"Hey, everybody." "I'm James Gunn." "I'm the director and co-writer of Guardians of the Galaxy, and this is my commentary on the film." "Here at the beginning, we have a young Peter quill, and his Sony walkman." "When I first started Writing this screenplay," "Uh, I really..." "One of the first things I thought of was using the Sony walkman as Peter Quill's attachment, his emotional attachment to Earth and his mother." "And the songs, in a way," "I think are the character of his mother throughout the film." "Here we have Gregg Henry who plays quill's grandfather." "Gregg Henry, who has been in most of my films." "AII of my films, actually." "He was the mayor, Jack MacReady, in Slither, and he was Detective John FeIkner in Super, and he is just a really amazing guy and wonderful actor who can do almost anything." "The kid is played by a boy by the name of Wyatt OIeff." "OIeff." "Who is a great kid, and he loves to cry on film and do what we call a "gutturaI wall."" "He was always excited to do a guttural wail, which you'II see in a second." "Laura Haddock is the mother and she actually had a bit role in Captain America, where she played a fan who wanted his autograph." "But there is no relationship that I know of." "Maybe that could be her grandmother or something, but she's too young." "She grew up in the 1970s." "We used a little bit of digital effects to make Laura look a little bit more sickly and thin than she is in real life." "Um, and it's a pretty strange way..." "I think, that so many people come to this movie because they want to see something fun, and different, and colorful." "And also at the same time we like to take people by surprise and give them something different than what we expect." "So when they came to see the movie, and there's this very sad scene at the beginning, um, I think it gives them a little bit of the heart that's in the movie, and starts us off on a rather serious path" "and then we'II go into something a little bit more fun in a second." "We hear, Meredith Quill, his mom, talk about his father as a being composed of pure light, and there will be spoilers throughout this commentary, and, of course, one of the spoilers is that" "Peter Quill's father is someone from outer space." "In the comic books, he's J'son." "I'm not real fond of the name J'son, and I think that the character is probably not the same as who he is in the comic books." "I know who he is, but I can't give that away, 'cause that's saved for the next movie." "There's Dr. Fitzgibbon..." "Oh, there's the guttural wail, right there." "There's a character named Fitzgibbon in every single one of my movies, named after my good friend, Larry Fitzgibbon, and that's Dr. Fitzgibbon as he's credited in the credits." "It's hard to work in a name Fitzgibbon in a movie that's composed of almost entirely outer space scenes." "Here we have him run out." "He's about to get abducted by a gigantic spaceship." "And this gigantic spaceship is something we call an M-ship." "That's the type of ship it is." "It's actually the exact type of ship that the Milano is, a Ravager vehicle." "There are two different types of M-ships, the larger cargo M-ship, which is what the Milano is." "And the smaller M-ship, which Rocket's Warbird at the end of the movie is, is that." "Here we have the marvel logo coming in after the opening, and that actually was an idea by Kevin Feige." "Kevin Feige is the head of marvel, and he's probably my biggest collaborator throughout this entire film, along with a bunch of other people, but he's probably my number one collaborator on this movie." "And it was his idea to have the marvel logo come up after the kid was abducted, um, which helps to ease us into a completely different environment, so that it's not too jarring." "And it's very interesting, 'cause early test audiences saw it, where the marvel logo wasn't there, and they thought it was veryjarring, uh, this change, and all we did was change just where the marvel logo was," "and they found it a Iot easier to move from one place in time to another." "And we have the names of all my friends who acted in the movie, who I've become very close to." "I often say that, you know, there's a lot of oddballs in this movie, and this is a movie about oddbaIIs." "And it's about oddbaIIs who become a family and all of us became a pretty close family over the course of this movie." "Lee Pace, for instance, who plays Ronan the Accuser, isjust about the nicest guy." "There's michael Rooker." "Michael Rooker, who's been in all of my films." "He plays Yondu in this movie." "He's fantastic." "Karen GiIIan." "Here we have a holographic map device, which Peter quill has." "This map device was given to him by The Broker." "There's some backstory to what's happened here." "Here it shows him the location ofwhere the Orb is, because somebody obviously had this map device to show them where the Orb was from years past." "Many, many years past." "Um, the backstory that was in the script, that we cut some dialogue from the film, is that this is an ancient planet, Morag, that had a pretty advanced civilization many thousands of years ago." "That's my dog, Dr. WesIey Von Spears right there, who was playing with the little girl." "He was a very good actor." "And my assistant, Simon Hatt, was wearing a green jumpsuit right behind him while they were doing that." "Um..." "Anyway, so this ancient planet Morag had a pretty advanced civilization, and it was destroyed probably through some sort of global warming, and is covered by oceans, but the oceans recede every 300 years." "And, so, Peter quill has been waiting for this time to go and get this Orb." "And Yondu found out about it from The Broker." "And here, Peter Quill is ripping off Yondu and going to find the Orb." "The Sony walkman, which hooks us up back to Earth," "(UPBEAT POP music playing) and here we have Come and Get Your Love by Redbone." "Fantastic song." "probably the song I've heard the most." "And this is the biggest tonal shift in the movie, which I think helps to give the audience a sense of the different sorts of emotions we're playing with in the movie, and helps to ease them into the tonal shifts throughout the movie," "which are a little bit more mellow than this one." "These are OrIoni." "There are two small creatures in the movie, Orloni and F'Saki." "F'Saki are the ones that later eat the OrIoni." "Orloni are amphibious creatures that have gills, but can also breathe out of water." "And so, they're some of the only creatures that survive the lowering of the seas of Morag." "Peter quill is going to Morag sooner than is safe, um, which is the reason why he's able to get the Orb before Yondu is." "Or before Korath is." "We have Jeremy Latcham, one of the executive producers." "And Victoria Alonso, who is the post-production producer." "really important people to the making of this film." "Jeremy Latcham and Jonathan Schwartz are the two producers I met with almost exactly two years ago to talk to them about this idea for a movie they wanted to do called Guardians of the Galaxy, and that was, um..." "And that was something that, when they first brought it to me," "I thought it was a pretty strange idea, considering there was a talking raccoon in it, and nobody knew who the Guardians of the galaxy were." "And driving home from that meeting, I really didn't think I was going to do it." "But all of a sudden I had this burst of inspiration of what I would do with the movie to make it my own." "And I saw an opportunity there to create a movie that wasn't necessarily the same as the movies that I grew up loving." "Like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back, but that gave people the same sort of feelings that those movies gave to me." "And to create something that was bright and colorful, a true space opera in every sense, with music." "And, visually, I understood where the movie was coming from with these colors, and still retaining some of the grittiness of movies of the past 20 or 30 years that have seemed to take out all the color from science fiction films." "This scene was actually really hard to shoot." "This was one of the very first scenes we shot." "So chris Pratt, who plays Peter quill, who's my very close friend today, um, was getting into the groove of playing the character." "And we hadn't shot any of the talking scenes yet." "It was the first talking scene we had shot in the movie." "We'd already shot some of the exterior running stuff on Morag that takes place in a second." "But this stuff took some kind of getting used to, of exactly where we were with the actors, and what kind of performances we were getting out of them, and striking this balance between something that was comic," "but also something that was realistic." "Like, I remember talking about Black Hawk Down in this movie where he's being surrounded by the Sakaaran." "Also, as a bit of fun, all those Sakaaran voices are pretty much me." "I'm doing almost all of the Sakaaran voices in the movie except for my assistant Simon Hatt, who's doing a few of the Sakaaran voices as well." "There, you get it." "That's us." "Sakaaran are trapped by the magnet." "(GROANS)" "GUNN:" "Peter Quill doesn't have any super powers, but I did say often while filming, if he had a super power it was the fact that he was able to screw up completely and get messed up and trip and fall," "and then regain his composure, you know, quickly, to do something sort of heroic, which is what he's doing here." "He's going back and forth between something really cool and something really not cool." "Because he's kind of an oaf at the same time as he's very cool." "There's a vulnerability to chris Pratt in his performance that I think makes him a little bit different from other movie stars." "And he wasn't necessarily a movie star when we started shooting this movie, but he certainly is now." "This scene was a scene that I actually storyboarded." "This is one of the scenes in the original script by nicole Perlman, and I, uh, storyboarded this sequence, um, for my pitch to marvel as a director, and so those are pretty much my storyboards that I did back in 2012" "that have retained, you know, exactly that quality from the original." "This is a great woman by the name of MeIia KreiIing, who is a really cool girl." "And who plays Bereet." "Bereet is a character from the marvel comics." "A Iot of the characters in the movie have names of characters from the comics." "Sometimes they're very similar to them, and sometimes they're very different." "But I'm a big comic book fan, and I Iike throwing all of those little Easter eggs in there so people have something to play with." "This sort of landscape backed by the 1970s music is really something that was one of my original inspirations." "There's the troll doll, which we'll see at the end of the movie." "REPORTER ON TV:" "...protesting the recent peace treaty signed by the Kree Emperor and Xandar's Nova Prime." "GUNN:" "Making the first act of a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy is very difficult, because you need to explain to the audience who all these different characters are, what their goals are, and at the same time, you know," "explain that there are these alternate worlds and what those cultures are and there's a bunch of gobbledygook names coming at them." "Yondu, and Xandar, and Morag, and Ronan, and, you know, Kree, Bereet." "And it gets confusing for an audience." "So one of the most difficult challenges of making this film was trying to make it as simple as it could possibly be for the audience." "These are all my friends." "That's my brother, Sean." "And then behind him is a guy by the name of Dave Yarovesky," "Dave Yarvo, who's one of my best friends in the world." "And the guy in that blue makeup behind Rooker..." "That guy acting weird back there is my friend, Nick holmes." "So all my friends just happened to look like Ravagers" "(CHUCKLES) I suppose." "And this is their little piece of the movie." "And, of course, Rooker and I are good friends, for a Iong time." "Rooker's a crazy maniac, and when I created this..." "When I wrote the role of Yondu..." "Yondu was not in the original script." "I added him to the script." "I wrote the role specifically for michael Rooker." "And I was really happy that marvel let him be in the movie." "Rooker is often cast as someone who is very tough and silent and stoic, and I wanted to give him a role that showed this, sort of, maniacal part of himself that he has." "He's a big Iaugher, and I often refer to him as a 3-year-oId in a 50-year-oId buff body." "And that's what he is." "Here we're introduced to Ronan." "Ronan's backstory is that he was..." "Uh..." "There have been many, many millennia ofwar between the Xandarians and the Kree." "They're very different cultures." "Xandarians are very progressive." "The Kree are very traditional." "And for years and years and years, they have been at war." "And recently a new Nova Prime came in, who is the head of the Xandarian culture." "She's both president and, sort of, you know, the primary general on the planet." "They are militaristic, despite their progressiveness." "And she signed a peace treaty with the Kree, so that they would no Ionger attack each other after this 1,000 years ofwarring." "And Ronan is a fundamentalist Kree who sticks to the old ways." "His traditions are very old, he's filled with a Iot of rage, because his father, and his father before him and his father before