'Ant-Man And The Wasp' Director Recalls Working With Stan Lee

Peyton Reed might be a filmmaker with two of Marvel Studios' visually appealing movies under his belt, but at the end of the day — he's a comic book fan just like the rest of us. In a Q&A session with Collider's Steve Weintraub earlier today, Reed detailed what it meant to be able to work with the late Stan Lee in his two Ant-Man movies.

After growing up as an avid Marvel comics collector, Reed was absolutely floored to work with Lee on Ant-Man and its sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp.

"To finally get to work with him on the Ant-Man movies, that was a dream come true," the filmmaker mentions. "On the first day, I actually got to have a great conversation with him about the conversations he had to have with artists all the time about putting something in the frame that tells you about the scale of Ant-Man. And low angles are going to be your friend and all these sort of rules he had in his head to tell whoever it was going to be like Jack Kirby or Don Hecker or whatever artist was drawing at the time."

Reed then went on to mention how Lee and he had the same problems with Ant-Man, even though the mediums they worked in entirely different. The director mentioned had Lee always told his artists to always remember Ant-Man's shrunken state when drawing, so as to refrain from making the character look he's as normal sized as the other heroes on the page.

"I said we have the same issues in this movie with visual effects," Reed continues. "If you're doing a medium shot on Ant-Man when he's shrunk, he no longer feels tiny. He feels normal. So all those issues he dealt with in the comic panels, we were dealing with in sort of a moving, visual, more sophisticated way but they were the same exact issues."

"I love Stan Lee and he was a huge influence on me. I will miss him."

Ant-Man and the Wasp is now available digitally and on home media. Marvel Studios is releasing three movies this year, including Captain Marvel on March 8th, Avengers: Endgame on April 26th, Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th.