By Jeremy Smith
As promised last week, here is the second chapter to my interview with ANT-MAN director Peyton Reed. Two days before the film’s opening, we met up at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Blvd., across the street from the legendary Chinese Theatre where Reed was introducing two cast-and-crew screenings. This is a much looser conversation that covers a lot of ground. Since reviews had begun to hit by this point, Peyton was keen to correct the record about what jokes and story beats belonged to him (or to Adam McKay and Paul Rudd). After a while, we got into the Marvel filmmaking process, and the idea that it is auteur resistant – which led to a sidebar about the use (and misuse) of the auteur theory in 2015. Also covered: Christophe Beck’s excellent score for the film, Michael Douglas as actor and raconteur, the ecstasy of Garrett Morris, the agony of Neil Hamburger, and, finally, the Tom Scharpling cameo that almost was (and may yet be again).
For a longer introduction about Peyton (and necessary context to some of what we discuss here), please read our first interview. Once you’re done with that, feel free to dive in!
Jeremy Smith: Too much of the discussion about the film has been reduced to journalists attempting to figure out what was held over from Edgar and Joe’s version. The reviews are the most frustrating, because they’re trying to make educated guesses when you’ve spent a good deal of time in interviews explaining the differences.
Peyton Reed: Since we spoke, I’ve sort of stepped back and wondered, “What’s the point of this? What’s the point of trying to parse out who did what?” I sometimes don’t remember on any given movie what was in the script, what a writer came up with or even what I came up with. It all just becomes a collaborative thing – and that’s not a copout answer. This is truly the process. And this movie happened so quickly. I’ll admit I do get miffed. I read an article earlier that said, “It had to have been Edgar Wright’s choice to score the briefcase fight to The Cure.” I was like, “What???” (Laughs) That was my choice! DISINTEGRATION was the second CD I ever owned!
Jeremy: The need to parse out who did what is already kind of silly, but it gets frustrating when you know these people don’t have all, or sometimes any, of the relevant information.
Reed: That’s the thing. What’s interesting to me is that it’s a small overall percentage of the moviegoing population. I’m just excited to show the movie to people who don’t give a shit who directed it. It just plays as ANT-MAN. That excites me more than anyone else. But the whole parsing out thing only frustrates me is when someone says “Of course, DISINTEGRATION by The Cure is Edgar’s idea.” Why? And just the logic of it. “Okay, he wrote the drafts, and then he left the movie, but then he came in later as a music supervisor to add songs?” I don’t understand the supposed logic of that.
One of the big takeaways for me is that a lot of the people writing about the movie don’t understand how movies are made – which is curious to me when that’s part of their job, I think. And then the other thing has just been the sheer laziness of journalism – present company excepted, and a handful of others that I truly love to read. It’s rarely the proper film critics who are guilty of this, but… I guess you’d call them the “fanboy critics”. I’ll probably get in trouble for that statement, but I kind of don’t care. Accept the movie that is before you. And then there’s the other notion that… I have a sense Edgar Wright is probably over this situation, but it’s funny that a lot of his fans are not. His adult fans.
Jeremy: Edgar has moved on to his next movie. BABY DRIVER sounds awesome, and it’s going to be pure Edgar, which is what any fan of Edgar’s should want.
Reed: It was interesting doing press in London. People would come in every four minutes, and they would all go, “I have to ask you this upfront…” They all lead with it. I wanted to do the quick jumpcut version of it. “He developed this movie for eight years.” (Snaps) “He developed this movie for ten years.” (Snaps) “Twelve years.” It just kept getting more ridiculous.
Jeremy: I want to get back to this idea of trying to assign credit to writers based on voice. It’s perilous. For years, I labored under the mistaken notion that Leigh Brackett was the true writer of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. I’d be like, “Just listen to the dialogue. That’s right out of RIO BRAVO!” And then, once I started reading more about the production, I found out she only wrote the first draft, and that Kasdan and Kershner wrote most of what I love.
