When you go on a set visit, you don’t know what you’re going to see that day, and more importantly, you don’t know what’s going to be revealed later on when you can report on the set visit. Sometimes you’re ahead of the reader and sometimes you’re behind.

In the case of Ant-Man, I saw what went into the making of what you’ve already seen in parts of the trailer. Last year, I went on a two-day Ant-Man set visit, and on the first day when we went to Atlanta’s Pinewood Studios, I saw the part in the trailer where Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is hanging out of a helicopter and Darren Cross (Corey Stoll) shouts, “Did you think you could stop the future with a heist?” Now, I know what follows that line, and it’s definitely a spoiler, so I’m going to keep that to myself. When you see the movie, you’ll be grateful I didn’t share it with you.

The next day, we went to the Georgia Archives Building, which is serving as both the exterior and part of the interior for Pym Laboratories. You know that scene in the trailer where Darren Cross is greeting people in the lobby? We saw that too, although we also got a little bit of what happens after Cross enters and we meet up with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and his estranged daughter Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly).

But even though I saw filming of what you’ve now seen finished, I still learned a lot from my time on set. Check out 106 (!) things you should know about Ant-Man:

Pinewood Atlanta Studios

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • They were filming on a soundstage surrounded by blue screen and inside of a fixed helicopter. Cross is firing wildly, and we can tell he’s trying to hit a tiny Ant-Man.
  • In addition to saying “Did you think you could stop the future with a heist,” Stoll occasionally drops in, “You’re just a thief!”
  • We also get some close-ups of Rudd hanging on to a strap as he dangles out of the helicopter door.
  • Later on, Stoll put on a black-and-yellow motion capture suit. That was turned into the Yellowjacket suit in post, and you can see it in the trailer.
  • So why did they put Rudd in a full suit while Stoll gets the mo-cap PJs? Well, let’s head over to the costume department.

Costumes

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • When we get to the costume department, we see pieces of a Yellowjacket costume like the arms, but they’re unpainted. We’re told that the Yellowjacket suit was impractical to do with a real costume, but that the piece we saw was for scale.
  • We also got a look at the many Ant-Man costumes and helmets, and they all represent various stages and uses for the movie.
  • There are “Hero” costumes, which are for looking good or dialogue-driven scenes, and then there are the “Stunt” costumes, which are more flexible and made, in a shock to no one, for stunt work.
  • We also got to see about 7-8 helmets, and each one was in a various stage of scuffing.

Macro Unit

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • For Macro Unit photography, they used amazing cameras to capture Ant-Man’s POV as well as close-ups and movement in detail.
  • Examples of close-ups they’re getting are for pipes, a record player, tables, light fixtures, and an ATM machine. The hardest one to get was a vacuum cleaner.
  • This was all done to provide “an almost alien landscape” as well as put more emphasis on practical effects rather than build all of the environments using CGI.

Pym Tech

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • The lab provides juxtaposition between old and new, with Pym representing the former and Cross representing the latter. If also shows that Pym is emotionally stuck in the past.
  • The Georgia Archives building is good because it has no windows, which would be fitting for a laboratory that’s doing top-secret work.
  • In the movie, Pym Labs is located on San Francisco’s Treasure Island.
  • The Archives building is unoccupied because all records have gone digital. It’s also sinking into the ground.
  • The production has added their own touches such as a pool, streetlights, molecular statues, a Pym flag, and a large “Pym Tech” sign.
  • The lobby is a “wooden catacomb,” says production designer Shepard Frankel.
  • During Cross’ address to the audience, we see a guy with a neck tattoo that’s a very familiar symbol. I won’t spoil what it is since it could be a fun Easter egg, or it might be important to the plot. Just be on the lookout for it.
  • Pym visually pops against the crowd by wearing a brown suit instead of black or grey.
  • If you want to get an idea of how many takes Marvel does, we spent 20-30 minutes watching Pym tell Martin Donovan’s smarmy character, “How’s your face?” When this line comes up in the movie, I will be the only one in the theater applauding this moment.

From Our Interview with Paul Rudd

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • Rudd says his screenwriting with Adam McKay was about enhancing storylines, adding and changing some things, and getting the script to a place that Marvel wanted to take it.
  • The two of them haven’t made it a joke-heavy movie like Anchorman, but there are moments of levity. “We are dealing with ants here, after all,” says Rudd.
  • The craziest thing he’s done on set is staying away from the craft services table. That’s a good joke, but looking at his physique, he wasn’t kidding.
  • He’s noticed that although he has to match the action choreography on every take, Marvel is still open to trying different things.
  • He could help but feel “kinda cool” when he puts on the Ant-Man suit.
  • They focused on the familiar relationships because that’s a quality Hank and Scott share.
  • The suit doesn’t breath at all, and it takes a couple people to help him get in and out of it.
  • There’s a learning curve for Scott in trying to use the suit.
  • The suit has more parts than any suit in the Marvel universe.
  • He wants a LEGO version of him (he didn’t know at the time that they were going to make one).
  • They went through a lot of fittings on the suit before they got the right one.

