There’s a nice parallel with Ben Affleck bringing in Argo scribe Chris Terrio onto Warner Bros’ Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, as according to new Ant-Man director Adam McKay star Paul Rudd has tightened his grip on the troubled Marvel movie.
“[Rudd] called me when Edgar Wright stepped away from the project and told me what was going on,” the Anchorman director told Collider.
“I went and met with Marvel, and I was a little dubious just because I’m friends with Edgar and I didn’t know what the story was, and then when I kind of heard what happened, that Edgar had parted ways, and then I saw their materials, I was like, ‘God this is pretty cool’.
“Ultimately I didn’t want to jump in as a director, I had too many other projects going and it was too tight, but I thought, ‘You know what, I can rewrite this, and I can do a lot of good by rewriting it.’”
McKay revealed just how intensive a rewrite has been done on Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man script and how much of a role Rudd played, saying, “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.
“We just shaped the whole thing, we just tried to streamline it, make it cleaner, make it a little bigger, a little more aggressive, make it funnier in places—we just basically did a rewrite. Edgar had a really good script. But we just had a blast, and Rudd was just so much fun to write with. I walked away saying, ‘Hey, you and I gotta write a script together.’”
Ant-Man will be in cinemas on 17 July 2015. Find out more about the comics that inspired the film with the 100 All-Time Greatest Comics Bookazine.
