the guys
about his Grandma's jukebox that only plays Morrissey.
I used to play drums in a Smiths cover band, Louder Than Bombs,
and found out that there was a rival cover band
called Sweet and Tender Hooligans, who were very popular in LA.
I went to see them
and they were an all-Latino version of the Smiths.
And they were way better than our cover band,
but it was there that I learned that Morrissey
was really writing very specifically about
East I., and characters in East I.,
and it made sense as something that would be a part of Luis's life.
But here, it's all Luis's heightened version,
probably based on stuff Scott told him
about his relationship with Hank, and particularly with Hope.
So, it was fun to have
Paul and Evangeline start to lip-sync Michael's stuff.
And then my heart is all, like...
"That fancy raspberry filling represents the company's red...
"and we're days away from going out of business."
This, we shot over one long day,
and just Michael went to town.
I went back in the cutting room and picked my preferred takes,
cut it together basically as a radio cut,
and then we had that on hand
for all the other pieces that we needed to shoot when people would lip-sync.
And, of course, the lip-syncing was great.
We just set up a dolly,
and just played Michael's lines over a speaker
and had Paul and Evangeline and everybody else do it
until they got it right.
Here, it builds until the appearance of Ghost.
The Baba Yaga joke,
that was Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, two of our writers,
who came up with the Baba Yaga gag.
And it was a perfect way to progress David Dastmalchian's character, Kurt.
And tying in Ghost to this old Russian folklore.
And again, David Dastmalchian, one of the funniest people I know.
BURCH: If that freak gets Pym's tech...
I'm never gonna see it.
So, what do we do now?
REED: Tip, T.I., who plays Dave in the movie,
also, I think, gets some great moments in this movie,
and it was really fun to bring those guys back again
because I really do feel like they're part of the heart
of what the Ant-Man movies are.
And really, again, dealing with
in this very mundane way
that whether their business succeeds or dies
is very crucial to the end of our movie.
Here we reveal, of course, that Sonny Burch has a mole in the FBI.
We also learn
that Agent Woo has become obsessed with Scott's magic,
close-up magic and he's enrolled in the Online Close-up Magic University.
The magic thing was something that just felt fun to us
as a thing that Scott Lang was gonna be doing for Cassie early on
but also that we could build it into our plot in a much larger way.
In that way, you know, stuff like the original Back to the Future
was a big influence, where there's all this setup of these random things
in the first third of the movie
that seem random at the time,
whether it's close-up magic, or Altoids, or whatever it is
and then see these things paid off throughout the body of the movie.
Again, Steph Ceretti's, the digital work here
all of this tunnel is practical
and we even had practical bellows on that giant quantum tunnel
but when it's in motion, it's all digital
and feels so real and tactile to me.
This scene, I think, I have to say, is at the moment
one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
When we talked about heady concepts like quantum entanglement,
the big issue became, how do we dramatize quantum entanglement
without having Hank Pym go to a chalkboard and talk about it?
And at one point during the writing, I can't remember who was there,
I'm sure it was Paul, and I think Stephen Broussard, our producer,
I think it was McKenna and Sommers,
but talking about like,
"What if it's like that Steve Martin movie, All Of Me,
"where Lily Tomlin is inhabiting Steve Martin's body?
"I mean, maybe not that broad, but what if it's that idea?"
And when we hit on that, it struck us all as like,
"Okay, yeah, that is Ant-Man's way of dealing with quantum entanglement."
And then, as the guys wrote the scene, and as we shot it
and, of course, as Paul, Michael, and Evangeline performed it,
it became this, I think, terrific scene
where it is them reuniting with Janet,
though it's not really them reuniting with Janet.
And seeing Paul play Janet Van Dyne
and Michael Douglas, the moment he appears in close-up, saying, "Janet?"
(CHUCKLES) And the movie is all in, and selling this concept.
It's very fun to see this with an audience,
and see how it plays out.
They're intrigued the moment that Scott seems a little tweaked
and they think they know what's coming,
but when it comes it's awkward and there's awkward laughter
and then when they really commit to it,
and it keeps going, it becomes very funny.
It's a very satisfying, funny, and also weirdly emotional scene.
We talked a lot about the Janet Van Dyne of it all and how,
before you ever see her in the movie,
I mean, you see her in the flashback at the beginning,
you see her a little in Scott's vision
but it was important to keep her alive throughout the movie.
So when we hit on this concept
it really struck us as tonally correct for our movie.
And I had an insurance policy which was Paul Rudd.
I knew that Paul was gonna do amazing things with that idea.
We talked a lot about,
"Do we have Michelle come in, and perform the scene
"and then have Paul just kind of key off what she did?"
But, you know, in talking to Paul and Michelle, it didn't seem necessary.
It just felt like, okay, this is something that Paul can do
and knock out of the park.
This quantum array I should mention too, I love the effect of this thing.
This is kind of what I'm talking about with Hank Pym's technology.
There's a kind of clunky, pieced-together,
tactile quality to this thing.
It's definitely not Stark Industries technology.
It's something that he's really created,
and has a very mechanical feel as well as a digital feel.
Even the digital readouts,
they really feel like they're more from the '80s.
It reminds me of The Police, Ghost in the Machine cover.
That was my inspiration. Sting.
Here we played around a lot with
sort of how emotional to get with this mother-daughter reunion
that was also slowly building the Scott-Hope dynamic.
And that seemed like something that was very interesting to us,
along with the idea that
Scott and Hank are suddenly holding hands, and everything gets awkward.
SCOTT: All right, first you're gonna see all kinds of lights...
and it's gonna get really trippy...
but then it's gonna turn black...
REED: Here I should also talk about the quantum pod.
In the first movie, Scott Lang goes down only in the Ant-Man suit
and he gets as far as this place we called The Void.
In the first movie, tonally, it feels like a place you don't come back from.
But Scott made it out, so that set them on their journey.
In this movie, we needed not only the tunnel
but a dedicated craft of some kind.
So we went out sort of like starting to design this quantum pod.
And basically, that wanted to feel like Hank Pym technology as well.
So it feels like, you know, part rocket-sled, part helicopter
and very much of an era.
And it was something I got very involved in, sort of, the design of,
because I really wanted it to have a very particular look
and hark back to things like Fantastic Voyage
and sort of still have a retro vibe to it.
And again, Shepherd Frankel and their team helped design it.
