Joss Whedon wants you to know he is so very, very tired. In multiple interviews (including one we did on the set with him), Whedon said that Avengers: Age of Ultron has exhausted him, and he's probably not coming back for Avengers: Infinity War.

"Shoot me in the face! It is a nightmare," Whedon tells SFX [via THR] "I long for the simple movies like Serenity!" While that comment certainly contains Whedon's hyperbolic humor, he did add, "Honestly, this is as though as anything I’ve ever done, and I haven’t worked this hard since I had three shows on the air."

Part of the struggle comes from squeezing in so many new characters—including Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Ultron (James Spader), and Vision (Paul Bettany)—and having them come from so many different places. "They’re very disparate characters. The joy of the Avengers is they really don’t belong in the same room," Whedon explains. "It’s not like the X-Men who are all tortured by the same thing and have similar costumes."

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Image via Marvel Studios

That doesn't mean, however, that he's not excited about the upcoming film. In addition to the new characters, Whedon shot the film differently than the first one, and you'll definitely see how much has changed with regards to Hulk (Mark Ruffalo):

"There is more Hulk in this movie than there was in the last first. But what I’m excited about is we shot this movie very differently. I was running a lot of cameras, I was shooting long lenses, which I don’t usually do," he said, adding that he aimed to shoot the film a little like a documentary.

This will be the first time where the Hulk gets to fit organically into the action rather than work as a walking set piece that requires our full, undivided attention. Says Whedon:

"What I love is we have the opportunity, because we went in with this mission statement, to shoot the Hulk like a character in a movie, and not like a ‘Look what we’ve got!’ We have ‘overs’ – blurry ‘Hulk’s over there! Bits, very quick shots. Everything isn’t ‘We built the Hulk so for god’s sake you’re going to watch him in this long take, full frame, the whole time!’ We really got to make him one of the characters in the movie. And that was a gift."

Avengers: Age of Ultron opens May 1st.

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