As I said in Part 1 of this report, last October, I did something I’d never done before. I went to my first set visit for a Marvel Studios film. In this case, it was the ANT-MAN set at the new Pinewood Studios-Atlanta. Day 1 was spent entirely in the soundstages and production offices of the then-brand-new Pinewood Studios–Atlanta, but Day 2 took us on location to the site of the long-abandoned Georgia Archives Building, just down the street from the main gate of the Olympic Stadium. Even before we walked into the structure, we could see there was something special about it. There was a giant sign in front of the building that read Pym Technologies, leaving no doubt about some of the folks we’d be seeing today.
As we strolling along the front of the building, a few things became noticeable. The sidewalk in front had been turned into an entranceway onto the property, complete with a security guard check in building. I peaked into the unmanned shack, and notice a coffee mug and memo, both featuring the Pym Tech logo. There was also a artsy statue on the front lawn of what appear to be molecules, connected in a very specific pattern that may have been representative of the mysterious Pym Particle. By wonderful coincidence, it makes sense that both a building that housed rare documents (temperature controlled, high security, no windows, etc.) would also be a perfect place to house a tech company. And although we can’t see it from the ground, apparently there will be a helicopter pad located on the roof. This is the first day of actual shooting on this set, although the production team has been on site for about three weeks doing prep work, primarily in the gigantic, high-ceilinged lobby.
We’re told that in the film, Pym builds this headquarters in 1989, and that lines up with the opening flashback sequence of ANT-MAN, which I saw with several other clips from the film a couple of weeks ago at Industrial Light & Magic. The sequences features a couple of familiar faces from the extended Marvel universe, but it also features a de-aged Michael Douglas as a 40-something Pym confronting his SHIELD handlers about suspected misuse of his particle. The one new face in the room is that of actor Martin Donovan (whose character has not been revealed), who makes the mistake of making a crack about Pym’s apparently dead wife Janet, at which point Pym grabs him by either his tie and slams Donovan’s face into the table, bloodying his nose and a great deal of his face. I’ll get back to why that’s important in a minute.
Just before we go into the Pym building, we spot Douglas making the walk from wardrobe and makeup to the set. He’s eating an apple and looks fantastic with a silver goatee, wearing a great suit and tie that looks slightly retro. We’re told at this point that Pym lives in a 1890s Victorian house, his wife has been gone now for about 25 years, and he still hasn’t quite recovered. He enjoys living in the past—from his home to this clothes to the looks of his company headquarters, which, in the film, will be located on Treasure Island in San Francisco (just a quick swim to Alcatraz Island).
We’re also told that at today’s Pym Technologies, Hank Pym isn’t much of a presence in the day-to-day workings of the company. The man in charge is Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), and Pym’s daughter Hope (Evangeline Lily) is also an exec at the company, somewhat resentful perhaps that she’s not in charge—a fact that has driven a wedge between father and daughter.
We’re shown a few bits of production art for interiors that will be done in this building, including the lobby and a massive laboratory set. We walk into the entrance and are immediately in the middle of the set filled with mostly business types in suits and Pym Tech visitor badges (meaning these people don’t actually work here, but are gathered in the lobby for an event). High up on one wall of the lobby is a painting portrait of Douglas as Pym (apparently Douglas had it commissioned personally); opposite that is a framed blue screen that I’m guessing will have something placed on it (likely a video presentation) in the final film. Other fairly typical corporation artwork lines the other walls. We’ve stumbled into a rehearsal for the next scene, so we move out of the room and onto a large marble staircase just out of the camera’s line of sight. When I sit on the stairs, I knock on the marble and realize it’s actually painted wood. Hollywood!
We eventually see director Peyton Reed on set, running around, positioning actors and extras, as well as the stand-ins for Stoll and Douglas (more than a few of us immediately noticed that Stoll’s very nice stand-in bore more than a passing resemblance to FULL METAL JACKET-era Vicnent DiNofrio and Billy Corgan. Other crew members go by us wielding directors chairs bearing the ANT-MAN logo, which is actually the first time any of us have laid eyes on it. Lily and her stand-in are also nearby, sporting what can only be described as the classic Wasp bob hairstyle, and dressed in a sharp black suit. I have no idea if she at any time dons the Wasp costume in this film, but if she does, she certainly has the look dead to rights.