him, have all died in this Kree-Xandarian war." "And there's a Iot of backstory there, you know, and he's not happy about this." "He thinks that the Kree are just letting the Xandarians get away with it by not murdering, not continuing this war." "So he's angry." "And probably not completely unfounded, in certain ways." "probably there are things that we don't know that the Xandarians have done that have not been completely great." "And there we meet Zoe SaIdana as Gamora forthe frst time, who's become a really dear friend, and Karen GiIIan as nebula." "They're sisters." "They have complicated relationships, and I really..." "I Iove the character of nebula." "nebula's a character who was designed early on, and I needed an actress to fit exactly how the design looked, because I Ioved the design by a guy by the name of charlie Wen, who did a lot of the vis-dev work," "visuaI-deveIopment work, on this movie." "Here we have bradley cooper as Rocket." "We hear him for the first..." "There's Stan Lee, who, of course, was my hero as a child." "The godfather of all marvel characters, and was my biggest hero that I ever had in my entire life, and it was a greatjoy to be able to work with him and put him in this little role in this movie." "Here we meet Groot for the first time." "Groot is the soul of the movie in a Iot ofways." "He's the only one of the Guardians that has any sort of sweetness to him." "The rest are all pretty damaged and..." "This scene was very difficult to get right, actually, um, with Rocket and Groot." "It's the first time we see Rocket, and the frst time we see Groot, and it was difficult getting them both to a place where they looked, you know, good enough." "I'm a stickler with visual effects, and with prosthetic effects, as well." "This is a guy by the name of Chris Fairbank, who plays The Broker, and he just turns in an amazing performance." "I wish he would get noticed more for it." "And I hope that we get to use him in future Guardians films, because he isjust the easiest guy to work with." "Such a sweet, loving man and British guy." "We shot Guardians of the Galaxy over a period of, Iike, five months in London, england, in a few studios." "Shepperton Studios, Pinewood Studios, Longcross Studios." "This set was actually..." "I can't even remember which studio it was at." "probably Shepperton." "It was at Longcross, I just looked at my assistant and he told me." "Anyway, yeah, chris is a fantastic actor." "Farewell, Mr. Quill." "GUNN:" "And here we have Chris meeting Zoe for the first time." "QuiII meeting Gamora." "It was another very difficult scene to cut together." "They're both really good in this scene." "But this day was rough." "And it was very, very hot on these days." "It was nearly 100 degrees in London." "Just burning hot." "We shot over a period of a few days." "We had, you know, couple hundred extras, which you see a Iot of them in the background, all in this alien makeup." "And on the first day, they'd all keep all their big costumes on." "On the second day, parts of their costumes started coming off." "And by the third day, on this set, we'd walk over to where all the extras were being held, the extras holding area, and they'd all be in their underwear." "That's no joke." "They'd just be in their underwear with their yellow faces and prosthetics on." "Ah!" "GUNN:" "The whole idea of this scene was, you know, it's our first true action scene in the movie, I guess, besides the chase and the Milano getting hit by the fountain." "And it wasjust to have each of the characters having one up over each other." "One after the other." "They're all pretty smart and pretty good in their own ways." "They're all good at fighting." "And they're also kind of doofuses in their own ways, so this is about them each, you know, being able to triumph, and then get their comeuppance, one after the other, as they meet each other for the first time." "There's a girl up there in blue, Sameera, who's a really cool actress." "And she was one of the coolest looking characters in the movie." "And we unfortunately cut her role from the film, as we did a lot of the smaller characters, because itjust seemed to slow things down." "But there was a moment where chris stopped in the middle of all this, and sort of came onto her and she liked it." "You gotta be kidding me." "Ooh." "Hey!" "GUNN:" "Here we have Gamora sort of being very, very mean to Groot and chopping off his arms." "She's kind of a jerk." "And you'II see in later scenes that" "Groot really holds it against her, and doesn't like Gamora for a while in the movie because she beat the crap out of him." "Like how much this is gonna hurt." "(yelling in pain) -(electricity crackling)" "(ROCKET laughing)" "GUNN:" "That always made me laugh, when chris was doing his wobbly falling thing." "(GROOT WHlMPERlNG) -lt'll grow back, you d'ast idiot." "GUNN:" "Vin Diesel plays GrooT He's amazing." "He only has five words that he says throughout the entire movie." "And yet he says them with such aplomb." "And he is a fantastic, fantastic voice actor, who really inhabits this character, and..." "We had a Iot of different people in early versions of the movie, do "I am Groot."" "There's John c." "ReiIIy by the way." "And I did "I am Groot."" "We had one of our visual effects artists who had a deep voice do "I am Groot."" "We had Krystian who played Groot on set doing "I am Groot."" "We had my brother Sean doing "I am Groot."" "And, you know, they were all fine, and the character was really compelling to look at." "But it wasn't until Vin diesel came in and started doing the voice that that character seemed to completely become himself and to fill up completely." "And it is due to the fact that there is just some magic in Vin's voice that fits so well with that character." "And I think, at times, it's an undervalued part of how beautiful that character is, and there's a reason why Groot is many people's favorite character, if not most people's favorite character, who sees the movie." "One of the great joys of this movie, for me, was working with glenn close." "She is such an intense actress." "I say she has 10,000-pound eyeballs." "I Iove working with her." "And she's such a warm and wonderful human being." "There's Peter Serafnowicz, and the pretty girl is one of my best friends in the world, MikaeIa Hoover." "Those were fun days, shooting that stuff." "Peter Serafinowicz is a really funny guy." "You may have seen him in Shaun of the Dead, or some of his online stuff which he does, which is very funny." "We actually followed each other on Twitter before he came in for this movie, and that definitely was part of the reason that I was so interested when he auditioned." "What the hell?" "GUNN:" "This sequence was something that we cut from the movie for a while, because we didn't know we needed all of it, but we did, in the end, need all of it." "It explains a Iot of stuff." "It used to be a little bit longer." "This thing with Peter giving the finger is very interesting, because that was something that..." "A Iot of the funniest moments in the movie are a back-and-forth between me and chris Pratt." "Um..." "So chris Pratt did the finger thing one time when we shot it, and he did the winding of the finger, and the finger comes up and then he made this sort of surprised look on his face," "and, you know, we took a break and I talked to him and I said, "Let's do that same thing," ""where you wind up your finger and be surprised," ""and then comment on how you're so surprised about," ""you know, your finger having gone up and then apologize for it."" "And that's how that came about." "And there's a Iot of moments like that in the movie with chris." "He's very, very good at improv-ing." ""Ain't no thing like me 'cept me,"" "is one of the most quoted things to me in the movie." "In the original, uh..." "When we originally shot the movie," "QuiII starts singing the Tigger theme to Rocket there." "But for some reason itjust didn't work very well." "Yeah, we know who you are." "Who is she?" "l am Groot." "Yeah, you said that." "I wasn't retrieving the Orb for Ronan." "I was betraying him." "I had an agreement to sell it to a third party." "GUNN:" "Here we have Gamora explaining that she is betraying Ronan." "She wasn't getting the Orb for Ronan." "Well, he don't know talking good like me and you." "So his vocabulistics is limited to "l" and "am" and "Groot."" "Exclusively in that order." "GUNN:" "The irony there is that Rocket is explaining that Groot doesn't speak so well, and yet," "Rocket's own vocabulary is completely wrong." "His grammar is wrong, he's making up words like "vocabuIistics."" "(GRUNTlNG) -(static crackling)" "This is the mean guard played by Spencer." "Spencer was fantastic." "We couldn't believe, Iike, we got this magic out of this great big dude that came in." "Um..." "And we cast him because of his face, frankly." "He's a big huge guy that had a great face." "And it's hard casting guys against chris Pratt, because chris Pratt is huge." "It was one of the difficulties we had in casting Drax, because Chris is, you know, over six foot two, and he is just an incredibly big guy." "So casting other actors around him that look as if they're any threat to him whatsoever is very difficult." "And so, when we found Spencer we kind of cast him because he was so big and he just is really funny in the movie, and we like his performance." "This is a really important moment for me." "This is when chris sees for the first time that Rocket has been tortured, he's been messed with." "His back." "Something terrible has happened to this character, and he's more than just a funny talking animal." "And it's a very, very important moment in the movie." "And chris' performance is very, very good there, and the animation by Framestore, the cgi animation, is just some of the best in the movie." "Framestore were the company that developed Rocket and his look, and just some of the stuff is just wonderful." "wonderful." "Here we have a shot of lloyd Kaufman next to my assistant, Simon Hatt." "lloyd Kaufman is the founder of Troma Studios, the world's oldest independent film company." "They created such movies as Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke 'Em High." "And they gave me my firstjob." "Ever." "He hired me for $1 50 to write a movie called" "Tromeo and Juliet, and that was my first film ever." "And it taught me a Iot about filmmaking, everything about the brass tacks of filmmaking from writing a screenplay to location scouting to casting to actually directing actors, and filming love scenes and then afterwards actually having to put a movie into theaters," "and work on the poster art and all of that stuff." "I just learned everything about filmmaking from Troma." "That is Nathan FiIIion doing the voice of this character." "Nathan FiIIion is known by many fans, from his roles in Firefly or his role as Castle on ABC, and also as the character bill Pardy in my film, Slither." "Like Gregg Henry and michael Rooker, and the voice of Rob Zombie," "Nathan FiIIion has been in every single one of my movies, and so this one is no different." "It got out very early that Nathan FiIIion had a cameo in this movie, and a Iot of people hoped he was Nova, which he isn't, or some other big role, which he is not." "He is simply the monstrous dude." "But one of the great things about casting Nathan as this monstrous dude, is that he will..." "At a later time, we could potentially put him in a bigger role within the Marvel universe, where he doesn'tjust get his nose ripped apart by Groot and then is done." "(GASPS)" "I Iove how Gamora's green skin looks against the red in the cell." "The production designer on this film is a guy by the name of charlie Wood." "He is another one of my biggest collaborators in the film." "He's a fantastic talent." "And he really understood where I was coming from and what I wanted to do with this movie from a visual sense." "This is a scene inspired by the TV show Locked Up Abroad." "I'm a big fan of the TV show Locked Up Abroad, and I noticed a Iot of times when people are actually locked up in other countries, they don't have their own cells." "They actually have to sleep surrounded by a bunch of other people, which seems much worse than having your own cell to me." "So I thought that would be funny for Peter quill to have to sleep." "That is mush-faced Rocket." "That is based on my dog, Dr. WesIey Von Spears, who gets mushed-faced a Iot of times when he sleeps." "And it took a Iong, long, long time to get that visual effect shot right." "And Framestore must have done, you know, 50 iterations of it." "Here we have Dave Bautista as Drax the Destroyer, and Dave is just..." "He came in and auditioned for the first time, and I couldn't believe how much he was able to do with the character." "Drax is such an interesting character, because he is completely humorless, but he's also very funny because of that, so there's a Iot of comic timing you need." "And at the same time he is such a physical presence." "And he also has a Iot of rawness of emotion." "And Dave Bautista came in and just knocked it out of the park." "He's just a fantastic actor, and also happens to be one of the nicest guys in the world." "Former wrestler." "When he auditioned, I had no idea who he was." "I don't know anything about wrestling, so I did not know who Dave Bautista was." "Zoe was often having to say the name of Thanos in the movie, and for some