Reed: Clearly, when I started this movie, I knew this would happen. It just comes with the territory. Then I got to a point where I was like, “Fuck it! I don’t care!” I’ve always wanted to make a comic book movie, and I’ve been reading Ant-Man comic books since I was ten. I have my own feelings about the source material, and that material has been around for fifty years. When I first met with Marvel, that was my biggest misgiving: “How rigid are they going to be about what’s already there.” And they just said, “Here are the drafts. Have at it.” I felt an incredible amount of freedom. It’s hard for me to talk about it with all of the assumptions, the whole conventional wisdom of “The Disney-Owned Corporate Marvel vs. The Auteur.” That was the storyline, but it’s an easy story and absolutely not based in fact – in terms of my empirical evidence of having read every draft, and the empirical evidence of me and my relationship with Marvel. Feige was like, “Man, this is the twelfth Marvel movie. Mix it up! Change whatever!” I felt incredible freedom, more so than on movies I’ve made for other studios. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true.
Jeremy: That is the impression out there with Marvel movies right now. They want hired hands who’ll do their bidding, not auteurs.
Reed: Here’s the thing: whatever happened with those two parties that preceded me, I think there’s a certain part about it that they’re not allowed to talk about publicly. But when I came on, [the project] was clearly in the disaster category*. It just was. They’d shut down for, I think, twelve weeks. No one was doing anything, and they had a release date.
Jeremy: How integral was Paul to the salvaging process?
Reed: I mean, you know I have the utmost respect for Edgar as a filmmaker, but when I sat down with Paul, I knew him before this, but one of my biggest things was to gain his trust as his director. He had a lot at stake. He was out front. Whatever happened behind the scenes, he was contractually obligated to play Ant-Man. (Laughs) That was a really scary time for him. There’s the actor’s side to this, and Paul was abandoned. You know, there’s part of that thing where directors feel like they have to play psychiatrist a little, and deal with every actor and how they’re feeling about the movie. That was my biggest thing was Paul, going to him and saying, “Look, I know you have this version of the movie in your mind, and it’s probably the reason you signed on in the first place. But that’s not happening now. It’s happening another way now. Let’s talk about how it’s going to happen.” And, again, it was my good fortune that Adam McKay was writing with Paul. I was a little worried that Paul was just going to write because that idea of actor/writer can go awry really quickly. But it’s a great credit to Paul as a writer and an actor that he’s as generous as a writer as he is an actor. It was a really good situation. We did a lot of restructuring and a lot of rewriting.
Jeremy: Which allowed you and Adam to add in things from the comics that you liked.
Reed: Some of which I was shocked wasn’t there in the first place. It’s so delicate talking about it because no one will ever read those drafts – at least, I don’t think they will. It’s funny, but I thought a lot about JODOROWSKY’S DUNE. I love that documentary. I love Jodorowsky, and I love him talking about the project. I love the artists that he was able in to make that movie. It’s amazing. But the big question mark is, “Would that movie have worked? Would it have been good, or would it have just been a huge, self-indulgent disaster?” No one will ever know. But the documentary buys in and sells that notion that this is one of the most amazing movies you never got to see. And it’s interesting that David Lynch ended up making DUNE. If David Lynch had started making DUNE, and then walked away, it would’ve been “David Lynch directing DUNE??? That would’ve been the greatest movie of all time!” It’s all in the perception. “James Cameron’s SPIDER-MAN? My head’s going to explode! That’s going to be the greatest movie of all time!” It never happened. We’ll never know.
This applies here as well. “Edgar Wright’s ANT-MAN? That’s awesome!” As you well know, I was psyched by that proposition. I really wanted to see that movie. But he never shot the movie, so we’ll never know. You’d have to talk to Edgar – and, again, I’m not sure if he’s legally allowed to talk about his experience. I didn’t develop FANTASTIC FOUR for nearly as long as he was on ANT-MAN, but I know how painful it is to walk away from a project like that. I lobbied hard to get FANTASTIC FOUR. At that point in my career, I was a long shot. But I got it. I was so psyched to work on it, but it quickly became clear that Fox, in 2003, was not interested in making the movie I wanted to make. I only developed that movie for about a year, but I get it. I would never presume to know what Edgar’s reasons were, but I know how hard it is.
(The waiter drops by to take our order. When he leaves, Peyton picks up with a different thought.)
It is interesting that these movies are a process. There’s a certain discovery that happens when you’re shooting and editing that either could not be foreseen when you’re writing, or was a bump in script format that, when you put it on its feet, it’s more than a bump.
Jeremy: Was there a specific discovery you can remember from the shoot or the editing of ANT-MAN?