Dan Sudick, who's our special effects whiz,
built this practical pod which is just incredible.
You can sit in the thing, and feel like you could actually,
you know, go shooting down this quantum tunnel
and into the quantum realm.
Here in this sequence again,
Scott has screwed up, as Scott tends to do.
He's well-intentioned always.
He's, you know, trying to make things right for Luis and the guys
but he's inadvertently betrayed their location
and our heroes become estranged again.
I have to say
I love the dynamic between Scott and Hope in the movie.
I love what Paul and Evangeline did in the movie.
And really furthering that dynamic.
It's a very different dynamic than in the first movie
which is what we were after from the very beginning,
in the way they relate and in their plot functions.
Here again, always exciting to me when we go down into the macro-world
and spend time with Ant-Man.
Back in our apartment here,
the mislead thinking it's the FBI
but it's Maggie, Paxton, and Cassie looking for her soccer shoes.
One of the things that was a mandate from me on this movie
as it was in the first movie is I wanted this movie to be under two hours
for a number of reasons.
One, I knew we were going to be following Infinity War
which was gonna be this massive, massive epic.
But most importantly, just because, this is a comedy,
and it's an action comedy, and it didn't wanna overstay its welcome
so a great part of the post-production process
was just the tightening and finessing of this movie.
And you had to be careful to not cut out things
that we had set up, the sort of setup-payoff
of the movie remained really important.
Here also I think it's great, I can't say enough about Abby
and how she's developed as an actor
even in the three years since we did the first Ant-Man.
But in the comic books, Cassie Lang, as she gets older
becomes a hero in her own right.
And though we don't deal with that head-on in this movie,
it was fun to sort of plant the seeds of a Cassie Lang
who is definitely her father's daughter.
And who covers for her dad at this very crucial moment in the movie
and who, for a moment there, goes toe-to-toe with Agent Woo
and basically lies for her father
and buys Scott Lang some time to get in there and switch out the giant ant.
And of course at this point in the movie, we know that she suspects,
"Okay, he has been Ant-Man again, and what's going on?"
HANK: I'll start the van.
You get the lab.
REED: I love the juxtaposition visually of this building in the forest.
This, again, we shot in the woods in Georgia,
outside of Fayetteville, Georgia, near Pinewood.
And then Steph Ceretti and our vendors went in
and added all these gigantic redwood trees
and I always loved the idea.
We scouted Muir Woods outside of San Francisco early on in the movie,
and then we couldn't actually shoot there.
I loved it as, you know, part of the texture of this movie.
Again, bringing back Judy Greer and Bobby Cannavale
and keeping those characters alive in a movie
where there's a lot of story to tell, and a lot of plot.
I will also mention here Benjamin Byron Davis,
who plays Agent Burleigh there, the big guy.
I had done a pilot with Ben, and loved him.
Loved his look, and he's an incredible actor
so I was thrilled to be able to bring him into this movie.
I'm sorry, Scott. They're your friends. That's insensitive.
I just really needed a win, you know?
REED: Randall Park again riding that line of authority figure
and guy who's just rooting for Scott Lang. (CHUCKLES)
I love that dynamic between the two of them.
Here we're back in Muir Woods
and we further the story of the traitor who is going to
steal the lab for Sonny Burch.
We talked a lot in this movie about Ghost's powers,
how she was gonna appear,
what the phasing allowed her to do
and how deadly... Was she gonna be killing people left and right?
And it was something that we found this balance of
but it took sort of the whole process to find that balance.
Because we knew we wanted to sort of redeem her at the end of the movie
and show that sort of her future could kind of go any direction.
Thanks for covering for me.
REED: This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, absolutely.
I like that it's, except for what we see out the window,
it's delightfully visual-effects free
and really is just Paul and Abby performing this scene.
The writing in the scene, I think, is really terrific
because, you know, in the wrong hands, it could be a very cloying scene
and we do what Paul Rudd always refers to as the treacle cutter
and re-introduce the idea of "World's Greatest Grandma."
But we also liked the idea that
she's suggesting that, "Maybe you need a partner,"
and she has herself in mind as his partner
and it struck us as really real, and poignant,
and a really great progression of the father-daughter dynamic here.
And she also kind of gives
her seal of approval to Hope as a potential partner.
And also gives him, you know,
sort of lays it out to him, like, you know,
"Listen, your instinct to be Ant-Man is a good one.
"It's not stupid to want to help people."
And I really liked that dynamic.
And again, this is all Paul and Abby.
And Abby, I think, really loves Paul
and they have a great chemistry in real life.
And hopefully, you feel that in the scene, and it feels real to me.
I think it was also important to me when we did the first Ant-Man,
I had no children. And I have two little kids now.
I have a three-year-old, and a one-and-a-half-year-old.
So, like, keeping this, the sort of father-child dynamic alive in the movie
was important to me.
And, Abby, I think is so good, and so focused
but still retains this little kid quality that makes her very special.
Agent Woo will see you in an hour.
REED: Here's Ben Davis again.
This is a fun scene too, because it almost has...
I think it probably has its roots
weirdly in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(CHUCKLES) where they're about to do this crazy, probably suicidal thing.
And just before they actually do it, of course, Scott shows up to help them.
But I really like the father-daughter dynamic.
The mutual respect and love between these two characters in this scene
and it just feels very fun
and in keeping with the crime aspect of our movie.
And also reminding the audience that
Hank Pym is not just the mentor character in this movie.
That, you know, back in the day, he was his own badass hero.
And despite all the sort of shortcomings of his personality,
at the center of it, he has a mission, and he has a good heart.
HOPE: Okay.
REED: Here we kind of go back to a little of the stuff
that we did in the first movie.
Seeing these glimpses of macro ants, and Scott controlling ants.
That was another thing in this movie, is kind of finding the balance of
not retreading too much of the stuff we did in the first movie
but also not forgetting it.
Keeping it alive that Ant-Man just, he doesn't just shrink and grow,
he can also control ants
and they become and remain
a crucial part of the storytelling, and of his powers.
Here we shot, uh... This is in the...
This is in some building in downtown Atlanta we made our FBI thing.
And this hill, where the van is outside,
this may be the only hill in Atlanta,
(CHUCKLES) when we were trying to re-create San Francisco in Atlanta.
I think by Steph Ceretti's count
starting from here, and really throughout the movie,
in the car chase particularly,
I think probably 75% of it was shot in Atlanta.