reason she couldn't get it straight." "She kept saying "They-nos" or some other pronunciation." "(CHUCKLES) And I had to remind her before... lt became like a mental block, and I had to remind her before every take how to pronounce "Thanos."" "I don't think this is the best way to go about it." "GUNN:" "Here we find out that, in a second, that Drax is completely literal and doesn't understand any sort of..." "Anything outside of..." "Other than just exactly what you say." "He doesn't understand metaphors or similes or anything." "Gestures." "I was trying to get information." "You ever see an A'askavariian?" "They have tentacles, and needles for teeth." "If you think I'm seriously interested in that, then..." "GUNN:" "There were more A'askavariian jokes in this scene that I cut from the scene, and sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake or not, because Rocket would be very..." "Rocket became sort of distracted by the fact that quill had slept with an A'askavariian, which seems very disgusting to him." "Oh, no, it's a symbol." "And there we go." "Dave doesn't get what's going on." "In all honesty, to me, this scene is where the movie really gets going." "We've given the audience their medicine." "We've taught them who these characters are, where they came from, what the basic planets are, what the basic, you know..." "Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys." "And at this point in time, it's also where the group is together, or at Ieast we meet the Iast member of the group for the first time." "And this is where the movie really starts, and really starts to take its form." "And from here on out," "I'm always happy when I'm sitting in a theater with people, and this scene happens, because from here on out, itjust is a fun ride for the audience." "That's a character by the name of MoIoka Dar, who's played by alexis Rodney, who is a fantastic actor." "And the, uh, "That was my favorite knife" line was not in the script, but it was something that I thought of when I was sitting in the tent and went and whispered in alexis' ear." "MoIoka Dar is also a character from Marvel comics, and I think he was in the KyIn actually, as a prisoner." "That Orb is my opportunity to get away from Thanos and Ronan." "If you free us..." "We had a Iot of problems setting up the fact that Gamora was betraying Thanos and Ronan." "It was something we had problems with in early test audiences." "So trying to get it right in the edit was a difficult process." "We had a few great editors on this film, including Fred Raskin, and craig Wood, who really were just two more fabulous collaborators." "That's The Other, played by alexis Denisof, who is in The Avengers, and he's one of the only things that connects us to The Avengers, along with Thanos in a second," "who we'II see for the first time." "Thanos is voiced by Josh BroIin, who came in and did a terrific job." "Josh BroIin also motion-captured the character of Thanos." "Here we see Ronan is about to kill The Other, which shows you how intensely powerful Ronan is, because The Other was able to push around Loki at times." "So the fact that Ronan kills him so easily is intense, although we..." "Here we have Karen GiIIan." "This is probably my favorite Karen Gillan-as-Nebula scene, because she's definitely not too happy with this." "First ever appearance of Thanos in the marvel universe." "It was pretty fun to write this character and help to create him for the screen, because I know he will be a larger part of the marvel universe in the future." "At the same time, we also kind of had to shoehorn him into this film a little bit because he doesn't have a whole lot to do with the plot." "But, you know, we're setting up a larger universe here." "We're notjust telling one story." "And I think for the most part, we stick to our story." "I Iove Karen right here." "She's funny and sexy and nonchalant, and you get a Iot about who nebula is there." "Let's head to the Kyln." "I Iove Thanos' smirk here." "Like I said, Josh Brolin is motion-capturing Thanos, and a Iot of times people bring up the motion-capture of Rocket and Groot." "And it should be made clear that neither" "Rocket or Groot were never motion-captured." "And they can't really be motion-captured." "Rocket has a face that is very different than a human face." "And if you tried to motion-capture a human's face onto Rocket's face, itjust ends up looking very strange." "So, Rocket's actions are a combination of a few things." "Number one, we have a..." "You know, hundreds and hundreds of animators who worked on Rocket, and they're actors because they are creating this character." "secondly, in a scene like this, my brother Sean Gunn played Rocket on set." "And he's a very, very important part of the overall filmmaking process, because he set down the energy and the dynamic for Rocket between the actors." "The other actors treated Sean as if he was a member of the team." "And in a scene like this, there's a Iot of Sean's actions we..." "We shot and motion-captured." "Not motion-captured, motion-referenced everything that Sean did on set." "And a Iot of this acting is Sean's." "And we also videotaped everything that bradley cooper did when he was reading the character, and a Iot of that we used in the movie." "And then if those guys didn't do anything that was exactly what I wanted," "I would just video-tape myself with my iPhone and send it to the animators." "So, there's a Iot of people that go into creating Rocket and Groot." "And it is, they are..." "I think it's one of the reasons why I Iove the characters so much and feel so attached to them, because they do, in a way, become their own organic selves." "Because they are the combination of so many people's works." "They become themselves." "It's a strange thing." "This is the KyIn escape sequence." "I think I should point out tyler Bates' marvelous score here in this scene." "He did such great work on this movie." "And people talk a Iot about the wonderful soundtrack in the film, and there's great '70s songs in this movie, and just last week, it was number one on iTunes." "But tyler Bates' score is just majestic." "And I wanted a score that had a great theme, which we'll hear in a second, which sort of harkens back to the movies I Ioved as a kid." "Again, Iike the Superman theme, or the Star Wars theme or the Jaws theme." "Themes that you went home humming and you could really remember." "And I think the Guardians' theme is like that" "Here, we have one of my favorite moments in the movie where we really get what we want, a raccoon with a big machine gun shooting robots." "And an angry Groot, pissed off that they've been shooting him." "And that's one of the best shots in the movie, by the way, animation-wise, when Rocket's laughing." "(GRUNTlNG)" "l'll need this." "Good luck." "It's internally wired." "I'll figure something out. (GRUNTS)" "(GUARD GROANS)" "Drop the leg!" "You know, my experience on making movies is there's always one scene or sequence which comes out fully formed." "It's not necessarily the easiest sequence in the film, but it's usually the one that..." "It's where I really feel like I've got a hold of the screenplay." "And, when I wrote the prison escape sequence in the script, this scene was that." "Itjust came out." "It has changed almost not-at-aII since my very first draft of the screenplay, where this scene was written for the first time as a prison escape sequence." "There was an escape from prison in the original script, but I don't think it had a..." "They didn't really escape." "I think they somehow..." "I can't remember what happened, but it wasn't this escape, and it was none of Rocket figuring this way to get out of the movie, or get out of the KyIn." "And then, while I was writing the sequence," "I was..." "I draw little storyboards." "I draw little pictures of what the shots will be, and I had my script with the little shots of the prison escape in there and a Iot of those are still what is in the movie." "Here we have tyler Bates' Guardians theme, which I really dig." "There we go." "First appearance of the Guardians together, not so together yet." "So, from there we took the little drawings that I did, and then we had a fabulous storyboard artist by the name of David Krentz come in and do actual versions of my drawings, which other people could understand, and also add his own flavor to it." "David Krentz is one of the storyboard artists" "I, uh, really liked working with the most." "And he drew out the whole sequence, and then, we animated the whole sequence with pre-vis." "DRAX:" "How are we going to leave?" "And that's what this scene is." "The scene really hasn't changed much from that time." "It's almost exactly the same." "Cease your yammering..." "The KyIn itself is an amazing set." "This is a huge, huge set." "It's composed of over 350,000 pounds of steel." "And the only way we could afford to make a set so big, it actually went all the way around, um, was to, you know, create it and then melt all the steel down and sell it back," "so that we could afford to make this set." "But it's a fantastic work of design by charlie Wood and his team, production design team." "probably only bettered for me by the Milano set, which is really probably my favorite set." "The most beautiful work of art in the whole movie, the interior ofthe Milano." "Their flesh was quite delicious." "Not helping!" "Number three!" "And here, we have the moment where Rocket escapes, definitely one of my favorite moments in the movie." "Spent a Iot of time just perfecting this sequence to make sure it worked exactly right." "And people seem to really like it." "And again, this is when things are really cooking in the movie." "That shot of Rocket is just one of the best" "Framestore of his little eyes smiling." "Itjust looks completely real." "That's my friend, Emmett, and he is an old buddy of mine." "Emmett and I, who plays the main guard, uh, we met on a double date (CHUCKLES) many years ago." "We were dating roommates, and we went out to dinner one night, and he was with his roommate, and I was with my roommate, and we found out that he was an actor, and I was a writer and director," "and we became friends." "And I think my date lasted one more date." "And his date lasted maybe two more dates." "But we're still..." "Emmet and I are still friends today." "And so, when I came to england to shoot the movie, he was living there, shooting a soap opera, or had just gotten done shooting a soap opera and we decided to give him a little cameo," "fun role." "This sequence is a real combination of planning, and just the great work of a bunch of people." "There are parts that are completely cgi, parts that are..." "Those are all cgi shots." "That's completely practical." "That's mostly cgi." "We have a little bit of them in there and that's all cgi." "That's practical, of course, with a little bit of cgi in the background." "For me, when you make a movie, you really create the film before you ever set foot on set." "And so, it is about actually knowing exactly every little bit of the film that you're going to do before you get on set." "Um, so that at Ieast as your base, you have something that you can trust." "You can always add improv-ed lines or other things like that, as long as you have something good to begin with, that's going to work whether or not you come up with a better improv-ed line or not." "And a Iot of times, you know, a Iot of people think that there's a Iot of improv-ed lines in this movie, and there really aren't too many." "There's a few." "Um..." "But the truth is, you know, when I'm writing dialogue, the whole thing is to try to get it to feel as natural as possible." "And one of the fun things about dealing with the Guardians of the galaxy is that they're a bunch of aliens who talk like real people." "And to create that sort of natural conversation between these characters is one of the things that makes it funny, and adds a Iot of humor to it." "And you get a great amount of, just, fuel just from the fact that they're in outer space and they're aliens." "ROCKET:" "Well, how's he gonna get to us?" "GAMORA:" "He declined to share that information with me." "Well, screw this, then!" "I ain't waiting around for some humie with a death wish." "You got the Orb, right?" "Yes." "GUNN:" "The Guardians don't trust each other yet, so, of course," "QuiII kept the Orb with him, so that they wouldn't have it." "I Iove this hallway, the colors in it and the grittiness of it, it's fantastic." "And here we have quill meeting with Spencer." "Once again, the mean guard." "And a great song, the Rupert holmes song," "Piña Colada Song, which..." "Orit's called Escape (The Piña Colada Song)." "Sorry, "Piña Colada Song" is in parentheses." "definitely a catchy song, it's a song I Ioved a Iot when I was a little kid, and it's a great opportunity to put it in the movie." "It's a very sad song, actually, if you listen to the Iyrics, or a very weird song, because it's about a guy who puts a personal ad looking for a woman, even though he's married." "And he meets this woman in the personal ads of this newspaper, um, who is also looking for a man who wants all the same things that the man wants, piña colada songs and making love at midnight," "and, you know, sand dunes, or whatever they do, and they all want these weird things." "And they meet up and they find that it's each other's husband and wife, or boyfriend and girlfriend, whatever." "They're