At least according to Adam McKay, who was called in for rewrites, the new script for Marvel’s Ant-Man is more aggressive than what Edgar Wright was intending. You’ll have to argue out what “aggressive” might mean in this context, but McKay did also say that there’s extra action now.
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He was speaking to Collider, where he also revealed that Paul Rudd helped out with writing the new material.
“I’ve always known Paul Rudd’s a really good writer from improvising with him on set, but I had no idea he was that good—he’s really great with dialogue. So the two of us holed up in hotel rooms on the east and west coast, and I think it was like six to eight weeks we just ground it out and did a giant rewrite of the script. I was really proud of what we did, I really thought we put some amazing stuff in there and built on an already strong script from Edgar Wright and sort of just enhanced some stuff.”
McKay did note that a lot of the work originally penned by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish will its way to the screen in someway.
“There’s a lot of dialogue and character still in there…. we just tried to streamline it, make it cleaner, make it a little bigger, a little more aggressive, make it funnier in places.”
McKay noted that he was initially reluctant to get involved, citing his relationship with Wright as reason to not wade in.
“I’m friends with Edgar and I didn’t know what the story was, and then when I kind of heard what happened.”
How much detail he knows about the circumstances of Wright’s departure isn’t clear, but whatever McKay knows, he ain’t telling. This whole situation is horribly unpleasant, I think, with all kinds of talented people getting caught out in the spotlight when, if it happens at all, this kind of thing should be happening in private.
And there I go, turning up the lights again by writing this. Anyway, there you have it. Paul Rudd did some writing on Ant-Man, whether or not he’ll get a credit, and that writing has – in Adam McKay’s view at least – been done to make the film ore clean, big, aggressive and funny.
Ant-Man is set for release on July 17th, 2015. I await the official credits list almost as keenly as I do the film itself.