Reed stops by to say hello to us once again just before shooting starts on the first scene of the day. All of the extras are staring up at the empty blue screen, Cross is introduced as Pym Tech’s “visionary chairman and CEO,” and he proceeds to give a very smiley, positive speech. After which he walks up to a few folks in the crowd, shakes hands with two or three people as the crowd parts for him, and he makes his way to say hello to Pym. With each take, Stoll changes the speech just a little bit to give Reed options about how to cut the speech. He opens with “My fellow visionaries!” and talks of a “revolutionary and monumental technology” that will have Pym Tech etched in history.
Since so much of any sit visit is a lot of sitting around, you occupy yourself by letting your eyes wonder around the set and at the faces of the many actors around you. Sometimes you notice things that aren’t pointed out to you. For example, Martin Donovan is in this scene. Now what’s interesting about this is that about two or three days before we landed in Atlanta, nobody knew he was even in this film. It was announced just before this set visit for the simple reason that the Marvel powers that be knew we’d see him on set and wanted to get the jump on announcing his still-secret part in the film. So when we all see him, we are a little surprised because we hadn’t been told he would be around, but at least we knew he was in the film at this point.
As for the scene itself, I started to look at some of the actors milling about and saw one of them that had a label on his costume that read “Ten Rings Buyer.” Now that either means something to you or it doesn’t; I’m not going to explain it. But I will say that another actor had a very distinct Ten Ring tattoo on the left side of his neck. Then I started to realize what this sequence actually was. It was a pitch that Cross was making to potential buyers of some new technology he was introducing, and that many of these people in the room were villainous types, including perhaps Donovan’s character.
The next scene is an extension of Cross’ speech, shot from the back of the crowd. We see Hope walk into the room in the middle of the speech and approach Pym. In the landscape of the black, blue and gray suits in the room, Pym stands out as the only person in the room wearing a brown suit and the only one with glasses. He seems surprised to have been invited to this gathering, but it seems clear that Cross is there to gloat. This portion of the scene ends with Pym saying to Hope “Be careful. You don’t know these people.” I also notice that a couple of the other actors in the room (including the tattooed guy and Donovan) are glaring at Pym suspiciously, wondering why he’s there.
Things switch around again and we pick up the scene a couple seconds later. Cross approaches Pym and Hope, talks a bit, and then Pym sees Donovan, who says, “Long time no see, Dr. Pym. How’s retirement?” To which Pym replies, “How’s your face?” I want a t-shirt that says that yesterday. In between resets, our group is ushered into a small conference room to hang out and sometimes interview the actors. On this day, we got some great face-to-face time with Douglas, Stoll, and Lily. At one point, Reed popped his head in and said, “Real quick. One question about the movie. Anything you want to know.” Half of us yelled out “How’s your face?”; the other half wondering who the hell Donovan was playing.
Clearly in a playful mood, Reed pretended to get called away right as he was about to answer. At another point, after she’d already sat down for a formal interview with us, Lily popped her head into our tight quarters just to say hello and chat for a second as she walked from set to her trailer outside. It was a fairly lively and eventual two days, and I’ll have all of the interviews for you over the next couple of weeks leading up to ANT-MAN’s release on July 17.
Skipping ahead several months until a couple of weeks ago, as I mentioned, I got a chance to pop into ILM’s offices recently to see several finished sequences from ANT-MAN, hosted by Peyton Reed and co-producer Brad Winderbaum. In addition to the 1989 opening sequence, the rest of the first eight or so minutes of the film include seeing master thief Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) getting out of jail (after a rough exit interview/ritual) and being picked up by his long-time friend Luis (Michael Peña), who already has a new job in mind. But Scott isn’t interested, saying he wants to focus on reuniting with his daughter and making some kind of peace with his now ex-wife (Judy Greer), so he can spend time with his daughter. Scott doesn’t think that he, a guy with a Masters in electrical engineering, will have any trouble finding a job, which is a great set up for where we see him working in the next scene (which I won’t ruin).