cheating with each other." "I think I'd be..." "I think..." "It's a love song and they're happy at the end of it, but I think I'd be a little pissed off if my wife was putting personal ads in the back of a magazine." "Even if I was doing it." "Which I wouldn't do, of course." "There we have quill's gift that his mother gave him, which we're setting up for the end of the movie." "Or if you wanna blow up moons." "No one's blowing up moons." "If you look in the background of this scene, you'II see Groot doing a bunch of goofy stuff." "He's playing around with stuff on the walls, which I think is very funny." "There is a whole..." "You know, one of the cool things about making this movie and, you know, getting reactions to it on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, is so many people write to me about how they've seen the movie" "two, three, four, five, six, seven times in a movie theater, and that they have a different experience every time they see the movie, 'cause there's so much going on." "There's so many different things happening." "You get to see a Iot of it." "And you get to see a different movie every time you watch it." "And that certainly was one of the things that we hoped would be the case when we were making this film." "while we were making this movie, we all felt that we were creating something very special, um, and we felt that we were creating something very different." "We fell in love with the characters." "We thought we were creating something different visually." "And we definitely did..." "Made this film with our hearts and souls, and tried to create something that was different." "And it was great when the movie came out and performed so well." "If I had a black light, the place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting." "Well, there's the line that a Iot of people talk about." "probably more than any other." "The Jackson pollock line." "It's another case of chris Pratt and I bouncing off of each other." "It was an improv-ed line." "chris Pratt said that black light..." "He said, you know, "If you put a black light up in here, you..." ""It would be a mess."" "And then, I went in and I ran on set and I whispered into his ear," ""Say that it looks like a Jackson pollock painting in here."" "And then he added that element to it." "And he did both of those lines." "It was something that we never thought we would put in the movie, because it is a little bit risqué, and we kind of did it for ourselves." "But when we were in the process of testing the movie, we added..." "I said to Kevin Feige, I'm like," ""Let me just put that in one time," ""and add it to get a laugh out of it for one audience," ""even if we take it out the next time, which we'II probably do."" "And we put it in the test screening and it got the biggest laugh in the movie, and then we were trapped." "We had to keep it in, which we did." "That's my brother, Sean Gunn, there as KragIin." "He also played Rocket on set, as I said earlier." "And here we have michael Rooker acting like a nut." "That really is Rooker's personality." "God, we have some great outtakes from this scene, because that's all pretty much improv noises, and there were a Iot of times when I was..." "I have..." "I have on set what I call a "God mic,"" "which is a microphone that I can speak out over speakers to the actors." "And through the God mic, I kept saying those different sounds, and then Rooker was trying to copy what my sounds were, and then I'd say something else, and he was copying the sounds, and it all sounds very ridiculous." "The God mic was a new experience for me, because I have a very close relationship with my actors, and even though I Iike action sequences and big, you know, big movies," "I really believe in the intimacy of working closely with actors, and really trying to create real characters and real moments." "Um, and..." "normally, that means on a movie set that you do a take and then you run in to the actor and you whisper in the actor's ears some sort of notes that you give them about, you know," ""Think of your mother dying," or something like that." "And it's a very private thing." "But with a movie like this, which was much bigger than other movies I've done..." "My last movie cost $3 million." "I had to get used to working on much bigger sets." "And actually, the amount of time I would waste having to run from the tents to the set would be a lot, so I just set up a big God mic, where I couId talk through speakers to the actors." "And we all got used to me giving them very intimate directions that the entire crew could hear." "But the crew was so supportive that it became a very trusting environment because of that." "And I also thought that it made the crew feel more involved in the making of the film." "And more of a closeness with the film, and it became more than just a job to so many crew members on set, because they loved what they were doing, and they felt close to so many of the people that were in charge." "The actors are all such nice people in this movie." "I've always had movies where..." "It's very important for me to choose actors that are easy to work with." "Life is too short." "It took me two years of my Iife to make Guardians of the Galaxy." "I didn't do much else for that two years besides work on this film." "And to work with an actor that's difficult isn't worth it." "This is a sweet moment with Groot and this little child." "Groot's flower, it is probably inspired by Frankenstein, the James Whale film, and that sort of sweetness that Frankenstein has." "But Groot doesn't throw the child in a river afterwards and murder her." "That's something we chose not to do." "Here's the F'Saki-Orloni race, which was originally much longer." "And we cut it down, simply because..." "There's Marama Corlett, who is the one who is announcing the Orloni race." "And she's a really, really fantastic actor." "She plays the pit boss and I was so sad to cut her role." "mostly, she's standing next to Drax there." "Because she did such a greatjob, but these things happen sometimes." "Those were probably my favorite days on set with the Ladies of the Boot of Jemiah." "wonderful, fun days." "This was actually one of the hardest scenes in the whole movie to shoot." "Just this scene between two people, on a balcony." "And, in fact, the scene was much longer originally." "And I started doing the whole long scene between the two of them, and I was dying on set." "I just knew that I hated it." "So on set," "I actuaIIyjust changed all the dialogue around, and I cut most of the scene and turned it into a much more simple scene, and I changed all their dialogue at the last minute," "which was one of the wiser things I think I did on set, because it wouId've been a waste and it wouId've all gotten cut, and I think it works much better as it is." "The backgrounds by Framestore are really beautiful here, our sort of version of the romantic sky, and instead of fireworks in the background, we have the machines welding around them with the sparks flying that do something really beautiful." "chris and Zoe are both really good in this scene, but it was still very difficult." "This is another version of chris and I working off of each other." "This was all in the script, but it was in the script because chris came into my office one day and he said," ""l bet he loves Footloose,"" "and, "What if he thinks of that as a legend?"" "And I thought that was great, and then I added the stuff about the great hero Kevin Bacon." "Kevin's a friend of mine." "He was the bad guy in my last movie, Super." "So I was really excited for Kevin to see the movie, which he saw a few weeks ago and tweeted about, and seemed to really love, which is great." "I Iove this shot of Zoe." "That's just one of my favorite shots of Zoe's acting in the whole movie." "She's just so amazing in these small moments, and how she's able to use her eyes and just portray so much emotion with the smallest actions," "I really love." "And here we have the welding." "I really like this stuff." "I think it's very sweet and romantic and I Iike it quite a bit." "And then, like we do so much throughout the movie, we like to take these conventions that we..." "We enjoy the conventions, but then we turn them on their heads." "And, in this case, we turn it on its head with Gamora accusing quill of pelvic sorcery." "Your pelvic sorcery!" "It's another line that survived from my very first draft." "(indistinct shouting)" "We did cut a big scene here, from this sequence, that's in the deleted scenes." "And it was simply because we needed to move the plot along, and I feel bad about it." "It was a real nice scene where" "Drax talks about his tattoos and what they mean to him, and they're all about family, and he ends up becoming very touchy, and he and Rocket start fighting." "And so in the actual cut of the film," "I'm hoping that it's not too confusing that they've been fighting off screen." "'cause we did explain it when we shot it, and then I decided to cut it to make it move faster." "There's a Iot of sadness in this scene." "I thought this scene was very, very, very important to the movie." "Because from the very beginning, when marvel first came to me with the idea of this film," "I thought the only..." "There's Rocket's lip quiver, which I really love." "But it's a movie about a talking raccoon." "And for me, it was about creating a situation where, if there was a talking raccoon, how could that talking raccoon be real?" "What would make him real?" "And it really was, a little..." "He's this little innocent creature, just an animal, who was experimented on and hurt and changed and manipulated, for the benefit of someone else." "And he's very, very alone because of that." "There really is nothing else like him." "His consciousness and his being is different from any other creature in the entire universe, because he's one of a kind." "And he's very alone because of that, and very sad." "And I think that's what works for Rocket, is that he's so funny, and he has all these humorous asides, but at the heart of it all, he's a very, very, very sad creature," "and he definitely is the most wounded of all of the Guardians of the galaxy." "And then, beside him is the character who is the least wounded, who is Groot." "That's OpheIia Lovibond, who plays carina." "And then, my friend, Benicio del Toro, who plays The collector." "Benicio is an actor unlike any other." "He is truly, truly in the character." "He goes very, very deep." "AII of the other actors on set worship Benicio." "He is a very serious guy, but also, at the same time, a very Iaid-back guy who hangs out in the tent with the extras, and chats to everybody on set." "My set PA was a girl by the name of Brittany, who was the daughter of one of the members of Iron Maiden." "And Benicio happened to be wearing an iron Maiden T-shirt on set, and I said, "Hey, you know, Brittany is the daughter" ""of one of the members of Iron Maiden."" "And he was so excited over that, and had to take pictures of him with Brittany to send to his friend, so that he could share this great moment of meeting the daughter of one of the Iron Maiden guitarists." "And she was flipped out, of course, because Benicio del Toro was wanting to take a photo with her." "Let us see what you brought." "This is interesting." "chris is about to drop the Orb." "This is totally real." "This was not planned." "chris actually dropped the Orb." "And then he, of course, recovered it with humor." "But he actually dropped the Orb." "That was not planned at all." "This is my best friend, Stevie Blackehart, who Drax is about to attack." "Stevie has been in a few of my movies, and he's been a friend since my first film, Tromeo and Juliet." "He played Benny Que." "He runs a bar called the Edendale, bar and restaurant, in Silver Lake, and he truly is my best friend in the entire world." "I Iike to work with actors that I care about." "And so whether it's Stevie, or Michael Rooker, or Nathan FiIIion, or Gregg Henry, my brother Sean..." "filmmaking can be a very lonely experience at times, it's very difficult." "You have a thousand people coming to you at all times with questions." "Very, very little rest." "It takes a Iot of mental energy, a Iot of concentration." "And to have people on set that you can occasionally just walk over to and put your arm on their shoulder and be like... (EXHALES)" ""Take a deep breath,"" "Makes all the difference in the world to me to just have a few close friends around me at all times." "And I always pick up new close friends." "On this movie, Chris Pratt and I became such good friends that he..." "I had a home that was right next to the river in London, and chris Pratt came out and visited one day, and he liked it so much that he rented the home next to me." "My brother Sean lived with me, so we'd have a Iot of late nights hanging out on the deck with me and chris and my brother Sean, and Rooker would often come over and that would be sort of our crew while we were making the film," "and my assistant Simon." "carina, even though she has been warned that this thing kills you," "I guess is hopeful that she could use it to kill The collector." "And I think, in a way, she's probably committing suicide." "She'd rather be dead and kill collector than be living and be a slave." "Oh, I forgot to talk about all the cool stuff in the background of The collector's sequence." "Like the worms from Slither, and