 So there's been a lot of speculation before this movie about where Ant-Man was during Avengers Infinity War. I wondered what the strangest almost memorable fan theory you've heard about that was. I've read a few, nothing that I've read is correct, but it's fun to read different opinions about things but it it was kind of, you know, people would say before this came out too, like why was it, where were you in an Infinity War? I couldn't say anything but it's like well I know, you know, you'll see this since some of those questions get answered. I love the idea that he was just, he was there the whole time, just really tiny. Yeah, he just couldn't see me. That was the first answer I used to get. It's like yeah, I was in every shot, you just, it's really small. You can go back and say well was he in every single Marvel film that's been made? Maybe. I want to see that in a flashback. I could say all will be revealed and then that becomes a national story on a joke like that. But all will be revealed. Well, I mean, I like the one that says that Ant-Man and the Wasp were both there the whole time. They were just too small, you couldn't see them. The funniest, strangest fan theory is actually that he was there all the time but no one could see him because he was so small. Well, there are a lot of fan theories online that Ant-Man was in Infinity War and in fact may have been in every single Marvel movie leading up, you just can't see him. So people online will, you know, do frames or shots from other Marvel movies and stick Ant-Man and sometimes Ant-Man and Wasp into those frames, which I think is, it's a funny pastime that people tend to have. I want to see that and I want to see Louise narrate it. Yeah, a lot of people asking for that online too, of Louise narrating everything that's happened in the 20 MCU films so far leading up. We actually did a piece for Comic-Con last year when we were shooting the movie with Paul Rudd and Michael Peña and the whole idea is they're looking at, you know, it played at Comic-Con, you know, explaining every Marvel thing that led up to there and the audience thinks they're talking to them and then we reveal that they're talking to Michelle Pfeiffer to try and convince her to be an Ant-Man and Wasp. So yeah, it was something we played once at Comic-Con so who knows if that may surface at some point. I never read a comic book in my life. I'm so grateful that they brought me into this family. I did a little bit of homework on the Ant-Man. I really screwed up because they didn't tell me when we started this that I should go see Captain America because if I saw Captain America that I would understand what Ant-Man, Paul Rudd, had done in there and why. So when I read the script for this, I had no idea that beginning what was going on. And then they finally, the director paid reason. Well, he's been in Captain America. I said, I didn't see Captain America. And he looked at me like I committed the greatest sin in the world. I said, well, if you told me to go see Captain America, I would. I'd go see it, you know, and I would know. But you should make a note. Go see Captain America before you read the script. So I don't know where it falls in the Infinity Wars. I don't know. I'm sorry. If this is successful enough, we're going to do a third one. I promise you that we come back and do an interview for a third Ant-Man in the Wasp. I will know everything. What would you like to happen in a third movie? What would you like to see Hank doing? I think we should do a prequel. I think we should go back 30 years before Paul Rudd was born and I'll play Ant-Man as a young man. We can do it all and we'll start it fresh. Don't they do like in Star Wars? They do ones before? I think it's time. There's so many amazing, huge action scenes. I mean, literally huge. The San Francisco P.S.C. in particular is so awesome. And what was that like to shoot? Great. You know, San Francisco is such a beautiful city. It's really spectacular. And it seems as if anytime there's some action scene in a movie in San Francisco, it's something that's always getting destroyed, which is a shame. But the Golden Gate Bridge always gets destroyed in movies, always. And we left it alone. So I'm really more proud of that than anything else. That we didn't even touch the Golden Gate Bridge. Both Ant-Man and Ant-Man of the Lost take place in San Francisco. And one of the things I wanted to do in this movie was shoot more and get out in San Francisco more. So we designed this whole back half of the movie so it all takes place in broad daylight in San Francisco. So they actually let us shoot in a lot of places that I wasn't sure they would let us shoot in San Francisco. So to shoot down by the pier and have a giant man down there and eventually do this thing where he falls into the bay was really, really fun. The last shot of the day we shot there, I remember we had all these extras on the pier and we got to shoot these giant water cannons at them as they get caught in the splash of giant man falling. And for a director, it's a very gratifying thing to be able to shoot water cannons at a lot of people. The original comic book character is extremely feminine, which I wanted to honor, but she's also extremely sexualized. And I didn't especially want to mimic that part of the original. That was tricky to figure