And our visual effects team photographed
plates of San Francisco, and comped them in.
So much of what you see in this movie is actually Atlanta for San Francisco.
Again, we did shoot a lot in San Francisco
and far more than we did in the first movie.
But you'll really be hard-pressed to tell what's actual San Francisco
and what's our digitally re-created San Francisco.
How could this happen?
I mean, what the dickens?
Thank you.
REED: We obviously spent a lot of time in this movie in vans and cars.
And I liked that idea, because we wanted again
the whole movie to be forward motion.
We didn't want to be standing around in laboratories and houses too much.
We wanted to really get everybody out there, and in the city.
Now that is San Francisco. There it is.
That's the real San Francisco. There's Coit Tower up there.
And we re-introduced our ants doing things.
They're basically like a living GPS device here.
Again, the idea of kind of keeping everything as photorealistic as possible
and looking at videos of flocks of birds and how they move in the wind
in designing these swarms of ants.
And our digital building here.
Shepherd Frankel and I talked a lot about this rejuvenation chamber
and what it should be like.
And as you start to design something like a rejuvenation chamber
you realize how many other movies have similar tropes.
Whether it's, you know, The Empire Strikes Back
or anything that someone has put in a chamber
and they're all over the place.
And how do we make ours different?
And we hit upon the idea of these sort of lenticular things,
these basically like lighthouse light lenses.
These Fresnel lenses that had different dimension
and we could play around with light.
And it's a great kind of tactile texture that we have in the movie.
"If you want to do something right, you make a list."
So, we should do that.
One, we have to break into that lab.
REED: This planning scene, this was something
I think we shot at additional photography.
A big part of the thing that Paul and I particularly work on a lot
is finding that balance of Scott Lang as capable hero
but also giving him more actual comedy in this movie
than he had in the first movie.
Playing him less as the straight man in the situation
and trying to give him a little more comedy
while making sure he's the same guy from the first movie.
This is where we learn that the plan changes
and that it makes more sense for Scott and Hope to stay up
and for Hank to go down.
Evangeline is so good and so committed in this role,
and I think I haven't talked enough about really how she saw this hero
and how she wanted it to be different from some other heroes.
A big part of it was in the detail work, you know.
She always talked about, "I don't wanna do these
"you know, elaborate fight scenes and then have my hair and nails perfect,
"and you know, when I fight, I wanna sweat.
"And I wanna be, you know, flushed in the face.
"And my hair, I don't want it to be all glam.
"I want it to be in a very practical ponytail
"because that's the only way the helmet will come on and off."
And, you know, she thought so much about the detail work
and really pushed to retain it throughout.
And that coupled with just, sort of her,
you know, knowing emotionally
where that character was at every moment in the movie,
which in an action comedy, is not always easy.
She really, really brought everything to this character in the movie
and worked so incredibly hard on this character
and I think it pays off in the movie.
And I think she felt a certain responsibility to this character
and to the fact that this movie is Ant-Man and The Wasp
and it really is Hope's emotional journey.
What is it?
Don't know.
REED: Here, again, in designing this set,
we wanted it to be not only tactile
but sort of retain, you know, a very colorful quality to it.
In keeping with what we did in the first movie, you know,
there's a lot of primary colors, not making it candy-colored
but really kind of keeping the technology fun and interesting
and harking back to sort of some of those more retro science fiction movies.
In trying to figure out these trap-jaw ants
and, you know, whether they were large or small, people have asked,
"So are the ants normal-sized ants that were in the shrunken lab
"and when you grow the lab, they become big?
"Or are they grown separately and, you know, what does Hank feed them?"
We actually had a shot of him feeding ants sugar from a sugar bowl
that didn't make the final cut.
But, yes, Hank's very good to them. He treats them well.
He limits their hours.
He pays them overtime if they're putting in too many hours.
He really treats them well. There's no abuse going on here.
Laurence Fishburne, again, I think, turns in a performance in this movie
that's really delicate and really...
You know, he's such a conflicted character
but he always, you know, keeps his sort of
hero's heart in plain sight in this movie.
And it's something I really, really... I love in this movie.
Again, he's someone I just can't imagine anybody else playing that character.
Again, I'm making good on my promise to Michael Douglas.
"Yes, you get to suit up in this movie.
"And, yes, you will see some action."
And Michael sees some serious action here.
As does Paul Rudd
who gets thrown through a wall
and slammed against another cinder block wall.
Paul is very good, as is Evangeline and all the actors,
and Hannah especially coming in new,
about wanting to do as much of the physical acting as possible.
Obviously, there are things that aren't safe for them to do
but they all want to do as much as possible.
I think I would say, particularly in this movie,
Evangeline was very, very adamant about,
you know, the way that Hope moves as Wasp.
Not only when she's fighting full-size, but when she's flying.
We talked a lot about sort of this balletic flying style
and part of that was determined, you know,
as we were rehearsing with Evangeline,
but also in the character animation with the visual effects companies.
As far as Ghost goes here,
we wanted her to have almost this Terminator 2, T-1000 quality
as she's going through that abandoned building after Scott.
There's nothing that stands in her way.
He's got to move around all these walls and objects
and she can obviously phase through them.
In creating this mislead that Scott is about to meet his end.
And that's something that we're constantly calibrating in this end
where we're juggling all these balls of, you know, the shrinking and growing lab
and, you know, Hank making it down to the quantum realm.
and Scott creating this misdirection,
which of course he learned in his online magic school studies. (CHUCKLES)
It all felt in keeping with the tone of our movie.
The other thing that really excited me about this movie
was the chance to get to do our own
Ant-Man and The Wasp version of a car chase.
Which kind of references everything from the Michael Douglas TV series,
The Streets of San Francisco
to Bullitt, of course, the Peter Yates movie.
And maybe, most specifically, Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?
What's Up, Doc? we screened early in prep
to the people who hadn't seen it
and, for me, just as inspiration. I love that movie. I saw it as a kid.
It's a chase that takes place, at the time was really a riff on Bullitt
but it takes place in San Francisco
and it's really heavily influenced by not only screwball comedies,
but also silent movies, and Buster Keaton.
And in designing a lot of these chase gags,
coming up with a million gags, and creating this chase
that went through the very specific topography of San Francisco
and specific landmarks,
and used the shrinking and growing technology
in hopefully a kind of badass way.