Howard the Duck is back there when we first walk in." "And just all sorts of neat stuff in the background." "These are my favorite shots in the movie." "This makes me laugh so hard." "I just love the look on Rocket's face right there." "(laughing)" "It makes me laugh every time." "Many people here think that chris is saying the F-word..." "What the which he isn't (LAUGHS)" "I know." "He's just saying, "What the..."" "And then there happened to be that spark on set, which really was a mistake." "That's cosmo the Dog." "In the comics, he's actually one of the Guardians." "people often..." "Right here, this shot with Rocket, where he's pulling down his eyelids and you see the pinks of his eyes, that was something that was very important to me from the time I wrote that scene," "that we see the pinks of Rocket's eyelids." "I always thought that was funny." "Anyway, cosmo the Dog is somebody who people wanna see in the Guardians movies, because he is a Guardian in the comics." "But to be completely honest, it's a difficult feat, because cosmo is a real dog with real fur, um, and to have a real dog with real fur next to a cgi raccoon with cgi fur," "it's not a very helpful thing to do for the look of Rocket." "So he's actually a difficult character to incorporate into the Guardians, as I say, to the sadness of Guardians fans all over the world." "Oh, no." "DRAX:" "At last!" "(laughing)" "GUNN:" "Drax is a nutjob who has called Ronan, and thinks he's going to win this war because he's a maniac." "And then we have Yondu and my brother, KragIin, come to get them at the same time." "Ronan the Accuser!" "You are the one who transmitted the message?" "GUNN:" "In a minute, we're gonna have what we call the pod chase because it's a chase with pods and Necrocraft, and it was one of the more difficult scenes to do in the movie." "And one of the more difficult things about making a movie with this amount of visual effects is that when you screen the movie, you test the movie to see if audiences like the film." "But when you have two characters who aren't there and you have huge sequences, Iike this pod sequence, which are largely cgi, um, it becomes very difficult" "to see if audiences really like the scene." "Because we didn't get the pod chase done until not too long before the movie was going to be released." "So this was always a scene that people didn't react to as strongly as other scenes in the movie that were more practical." "So we just had to go on faith that this scene would be fun." "And at the end of the day, it's really one of the more fun sequences to see, and it's especially one of the more fun sequences to see when you're watching this movie in 3D." "It makes it a Iot of fun." "And I Iove these little pods." "They may be my favorite spacecraft or flying craft in the film." "Ah!" "(GRUNTS)" "We looked at a Iot of different references for our flying scenes in the movie." "Everything from, uh, Star Wars to Top Gun to The Right Stuff, and we wanted to create our own sort of flight scenes." "But I will say that The Right Stuff was a big influence to us." "Not so much in this scene, but in the stuff at the ending of the movie with the way that the spacecraft moved." "We wanted to take something from the 1960s Apollo spacecraft uh, which is not the things that people normally think of influencing a science fiction film." "Rocket gets a Iot of the best moments in the movie, and this is certainly a pretty cool one, where he just smashes through this guy." "(yelling)" "Those bad guys in the movie are Sakaaran." "We get to see their faces later in the movie." "They're pretty disgusting looking." "They're a mix of practical and digital effects." "As much as possible in movies, I Iike to mix practical and digital effects because it makes it much more difficult for audiences to know what is real and what is not." "That shot there is..." "This shot is very largely practical, believe it or not." "And then a lot of these shots, that's practical, that..." "The inside of that spacecraft is real," "Chris is in a real, uh, pod that he's driving." "That's real." "So a Iot of this stuff is very, very real, and when you mix it in with something that's digital," "like, that shot's 100% digital." "And that's both." "It becomes more difficult to tell what's real and what's not." "(GRUNTlNG)" "(BONES cracking)" "(screaming)" "It's actually not my favorite shot in the movie, but, oh, well. (CHUCKLES)" "You have a few that you don't like." "But that stunt of twisting him around didn't work that well for me." "Again, I gotta really praise Karen GiIIan." "She's such a great actress, and you do get a Iot of emotions that are happening, and for me, Nebula's not..." "She's a pretty bad character, and she's definitely a sadistic character who enjoys the pain of others." "But I don't know if she's 100% evil." "Ronan is pretty close to 100% evil." "But in a second you'II see Karen blow up Gamora, and kill her." "Or she thinks she kills her." "And you'II see the look on her face, and it's really..." "She has mixed feelings about it." "And it's one of the nicer shots in the movie." "That's our producer Lou's favorite shot in the movie, is that shot there, it's his favorite shot in the movie." "Throughout this sequence, we have another great musical piece by tyler Bates." "And, um, one of the things that I do that other directors normally don't do, although, I will say I originally got the idea from" "Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone who worked together on great Spaghetti Westerns, such as For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, uh, Duck, You Sucker!" "," "Once Upon a Time in the West, which is my favorite." "And tyler wrote big pieces of music before we ever shot the film, so that I couId actually shoot the scenes to those pieces of music." "I think that in filmmaking, music is just a vastly underrated part of the puzzle." "people think a Iot about the visuals, and they often make entire films and cut them together and finish them and then give them to a composer, and say, "Hey, go write some music for this,"" "and expect those composers to do great work." "But with me, I really think that music is an important part of fuelling the film, and if you write the music first, you can create whole sequences around that music, and really do something wonderful with it." "And that's what this music is here." "It drives the scene." "And we play some of the music on set so that the cameras can move to the music and the actors can move to the music and they know exactly what to expect, and they instantly get the tone of the scene." "For instance, in this scene, if you didn't ever hear the music, you might think that the scene is gonna be played more like an action sequence or in a different way than it's played," "but it's actually a very emotional sequence." "This is a scene in which Peter Quill is actively sacrificing his life." "He's going to die if he saves Gamora." "I want to talk for a second, too, about the science of this scene because there were a Iot of things..." "When we were doing test screenings, people came and said that Peter quill would die in this situation." "And scientifically, that's not true." "Uh, people actually could survive in space in the proper conditions for short amount of times." "Um, A, without having their skin covered, or while having their skin exposed, and B, if you emptied the air from your lungs, for a very short while out in space, you could survive." "The myths that people either burst into flames or explode as they do in Total Recall are just completely not true." "Um, and we, uh, consulted with a NASA scientist throughout the entire creation of this movie to make sure that, although it is a space opera, and fun is the most important thing, that we could adhere to the laws of science wherever possible." "Now, you may ask why they're clean here." "And the reason they're clean is, because there is a regenerative system they go through when they go through the intake into the Eclector." "My assistant's smiling and laughing at me right now, but that's what I say." "I was gonna have them come out in all this goo, but I think we were near the end of the shoot by this time and the Iast thing we wanted was two actors covered in goo for half a day" "when we were trying to rush and get all of our sequences done." "chris is great in this scene because he has to be very funny, at the same time he's getting tears in his eyes and he's really getting emotionally touched." "And he's so good in that scene, and so is Zoe." "And that's probably the grossest 3D shot in the movie." "If you see that shot in 3D IMAX, we actually cut out the vomit that he's vomiting up so that it goes outside of the borders of the frame of the film." "And that's a very interesting experience, it makes it feel like it's going right in your face." "They're all idiots!" "(GRUNTS)" "Quill just got himself captured." "None of this ever would have happened if you didn't try to single-handedly take on a frickin' army!" "(sighs)" "GUNN:" "Here, we have Dave really do some great work, and you can see the rawness of his personality and that he's really in the moment in this scene." "These days were so hard for Dave because it was actually very cold on these days, he was freezing cold, he had to walk around shirtless, we had to cover him in goo, he was getting over a pretty bad sickness." "He was screaming at the top of his lungs the day before, so he was losing his voice, and then he has to do this scene, which is the emotional center of his character." "And then be mocked by this little raccoon." "But I Iove..." "Again, we have some fantastic cgi work by Rocket in this scene, where he's reaIIyjust a fantastic actor." "And that's, uh, due to Framestore." "bradley's great in this scene, his voice is great." "My brother Sean was magnificent on set." "I have to say this was some of his best acting in the entire movie this day." "And Dave relied heavily on my brother Sean to create a Iot of the dynamics between Drax and Rocket." "And it's interesting, Drax and Rocket have a very special relationship in this movie and I don't know why." "That is, a part of it is because of their moment at the ending." "But I Iike the dynamics between the two of them." "Groot takes a leadership role here." "Again, some really great voice acting by Vin diesel." "There was a Iot of debate on whether we should just cut out after Drax said, "Three,"" "or whether we should have the Rocket-beating-up-grass moment." "I was a proponent of keeping the beating up grass moment, and so the rest of the marvel folks went along with me." "I hope people like it." "This is a..." "Ronan's story is pretty simple." "He's a pretty simple bad guy." "But this is one of the moments I really like for him, in which he has some real balls, actually, and he decides he's gonna betray Thanos, and it makes him a little cooler than a Iot of villains" "simply because he is notjust a yes-man." "He's actually a true rebel to the core, and he does have his own set of beliefs, even though those beliefs are pretty evil." "There was a Iot in the original script about Ronan's religious beliefs that got cut little by little from the film." "And I miss them in a Iot of ways, I think, but we did it to simplify things." "But Ronan's religious beliefs are basically that strength is virtue and weakness is sin." "Um, and so, his moral vision of the world is..." "It's very moral, but it is something that would be considered evil by most people on planet Earth." "But that is where his morals lie." "So it makes sense that he's going to want to kill Thanos, who kind of pushed him around a little bit." "If you kill him, I will help you destroy a thousand planets." "YONDU:" "You betray me?" "(PETER GROANS)" "Steal my money?" "Stop it!" "Leave him alone!" "When I picked you up as a kid, these boys wanted to eat you." "They ain't never tasted Terran before." "I saved your life!" "Oh, will you shut up about that?" "God!" "Twenty years, you been throwing that in my face, like it's some great thing, not eating me." "Normal people don't even think about eating someone else!" "Much less that person having to be grateful for it!" "You abducted me, man." "You stole me from my home and from my family." "You don't give a damn about your Terra!" "You're scared because you're soft in here." "Here, right here!" "GAMORA:" "Yondu!" "Listen to me." "GUNN:" "This scene was actually very, very easy to shoot." "I had set apart a Iot of time to shoot this scene and it went pretty quickly because it was near the end of the shoot and all the actors were really in the pocket with their characters." "They knew who their characters were." "Quite honestly, Rookerjust never, he just never lets me down." "Every single take of him always is good." "He just never ever lets me down." "And chris was just the best he was in the entire movie here." "So everybody was just, just great." "Captain's gotta teach stuff!" "GUNN:" "That's a line that gets a Iot of laughs." ""captain's gotta teach stuff." (CHUCKLES)" "There's also that rack focus to KragIin a second ago after Gamora's talking about the Power Stone," "which, to me is possibly that KragIin is from Xandar, the planet they're talking about." "The Ravagers are basically outer space bikers." "They're just bad guys from all over the place that are out for themselves and they smuggle and kidnap and steal, and they're basically bad guys." "But they're not