out. How do you make a woman clearly feminine and graceful so that her movements are indicative of womanhood and delicacy and grace and elegance without making her overtly sexual? One of the advantages to that was that she has a suit that's head to toe covering absolutely everything, which was a wonderful luxury. I was so glad I wasn't in a miniskirt and a boostier. The beauty of this film with a front part is all in pieces. So you have one stage where real people are acting, right? You got another stage, which is green screen, special effects where they're adding the effects. You have another stage where they're doing stunt, the stunt action. And then you have a fourth stage where they're doing little miniature, little tiny ant stuff. And so the beauty about this movie is how they effortlessly sort of interrelate all these things. So when you're actually just doing it, you're not that much involved. But once they like to watch the final film then, because it must be completely different. You know, I just can't believe the magic, the magic of movie making and how they, all these different departments come together and make something look so, so effortless. I love doing my stunts. I love doing action. I absolutely love it. You kind of get this feeling of, you know, you feel like a super villain or hero, you know, when you do those scenes and you know, after you've kind of kicked ass or once you've kind of done that, you can really hear everyone on set like, whoo! You know, kind of whooping and you've achieved it and it looks really super badass. And yeah, it's a lot of fun. With a big movie like this, there must be something to shoot which don't make the final cut. So I wondered if you had a favorite deleted scene that we might get to see later on the DVD. There's this one scene that did get deleted and I was sort of disappointed because I wanted to see it where Scott says to Hope, he says something to the effect of like, I did pretty good out there, huh? Oh no, he says to Hope you did really well out there and she's like, okay thank you and he's like, we're gonna say the same to me. And then it ended up being used in the trailers which is what's interesting about marketing nowadays is they often take those scenes off the cutting room floor and they put them in trailers so you do get to see the stuff that gets deleted and the fans get to see it and then they go watch the movie and it's not even in the movie. There's some stuff that we shot that was in the quantum realm. There's one that'll be on Blu-ray in the DVD when it comes out eventually. It's a thing with Michelle Pfeiffer in the quantum realm she's kind of, she and Hank are going back to their ship in the quantum realm and they come upon this gigantic or I should say subatomic creature that looks extremely dangerous but she's able to communicate with this creature in her own way and sort of it lets them pass through. But it was one of those things it was, we loved but as you start to cut the movie down and get it tighter and tighter some things just have to go and that was one of them. Because that's what I wanted to show. How do you even go about shooting something so big as that? It's a lot of pre-planning and we do a lot of I storyboard the sequences and then we do a lot of pre-vis work which is taking these locations and sets and putting them into computers so we have a whole three dimensional animated version and we're able to kind of do rudimentary versions of all those scenes before we actually go out and shoot. So by the time we get on set we know what we're doing. So the post-credit sequences is something we love in Marvel films. I think this one might be a bit shocking to some people. Hopefully so. What sort of reaction have you had so far? Well it's been really fun to see the end of the movie with an audience because our movie ties up our story and sort of resolves all the characters and the things that are going on in the movie and then we have a very colorful end title sequence and then we have a tag scene where we see what our characters are up to next and what happens in that tag scene has really surprised a lot of people and I can't say more than that but as a director to be in the audience and see people react to that is really fun. The movie has so many funny moments. What's your most memorable or funniest moment from making it? Some of the opening scene I'm in the cardboard boxes. It's like a little maze with my daughter and it was all practical. It was the coolest thing ever. I think that set was one of the best I'd ever worked on. It was fun to kind of go through the little ant maze. So was that a real cardboard maze? Mm-hmm. Really built. And the slide really went downstairs and so it was all something you could do. That must have been so much fun. It was really fun and I shot those scenes with Abby who, you know, especially when we were in the slide she just wanted to do it over and over and over again. I mean, who wouldn't? Yeah, who wouldn't? I know. I was afraid that my own daughter would see that film and demand that I build that for her. Thankfully, we live in a New York City apartment and it's a little trickier to build a slide down a staircase in a New York City apartment. But it would be a really good slide though. It'd be really good. Imagine how long it would be. We'd need stairs first. Did it