Full ‘Ant-Man And The Wasp’ Press Conference Recap

On Sunday afternoon, Marvel Studios assembled the cast and director of Ant-Man and The Wasp in Pasadena, California for a press conference. Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Laurence Fishburne, Michael Douglas, Hannah John-Kamen, producer Kevin Feige, and director Peyton Reed took the stage.

The conference started discussing Rudd’s work as a writer.

“He gave himself more funny lines,” Douglas said.

“His best lines in the movie are not in the script,” Lilly said.

“Paul’s as generous a writer as he is an actor,” Reed said. “Paul always has the whole picture in mind when he’s writing and acting.”

“I try and think of the film as a whole and I think of every character,” Rudd said. “This has been a collaborative effort more than anything I’ve ever worked on and to think that I actually wrote it would be a gross overstatement.” He credits Peyton Reed and others, giving a lot of emphasis to Eric Summers and Chris McKenna who “did really a lot of the heavy lifting.”

Most daunting sequence for Reed?

“There were a lot,” Reed said. “We really wanted to set out and go nuts with the Pym particle technology….”What that did was create some real technical challenge. Maybe the biggest was we did a whole car chase that took us through the whole city of San Francisco…that was probably the biggest challenge.”

Will there be more Quantum Realm use and importance in the future?

“There are things that you see back there that Peyton has put in there,” Feige said. “Where and how they pay off in the near term and the long term remains to be seen. “

Lilly’s thought on The Wasp and getting in on action?

“I loved getting to be a blade runner, that was pretty cool. The knife gag in the restaurant scene is pretty cool,” Lilly said. “She’s completely in control the next second. It was just fun to get to see her take on the mantle because this is something she was ready and willing to do her whole life and she was wearing that suit for an entire film!”

How was it approaching the film from a perspective of being a sequel to Ant-Man and Captain America: Civil War.

It is a sequel to both movies. “We could not ignore what happened to Scott Lang in that movie in this movie…There are ramifications of the Sokovia Accords and Scott being on house arrest. It really gave us a natural starting point. “

“One of the things that was kind of nice was that it gave us a little bit of leeway a little harder than we would have been able to,” Rudd said. “Scott has been established…it felt as if we had a little bit more freedom to play into the humor…The first time around we were still modulating. That was one of the really fun parts about this.”

Fishburne is asked about playing a Marvel role.

“It is not the first Marvel role to come my way,” Fishburne said, having voiced the Silver Surfer in Fantastic Four. “I’ve been a reader since I was eight. I’ve been a fan my whole life. Really enjoyed the movies and what they’ve done with the MCU … I realized that I was on the lot of Marvel and working on ABC’s Blackish and remembered I had worked with Louis Desposito and realized I should go talk to them and say, ‘Hey, what do I gotta do to be in the movies?’ And they were kind enough to say, ‘We’ll think about that Fish!”

“It’s just a matter of going through the whole process of ‘How tight can we make it?’ Shifting things around… ” Reed said. “Then you go to the editing room and it’s a whole different process…It’s constantly refining the thing…I always wanted these movies to be under two hours…It needed to have a lot of forward momentum. We looked at a lot of things from Bullet, the Stevn McQueen movie, and What’s Up Doc which has one of the most insane chases through San Francisco. There were inspirations for the movie.”

Evangline Lilly is asked about which MCU character she would like to work with in the future.

Evangeline Lilly says her favorite scene in the movie to perform was Luis’ montage. Rudd points out how tricky those scenes are to shoot.

Why make this Ant-Man and The Wasp with two heroes in the title?

“The movie before Civil War is all about how qualified Hope is and her estrangement from her father preventing her from doing it,” Feige said. “It was without question in the tag on the first Ant-Man film which was in there for the beginning was about her finding that suit..We always knew the next one would be Ant-Man and The Wasp and she would suit up…”

“Originally, Wasp was going to be introduced in Captain America: Civil War,” Lilly said. “I never expressed it at the time and secretly I was like, ‘Hmm… She’s not gonna get an origins film.’ …Then I got a call that, ‘We’ve decided not to put you in Civil War.’ …and then they said what I thought they are gonna say which was, ‘We want to make a film dedicated to this female super hero.’ …I still didn’t know that was going to come with double billing and that was a surprise when I got an e-mail with a screen cap.”

More of John-Kamen and Fishburne in the future?

“What’s always great is that’s the mark of a movie that works when people say ‘I love those characters, when can we see them again?’” Feige said.

“Hope was born into the family business,” Rudd said. “The first one was pretty clear she would be really good at this…The idea that Scott was never eally sure how he could be Ant-Man and still be a good parent, if those two things could really co-exist, that’s one of the things we hang this on…This really is a duo and a team and we work together pretty well…Clearly, she’s really good at this.”