And again, photorealism was the key here.
To do something that felt like a gritty chase
but also you could experience some shrinking and growing.
And some Luis commenting
on the filthy undercarriage of vehicles. (CHUCKLES)
(LUIS GRUNTS)
That undercarriage is filthy!
Oh, they got bigger problems.
REED: This stuff I think is incredibly effective
and when you see it in formats like IMAX or ScreenX
it's doubly so, because it really, really does put you in the action.
And it's something we think about a lot
whether we're, you know, in full-size or in macro.
That's an actual drone shot of the real Lombard Street.
This was all shot on location in San Francisco here.
Obviously, we did not crash cars and flip cars over
tourist-laden Lombard Street.
But we did shoot all throughout
and shot all our plates on the real Lombard Street
to give it as much verisimilitude as possible.
And shots like this where we're really putting the audience down
with the shrunken van in Lombard Street, I think, are really exhilarating.
So, earlier, I talked about the kind of the photorealism
and it applies to the quantum realm as well.
This was one of the trickiest things,
visual effects and story-wise, in the movie.
Because we were not only gonna see more quantum realm
than we saw in the first movie, but we were gonna be cross-cutting
between this chase sequence in broad daylight in San Francisco
and it had to feel like the same movie.
So one of the things we talked about in quantum realm
was in sequences like this,
trying to make it as fantastical but also photorealistic as possible.
And we had this kind of philosophy
which was, what if we advertise the movie as,
"The makers of Ant-Man and Wasp created special quantum cameras
"to actually go down and shoot on a sub-atomic level"?
And what that meant to us philosophically was,
let's feel the limitations of the photography in the quantum realm.
So, we wanted to make it maybe grainier than it might normally be.
The environments and the camerawork is a little jittery.
You see lots of reflection in these sort of particles between the lens
and between the action that you're seeing,
and all of these things kind of combined
and also that it might also be hard to focus in the quantum realm, right?
So, as we get further into the quantum realm
I'll talk about that some more, but that was the guiding philosophy.
Here, fun uses of shrinking and growing tech in the chase.
Introducing motorcycles that we can shrink,
and of course a Stan Lee cameo.
This was the very first shot
we shot for Ant-Man and The Wasp, was down in Georgia.
Stan Lee's cameo. Which I was thrilled about.
It's always something that Marvel audiences look for.
And there's an onus on all the filmmakers in the MCU
to try and top the Stan Lee cameo from all the other movies.
And so, of course, we put in a very San Francisco-specific joke.
But it also felt like a good luck charm
to have our first shot of the movie be Stan Lee, who really started it all.
The PEZ dispenser finally gets paid off here.
That was something early on we talked about.
Like, what are some of the, you know, tiny innocent objects that we can grow
and they become these crazy weapons throughout the chase?
And then also using Ghost's power set in a car chase
and all the weird juxtapositions of Ant-Man, Wasp,
Giant-Man, various sizes of Giant-Man in a malfunctioning suit,
Ghost with her power set, shrunken lab,
of course, Sonny Burch showing back up, and being this fly in the ointment.
It all led to this crazy, chaotic chase
that was shot throughout Atlanta and San Francisco.
For me, kind of keeping this stuff, you know, moving
was a constant thing in editorial.
We had a very, very long version of the chase
in early cuts of post-production, which really had...
Was really I called the "kitchen sink cut,"
because it really had literally everything we shot in there.
And we knew that this chase, you know,
the audience can only kind of take so much,
and you can only sustain so many things at one time.
So, I was constantly whittling around
and, you know, getting rid of these little gags
and trying to not repeat ourselves with the action.
To constantly keep the audience off balance
and surprised by what happened.
But this is clearly something as you can see
from the very, very beginning of pre-production.
I worked with storyboard artists, and with our in-house previs team
and with our editor, Craig Wood.
Craig Wood and Dan Lebental, by the way.
Dan edited the first Ant-Man, and edited this one as well.
We brought Craig Wood along as well
who cut on Guardians of the Galaxy, and Guardians: Volume Two.
Both incredibly talented editors.
And I don't know that we would have been able to cut this movie
with just one editor. There's so much going on.
And Craig was very integral in sort of corralling
all of the technical stuff in this chase at the end that was going on.
And we worked very closely with previs from the very beginning.
So by the time we got on set and on location,
we knew exactly what we were doing, and where the camera was gonna be placed.
My approach to this kind of action as a director really is,
you know, as comedic action.
That there is a specific right and funny place
for the camera to be at all times. Funny or dramatic place.
I'm not a director that goes out with six cameras and just,
you know, sets them up all around, and shoots and says,
"Let's figure it out in editorial."
It really does wanna be, you know,
the camera wants to be very complicit in that action
and the way that it's cut, and the timing is crucial.
THE WASP: We're running out of time.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Warning, approaching quantum void.
(ALARM BLARING)
(PANTING)
REED: Here, now, Hank Pym has arrived in The Void.
This is as far as Scott Lang made it in the first movie.
And he has a plan up his sleeve.
This is where he essentially hits the nitrous
and is gonna go a step further.
In theory, they've determined that if you can make it beyond The Void,
maybe there's an entire realm down there
and that's where Janet said she's gonna be.
So, he hits the nitrous here,
breaks through the quantum membrane,
and here we are in the first stages of the quantum realm here.
Quantum realm was a very tricky thing.
Obviously, because the good news and the bad news is that
it can be anything you want it to be and it's infinite.
And a big part of our process here was trying to figure out
how much of our story would be in the quantum realm
and how much our movie could contain.
And creating this internal logic where
that's about as far as our heroes can get,
is just beyond The Void into this section of the quantum realm
that Janet calls the Wasteland. She's gonna meet them there, hopefully.
But designing it so it felt
like it had some terrestrial cues, but it felt very otherworldly
and we'll get back to that in a moment.
But now, back to our chase.
Another tricky thing was giving Hope and Scott,
Ant-Man and Wasp and Giant-Man lots of different versions
of action sequences and also keeping Luis alive during this chase.
Luis, who just wants to suit up and be a part of the action
and now gets to actually man one of these shrunken cars
to grow it and of course, this is the one he picks,
the Hot Wheel version of the Hyundai Veloster. (CHUCKLES)
And this is a car that, when we were looking at it,
and I was working with Shepherd about it, I was like,
"This should look like a '70s Hot Wheel.