Reed: There were a lot of things. There was nothing major. I don’t think we sacrificed any giant moment. The train stuff in the movie - the general conceit, not necessarily Thomas the Tank Engine, but the whole train set sequence – was always in Joe and Edgar’s drafts. It’s great! It’s fantastic! It’s exactly what you want to see in an ANT-MAN movie! It’s the right sense of humor. It inverts the whole “more is more” trend of superhero movies.
Jeremy: And then you’ve got a miniature Buster Keaton gag in the middle of a major superhero movie.
Reed: I love Buster Keaton, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that that was an influence for Edgar, too. There are a lot of similarities in Edgar’s areas of interests and my own. Musically, visually, tonally, comedic… all of that. So maybe it’s one of the things that made the final movie hopefully feel like more of a piece.
Jeremy: You do have similar sensibilities. It’s no mistake I’ve become friends with both of you. We’re all into the same shit. With Edgar it’s De Palma and Prince… once we met, it was like, “How are we not friends?” Not that anyone gives a shit, but that’s been the toughest part of this for me. I know that you two would totally be friends if you got to know each other.
Reed: It’s interesting, because Edgar and I exchanged emails early on, and… that was one of the things when I came in. “Is he really gone? Is this happening? Is this definitive?” When I finally had assurances from both sides, I was like, “Well, somebody’s going to direct this movie. I want to direct this movie.” We had a really nice exchange of emails that I feel were mutually respectful. I think we’re both well-mannered men, and we both felt that the right thing to do was to have this conversation – for whatever reason. For our own reasons. I think it was at the end of our email exchange that Edgar said, “One day, when this is all way past us, we can get together and have a drink.” I would love that. Because listen… we’re both going to make lots of movies. This will just be a bump in the road.
Jeremy: You’re both insanely talented filmmakers, and you’ll hopefully keep making great films.
Reed: Well, thank you. The media part of it… when I talked about lazy journalism, I suppose I’d be the same way if I were a journalist. It’s certainly the savory story to tell. And Edgar has a very fervent fan base. He makes films in a very specific way. My career has been more… women’s pictures. (Laughs) Cheerleader comedy, Rock Hudson-Doris Day homage, THE BREAK-UP… but we both have an intensely comedic background.
Jeremy: But that was not by design that that happened for you. Those were just the projects, right?
Reed: Exactly.
Jeremy: And as a film buff, something like DOWN WITH LOVE is catnip.
Reed: Absolutely. I was a kid who, probably like you, grew up loving movies, started to read movie criticism, then went back to read Cahiers du cinéma and got into the auteur theory. It’s interesting how the auteur theory has changed since the ‘50s to now. When it was first introduced in France and then in America, it was talking about studio-era directors and the commonalities between them. There was authorship there as a director. Post-auteur theory, there are at least two generations of filmmakers who grew up with and leaned into the auteur theory. They branded themselves. I was not a director that did that – and not necessarily by design. There have been a couple of reviews that called me a “journeyman director”. You know what? Fuck it. I love it! I do! I’m someone who would’ve loved to make movies in the studio system of the ‘30s and ‘40s. It doesn’t mean I don’t have my own style; it’s just how my career has shaped up.
But it would be interesting to sit down and have a conversation about the auteur theory with the cast of crew of your movie. They’re collaborative things as far as I’m concerned. There has to be someone leading the ship with a real vision, and I feel like I’m that way, but the auteur theory has morphed into something that is part fantasy and part insult to everyone who works on movies. I really believe that. And I think more often than not, for directors who’ve bought into it, it’s become a real straitjacket.
Jeremy: When you’re talking about auteur filmmakers, I know one way they can protect their vision is to shoot little to no coverage. That way, there’s only one way to cut the movie.
Reed: Right. Bogdanovich style.
Jeremy: Whenever I talk to De Palma, he’s like (in the world’s worst De Palma imitation), “Coverage? Coverage is a bad word. We don’t talk about ‘coverage’.” (Laughing) For some reason, I just gave De Palma a Texas accent.
Reed: You just turned him into Hoyt Axton.
Jeremy: I get them confused. But regarding De Palma, I remember doing a Q&A with Paul Hirsch for BLOW OUT. We were watching the train station sequence, and he said to me, “There’s no coverage.” I asked him later how often that happens now, and he said never.
Reed: It doesn’t happen now, but even the directors who have a strong visual stamp, it isn’t about oners and single shots; it is about the coverage and the cutting pattern.
