Can you talk about your love of the genre and why this opportunity was right for you?
I’ve always been a superhero movie fan and I’ve also been a Marvel fan. I grew up as the classic Marvel Comics nerd and when I was reading comics as a kid, starting in elementary school, for me there was very much a dividing line of Marvel and DC. What I liked about Marvel Comics was the attitude. Stan Lee created this editorial attitude for those comic books and it wasn’t just reading the dialogues of the characters. There was stuff in the margins and there was a real attitude to how it was written, so the storytellers behind those stories were great.

I also liked how they created this interlocking universe in the Marvel Comics realm where you could be reading The Incredible Hulk and Captain America would show up in that comic book, or you’d read Iron Man and Spider-Man would show up in that. It was a great cross-pollination in the comic-book world of Marvel that I gravitated to. 

In my professional life, I’ve always wanted to do a superhero movie, science-fiction stuff, and all those genres. I’ve done comedies until now, so when the chance to do Ant-Man came around, I jumped at the chance. 

I knew the Ant-Man characters inside and out — the Hank Pym version, the Scott Lang version — and I definitely had feelings about those characters. I think when you grow up a comic-book kid, you have your own personal relationship with those characters and in the movie version I had clear ideas about what I wanted to see, what I didn’t want to see, and how I would approach a character, so I think that was helpful.

Can you tell us about bringing depth to each of the characters in the film?
The basic structure of the movie is a heist, with the characters and the idea jumping off from Marvel Premiere no 47, which is a story called To Steal an Ant-Man. It was a story in the comics that introduced Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd). So that was all in place, but what I really wanted to do was take the characters and realise them fully in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

In the comics, Hank Pym (played by Michael Douglas) is one of the most complicated characters. He’s definitely a character motivated by guilt, so in the movie version I wanted to bring out a Hank Pym that really had some grey areas. He’s the mentor character in the movie but he’s kind of a screwed-up mentor. He’s got definite issues with his daughter and really ambivalent feelings about what he’s created: the Pym particle and the Ant-Man suit. So it’s interesting to have a mentor-pupil story where the mentor has some really mixed feelings about what he’s doing. 

Scott Lang is an interesting character, too, and a unique character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because he’s a father and a pretty normal guy who’s made terrible decisions in his life. At the beginning of the film, we see him coming out of prison and his number one goal is to be a part of his daughter’s life. That’s a really different arc for a character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and one that I found really interesting.

I also like that Scott Lang is a hero who doesn’t have any superpowers at all. It’s all about the suit. With Paul Rudd playing Scott Lang, we have a lot of fun with the idea of what a person would do if they found the suit. He’s really the eyes and ears of the audience in this adventure. 

Even though Scott is an Everyman, he’s also very smart, right?
Scott Lang is a very smart guy. He’s got a master’s degree in electrical engineering, but he also has definite skills as a cat burglar. At a certain point in his life, he made some bad decisions and has paid for them. He’s done a three-year stint in prison and, as we see him at the beginning of the movie, he’s getting out and he’s determined to make a new life for himself. He’s just going to go on the straight and narrow and have a relationship with his daughter and be a good guy, but it’s a tough world out there. There are these temptations that come at him, so part of it is this battle for his moral compass. You’re rooting for him to make the right decisions and part of the movie really is about him getting in touch with his better self. 

What’s the tone of the movie?
A movie like Ant-Man is tricky because there are a lot of things going on. It’s definitely a superhero movie, it’s got a strong science-fiction concept with the shrinking and controlling ants, it has the structure of a heist movie and it’s got these dual father-daughter redemption stories going on. But tonally the thing that’s holding it all together is that it really has the beat of a comedy.

We’re not laughing at Ant-Man but we’re definitely acknowledging the absurdity of this character and his powers and being able to shrink. Part of the thing was coming into this film and galvanising everybody very quickly by letting them know the tone, so that everybody was clear about it and open to what we can discover along the way. We actually did discover a lot of stuff. It’s hard to make a movie with Paul Rudd and say: ‘Stick to the script. Just say that line, man. Don’t go off the page’. That would just be dumb because Paul is so amazing and is one of the screenwriters of the film as well, but you want that spontaneity. It was something that I encouraged.

So what was it like working with Paul Rudd as Ant-Man?
Paul is like an insurance policy… a really charismatic insurance policy. Ant-Man tonally is a very specific thing. It’s different than any other movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and part of that is the hero himself. The average person is not necessarily familiar with Ant-Man and the comics, so there are these questions of ‘What does he do? What’s the tone of the movie?’ Paul clarifies that a lot and one of the great things about Paul is he’s mostly known now for his comedic roles and people forget what an incredible dramatic actor he is.

Paul is my favourite kind of actor. He’s smart and he comes incredibly prepared, but the preparation also means that he’s willing to throw that out and come up with something absolutely new. 

Take us through the challenges of making a shrinking movie... 
When I first came on Ant-Man, one of the things that was important to me was that this is a shrinking movie at its core and there’s a long history of cinematic movies from The Incredible Shrinking Man… Honey I Shrunk the Kids… but this had to be 2015’s version of a shrinking movie and by that it means the bar is very, very high in terms of technology. It’s got to look photo-realistic. We have to believe that he’s shrinking and part of that is what are the methodologies? How are we going to do this? It used to be that you’d bring in the giant pencil or the giant baseball but we didn’t use any of that in the movie.

We used a combination of motion picture macro-photography, still macro-photography, motion capture with the actors, motion capture with the stunt people, and then for every set we would build these miniature sets, called macro sets. Because if you’re down small with Ant-Man, and he’s running across a floor or running through a carpet, I wanted to feel those textures and make it really tactile. So that became the mantra: make it as photo-realistic as possible. Using the technology the way we do, we have the resources to make all those surfaces tactile and real, but we can still move our camera around as much as possible and that’s the big technological revelation of the movie that sets it apart from all the other “shrink” movies.

What can audiences look forward to in Ant-Man?
I wanted to make a movie that was tight and fast and funny and quick on its feet, but also kind of sneaks up on you in terms of the emotion of the movie. It’s a dual father-daughter story. But I wanted this to be a movie that’s, in a lot of ways, a bit of a palate cleanser after something like Avengers: Age of Ultron, which is amazing and huge and giant with tremendous scope. But now we’re telling a story about a guy who lives in San Francisco, finds a suit, and shrinks down, so by its nature the scale is smaller but it absolutely delivers all the action and the kinetics of the other Marvel movies but just on a tiny scale. 

I think people are going have a good time at the movies. They are going to laugh a lot and I think it’s an exhilarating movie. Obviously all these heroes have a wish fulfilment aspect to them. There’s something very childlike about the idea of shrinking. It’s almost like being invisible. 

Why will you watch Ant-Man? 
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