work? How you see it in the film? Did that take a lot of takes? Yeah, we had to shoot it in segments though. So we would just do kind of a little bit of a slide here but we did have one wrapped down the staircase and yeah, we really got to do it. So how were you with bloopers? Were there any moments where you couldn't help cracking up? There's a scene where I'm kind of channeling Michelle Pfeiffer that seemed maybe even more ridiculous than some of the other stuff that we were shooting which was also kind of ridiculous. There were moments there where we would take a step out of what we're doing. How does she feel about your version of her? I am not asked her. I'm a little nervous too. I don't know if I really want to know. Paul Rudd is so good on the one-liners. I'm really jealous because, you know, my part in the movie is having to kind of carry the storyline, the kind of complicated plot. As Professor Hank Pym, I'm dealing with a lot of the technical jargon. Paul can just come up with a bum. So he would crack me up on any number of occasions with the great one-liners. He could come up with the end of scene. There's a lot of science jargon. You've got to learn for this. I mean, were there any that you couldn't help tripping up on? And anything pertaining to the quantum realm was a workout for me. But mind just to give you a heads up if you interview Evangeline, she actually understands all this stuff. She understands the quantum realm. Besides being pretty talented actors, to say the least, and a wonderful athlete and does a great job as the wasp, she knows the quantum realm. So what, do you mean you don't understand the quantum realm? No, I don't. I don't. Not even in the slides? Not even a bit, no. I was excited to come back to the film and work with Michael Douglas again and get to do a lot more work with him. That's a highlight for me. And then having Michelle Pfeiffer as my mother, that was an enormous highlight for me. What was it like filming with them? Michael Douglas, as I said, is one of my favorite actors to work with and I was really excited to get a chance to have more scenes with him because Hank and Hope have, they've rectified their relationship in the first film and so they get their partners now and they're very close and they have this sort of shorthand and that was a really fun thing to play. I enjoyed that so much. And then Michelle Pfeiffer, I can talk about because I don't know if I worked with her, if I didn't work with her, I don't know if I had seen with her or not. Mom's the word. There's a hilarious moment and all I can say is Baba Yaga. And I remember Dave Dismulsion actually literally improvising this beautiful, beautiful song of Baba Yaga, his rendition and it was absolutely hilarious. Everyone couldn't keep it together on set. It was actually a moment that didn't make the movie but we all were kind of together and Michael Douglas was very, very funny and he would kind of just have these one-liners and I remember just kind of not being able to keep it together. Oh, there was a moment actually where Paul Rudd, Michael Penny and I broke into Imogen Heaps song. That was very funny and I was like, oh, that's very sad, I didn't get to see that. Actually played back because we're all kind of singing in harmony. How does that even come about in this film? I can't picture it. Not with that character. I think that was definitely a bit of a loopy thing. That makes more sense. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But it would have been great to see Ghost and Ant-Man singing together. Yeah, Ghost Karaoke. Ghost Karaoke. Yeah. I've heard that Paul Rudd liked to break into some song and dance sometimes when you're on the lab set. Yeah, absolutely. And also, we all went on a big karaoke night as well which was very fun, breaking into song. I think we all did at times actually. I think a Peyton Reed broke into beatboxing. What's your karaoke song? Stevie Wonder's Superstition. Ooh. Yeah. That's the one I go to. That's my go-to. That's like my safe one. Because I tried to attempt prints in San Francisco and I was like, ooh, halfway through. This is actually really hard. And also, yeah, nobody can do prints other than prints. Paul Rudd likes to sing and dance on the set. Those are always the, and it's very infectious. Other people start to sing and dance. Those are always the most fun. I think probably at some point when we were shooting in the big laboratory set, Hank Penn's Lab, we shot many days on that set. And I remember a lot of singing and dancing. What sort of things does he like to sing and dance to? He's a big eighties new wave person and his dance moves tend to all be sort of eighties new wave dance moves. So that's his sweet spot. You'll have to ask him about it when he comes in and maybe get him to do a couple of the moves. I've heard there was a bit of breaking out into song and dance on set between takes. Peyton is a huge music fan, as am I. He's a real die-hard eighties music aficionado. Oh really? Yeah. It's a bit of like music on set. I think he and I would actually sometimes go into all the Adam and the Ant songs and Adam and songs. How fitting. We were, Adam Ant, it was Adam Ant's birthday while we were filming and so we were talking about it. I think we shot a thing for Peyton's Instagram or something wishing Adam Ant a happy birthday.