Jeremy: Which a lot of us learned via hours of non-stop MTV.
Reed: Kids and adults are so visually literate nowadays. Maybe they already do this, but in elementary schools, along with English, they should teach visual literacy. Actually, not “should”. They have to at this point. It’s not where our society is headed, it’s where it is. Being able to decode the visual images of something, what it’s selling you or how it’s making you feel… that’s crucial. With the cutting and rhythm of ANT-MAN, that’s something we wanted to do: start with a slow burn and setup, and then, bam, it catches fire. We talked a lot about BACK TO THE FUTURE in that regard. They’re obviously very different movies, but I wanted to slow it down a little bit because I wanted emotionality out of the movie: I wanted emotionality out of the Hank-Hope story; I wanted emotionality out of Janet; I wanted emotionality out of Scott-Cassie. It is by design a more intimate Marvel movie, and I wanted an audience to feel that.
Jeremy: Adding the scene with Janet where she dies. (Slight smile from Peyton.) Not that anyone’s ever dead in these movies.
Reed: She disappears.
Jeremy: (Laughs) I like how seeing that moment gives Hank’s story a little more emotional depth. I don’t think Marvel gets enough credit for how well they’ve played tragic moments. CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER does this magnificently at the end.
Reed: I think that movie gets maligned in ways that it shouldn’t. I love that movie, and I think Joe Johnston was the perfect choice for that movie. That moment where Cap is going down with the ship? Amazing.
Jeremy: And that’s Johnston, I think.
Reed: OCTOBER SKY. I love that movie. Another overlooked movie. It’s a very simple movie, beautifully shot… it’s really, really good. But Joe Johnston doing a World War II movie with all of his design aesthetic that clearly informed STAR WARS, and just diving headlong into that original Marvel period… it works as a movie on its own, but does what it needed to do to set up the character for subsequent movies.
Jeremy: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER also has a hummable theme, which is rare for a Marvel movie.
Reed: I’ll say two things about that. In addition to wanting an under-two-hour movie, I came in and said to Kevin Feige, “I want ANT-MAN to have an identifiable theme.” When I was a kid and saw Donner’s SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, and walked out with that John Williams theme in my head… I went right out and bought the soundtrack. But can you do [a score like] that in 2015 without feeling like it’s a throwback? It was something that Kevin, who’s a soundtrack fanatic as well, had been chasing a little bit. There’s no bigger SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE fan than Kevin; he started out working for [Richard and Lauren Shuler Donner]. I wanted to use Christophe Beck, who scored BRING IT ON and had not been able to work with since due to scheduling. Chris had been wanting to do a Marvel movie, too, and made that known. In the wake of him having scored FROZEN and EDGE OF TOMORROW – two completely different, but awesome scores – we were really in sync. We hired Chris, and he delivered a scene that is everything we’re talking about. It’s muscular in the way superhero scores need to be, but it’s jazzy and has a playfulness to it. He knocked it out of the park.
Jeremy: Speaking of playfulness, Garrett Morris’s cameo drew one of the best reactions I’ve seen in a movie this year. There were only, like, five of us that got it, but we flipped out when we saw him.
Reed: That makes me so happy. Somebody asked me recently, “You had Garrett Morris from 2 BROKE GIRLS sitting in a cab. Why?” I realized that I’d have to explain to people that, technically speaking, Garrett Morris is the original onscreen Ant-Man. When we called Garrett to ask if he’d be in the film, he was like, “I love it! I was hoping you’d call!” I reminded him that when I was a student at UNC that… we invited Garrett Morris to talk. We had “A Night With Garrett Morris of SNL”. I just love Garrett Morris. I wanted to do three things with ANT-MAN: get Garrett Morris in the movie, have a Stan Lee cameo that tops all of the other cameos – and I think we succeeded – and have an Adam Ant song on the soundtrack. I got all three of those things.
Jeremy: And you had to have Gregg Turkington for some reason.
Reed: Let’s talk about Turkington.
Jeremy: Has Neil Hamburger seen it yet?