"It should be loud colors and flame decals
"and chrome, and just the most badass roadster you can imagine."
(SCREAMING)
REED: This is our Bullitt homage. The miniature Bullitt jump.
And Luis finally gets his moment in the sun
where he's able to be at the helm
of the shrinking technology.
LUIS: Burch's boys are all over me.
THE WASP: I'm on my way.
ANT-MAN: Right. I'll get the lab.
REED: These shots where we come in really close
on Giant-Man are exhilarating, because you really do...
It's great to be able to see the actors through these masks.
This car chase, again, I think, for me
had its origins in thinking about The Raid 2 and that incredible fight
that happened inside the car. Ours is obviously much shorter.
But I liked the idea of doing a quick version of that
with some Hope shrinking and growing.
Here, of course, once we landed on the visual
of Scott using a flatbed truck like a scooter essentially,
that just seemed like something incredibly fun.
Dan Sudick tricked out this real flatbed with hydraulics
so it listed to one side, so you could feel the weight of Giant-Man
leaning on one side.
And again, Steph Ceretti and all our visual effects vendors
really made good on this idea of making it as photorealistic as possible.
Here we are at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.
This is all shot in San Francisco, which was a thrill.
We had planned so much of this to be outside in San Francisco
and we had no idea how much the city was gonna let us actually do.
And they actually let us do a lot of crazy things.
Flip cars down streets, a shoot down at the pier,
take over this pier, shoot giant water cannons,
some water on a ton of extras on the pier. (CHUCKLES)
But, yes, this is all shot in San Francisco
and, for me, that was one of the important things in the movie
was San Francisco wants to be a character in this movie.
It's very different than any of the other movies in the MCU for that reason.
And we got incredibly fortunate with the weather.
And what weather we weren't fortunate with,
Steph Ceretti and his visual effects wizards were able to sort of
even out the weather and fix the clouds.
In the first movie, we get some real dramatic mileage
out of the death of Ant-thony.
And here, I think we take a slightly more callous approach
at the end here, as Scott's trying to summon an ant
and they're murdered in succession by seagulls. (CHUCKLES)
But this is real. Seagulls eat ants.
We wanted this thing to be gritty.
We've barely left the dock...
but it looks like we got some company.
Look. Right there. Do you see it, folks?
REED: From the very beginning, some of the imagery that we talked about
was seeing Giant-Man in the water, in the bay,
and having to chase someone onto a boat,
which led us to this Sonny Burch hitching a ride
on a whale-watching thing and this incredibly large Giant-Man.
He's 85 feet tall here. This is the biggest he's ever gone.
And of course, in the comics
in the Hank Pym era, when Hank Pym was Giant-Man,
there's a limit to how long he can be Giant-Man.
It just takes too much of a toll on his body.
So, we know at 85 feet here
that Scott is only gonna have a certain amount of time
before he passes out.
And hopefully, he can get the lab back in time.
Back to quantum realm here, you see this jittery quality,
very shallow depth of field.
And, you know, all of this, sort of, the atmosphere here is a bit grainy.
You know, you're dealing with a sub-atomic level here
and we wanted it to be very colorful but also to feel real and tactile.
It couldn't feel like an animated movie or to be cartoonish.
As we did our research on quantum... What would happen
to an actual person, if you could survive the shrinking process is
the psychological damage, what happens to your mind.
And here we see Hank's mind starting to break down.
And his mind throws at him,
basically, this hallucination.
He's back in the Pym house, he's hearing voices.
He hears his young daughter.
He hears seven-year-old Hope, and then she's there, and Scott's there.
And his mind is breaking down here.
When we talked about the quantum realm,
we talked not only about that physical landscape
but about the psychology of it, and we came upon this idea of
that this was sort of, a little bit of a safety zone for Hank.
Being back in the house and tying it back into the prologue and Hope.
And then being visited by what seems like Death coming for him.
Is it Ghost? Is it actually Death coming for him?
And, of course, it turns out, it's neither of those things.
Here with the visual effects, we see Hank starting to phase, too
and tying in this Ghost quantum dilemma
with what is happening to Hank in the quantum realm.
He's really starting to, kind of, break apart
and essentially lose his structural integrity
until someone does this laying of hands on him
and takes him out of the moment and brings him back.
And of course, it's Janet.
Michelle Pfeiffer, my one and only choice for Janet.
Thinking about her as Janet as far back as the first movie,
if we were ever gonna be able to make this one.
Fortunately for me, and for all of us, she said yes.
She is just one of my favorite actors of all time.
You know, Fabulous Baker Boys and Married to the Mob
are two of my favorite movies ever.
And those are just two of the many, many movies that she's incredible in.
I wasn't sure she would wanna do a movie like this.
She hadn't done a movie like this since Batman Returns.
And that had been a long time.
And we talked a lot about the character, we talked about who Janet was
in the realm of Marvel comics.
The fact that Ant-Man and Wasp,
back in the day, were on the cover of Avengers Number One.
Janet Van Dyne named the Avengers in the comics world,
so she's an important legacy figure.
And we talked about all of that stuff and then we also talked about
who Janet was 30 years ago,
and potentially what has she become after 30 years in the quantum realm.
And we talked a lot about she was incredibly powerful,
and that she had not only survived down there, but thrived down there.
And that she had evolved.
That, you know, being down there, the environment had sort of
allowed her to evolve in a way that was
more accelerated than had she been on Earth those 30 years.
...what we're dealing with up there.
ANT-MAN: (WEAKLY) I got the lab. I got the lab.
Move. Move.
- Move! - (PEOPLE CLAMORING)
Get out of the way.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
Let's go.
REPORTER: No one here appears to be sure what this is.
It's gotta be 80-85 feet tall.
- Get out of the way! - (PEOPLE SCREAMING)
(WEAKLY) I got the lab.
REED: Scott has made it back to the pier here.
He's gotten the lab safely back on land.
And he's just trying to get it far enough inland
in case it gets grown before he passes out and collapses.
This, again, was fun to kind of take this thematic from the comics
where he's only got a limited time as Giant-Man.
And to do basically the Nestea plunge here
and have him land in the bay.
Having been there and having been an intimate part of this,
I'm still constantly amazed at what visual effects is able to do
in terms of the photorealism.
This underwater sequence was something
that I came up with early on in the process.
I really loved the idea
of him collapsing in the bay and being underwater and having to be saved.
