LOS ANGELES, April 30 — James Gunn has a few problems with Hollywood.
The whole category of midbudget features, he says, has evaporated, leaving only tent-pole films and franchise movies that emphasise high-tech effects over narrative and whose release dates are set long before a script is written.
“The idea of cinema is dying in so many ways,” he said. “They’re the things that are put out by studios just to make money, which is murdering our industry.”
Valid though these complaints may be, they are surprising to hear from Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy, the Marvel space adventure film about a group of misfit heroes that, with a sarcastic, self-aware sense of humour (and a cast led by Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana), became one of the biggest films of 2014, grossing more than US$770 million (RM3.34 billion) worldwide.
Now, of course, that movie has spawned its own franchise, with a sequel, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, that is expected to prove even more astronomically lucrative than its predecessor.
So it says a lot about Gunn, 46, who came to Hollywood by way of small-town Manchester, Missouri, and a career in B-movies, that he believes he can resist the worst impulses of the studio system even while he works within it.
To his mind, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are still fulfilling his urge to tell stories about characters with complex, interconnected needs — even if one of those characters happens to be a talking raccoon — and to maintain the innovative traditions of his moviemaking forebears, at price tags upward of US$170 million.
Thinking back to the moment when he was offered the first Guardians, Gunn said recently in a phone interview from his home in Malibu, “I saw it as an opportunity. I could truly fill a hole of what was missing.”
Pratt, who was elevated from a TV sitcom star to an A-list film actor with help from the first Guardians, said that project allowed “James to earn Marvel’s trust, so that he could really make the movie that he’s always wanted to make.
“They provide the capital for this kind of a movie, and he does everything else.”
Gunn, a former disciple of Lloyd Kaufman, the schlock-movie impresario and Troma Entertainment co-founder, wrote that company’s outrageous Shakespeare sendup Tromeo and Juliet with Kaufman, then graduated to studio projects like Dawn of the Dead and the live-action Scooby-Doo movies.
After writing and directing the sci-fi horror pastiche Slither in 2006 and the violent superhero comedy Super in 2010, Gunn said he knew he was on Marvel’s list of directors for Guardians, though not high on it.
Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, said Gunn “was a name amongst many,” but added that “the secret of our list is, they’re not listed in order of preference.”
“It really is based on the vibe of the meetings and discussions we have,” Feige said, “that we come to our decision of who we want to collaborate and live with for many years to come.”
Given that Guardians of the Galaxy was based on a Marvel comic that was not especially popular at the time, filled with low-level characters who you wouldn’t even ask to cater an Avengers staff party, perhaps Gunn was ideally suited for the material.
After one preliminary meeting with Marvel producers, Gunn could not quite get over the character of Rocket Raccoon, a bad-tempered, gun-toting anthropomorphic animal with the voice of Bradley Cooper.
“I was like, ‘OK, a talking raccoon — that’s a stupid idea,'” Gunn recalled. “But let’s say there was a talking raccoon. How would he exist?”
Once he connected to the “extraordinary sadness” of the character’s Frankenstein-like origins, Gunn said, “it drove the whole thing for me, and I found it tonally interesting because of that.”
To him, the first Guardians presented a chance to reinvigorate the drab, dreary space-opera genre with the buoyancy of favourite films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and the gaudy colours of Flash Gordon.
The assignment came with many conditions, including a cast of characters who had to be established within the first 20 minutes, like Peter Quill (Pratt), a would-be outlaw who calls himself Star-Lord; and Gamora (Saldana), a green-skinned alien assassin. There was an existing script by Nicole Perlman and a preset release date, leaving Gunn little time to make changes. (He and Perlman shared screenplay credit on the film.)
Feige said he knew he’d made the right choice when he saw what was on the cover of Gunn’s revised script treatment: A colour photo of a vintage Walkman, a personal artefact treasured by Peter Quill, who uses it to play his favourite classic-rock songs.
“Before I even turned the page,” Feige said, “I thought, ‘This is perfect.'”
Gunn found making movies on a megabudget Marvel scale invigorating — “On my last movie, I did 54 setups a day with one camera, so this is easy,” he said — but also intimidating.
“I would wake up in a cold sweat at 3am thinking I might be making Pluto Nash 2,” he said, referring to Eddie Murphy’s costly outer-space flop from 2002. “There were moments where I was consoling myself with the thought that I could go teach.”
That said, the success of the movie — which was a hit not only with audiences but with critics, and enjoys a 91 per cent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes — bought a lot of leeway for Gunn, who started writing a second Guardians film as soon as the first one was released.
“I got to start from scratch with the story,” he said. “The emotional and action plots were completely intertwined, and all organic and one thing.”
Asked if Marvel dictated any plot elements this time, Gunn said: “None. Zero.” (Feige said, “The notion that we require things or crowbar things into one movie so it serves another” was “overblown.”)
“The only restrictions this time are things that we set up in the last movie,” he added. “Other than that, it can go anywhere we want it to.”
For Vol. 2, Gunn immersed himself in sources as disparate as the artwork of Jim Steranko, a comic-book illustrator known for his surrealism, psychedelia and sensuality; and the visually sumptuous movies of Wong Kar-wai.
He came away inspired to add characters like Ego, a living planet who is revealed to be Quill’s father and who, in his humanoid form, is played by Kurt Russell.
What connects Ego to the established Guardians ensemble, Gunn said, are themes of isolation and yearning to belong. “At the centre of this was a lonely being who had been floating out there for eons,” he said, “dreaming if other life exists out there somewhere.”
Gunn’s name also appeared this year on The Belko Experiment, a gruesome thriller about an office complex in Colombia whose employees are forced to murder each other.
Gunn wrote the screenplay and had been preparing to direct it many years ago, but withdrew when he and the actress Jenna Fischer were divorcing in 2008.
“Suddenly, I was like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to make a movie about people who are killing each other,'” Gunn recalled.
When MGM and Orion Pictures revived The Belko Experiment, Gunn stayed on as a producer. “For me it was mostly an excuse to take time off and hang with all my actor friends who I put in the movie,” he said.
Gunn has announced he plans to write and direct a third Guardians of the Galaxy film, and said that working on any other established franchise would probably feel too constrictive.
When Marvel first sought him out, he said, “I kind of did want to make a Hulk movie, but at this point, that isn’t what I would want to do. Working in that Avengers thing, you have to work within a pre-existing system. It’s more exciting to me to create something new.”
He added: “I have a story of a raccoon I need to tell right now. Nothing else really appeals to me. I love the raccoon as much as I love my family members.” — The New York Times
