guardians of the galaxy vol 2
Marvel’s cosmic misfits are back. guardians of the galaxy vol 2 writer-director James Gunn talks the tentacle-wrapped sequel with Joseph McCabe
“One of the first things I did was ban the colour purple”
In less than ten years the Marvel Cinematic Universe has propelled fans to deep space, other dimensions, magical realms and the microverse. The secret sauce that’s made those journeys worth taking? Good, old fashioned fun. And nowhere was fun found in more abundant supply than with the gang of intergalactic a-holes in writer-director James Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy.
The 2014 movie saw a starmaking turn by Chris Pratt as Peter Quill, an Earth man kidnapped as a boy by space pirates. Meeting a band of other misfits he forms his own loveably dysfunctional family – the literal-minded Drax, green-skinned warrior woman Gamora, sentient super-powered tree-creature Groot and the wiseass, genetically-engineered raccoon Rocket. It was the least likely Marvel movie to succeed. So of course it turned out to be the studio’s biggest surprise blockbuster. But how do you recapture the joy of
Guardians Of The Galaxy without losing the very spontaneity that fuelled its remarkable success? According to Gunn, it starts by figuring things out way in advance.
“I knew what the basic story was,” says the filmmaker of Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2, which finds Quill finally meeting his long lost father, the cosmic entity Ego (played by Kurt Russell). “I knew the background and where Peter Quill came from before I ever shot the first movie. I knew the basic story. That’s the essence of what this movie is.”
LOADED GUNN
Gunn tells SFX that Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 2 was written as a means of diverting his attention away from the release of the first film. “I started writing the first draft on the day the first movie came out in the United States. Because I didn’t want to think about the box office numbers; and the only way I could not do that is to write, because that totally takes up my whole brain. It came pretty quickly, but it was a lot of work to perfect the story. The initial story took months to write, just as a treatment. But it was a very long 70-page treatment that is almost exactly the movie that you see today. It’s changed very little from that time. That’s a huge difference from the first movie, where we did a lot of messing around with things up until we were shooting the movie. This one had a much more easy flow in that respect, in terms of the storytelling.”
Part of that storytelling, says Gunn, is
returning the Guardians saga to the pulp book roots from which it and so many other space operas sprang. He even took inspiration from their lurid covers, filled with bug-eyed, antennaed aliens and sword-slinging heroes in dire peril.
“I wanted to make the second movie have a very distinct visual look that was much different than the first movie. one of the first things I did was ban the use of the colour purple. There’s purple in the movie, but there’s very little purple in the movie. Because purple was by far the dominant colour in the first movie. This movie’s more about yellow and blue and teal and orange. But I also really wanted to up the ante with the pulp elements. So we harken back a lot to 1950s/’60s pulp novel covers, and that look of Flash Gordon – both the 1980s version and the earlier comics by [Al] Williamson. Really grabbing onto this pulp feeling and bringing it alive in a bright, big, colourful way was important. “So one of the first things I did was I sat down and I gave every scene a colour palette,” Gunn continues. “I wrote the story through colours, and I would want people to be able to look at the way those colours move, and be able to tell what the story is just through seeing those colours. A little green, a little orange, a little red – and then we get into some darker colours. It’s just the feelings they elicit. So when we go to the Sovereign world at the very beginning of the movie it’s all golds and blues, then we go to pinks and whites in the next location. Then we go to all greens for a long time, then we go back and at the end we get into some bigger colours.” Since the Guardians themselves have always been distinctly coloured, the latest members to join their ranks are no different. What distinguishes their new allies, however, is the fact that some of them were once their antagonists, including Quill’s former
guardian, the blue-skinned Yondu, and Nebula, Gamora’s sister and the adopted daughter of the evil Thanos.
“We have a big scene in this movie which is a big fight between Gamora and Nebula,” Gunn reveals. “I was very focused on the importance of the sister story in this movie. And I was very focused on having male and female voices equally strong, and adding the character of Mantis – who’s a character as silly and goofy as Drax and Groot, but she’s a female. Gamora and Nebula are awesome. They’re both Clint Eastwoods. But also having that element of the two of them and their interaction and their story… We kind of leave the first movie thinking, ‘oh Gamora’s a hero, Nebula’s a villain.’ Then in this movie we learn it’s a lot more complicated than that. Like any brother-sister story, like any story where you come in and you talk to one part of a feud and you just hear that person’s point of view, you don’t hear the other person’s point of view. We get to hear both sides in this movie. It makes a big difference, and I love both characters a lot because of that.”
PRAY FOR MANTIS
The empathic Mantis – played by Oldboy’s Pom Klementieff – makes her Marvel movie debut in Guardians Vol 2. Though the character began her comics career as an Earth woman, Gunn explains that like most of the film’s characters she’s now an alien being.
“I thought it was important to keep Peter Quill the only human in this movie. That outsiderness for him is important. But there was a lot of stuff that I took from [the comics]. I remember reading her in
Avengers when I was a kid and liking the character a lot, and liking that non-green version of her. Because, number one, it’s just a more interesting alien face to me, and number two, it wasn’t another green character, or even another coloured skin character.”
groot’s sacrifice at the end of the first movie means something. it’s not meaningless
Also new to Guardians Vol 2 is the scenestealing Baby Groot (voiced, as Groot was, by Vin Diesel).
“Groot’s sacrifice at the end of the first movie means something,” says Gunn. “It’s not a meaningless sacrifice. He sacrificed himself for these people he loves. And Baby Groot is not really Groot, he’s Baby Groot. He’s a different character and he does not have that character’s memories. He’s stupid – he’s a baby, he’s an idiot! So changing that character to Baby Groot was a hugely important element in crafting this story. Suddenly I was able to tell a story where the characters now had to react to this thing that was a baby, and they each had their own way of dealing with it. Drax is totally irritated by him. Rocket is protective but irritated. Quill ignores him, he’s a terrible father. And Gamora’s somewhat sweet to him. She’s the only one who really is kind to him at all. But I think she’s also kind to him because it gets on the other guys’ nerves. So it just provided a new element that kept things alive.”
LOVE THE CRAFT
Not all of Guardians Vol 2’s newcomers are friendly. Among other obstacles, the team finds itself confronting a tentacled behemoth straight out of the nightmarish imaginings of pulp horror author HP Lovecraft. “Yeah, I love Lovecraft,” Gunn shares with
SFX. “I have a very love-hate relationship with tentacles in my movies, because they’re in tons of them and they’re always a pain in the ass. But yeah, I love Lovecraft and giant monster movies. So creating that was a lot of fun.”
After Guardians Vol 2, Gunn will be creating on an even bigger canvas as the entire Marvel Universe assembles for 2018’s Avengers:
Infinity War and its as-yet-untitled sequel. Featuring Thanos’s ascension to the position of Marvel’s ultimate Big Bad, the two films will allow Gunn to determine the fate of his characters beyond Guardians Vol 2’s post-credits scene.
“I’m executive producer on those movies and I’m totally involved with how those movies are presented, how they take care of the cosmic characters, making sure their voices are intact, making sure that they’re who we want them to be, and that their stories are fulfilling and that they go to the right place where they’re meant to go.”
Gunn smiles, knowing that the wheels of the next Avengers movie will be set in motion by the events of Guardians Vol 2.
“I go to my room, write the story of Guardians, then I say, ‘okay, Avengers, now you gotta deal with what I did!’”