evil, because they don't do what they do to hurt other people, but they're certainly not good." "But it's one of the reasons, again, why I chose Rooker." "I think if Rooker's specialty is anything, it's playing characters who are morally ambiguous, who seem bad to begin with, but they have something good in them." "This goes all the way back to his first film role, which was Henry:" "Portrait of a Serial Killer, about a serial killer who is a very evil bad guy, but still had some vulnerability to him." "If you see him as Merle on The Walking Dead, he plays a racistjerk who also has a little bit of something you Iike about him, there's something good in him." "Um, and I think Yondu takes those same types of characteristics and really brings them to the forefront, because Yondu's obviously..." "He's not evil, he loves Quill." "And I think if you see the way" "Rooker plays the performance throughout, he is always rooting for quill to give him a reason not to kill him," "whether it's at the end of this movie or in that last scene." "This is a scene we call the 12% scene." "This is the scene..." "When I first wrote the screenplay, I gave it to marvel, and marvel really liked the screenplay, and Joss Whedon read the screenplay, uh, who's the guy who gave me my firstjob ever in hollywood," "and I've known for a Iong time, and he said, "I really liked the screenplay," ""but I think there needs to be more James Gunn."" "And I said to the group who was sitting there," "Kevin and Joss and Lou and Victoria, that I was afraid to add too much humor to the movie because I didn't wanna have a movie that was too much of a comedy and confuse people about what the genre was." "And Marvel said, "No, we think the humor's great." "Add more humor."" "And, uh, I said, "Okay, it's your funeral."" "And I went and I wrote this scene right after that." "And it's a 7-page scene of characters arguing." "And here's one of my favorite lines." "probably gets..." "Which is Drax..." "This line." "AII right, not that one, this line." "I wasn't listening." "I was thinking of something else." "(GROANS)" "GUNN:" "Which I think is really what this scene is about." "It comes at a strange place in the movie where they're gonna come together, and instead they spend the whole time arguing in a real infantile manner." "And yet, it's a Iot of people's favorite scene in the movie, and I think it really speaks volumes about who the Guardians are." "And also volumes about what the film is, because it goes from being this very lighthearted, dumb, Iike, arguing scene, and at the end of the scene, chris brings real emotion into it." "This scene, we shot for..." "We had 1 1-and-a-haIf hours of footage shot for this one scene." "I worked very, very hard, because I knew to get this movie right, I really needed to get this scene right." "We needed to really like the characters in this scene, and it needed to work dramatically and it needed to work comedicaIIy, as well." "And it was a difficult balance to achieve, um, but we did it." "Right here, where chris is giving his speech, is an interesting thing, because during filming, we shot Chris frst, and he gave his speech and he did a good performance, and then I turned around" "and did all the other characters and all the other actors." "And at the end of it, Chris came to me and he said," ""I really think I couId do better than what I just did." "I really..." ""Now that I have gone through it so many times," ""I think that I can give it everything it takes."" "And so we shot him giving the speech again, and he really nailed it the second time around." "And I remember saying one thing to him in particular during this sequence, and I hope it's not giving away too much, but chris was going on and on and he was giving this speech to the other guys," "and I said, "Okay, chris,"" "and I'm on the God mic and I said, "Okay, chris, just, just stop now and..."" "I'm gonna stop real soon 'cause that's my favorite shot of him saying, "You're asking us to die."" "I always think that's funny, that look on Rocket's face." "Nobody else does but me." "Kevin makes fun of me all the time." "Anyway, so chris is giving the speech and I stopped him and I said," ""Okay, chris, now, just stop and give the speech as yourself." ""Just give the speech as you." ""What would, you know..."" "Not to change the words." "To use the dialogue that was in the script." "'cause all of this scene was 100% scripted." "Every bit of this scene was scripted." "Uh, but to say, you know, "Just say it as yourself."" "And he did, and it was just this really magical moment, and that's the version we used to screen the movie." "Zoe was very sick on this day, I remember, so this day was a little bit more difficult on her." "There was a flu going around, and I think, uh," "Dave got it first and then Zoe got it." "And then, chris and I got it." "And we had to spend the Iast three days of shooting being very sick." "And after we were done shooting," "Rooker and I, we took a bromantic trip to Paris." "Which neither one of us had ever been there, so we went to Paris." "I was still sick, but at Ieast I got to see Paris." "Oh, I'm wrong." "There is, uh, one bit of the scene that is improv-ed, that was not in the screenplay, and that is "the jackasses" line coming up, which was improv-ed by my brother Sean." "And it's, uh..." "All this stuff was..." "That "jackasses" line was improv-ed by Sean." "(ROCK music playing)" "Here we have Cherry Bomb by The Runaways, which I thought was an interesting song choice." "All those colors back there, if you look at the colors of those screens, those are all colors from 2001 , the Stanley Kubrick film, (CHUCKLES) which, I liked those colors, so we put them in that scene." "And it's a little homage of sorts, or a rip-off, depends on what way you wanna look at it." "I wanted to make these screens look very cartoony, and use a different, sort of, technology, where we have these screens that we move back and forth, with these flat 2D images to create battle plans." "And that's the Ravagers' way of doing things." "One of the things that, you know, when we're creating different cultures for the film, it was about creating what is the priority for that culture, technologically." "Like, on planet Earth, all of our technology is pretty much geared towards either making things easier or being fun, making things fun." "So that's really what our technology is about." "But if a different culture has a different priority, that would be something different." "For instance, the Ravagers, their priority is really a sense of touch, of feeling things." "So, all of their technology is very, you know, when they have a spacecraft, sure, you could probably make a spacecraft that didn't have a rumble of the engine below your feet." "But in this..." "But because they're making things they wanna feel, they have more control over it that has to do with touch and feel." "And so all of their technology is based around feeling something, including those screens." "And it's also 'cause I love muscle cars, and I drive a muscle car, and their cars, their spaceships, are a Iot like Dodge challengers, really." "Here we have the, sort of, iconic walking down the hallway together in slow motion scene." "But we mess with it by having a Raccoon grab his crotch and Gamora yawning and chris scratching his nose." "There's a little frog and all of Yondu's little collection of cute little figurines that he likes that come in." "It plays into the very ending of the movie." "This is a terrible plan." "Hey, you're the one who said you wanted to die among friends." "Nova Prime." "GUNN:" "Then we have the technology of the Xandarians, which is much different, it's much more advanced in certain ways." "Um, I really wanted to create holograms that were not completely, Iike, thatjust looked pretty much like the real thing, if that makes sense." "He says that he's an" ""a-hole."" "But he's not..." "GUNN:" "There's a great line by Peter Serafinowicz where, uh, John c." "ReiIIy said, "He says he's an a-hoIe,"" "and Peter Serafnowicz turns to Naomi, the girl that's standing next to him, and says, "asshole,"" "explaining to her what he's saying, that we cut from the movie." "And every time I watch this scene," "I mildly regret having cut that moment, and wish it was still in the movie." "Ronan's ship is the Dark Aster." "It's miles and miles across." "With the Dark Aster, I really wanted to create something that felt very heavy." "Like, there's nothing about that thing that should be able to fly." "You know, when we look back at the pyramids in ancient Greece, we think, "How did people from that time make those giant things?"" "It almost seems frustrating how difficult it wouId be to create something so enormous." "And I think the Dark Aster is the same way." "It's just totally huge, it doesn't look like it should fly." "It looks like it's made out of stone and concrete, and it's a paradox in that way, but somehow it's able to take off." "Here we have the Guardians theme again, which I, as stated before, really love." "We actually had a really hard time coming to the Guardians theme." "tyler wrote a Iot of different versions ofthe Guardians theme." "I really wanted something really thematic." "And he would send me little things he had written that sounded like they were performed on a casiotone." "And he'd send them to me on my iPhone and I would listen to them and kinda strike them down." "And then he sent me this theme for something else." "And it was a very, very simple little theme and it wasn't even for the Guardians theme." "But I heard it and I was like," ""Oh, my God!" "That's it." "That's it." "That's the Guardians theme. "" "And I took his little casiotone version and put it over the scene in the KyIn when the Guardians first appear together." "And itjust sounded perfect." "Um, and I told tyler and then he developed it further to make it what it is today." "Come on!" "GUNN:" "Here we have my brother being a hard-ass." "Again, a Iot of these fight scenes, they're fighting in day..." "These are much more like, uh, aerial battles than they are like spaceship fighting scenes." "These are not spaceships, they're much more..." "They are spaceships, but they're much, we wanted..." "They're in Earth's atmosphere, or not, in Xandar's atmosphere." "So they have a different feel to the battle sequences." "That's actually a little bit more like Top Gun orthe Right Stuff, or has elements of those types of movies more so than say, space movies that you're familiar with." "And I wanted it to be very chaotic and difficult." "Seems overwhelming." "We'll never make it up there!" "GUNN:" "And here we have the Nova corps saving the day, coming to the rescue!" "Peter Serafinowicz as Denarian SaaI." "Denarian Garthan SaaI." "His frst name is Garthan, although we don't say it in the movie." "This is Denarian Saal of the Nova Corps." "For the record, I advised against trusting you here." "They got my "dick" message!" "Prove me wrong." "GUNN:" "I really like Peter Serafinowicz as an actor and as a guy." "We call this the "fishing with dynamite" sequence, 'cause originally there was a line about fishing with dynamite, which is what he's doing." "He's basicaIIyjust plowing down a bunch ofSakaaran (CHUCKLES) with the guns made to shoot down other ships." "So they don't really stand much of a chance." "I love, uh..." "That's, that was, uh..." "Dave Bautista laughing was not in..." "That's obviously one of the things that gets the most..." "I don't know, obviously, but the Kevin Bacon line is one of the things that gets referred to the most to me." "people talk about it a Iot." "But when Dave was laughing, that was something that I thought of on set and talked about while we were shooting." "And just went up to Dave and said, "What if you found this really funny?" ""That you love the fact that you're in this great danger" ""and that quill is shooting all these things" ""and just laugh the whole time hysterically like a mad man."" "And he started laughing and we had a very hard time keeping it straight 'cause it was so funny to us." "'cause there is something about Dave Bautista when he's sitting there laughing, that's like a big, giant baby laughing in his seat." "The girl next to glenn close, again, is MikaeIa Hoover who is one of my best friends." "She was in my web series, Humanzee!" ", and my web series, uh, Sparky and Mikaela." "She was also in my movie, Super." "NOVA CORPS pilot 2:" "Locked in." "GUNN:" "Here we have the Nova Net sequence." "This is something." "This sequence I actually drew before I ever wrote iT (CHUCKLES)" "Which was, I was trying to figure out how we could make the Nova corps seem a little bit more powerful and impressive, and yet still technologically unique." "And I came up with this Nova corps sequence." "And then, and then drew it." "And we had a great company working with us who did the..." "Great company by the name of Third floor, who helped me to animate this sequence and put it in action and they helped to design the sequence for me." "This is what we called the Groot spores sequence." "Um, it's another really beautiful sequence done by mpc, which is another terrific sequence in 3D." "Maybe my favorite moment in 3D actually." "And there is something really beautiful about the character of Groot." "It's also..." "This score is also just one of my favorites here." "tyler Bates' music is just completely beautiful." "The first time I heard it, I got