It was important to kind of create this arc with Scott and Hope
where he saves her, she saves him.
They're equally in peril,
and the thing that she's been chasing the entire movie, getting that lab back,
instead of going for the lab here, she goes underwater to save Scott.
That's what's important to her in this moment.
The underwater effects are terrific.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Lab at full scale.
They did it.
AUTOMATED VOICE: Ready to ascend.
Let's go see our daughter.
REED: So here, giving our heroes some action here
and I like that the Ant-Man and The Wasp movie
allows for these generational heroes.
And that we're telling the story of both sets of Ant-Men and Wasps.
That was something we really set out to do in the movie.
THE WASP: Scott!
REED: Again, these underwater effects blew my mind.
When we set out to design the sequence,
we talked about, you know, I, of course, naively said,
"So what, are we gonna shoot in a tank? How do we get...
"Does it need to be Evangeline in the suit? Is it a stunt person?"
And Steph said,
(IN FRENCH ACCENT) "Oh, no, no, no. This will all be done digitally."
(IN NORMAL VOICE) That's my terrible French accent, by the way.
And when these shots started to come back
it was really like everything I had hoped for and more.
Like, just the idea of the physics and being underwater
and the size difference
and her looking through the giant eyepiece of the mask,
I love it. It was just the imagery that I wanted.
Here, too, this was Evangeline's idea.
We always had the scene on the pier where Hope saves Scott.
And we played around with different versions.
And she's always thrilled to have saved him.
And then, you know, on the thing, she's, like,
"What if I kiss him? What if I kiss him?"
And we talked about that if and when
that should happen in the movie off and on.
And originally, it was gonna happen later.
And just in the moment, it felt right in that moment.
And again, that is thanks to Evangeline.
And it's in the movie.
Here, keeping our ex-con guys alive
and the idea of setting up this notion that was important.
As we're doing all these, you know,
juggling all these sort of big plot mechanics,
it was important to kind of keep this story of X-Con alive.
That these are the guys who show up.
They show up for their friend Luis and save him.
And then that they end up capturing Sonny Burch
and turn him in, and that's what turns their company around.
What if Hank is right?
What if this process kills Janet?
What, you're worried about her?
All I'm saying is that she is a brilliant scientist.
REED: Here we start to get into the climax. She's phasing more.
We talked about the whole arc of her phasing
and the progression and the idea that
just as Hank and Janet are gonna come up,
Janet's life is in serious jeopardy again.
There's a lot of quantum energy here, and that was a lot of R&D too
in terms of what this looks like,
but really increasing the prismatic quality of the light here,
doing these big, sweeping crane shots
as she's hooked up the rejuvenation chamber to the quantum tunnel.
Keeping everything as tactile as possible as much as we can.
(GASPS)
HANK: Janet!
REED: And seeing now that this quantum extraction
has started between the two of them.
We wanted this movie to kind of, you know...
We talked early, early on about
what is the third act, what is it gonna build to?
Is it gonna build to a thing where the quantum tunnel opens
and quantum creatures come over and start taking over San Francisco?
And that kind of stuff felt to me like
we've seen this a million times and it becomes more about spectacle
of giant creatures that we don't really have any footing with
and that the ending wanted to be really about these characters
and about this sort of split-second moment
where everything comes together at once,
and everything happens just in the nick of time.
Here, sort of the exhilaration of seeing Ant-Man and Wasp
finally being this well-oiled machine and fighting together
and it's the only way they're gonna be able to defeat Ghost.
And even though they're fighting incredibly well together,
she gets the upper hand on Hope and is about to take her out.
This shot here, we played around
the idea of fracturing time as he grows to become Giant-Man.
Slowing everything down and seeing all the beats of him
having to save Hope there and then shrink again just in time
to avoid getting hit by the pod.
We knew there were gonna be some hopefully emotional resolutions
at the end of this, and we knew that the moment
that Hope first sees her mom, Janet, for the first time
had to be a powerful one.
So, in these instances,
my approach is to obviously set the cameras,
us rehearse with our second team,
and get the camera move exactly as we can
as quickly as possible so that we can capture
the most spontaneous performance possible from these actors.
I love this moment, because the movie,
the entire movie since the prologue has been building towards it
and then you have powerhouse actors
like Evangeline and Michelle performing it.
I missed you too, Jellybean.
REED: Michelle was very, very involved in the look of Janet.
You know, how does she look different from the prologue,
from the '80s Janet Van Dyne?
And the idea of having this sort of long, flowing gray hair,
you know, and looking toward things like Jane Goodall and this idea that,
you know, she's been down there,
and there's something evolved
and something enlightened about Janet Van Dyne now.
Even when Ghost reappears here and is potentially a threat for a moment,
Hope seems like she's about to go after her and Janet stops her
and we see that there is
a decidedly more peaceful solution to the situation
and we start to see a hint of these powers
that Janet has gained after having been in the quantum realm for so long.
This was something that we played around with for a long time,
how to introduce it.
How much we show of Janet's evolution and what she's become
and how much to keep as a mystery from the audience here.
But the one thing I wanted to show here is this benevolence about Janet.
She's become a very different type of hero
and that she's attained or acquired these powers,
we're not sure how,
but that she's mastered sort of this quantum energy
and she's able to sort of bring her back to stasis here.
And we liked the idea, again,
of this father-daughter dynamic and redeeming this hero.
Or this villain, rather.
We're not sure... We liked the idea of ending this movie
where you saw Ava
and there was this whole dilemma about,
"Okay, what do we do with Ava?
"What becomes of her?"
And she and Bill Foster slip away,
and we're left with this ambiguity of what's gonna happen to her,
because she could really go either way.
"Is she going to relapse and remain a villain,
"or is she going to discover her more heroic self?"
We don't know, and that was one of the intriguing things about this movie.
We also liked the idea, again, of doing this mislead about,
"What do we do with them?" And cut to the cops and then,
of course, it's Kurt and Dave and they've apprehended Sonny Burch
and Uzman and Anitolov,
and used, of course, their own truth serum against them.
Walton Goggins, in particular, is so committed to this conceit
(CHUCKLING) where not only is Sonny Burch telling the truth
of all the terrible stuff he's done, but he's found some peace.
There's a load lifted off of him, and he's in a very Zen place.
And I thought that was a really, really funny take on that moment.
Here is very much a comic panel.