After being fired from his job when his boss finds out about his criminal past, Scott returns to the place he’s sharing with Luis and a couple other guys (including T.I. and Russian-accented David Dastmalchian, as Dave and Kurt, respectively) and asks about this sure-thing job, which turns out to be breaking into a private home and stealing whatever is inside a vault in the basement. I’m guessing I know who the owner is and what Scott is stealing.
The next sequence we’re shown is Scott putting on the Ant-Man suit for the first time in a the apartment’s cramped bathroom. He has to step back into the bathtub to get a look at the entire suit in the mirror, while Luis is pounding on the door trying to get in. By accident, Scott hits the buttons on the gloves and shrinks down in the tub (a scene you may have glimpsed in recent trailers and TV spots). When Luis turns on the water in the tub, he unknowingly flushes Scott down the drain, which leads to all sorts of fast-paced events in the building, including an encounter with a rat, fun in the air ducts, getting sucked up by a vacuum cleaner and even taking a spin on a DJ’s turntable.
Another scene gave us our first glimpse at Bobby Canavale and Wood Harris’ characters as they chase after Pym, who is given help by a winged ant he names Ant-ony, who apparently becomes his closest ally in the film. It’s important to note at this point, that most (if not all) of the scenes we saw with Lang in the Ant-Man suit, he’s got Pym in his ear, feeding him instructions. Sometimes he’s telling him what to steal and how to get there, other times he’s explaining to Lang how to communicate with ants. It’s clear that although there’s one man doing the heavy lifting, there are two doing the thinking. As an added bonus, Pym has mounted tiny cameras on a couple of his ant friends so he can keep an eye on Scott.
Still another scene is the helicopter fight sequence that we saw being filmed on our first day on set. The Ant-Man vs. Yellowjacket battle ends up inside a briefcase, where they end up spending more time dodging cell phones and the like. At one point, Yellowjacket yells “I’m going to disintegrate you!” at Ant-Man, which his cell phone hears as “Play ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure” and begins to play the album.
The final sequence they showed us I can’t even believe they showed us. And I’m certainly not allowed to talk about it. But I can say that it gives us a very clear picture of just how tied into the existing Marvel Cinematic Universe Ant-Man is going to be. I mean, obviously the set photos from CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR make that pretty clear, but what we were shown is a fantastic, very comic-booky moment from the middle of ANT-MAN that marks Scott Lang’s first encounter with the greater forces in his world.
After the clips were shown, Reed and Winderbaum did a brief Q&A to clarify a few things:
— They have in fact collaborated with the Russo brothers on Ant-Man’s role in CIVIL WAR, specifically on how he would fight among the other Avengers and how to shoot him small in battle scenes. But the basic guideline for shooting Ant-Man was “They have to top us.”
— It’s not a flashback-heavy film, but there are some. "In the comic books, Hank is a complicated character for many reasons, some of which we don’t get into."
— The Yellowjacket suit needed to be entirely CG because body armor would have been impractical and too bulky. Also, since Yellowjacket is using slightly different tech to shrink, the process may be having an mental impact on Cross as a side-effect.
— This will probably be considered Marvel’s most stand-alone movie, despite the connections to the larger MCU.
— The Ant-Man suit is analog, meant to be stealthy and not a weapon. Yellowjacket is digital--fully-loaded, weaponized armor.
— ANT-MAN is the perfect film to end Marvel’s Phase 2 because, after AGE OF ULTRON, Marvel wanted to scale back to its most intimate story, about an ordinary, street-level guy, struggling to make ends meet. Lang gets pulled into this world, which now touches every corner of the world. In a sense, Lang is the eyes and ears of the audience; his reactions are often our reactions. He wasn’t built to be a hero; he just decides to become one. He defines the new status quo of this universe—the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Everybody’s lives are impacted by heroes and villains, a theme that leads quite nicely into the storyline of CIVIL WAR.
— Reed told a great story about getting a call from Rudd recently from the CIVIL WAR set saying that while they were making ANT-MAN, he felt like it was just them doing this little film; but now that he’s surrounded by members of The Avengers, he’s realizing that he’s a part of something massive, and it was genuinely blowing his mind.
And that’s what I have for you as far as the ANT-MAN set visit and edit bay presentation. I’ll have individual interviews for you over the next couple of weeks. Hope you enjoyed this.