teary-eyed, and I remember looking over at my assistant, Simon Hatt, who we call Simon "cry-Baby" Hatt because he cries all the time when we show him scenes from the movie," "and he had tears in his eyes." "It was very sweet." "But I think it's beautiful." "And of course we undercut it with Drax being an idiot." "You, Quill, are my friend." "Thanks." "This dumb tree, he is my friend." "GROOT:" "Mmm." "And this green whore, she, too..." "Oh, you must stop!" "(NEBULA GRUNTS)" "Gamora, look at what you have done." "You have always been weak." "You stupid, traitorous..." "GUNN:" "people ask me how long it takes nebula to get into makeup." "I think it was about a little over four hours." "By the end of the shoot, Drax was a little longer than that." "Um, he had to have his arms up the whole time." "And Zoe was actually not that much shorter." "Her makeup was simpler, but Zoe, uh, doesn't sit still, so she's running around all the time." "It takes her a little bit longer." "She's a very fiery personality." "Um..." "This scene is definitely our Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western scene, and Yondu is our Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western character." "That's my voice, by the way, doing the Sakaaran." "(whistles)" "Yeah." "I Iike this scene a Iot." "This is a..." "Yondu's a very powerful character." "One of the reasons I picked Yondu from the comic books is that his super power is so interesting." "He's a little bit different in the comics." "He actually has a bow with his arrow, but I just went with the whistling thing, and took away the bow, which didn't seem as necessary." "Here we learn that because of her cybernetics and modifications" "nebula has healing powers, and makes her a pretty formidable foe." "This is actually one of the more fun sections of the movie for me." "Itjust really moves very quickly and there's a bunch of things happening all at one time." "It took a Iot of love and care to get this sequence to the right place, both in terms of the shooting of the sequence, and in terms of the editing of the sequence." "(ALL clamoring)" "Here we have the suicide bombers, the Sakaaran, who obviously love Ronan, and are willing to do anything for him." "That's Bereet, actually, from the beginning of the movie, saving that young girl, which a Iot of people miss." "And coming up we have that little girl and her mom, that's actually, we learn at the end of the movie, that's Rhomann Dey, John c." "ReiIIy's wife and daughter." "They have big eyes." "Rocket's doing something heroic." "ROCKET:" "We'll take care ofthe people down here." "I can't believe I'm taking orders from a hamster." "GUNN:" "people have brought up the fact that there probably are not hamsters in outer space." "And here's how that works." "If you look closely in the mug-shot scene, there is a translator in Peter Quill's neck, which means that all of the characters are not necessarily speaking english, but they are able to have a common tongue because they have implant..." "They have, uh, translators implanted in them." "So, whatever is a hamster-like creature is probably what Denarian SaaI is talking about there." "also, it was funny so I kept it in the movie." "I really like this shot." "Everybody shoot them before they hit the ground." "GUNN:" "This is definitely inspired by Space Invaders, and was described as Space Invaders in the script (CHUCKLES)" "Where the characters are all shooting down the aliens before they approach the planet." "(BOTH grunting)" "(ROARS)" "GUNN:" "Nice fight scene by Tommy Harper." "Tommy Harper and James Young were the guys who did the fight coordination of this scene, they also did all the fight coordination for Captain America 2." "really great guys, very talented guys." "And they helped to make this, give this scene a Iot of energy." "Finger to the throat means death." "GUNN:" "Djimon Hounsou, by the way, is great in this moment where he's... (CHUCKLES) going out of whack." "Metaphor." "GUNN:" "people love that line." "Uh..." "Oh, no." "GUNN:" "Djimon Hounsou plays Korath." "He's a fantastic actor and another really, just great guy who we were lucky to have do his piece in the movie." "Here we have Groot, uh, killing people for an awful long time." "people kept trying to get me to cut it down, but then I thought it was funnier when it was longer." "Sometimes I wish it was a little longer." "But the smile was really what did it." "And, uh, that is one of the nicer moments in the movie." "Here we have the Nova Net falling against the power ofthe Dark Aster, which is just a little stronger than them at the end of the day." "Not to mention when Ronan uses the Power Stone against them." "My friend Nick, about to get killed." "He's dead." "There will be no Nick holmes as a Ravager in the sequel, unfortunately." "And here we have the sad demise of Denarian Saal, who reaches out to his new friend Rocket for one last moment before he dies." "(GUNN chuckling)" "They have a fantastic relationship that they've been talking over the intercom for a few minutes." "Anyway, I really like how this looks." "I think it's a beautiful moment." "Quill, you gotta hurry." "The city's been evacuated, but we're getting our asses kicked down here." "GUNN:" "So here we have the..." "We've set up very, you know, very specifically what's supposed to be happening." "AII the guys are trying to get to Ronan to kill him with the Hadron Enforcer, that's what we believe is going to happen and that's the goal of our team." "I Iove this scene." "Zoe's skeleton." "Here we have nebula's..." "It's not her demise, but her escape." "nebula has a strange out in this movie where she just sort of decides to leave, um, which I like." "She says, "I know you're both crazy."" "There!" "chops off her own hand, which makes her pretty hardcore." "That's my friend, Dave Yarvo, as a Ravager, who she throws out." "The Yarvo..." "We call that scream the Yarvo." "We use it earlier in the movie as well." "And here are the guys getting closer to their goal." "They face Ronan." "(GUN powering UP)" "This is a moment that I hope you're having a nice home theater while watching this scene, because in a movie theater it's one of the cooler moments, 'cause you realize how loud everything has been for a Iong, long time" "and then suddenly things get really quiet." "And it's..." "Nothing has worked at all like it's supposed to." "I think it's a fun thing to do in movies, is we set up a goal for our characters, our goals..." "There's..." "Our characters fulfill that goal, and then itjust doesn't work at all as expected." "I do it, the same thing, in my movie Slither." "There's a grenade that the lead character gets that is supposed to blow up." "They worked, spent a Iot of time getting this grenade, and then itjust doesn't work." "Goes off in a swimming pool." "And this is the same sort of moment in this movie." "(SCREAMS)" "But we've got a crazy raccoon on our side here." "One of the difficulties, of course, with this movie was" "I really wanted to love these characters and share with the audience the love that I have for these characters and that I believe that they have for each other, and that they find with each other." "And so this moment is really that moment of sacrifice on the part of Groot's where..." "Here he's making the choice and you can see him make the choice there in his eyes for a moment, where he decides to do something." "He's seeing what happens and then he decides to sacrifice himself right here in this moment." "And it really is, uh, one of my favorite moments in the movie." "And again another, uh..." "This is the Groot Spore theme just played a little bit more grandly." "Uh..." "tyler Bates' music which really helps to fuel the scene and shows where it is." "And Zoe is just so great in this scene." "I just..." "The way she uses her eyes and the love she had for Groot." "And it was very strange, because we had the music blaring on set while we shot this scene, and Zoe looked up at Groot and she just started crying when we were shooting this scene, because she knew what he was doing." "And Groot wasn't really even there, um, but she felt it." "And I think that Zoe's performance with her face is just, especially here, itjust, it tells so much of the story of what's happening with Groot and who he is." "And then we have this moment, which to me is one of the more touching things in the movie." "Why?" "GUNN:" "And this moment here with tears in his eyes, and it's really very, very, very touching." "We are" "Groot." "When I first, uh, was working on the screenplay," "I came up with the "We are Groot" line, which was going to be..." "It was a completely different situation, in which Groot was going to go up and give this speech where he was going to say, "We are Groot" at the end of the movie, or near the end of the movie." "And instead this moment happened, um, and created what we call the Groot Cocoon, which is what he uses to save those guys." "And the Groot cocoon sequence became the We Are Groot sequence." "(POP music playing faintly)" "Here we have O-o-h Child by the Five Stairsteps, um, which is, of course, just a wonderful song." "But in this movie we use some songs as they were intended and some songs, such as Fooled Around And Fell ln Love, that plays on the balcony, uh, and it really is saying what's happening, you know," "Quill fooled around and fell in love with Gamora in a way." "And here we have the movie..." "The song plays almost ironically, because it certainly doesn't things like..." "Seem like things are gonna get brighter." "It seems pretty dark and awful." "And we have the, uh, citizens coming out." "There's The Broker, who has changed a little bit since the beginning of the movie." "And then we have this..." "Another great piece of music here, with tyler Bates coming over as Ronan is totally fine." "(SCREAMS)" "There's a Iot of questions here when Rocket runs at Ronan, whether he is running at Ronan to actually try to hurt him or if he is actually trying to get Ronan to move him over to this spot" "where he knows that they have a chance to do something else." "Here the characters look from one to the next." "...the time has come to rejoice and renounce your paltry gods!" "GUNN:" "And then we have one of, uh..." "What often people talk to me about is one of the riskier moves in the movie where Peter Quill begins to sing and dance." "And it was risky and the reason it was risky is because it was in the screenplay and it was funny in the screenplay, but never great." "Just kind of funny." "But I really felt like if chris could do a great performance in the scene, that the scene would be great." "And this is truly the magic of chris Pratt, because we just gave him full rein and he went and took it." "And we kept throwing stuff at him and he kept taking that." "And he added this little bit." "Tossin' it to Gamora and then Gamora shaking her head." "And it really is just chris Pratt that..." "It's really, truly, a shining moment in the movie in a Iot of ways, because that is... lf Chris Pratt didn't work in the scene, the scene wouldn't work." "Other scenes in the movie, um, you know, you can kind of fake your way through." "But that one you can't." "This is a piece of music we call Black Tears, and it was called..." "Again, this was music we played on set while we were shooting this entire sequence." "Sometimes with a Phantom camera at extremely high frame rates." "(explosions)" "But it's, uh..." "It was a scene that took a Iot of work." "And it was something that we had to show many times in the theater with absolutely no effects whatsoever." "Mom." "GAMORA:" "Take my hand!" "GUNN:" "And here we have sort of, really what the center of the movie is about." "At the center of Guardians of the Galaxy, uh, it is about a story of a son's love for his mother and a mother's love for her son." "It's a mother/son story at the center of it all." "And this is the moment where Peter quill accepts that his mother loves him and takes her hand, and has a shift within himself." "And the Guardians, in turn, each have a shift where..." "They're all characters who, from the beginning of the movie, each think that they're jerks." "They think themselves are jerks, and they have beliefs about themselves that they're bad people or bad creatures or whatever they are." "And, in this moment, they find out that there's something more important to them than just themselves." "And that's each other." "And, in some cases, I think it's a deeper love for a society that Peter has and Gamora has." "And with Rocket, I think it really is just a love for Peter and Drax and Gamora and Groot." "(GROWLS)" "And there's nothing ironic there from my point of view." "It really is just..." "It's about family, it's about love, and it's about these characters that hopefully find something in themselves that's a little better than what they thought was there." "And, if there's anything that comes out of the movie for people, maybe they can see that within themselves." "(ALL panting)" "YONDU:" "Well, well, well." "Quite the light show." "GUNN:" "Rooker's shown up." "By the way, that shot of Rocket's little hand coming up to grab" "Drax's was one of my favorites in the movie." "We call that the MicheIangeIo shot." "Peter, you can't." "Peter." "You gotta reconsider this, Yondu." "I don't know who you're selling this to, but the only way the universe can survive..." "GUNN:" "This is another interesting performance