What would've been a Jack Kirby-esque composition.
And really using... Again, I haven't talked about...
We shot this movie in the 2:40 aspect ratio
as opposed to 1:85, which is what we did the first movie.
And it felt like a good progression, as I said,
getting out and wanting to see and feel the environment
more than we did in the first movie.
And that so much of it is just broad daylight San Francisco
and really being able to play the frame more and opening it up.
Here, of course, a cheap gag of Paul Rudd running in his underwear.
I mean, what movie going experience...
(LAUGHING) It's just not complete if you don't see that.
Here, we played around, again, with the idea
of Scott's magic and misdirection writ large.
He's created this large-scale illusion to occupy the FBI agents
while they shrink the lab and take it somewhere else in the city.
We never explain, intentionally so, how Scott Lang pulls off that trick.
Just as a magician doesn't reveal their tricks,
we don't reveal it either.
This scene, we shot in Chinatown in San Francisco
and we talked a lot about the resolution or lack of resolution
between these two characters and what happens.
"Are they brought to justice?" And we finally decided we liked the idea
that they slipped away, not knowing what was gonna happen.
But the important thing is that Bill Foster, hero as he is,
is gonna stand by her through whatever happens.
And I really like that emotional bond between those characters.
So, it all has to build to this moment
where Jimmy Woo thinks he's finally gonna catch Scott
in violation of his house arrest.
And, of course, he's wrong.
Scott has managed to get back before they have,
and, of course, is engaging in one of his favorite pastimes,
the electronic drum set.
I'm a drummer.
It was important to not only get drums in this movie,
but to have them as accurate as possible.
Paul Rudd, no slouch on the electronic drums, by the way.
And, of course, as you'll see later in a tag,
we have a gigantic ant playing drums.
I made sure that when he's hitting the ride cymbal, you hear a ride cymbal.
When he's hitting the hi-hat, you hear a hi-hat.
I knew that was gonna be important to me and to friends of mine
such as Jon Wurster
who will post on Twitter when drums aren't period-accurate in movies,
and to Tom Scharpling, who tends to ding mistakes like that in movies.
That's for you, guys.
...but, uh, I'll be seeing you again.
Where?
Huh?
Where will you be seeing me again?
Like, in general...
REED: Here, another of my favorite scenes
between Randall Park and Paul Rudd.
We shot a lot of different versions of this moment
where he's let off house arrest,
but we just let these two go and build this incredibly awkward moment
where this meeting of minds and Jimmy Woo is...
He's proud of Scott. He feels frustrated he didn't catch him,
but he's proud of him and kind of wants to be his friend. (LAUGHS)
And they were terrific together in this scene.
Structurally, we knew we were gonna have to address
the events of Infinity War at some point in this movie
and we talked throughout the writing process...
"Throughout the course of our story, do we see monitors in the background?
"Do we start to seed in things going on in other parts of the world?"
And that struck us as kind of lazy, and we'd seen it before.
So we finally landed on this structure which felt like the very specific
Ant-Man and The Wasp way of dealing with the events at the end of Infinity War,
which was to tie up all of our characters' stories
in this kind of too-neat resolution
where it's almost too pretty of a bow on the end of every story.
Scott is off house arrest.
He's able to go to the house and pick up Cassie and see his daughter.
The X-Con guys land the Karapetyan account
because he's seen them on TV having captured Sonny Burch.
Hank and Janet, of course, are reunited
and they go on a well-earned vacation on a remote island.
And, of course, he presents her with the shrunken house from the first movie.
They grow it and are able to relax a little while.
And then, of course, we cut to Them!,
the classic giant ant movie from the '50s.
And Scott, Hope, and Cassie are at a drive-in theater.
This is awesome.
So, Cassie...
what do you want to be when you grow up?
REED: We liked the idea of bringing genuine resolution to these characters.
All to the tune of The Partridge Family again,
"Come On, Get Happy!"
And then have a really colorful, fun main-on-end title sequence,
and then present them with a tag scene
where it's a little bit in the future
and they are working on some new quantum technology.
And I'll get to that in a moment.
We had several cuts of this scene.
One where we revealed the shrunken drive-in very early,
but when we showed it to audiences, this seemed to pack the best punch.
Just not to reveal it till the end,
and it felt like a great ending shot of the movie
where their drive-in theater is a laptop in the yard.
Coming up with fun main-on-end title sequences is always a challenge,
and this one, actually, early on, we talked about
doing a fake behind-the-scenes documentary
which showed us shooting Ant-Man and The Wasp
more like a Godzilla movie from the '50s
(CHUCKLES) where we're people in suits stomping on model cityscapes.
Keying off of that, we decided to do this sequence,
which really came out of my...
When I used to do Super 8 movies as a kid,
I would always build these tabletop dioramas
with miniature train models and things like that
and shoot them in Super 8.
And I always think of that
as, like, the core spirit of filmmaking for me.
Just doing something in your backyard with your friends and shooting it
and blowing things up, and that was always fun as a kid.
So this really is kind of an homage to that.
Just the tabletop model version of our movie.
Revisiting these specific moments from the movie,
but in this very lo-fi, molded plastic, tabletop diorama thing.
And it also definitely was in line with our tone
of ending the movie in a very colorful, happy way
and then this gut-punch of a tag scene.
I have to stop and also talk about the music.
Chris Beck, again, knocked it out of the park.
Of course, he did the score for the first Ant-Man,
and he returns for Ant-Man and The Wasp,
continuing that great Ant-Man theme he came up with,
but also an incredible Wasp theme
and a quantum theme and all this stuff.
He really has embodied the spirit of these movies
and brings to mind these little hints of Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith,
and really just absolutely the spirit of the movies.
I first worked with Chris Beck on my first movie, Bring It On, in 2000,
and it's been so exciting to be able to work on these movies
with a large orchestra on both these movies.
Here is our tag scene.
Part of the thing here was to hit the audience
with as much random information as possible.
Where are they? They're on a parking deck
somewhere in the city.
We see Janet in street clothes for the first time.
There's Luis's van.
In the back of the van is a shrunken quantum tunnel, it appears.
Now, Scott is in his Ant-Man suit. What is he doing there?
He's turning something on.
They fire up the tunnel.
Here's Hope. She's got a container,
and they're talking about going and getting quantum healing particles.
So there's a lot for the audience to take in.