Reed: Neil has not seen the movie yet, but I kind of have an idea of what he’ll say about it. With Gregg, we had to cast the role of the Baskin-Robbins manager, and I said to Feige, “There’s this guy I think is perfect for the sad-sack manager. His name is Gregg Turkington.” And Feige, the head of Marvel Studios, goes, “Oh, my god, I love ON CINEMA!” If you had a conversation with the head of any other studio, and you mentioned Gregg Turkington, they’d be like, “He looks weird. Maybe. Let’s bring him in with some other people.” With Feige, he not only knew who he was, but was like, “Yes! Let’s cast him!” The Marvel people are actually comedy connoisseurs. They not only know mainstream comedians, but also indie or so-called alternative comedy. Feige is an obsessive DECKER and ON CINEMA AT THE CINEMA fan. How does a studio head make time to watch all of that stuff? This is an appealing thing for someone who is also a comedy connoisseur. It’s a relief to not have to go through the cattle call audition, and explain to someone why this guy is going to be awesome.
Jeremy: Also, throughout the movie, I was wondering if there was a place for Tom Scharpling.
Reed: I will tell you that not only was there a place for Scharpling, we in fact shot a scene with Scharpling. Scharpling was in a scene… there was a sequence in the film that was in the McKay-Rudd drafts that was referred to as the “wish fulfillment” sequence. There was a point where Scott gets the suit, goes through that whole experience and then does a lot of shitty things with the suit. We shot stuff where Michael Pena, T.I. and David Dastmalchian are shooting craps at an underground casino, and Scott is on the table flipping the dice. We also shot a scene where a woman is rushing with groceries and a baby under her arm, and she’s trying to get to the parking meter before the evil meter maid gives her a ticket. He doesn’t care, and gives it to her anyway, so Scott punches out his tires and blows up all the meters. It ended up not serving the story, but one of the beats in the montage was Scott filling out a lotto ticket, and then getting in the lotto machine with the balls to control what numbers came up. The disgruntled convenience store guy was Scharpling. And Rudd’s a huge Scharpling fan, too. But Scharpling being Scharpling, he was like, “Listen, I know you’re going to cut this scene. I’m not going to be in the movie. But if I happen to be in the movie or even in a supplementary scene, that’s a bonus. It was just fun to do it.” Scharpling is also a huge Marvel fan. As a housewarming gift for me in 1987 or ’88, he gave me his entire collection of 7-Eleven Marvel Slurpee cups from the ‘70s or ‘80s – one of which was Ant-Man. Scharpling and I have had a long relationship, and Marvel has always been one of the centerpieces.
Jeremy: I’m sure Scharpling will find his way into the Marvel movie universe eventually. And Philly Boy Roy.
Reed: We’ve got to get Wurster in there, no question.
(Food arrives. We eat. There is small talk. Then Michael Douglas comes up.)
Reed: In the original drafts, Pym was played as doddering and senile, which was a ruse. It was funny, but I felt it only got you so far. I wanted to embrace a more complicated version of Hank Pym because of his comic book past. I felt like the stage was really set for a Hank Pym motivated by guilt, who lived with this incredible tragedy in his past, and who was ill-equipped to deal with his daughter. He was obsessed with saving his wife absolutely at the expense of his daughter. He made a horrible decision early on in Hope’s life, and this was affecting their modern-day relationship in a very profound way. That was interesting to me because you had Michael Douglas playing this character; he’s made a career playing these kinds of complicated characters. That really excited him. He didn’t realize Hank was such a complicated character in the comics, so we discussed the various incarnations of Hank. We didn’t feel like we necessarily had to use a specific era or story, but it gave us the license to create a character with a lot of guilt, a lot of tragedy and a lot of deep-rooted suspicions about anything superheroic or Stark-related. He really dove into it. Also the idea of Douglas playing a mentor character, but he was a really fucked-up mentor. There’s that scene where he finally tells Hope what happened to her mom, and he’s so quiet and delicate. He’s terrific, and I hadn’t seen Michael do that in a very long time.
Jeremy: And Evangeline is right there with him. She’s great, too. I’ve always really liked her when she’s given a role with banter – especially, and this is going to sound weird, REAL STEEL, where she just has phenomenal chemistry with Hugh Jackman.
Reed: Absolutely. She’s really good in that movie.
Jeremy: And her interplay with Michael is wonderful in this.
Reed: Well, there was interesting drama in that relationship. You see how profoundly affected she was by her father not knowing how to be a good dad.