by, uh, Rooker." "Because, in a second, quill gives him the Orb, and Rooker, or Yondu, he's not dumb." "And if you look at the way Rooker plays this scene, and you'II ask..." "Have to ask him if this is totally true." "I'm not sure that he doesn't know that that Orb doesn't have in it what he hopes it has." "And that he just doesn't want to kill Quill." "It's especially from this moment, right here." "See that?" "He knows. (CHUCKLES)" "He knows." "Here we have..." "We learn..." "My brother Sean Gunn as KragIin tells the audience what's going on." "And he did a greatjob in that scene, because that's just pure exposition that Sean had to deliver in a way as if it was real dialogue." "And then we reveal what many people are not surprised to see." "Oh, I know." "But he was about the only family I had." "No." "He wasn't." "GUNN:" "This next sequence, uh, is a..." "To me, it's my favorite moment in the whole movie." "And it's the one moment that really does move me when I watch it." "Uh..." "bradley is so good in this scene." "And Sean and Dave were so good in this scene when they first shot it." "And Dave really wanted Sean to be there for his acting and so Sean is in most of these shots with Dave and we just took him out." "But, boy, it's just..." "And the animators, uh, did a greatjob." "Just in this moment here." "That's just one of the best acting ofRockeT (CHUCKLES)" "And Dave's so good in that moment there." "That, to me, is the best moment in the whole movie." "PETER:" "Why would you even know this?" "DEY:" "When we arrested you, we noticed an anomaly in your nervous system, so we had it checked out." "I'm not Terran?" "GUNN:" "We almost didn't put this scene in the movie, actually." "We aImostjust went directly to glenn close thanking them." "Because we did have KragIin and Yondu explaining that his father was something else." "But we decided to keep it in the film." "We wanted to be careful not to have too many endings in the movie, so doing all of the stuff after they save the day and destroy Ronan, we needed to make it as fluid as possible, because there were a Iot of different things to tie up." "Here we have Rocket with little Baby Groot." "...he has something to show you." "Thank you, Nova Prime." "GUNN:" "Because we did have other scenes in this sequence that I liked a Iot that we just cut because it was just too many, too many things happening." "In the comic books, of course, Drax is out to kill Thanos." "He's been created to kill Thanos, basically." "And so here we find that Drax has at Ieast a little bit more in common with his comic book counterpart than we initially thought." "And, of course, when you're making a movie like this, you owe a great debt to the creators of the comic book characters and the stories that they told." "And you wanna remain as true to the spirit of those characters as you can, while at the same time creating a movie with characters that work the best they possibly can as a cinematic entity." "And I think that we found a good balance." "You know, we changed some characters a Iot obviously." "Yondu's much different than he is in the comics." "Drax is much different." "Drax's personality is a Iot different." "But there's a Iot of what the..." "I think we struck a good balance." "This was one of the worst days on set, actually." "It was just a miserable, miserable day." "Because we were on the roof of this actual building in the center of downtown London." "And there were..." "It was a Sunday, so there were church bells ringing every 15 minutes." "And there were jets going overhead constantly." "And it was..." "The sun was changing, so that one moment it wouId be extremely bright and the next moment it wouId be dark and in cloud cover." "And it was every single thing just didn't work together to create something good." "And the fact that we got a decent scene out of it is truly a miracle." "And we have Peter Quill's present from his mother." "And Chris is, uh..." "Again, chris proves why he is the only guy of his type in film today, that he has this vulnerability to him, yet he has a masculinity and he has a sense of humor and all of those things come together" "to make what I believe is, you know, the greatest movie star of today, which is chris Pratt." "And this moment..." "This was dialogue, uh, by..." "Laura was recorded in the back ofa car (CHUCKLES)" "And I was sitting in the car next to Laura as she was recording this dialogue." "Because we were on set, and we had her come in to record the dialogue so that chris could listen to it as he was..." "We were shooting this scene on set." "And I was sitting next to Laura and I got tears in my eyes when she was reading her letter to Peter Quill as I was sitting there next to her." "Which we only did one or two times and used the one that touched me." "You have to trust your instincts a lot, I think, as a filmmaker, and what is it that moves you." "Sometimes it can betray you, but sometimes..." "usually it won't." "(RB music playing) -(KNOB clicks)" "And here we have the true song of a mother singing to her son." "It was very difficult." "I wasn't sure I wanted to use this song, because it's been used a Iot." "It's very familiar to people and most of the other songs have not been." "But itjust told the story perfectly." "This moment here is just one of my favorite little bits in the movie." "Gamora says earlier that she doesn't dance because she is a warrior." "And here she does this, which is very subtle." "But it's one of my favorite moments in the movie." "And this is another one of my favorite moments, which was more in the script, and it's Yondu," "who pretty much knows that there's not an Infinity Gem inside that thing" "(CHUCKLES) by this point" "And then, he's been ripped off, but he's been given the thing he loves the most, which is a cute little character that he collects. (CHUCKLES)" "That we've also seen earlier in quill's ship." "Of course, the Infinity Gem is safe." "And here we reveal that John c." "ReiIIy's family is the same family that Rocket saved earlier on the bridge." "I'm not sure how much people pick that one up, but..." "Yeah, so the song is reaIIyjust as..." "It's a song from a mother to a son and it's hard to have a song about love that doesn't necessarily seem like it's about sexual love andAin't No Mountain High Enough seemed to work perfectly." "We have a special relationship between the two guys." "And then we have little Baby Groot coming back to life." "PETER:" "So, what should we do next?" "Something good?" "Something bad?" "A bit of both?" "We'll follow your lead, Star-Lord." "GUNN:" "And we end with one of my favorite songs of all time, probably the greatest pop song ever, in my mind." "Which is I Want You Back by the Jackson Five." "And it's hard not to be happy when you hear this song." "It's almost like cheating at the end ofthe movie. (CHUCKLES)" "(GUNN reading)" "We just needed something to work out with the beat of the... (CHUCKLES) The beats ofthe music." "We wanted people to stay in the theater for this, um, which is a sequence that was in the script, but it was written as the end tag of the movie." "We were gonna put it at the very end." "But then we liked it so much that we were like," ""We can't let audiences leave without seeing this moment."" "And it was just such a great way to end the movie." "people really are happy when they see this little Baby Groot dancing." "By the way, that's me dancing." "That is me motion-referenced, dancing as Baby Groot." "That's my dance moves." "My buddy, Dave Yarvo, saw the movie with me and he was like," ""That's you dancing, isn't it?" Because he recognizes my, my wonderful, sweet dance floor moves." "And my unique dance style as Baby Groot's dance style." "And that's..." "That's it." "Do I keep talking during this part?" "(MAN COUGHS)" "(laughing) I don't know." "We gotta..." "Jamie christopher should be brought up." "My first AD, man." "Because Jamie christopher is just such a wonderful, wonderful, truly talented man, to help put this whole thing together." "I think it's so fair..." "So unfair that an assistant director is at the end of the film, um, because they do such great work, and they work as hard as anyone else on a movie set, uh, and he just..." "He really helped put this movie together." "I also gotta..." "Um, also, Ben Davis, the cinematographer." "His work should be pointed out, because he was such an important part of making this movie." "Stef and Susan, our visual effects supervisor and visual effects producer." "They were so important in creating this movie." "Um, there are a billion names." "I actually, uh, saw the movie in a theater a little while ago and was just surprised by how many people..." "Because most of these people I honestly don't..." "I don't know." "Um, but they were all working for somebody who was working with me, and..." "There we go, Brittany Smith right there, that was my set PA." "Brittany's job was to follow me around, no matter where l went, uh, so..." "She was very good at it." "I didn't even realize she was doing it for the first part of the movie, but after a while I got wise and I'd be in the bathroom and find out that Brittany was waiting outside." "Simon Hayes is somebody I want to bring up, because he was the sound man on set." "He did an amazing job." "And of course, alex Byrne, who did the costumes in the movie, is somebody who I'd Iike to point out because she does such great work." "Sarah Finn, our casting director, and Reg, our UK casting director, did great work." "Sarah Finn, when she frst brought to me chris Pratt," "I thought it was a terrible idea, because I thought of him as the chubby guy on Parks And Rec." "And she was the one that kept pushing and pushing and pushing until I would see chris Pratt audition." "And when I saw him audition, I knew within 20 seconds he was the guy, so Sarah deserves a Iot of attention." "David White, who did the prosthetic effects, um, did such marvelous work." "My assistant, Simon, is supposed to be writing down names of people that I'm forgetting, but he's not doing a very good job." "He's just kind of looking at the credits like a lunatic, staring." "Being a maniac." "Who else did I forget, Simon?" "(laughing) That's every..." "Simon says that's everybody that matters." "There we go!" "Bill Mantlo, Keith Giffen, all..." "Uh..." "Jim StarIin." "AII these guys, the original guys who created these characters for the comics." "Of course, Andy Lanning and Dan Abnett, who created the 2008 run of Guardians of the Galaxy." "They are the guys who really, sort of, laid the..." "They planted the seeds of this movie, so I'm so grateful to them." "Um..." "So many people." "AII these names of people that do spend countless hours doing little tiny things in the movie, and I'm so incredibly grateful to all of the people that put their time into this movie, and put their hearts into the movie, and..." "The people who worked on set." "And, of course, the actors." "Look at that." "Look at all those people." "Pretty amazing." "really." "It really takes more than a village, I think." "It takes a mega-city to create a movie like this." "well, I guess that's about it for me and this director's commentary, uh, so I want to thank all of you guys for either buying or stealing or borrowing this DVD or BIu-ray or whatever format you're listening to this." "hello, people from the future that are listening to this on your brain implant." "I hope you guys are enjoying this director's commentary, which I think will last for hundreds and thousands of years." "(GUNN laughing)" "But really, thank you guys for watching the movie." "The interaction with the fans of this film all along the way has been such a wonderful experience for me." "This movie has touched people's hearts all over the world." "And, you know, every night before I went to bed I would think of that while I was making this film." "Hoping that this movie could touch people, maybe when they walked into the theater, they'd Iike the person sitting next to them a little bit more when they walked out of the theater." "skywalker Sound." "Boy, Simon should have written them down." "But he didn't, because he's an idiot." "He's an idiot." "And SkywaIker Sound did a marvelous job on this movie." "And there's our great soundtrack by all of our great, uh, great pop artists of the 1970s." "Wow." "I got an email from Eric carmen, the other day, and the Raspberries." "So..." "Thanks to Dave Jordan for being the music supervisor who put all those songs together and got us every single song I asked for." "AII those songs were in the screenplay." "And every single song I asked for, uh, Dave Jordan got for me." "Which I appreciate." "He did a good job." "And it wasn't that crazy." "people keep thinking it's gonna be crazy, crazy expensive." "And, of course, it's expensive for a Iow-budget film, but, you know, it wasn't too bad." "So thanks to all those artists for letting us use their songs, and I hope they are reaping the rewards of having that soundtrack at number one." "There's cosmo the Dog in our tag scene and Benicio del Toro who did not know, when he was shooting this scene, that he was going to look over and see Howard the Duck." "And that's Seth Green as Howard the Duck." "My good, good friend, Seth Green, who I've known for many, many years." "And he came in and did us a favor as Howard the Duck." "And that doesn't mean that there's gonna be a Howard the Duck movie." "although I know you're hopeful." "Love you all."