“marvel is aware of the danger of repeating themselves”
with the fight trainers, she dug in. I would not want to go toe- to- toe with Evangeline Lilly in a boxing ring! Having strong female characters in a movie is really important to me. Down With Love, my second movie, is all about that. It’s all about the inequality of the workplace, and one woman’s attempt to subvert the male- dominated workplace in the ’ 60s. In this genre of movie it’s starting to be talked about more and more, and rightfully so, that there need to be more female heroes in this arena. In the comics Yellowjacket was originally Hank Pym. And Hank Pym had what one might call a touch of schizophrenia. He was Ant- Man, he was Giant- Man, he was Goliath, he was Yellowjacket, he was briefly Wasp, and then he was back to Ant- Man. When it came time to do the movie I think the feeling was well, why not take Yellowjacket which is, design- wise, amazingly cool. And it just made sense for the cinematic version to use this character, Darren Cross, who existed in the comics – he was the villain in Scott Lang’s first appearance in Marvel Premiere issue 47. It made sense to create a version where he was Pym’s protégé, and had inklings of this buried Ant- Man technology that Hank wouldn’t necessarily share with him. Now he’s on his own and free to replicate and maybe even It’s interesting. You were asking about my decision- making process to come on this film. One of the things in the back of my mind was that these movies are huge, and extremely successful, and Marvel clearly has a way of doing things. What’s it going to be like to step into that environment? I’m really pleased to report that not only do they allow idiosyncratic choices but they really encourage it, because no one is more aware of the danger of repeating themselves than Marvel. The cool thing about this universe – which obviously parallels the Marvel comics universe that I grew up with – is that you can create this larger universe that encompasses all these heroes, but also encompasses all these radically different tones. And to me that’s kind of the equivalent of the comics world, where the artist who was drawing The Avengers was very different to the artist who was drawing Hulk, who was different from the artist drawing Iron Man – and yet these characters could all show up in each other’s comic titles. It’s astounding – and now almost seems like a no- brainer, because they’ve done it so well. But ten years ago it was almost unheard of. [ Marvel] say, “Let’s make Ant- Man as distinctive and different as we can.” I always look back at last year, 2014 – they released Winter Soldier and they released Guardians Of The Galaxy. And I love both of those movies, but they could not be more tonally different. And they both succeed on their own and they both succeed as parts of that larger universe. Yeah, and that’s amazing, because I love the first Cap – it’s a full- on WW2 period, straight- faced movie, and then you take that same character and you put him in this contemporary environment and it’s a radically different tone, it’s like a ’ 70s political thriller. They’re psyched to do that, it’s what they live for. And with the stuff I’ve seen from Civil War that’s another thing altogether… I would be wide open, if we were fortunate enough to make a sequel to Ant- Man, to throw everything out of the window and go for a different tone. It’d be great!
Ant- Man opens on 17 July.