Jeremy: So did Michael ever have moments where he was like, “Hey Peyton, this reminds me of the time I was talking to Milos on the set of CUCKOO’S NEST…”
Reed: Listen… he didn’t have to do that. I would solicit these stories. Any downtime we got, I would sit down and say, “Can we talk about THE CHINA SYNDROME? I probably just gave you twenty-seven cents because I just bought the Twilight Time Limited Edition Blu-ray.” We talked a lot about THE CHINA SYNDROME. He told me about telling Jack Lemmon, “Jack, you know you can’t do the ba-ba-ba-ya-ba Jack Lemmon thing. You’re a military guy.” We all know Michael Douglas is an amazingly intelligent guy, but there is nothing diminished in him at all. We talked a lot about Zemeckis and Gale, and how they’d done I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND, a movie I love that bombed. We talked about USED CARS, a movie that I love that bombed. They wrote 1941—
Jeremy: A movie I love!
Reed: -that bombed. Zemeckis was in his twenties, and he couldn’t get off the couch. In his mind, he was washed up. And Douglas talks about how, “Man, I saw that USED CARS? Fucking loved that movie! So when ROMANCING THE STONE came around, I wanted Bob Z.” That movie absolutely reinvigorated Zemeckis’s career. So we talked a lot about Zemeckis and ROMANCING THE STONE.
Jeremy: What about JEWEL OF THE NILE?
Reed: We did not talk about JEWEL OF THE NILE. We did not have that conversation. (I get a great off-the-record Douglas story here. Sorry!) I love Michael Douglas. I always loved him as a fan, but working with him was a joy, man.
Jeremy: You talk about complicated characters, and the risks he’s taken as a movie star. WAR OF THE ROSES? What kind of movie star today would allow themselves to play a drunken lout who pisses on his wife’s fish dinner?
Reed: He loves it! FATAL ATTRACTION, BASIC INSTINCT… he found this niche that worked. There were so many moments, but for that ANT-MAN/WASP scene, he had to sit in this array where we had five cameras, and be still essentially just act with his face. To see him do that process that he’d never done before, and go to an emotional place in that scene. It’s such a brief moment in the movie, but to go to this emotional place of his twenty-five-year younger version losing the love of his life, he was like a twenty-year-old actor. He committed and got tears in his eyes. There is no laziness to this guy. This is an actor who’s still hungry and wants to try stuff he’s never done. He’s not afraid to look stupid. That was inspiring to me.
He’s also just old-school Hollywood. When we were in London recently, he said, “Hey, we’re going to do this small dinner with Catherine [Zeta-Jones] and some people at this private dinner club. I want you and Paul and Michael [Pena] to join us. This small group of people… I’m sitting next to Christiane Amanpour, Tom Stoppard is seated across from me, Sarah Ferguson stops by later…
Jeremy: Tom Stoppard? Seriously? Did you talk to him?
Reed: Before the dinner, we were in the parlor having drinks. It was all very English. I was like, “What do I say to Tom Stoppard.” So he comes up and says, “Hi, I’m Tom Stoppard.” I introduce myself, and he says, “So you’re the director of the movie?” I was like, “Yeah.” And he said, “I’d like to talk to you, if it’s okay, about the process of making a movie like this.” I’m like, “Is it okay? Absolutely!” After a while, I got to the point where I could talk to him about not only his plays, but his experience in writing for movies, and what were his most fulfilling experiences. We talked about BRAZIL. But he’s just so inquisitive and lovely. Later, he’s sitting next to Rudd, and he says, “So, you not only starred in this movie, but you co-wrote it as well. You’re a writer.” And Paul being Paul was just, “Aw, I was working with Adam McKay, but I don’t know about being a writer…” And then Stoppard asked, “I’d love to know what’s your process as a writer?” Later, after everyone had left, Rudd and I are riding back, and he goes, “Tom Stoppard asked me what my process was as a writer! Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve never felt like a bigger fraud in my life!”
It was around this time that Peyton had to head back to the Chinese to introduce the 8:15 showing of ANT-MAN. As we finished up, I needled him a little about what he’d like to do next, and while he’s got a number of other projects he’d like to pursue, he was adamant that the Marvel experience was a blast. If Marvel calls again, he would happily go back for more – especially since this time it will be his film from the beginning.
As you are well aware, ANT-MAN is currently in theaters. Get out there, and get small!
*This is the period immediately following Edgar Wright’s departure, which was hastened by a rewrite in which he had zero involvement. Reed is referring to that particular rewrite.