And the idea was, "Let's just give them a taste of...
"You know, now after all those neat resolutions,
"what are these heroes up to next?
"Are they progressing this quantum technology?
"What are they doing?" And they've got a portable tunnel
and Scott's gonna go in, and we learn that he's getting these particles
to hopefully further heal Ghost.
So, that's intriguing. Somehow there's been communication
between Bill Foster and Ava
and Hank and Janet and Hope and Scott.
Suddenly, he's lost in the quantum realm. They've lost contact,
but, of course, it's Scott screwing around
and things are funny.
It was, sort of, building all these,
what were hopefully gonna be, misleads for the audience.
Now, presenting another part of the quantum realm.
This very colorful, cosmic part of the quantum realm
where he's getting these healing particles.
And now, things go south.
And now, we present how our movie, Ant-Man and The Wasp,
deals with the dramatic events that we saw at the end of Infinity War.
Scott thinks they're playing a joke on him.
We cut back
and the three characters that we've seen are no longer there.
They've been turned to ash,
thanks to Thanos.
And, seemingly, Scott Lang is trapped in the quantum realm.
To see that sequence with an audience
has been incredibly gratifying, and again,
there were many, many different ways we talked about how to incorporate
the Infinity War events into our movie,
and that felt like the way to do it.
It felt cheeky in the way that hopefully Ant-Man and The Wasp was cheeky,
but really does pack a dramatic punch with audiences
as you see it in the theater.
What this means in the larger sense, of course, I'm not at liberty to say.
You know that.
Even if you're sitting here listening to this,
and you've been listening to me ramble on for two hours
and you're hanging on the hope,
"Oh, man. Is he gonna reveal something about Avengers 4 that I don't know?"
Well, guess what. You're in luck.
(FLIPPING PAGES) I have here the screenplay for Avengers 4
which I am going to read to you right now.
But before I actually get through the entire script,
I'm just gonna read some of the salient plot points.
Now, these are not only spoilers, I would say these are extreme spoilers.
So I'm gonna go through them very, very carefully.
Okay, so the first question is,
"Is everyone dead, or who's coming back?"
Well, here's what I'll say.
I can only speak about our characters in Ant-Man and The Wasp.
So Scott Lang is in the quantum realm,
and he is seemingly trapped
and we don't quite know how he's gonna get out.
We know in the first movie,
he had some grow disks with him that he used to get out.
Dramatically, we can't go to that well again.
Oh, that would just be lazy.
As filmmakers, we can't do that again.
So we made sure that he does not have any grow disks
with him in the new suit.
And remember, it appears that it's the malfunctioning suit.
So, how's he gonna get out of that?
Well, here's how.
(STATIC)
And he manages to do what I just said.
So, um, you guys got that, right?
Cool.
So, now let's talk about our favorite Avengers.
Let's talk about Spider-Man.
Let's talk about Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther,
um, Hulk.
What happens to these characters in Avengers 4?
Well...
Hang on. Someone's coming in.
Yeah? You know what?
I'm being told that I cannot actually tell you any of this stuff.
(FLIPPING PAGES) I thought the street date of this disc
would allow me to kind of reveal some of the secrets,
but I am not gonna be able to reveal any of that.
I apologize for that.
Sorry to get your hopes up about that.
I can talk to you about the next Ant-Man movie.
Actually, I'm not allowed to talk about that either.
There's really been no determination
as to whether there is even going to be a next Ant-Man movie
or Wasp movie or anything.
We don't know anything.
And I'm not allowed to talk about that.
So...
Let's talk about...
Let's talk about Planet of the Apes. You guys like the Apes movies?
I've been digging those movies. I like those a lot.
I like the originals. I grew up on them. I love them.
The first, original Planet of the Apes turned 50 this year.
I'm a huge fan of that.
I don't know where that series is gonna go,
but I'm excited to see it, always.
Any Star Wars fans out there? You guys Star Wars fans?
They've been making more Star Wars movies.
Those are gonna continue.
Um, let's see.
I'm actually gonna have an Altoid.
- (BOX RATTLING) - Hold on.
(MUNCHING)
Altoids were featured in the movie.
As a result, I got a lifetime supply of Altoids.
Which means I'm gonna have the freshest breath imaginable.
Really, for the rest of my life.
These are really curiously strong, man.
Delicious peppermint flavor.
I'm not getting any financial kickback from saying that either.
That comes from the heart. This is really good.
I've been talking for two hours straight. (CLEARS THROAT)
And if you don't hydrate, have enough Altoids,
things can go seriously wrong.
You know what? I'm gonna go back on point now.
I wanna talk about Chris Beck's music
which you're hearing throughout this end credit sequence.
Chris was able to,
as I said, take all the themes from the original movie
and expand on them and create new themes.
And the entire score was recorded at Abbey Road
where, of course, the Beatles recorded all of their records.
And I was not able to go.
I wasn't able to go to one of the sessions.
I think there were three...
Laura, were there three or four sessions?
I think there were maybe four sessions,
recording sessions, at Abbey Road.
You have to understand, this would've been a dream come true for me.
Abbey Road.
To be able to sit where John, Paul, George, and Ringo
recorded all of their records.
Nope.
Didn't have time.
I was here in post-production, editing, working on visual effects.
And we could tap in via satellite, but it's not the same thing.
Oh, look. "Tilting Scale, written by Norwood Cheek
"performed by Cardinal Family Singers," on that credit.
That's my friend Norwood. I play drums on that track.
Proving once again that I am a drummer.
Would've loved to have gone to Abbey Road. Couldn't go.
You'd think on a movie like this that the director would be able to go,
but no, didn't happen.
Didn't happen the first time,
had a pact, a blood pact, that I would go this time.
I violated that blood pact. I did not go.
So, for that reason alone,
we have to do a third Ant-Man and Wasp movie.
Because I gotta go to Abbey Road, where the Beatles recorded.
Okay, so now,
we're getting to what is known as the second tag.
And we know we have just gut-punched the audience
with our tag that addresses the blip-out.
Now, we're back at Scott's apartment.
We see an emergency broadcast test on the screen.
This is the aftermath.
And the only thing left standing is the ant
that Hank and Hope programmed to do Scott's moves.
Still alive and still jamming.
"Ant-Man and The Wasp will return?"
Thank you for your time.
This has been Peyton Reed, director of Ant-Man and The Wasp.
See you soon.