From Our Interview with Michael Douglas

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • The line “How’s your face” references an event that they haven’t shot yet, and took place 25 years ago, which means they’ll be de-aging Douglas.
  • They’re going to shoot the flashback scene on the last day so he can shave off his facial hair.
  • Pym has a dismissive attitude towards the Avengers and sees that there are serious problems in the world that they’re not addressing.
  • He sees this movie as having a more personal story, specifically with regards to Hank’s relationship with his daughter, Hope.
  • Douglas signed on because he wanted to get into the Marvel world, but also he had never done a blockbuster movie.
  • He’s enjoying the “theatrical quality” of the film.
  • They also encourage the actors to try different things (usually at the tail end of the scene).
  • He says the movie is going to be fun to see, “and I finally got a picture my son is proud of. It’s taken me 40 years. Everything, I’m cool, now I’m cool.”

From Our Interview with Evangeline Lilly

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • Hope and Hank have an estranged relationship, and they’re forced back together because of circumstance rather than wanting to heal the wound.
  • When they started working on a new script after Edgar Wright left, Lilly worked to have her character beefed up, and now sees her self as part of a trifecta with Hank and Scott rather than a supporting character.
  • Hope has a high position at Pym Tech that she’s earned on her own rather than being Hank’s daughter.
  • Part of Hope’s conflict with Scott from her frustration that he would choose someone else to wear the Ant-Man armor instead of his own daughter. However, the film will answer the question of Hank chose to do that.
  • On working with Michael Douglas, she says he brings an energy to the set, and when he opens his mouth, “you go, 'Oh that's how it's done. That's what we're supposed to be doing.'”
  • One of the additions they made to the script is that Hope now gets to do physical stuff in the movie.
  • The thing that got her most excited for the film was watching pre-viz that showed how they would use the ants. “They’re really the best part of the movie,” says Lilly.
  • She was attracted to the character’s ambiguity as opposed to someone who was overtly good or evil.
  • Lilly enjoys working with human beings as opposed to tennis balls like she had to do on Lost, Real Steel, and The Hobbit
  • She doesn’t have any interest in doing a Marvel TV show beyond maybe one episode.
  • There’s not a lot of romance in this movie.
  • She cracks up a lot during scenes she does with Rudd.
  • Lilly says she has “the best ant scene in the film.”
  • She thinks the recent Marvel Ant-Man comics are “total crap” and wants to track down some older Ant-Man comics because the current ones don’t have Janet Van Dyne, Hank Pym, or Scott Lang.

From Our Interview with Kevin Feige

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Image via Getty
  • Ant-Man not only continues to expand the MCU mythology, but it also has roots in the early days by having Hank Pym connected to Howard Stark and Peggy Carter.
  • We’ll get to see the S.H.I.E.L.D. of the late 80s, early 90s, although 96% of the movie takes place in the present day.
  • There’s an indication that the movie takes place just after Age of Ultron.
  • He feels it’s the right rhythm to bring in new characters while also expanding old ones like they did last year with Guardians of the Galaxy and The Winter Soldier.
  • Going to delve into the first Marvel hero to have a kid, “which is also a unique and fun.”
  • Pym has a lot of disdain for S.H.I.E.L.D., superheroes, and Howard Stark in particular.
  • The world isn’t really aware of Ant-Man because he was operating as a secret agent for S.H.I.E.L.D. during the Cold War.
  • For Hank Pym, they wanted to cast someone who you could believe could have been Ant-Man if the movie was made in the 70s or 80s.
  • They won’t go so far as to pick up the story in the comics where Hank beats his wife, but you will see that he’s got a bit of a temper.
  • We will see Janet Van Dyne in action in this film and “part of sort of what happened to her.” And what happened to her is part of the reason he doesn’t want Hope to put on the suit; he also needs Scott’s expertise in burglary.
  • You won’t see who’s playing Janet Van Dyne; you’ll only see her eyes when she’s wearing the outfit.
  • Scott wants to have a bond with his daughter because she’s never really know him; she’s six and he’s been in prison for four or five years. To make matters worse, his ex-wife (Judy Greer) has now married a police officer (Bobby Cannavale).
  • The entire finale takes place in a little girl’s bedroom, which will make it one of the most unique action climaxes they’ve ever had.
  • By the end of the movie, a lot of the ants have personalities, and we’re going to see a good half-dozen different ant species.
  • Scott has a special bond with the flying ant he rides, who he calls “Antony”.
  • They’ve slightly modified the ants with CGI so that they’re not too gross looking.
  • When they do casting, they not only think about whether or not an actor can carry the movie, but how they might interact with other Marvel characters in future movies.
  • The break with Wright came because both parties were unhappy with the movie they were heading towards together.
  • Feige and Peyton Reed first worked together on Reed’s planned adaptation of Fantastic Four for Fox.
  • It was down to Reed and James Gunn for who would direct Guardians of the Galaxy.
  • A “whole new sort of concepts which plug right into elements from the comics were not in until McKay and Peyton and Rudd,” worked on the script.
  • There will be an homage to the Disneyland ride “Adventure Thru Inner Space”.

From Our Interview with Peyton Reed

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Image via Marvel Studios
  • There will be mentions of Stark Industries.
  • Adam McKay, who is a huge Marvel fan, added not only comedy but also “structural stuff and conceptual stuff”.
  • He was blown away by the early visualizations, but looking at the different drafts, he separated what he liked and didn’t like, and then added his personal relationship to the comics and the characters.
  • Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish’s script is the spine of the movie, but the tone has changed.
  • When he came on board, he had the freedom to make tweaks and changes to designs, and was surprised at the speed he could try out concepts to see if they worked.
  • There was an “insane amount of calculation” with regards to how they filmed things to scale, especially with regards to the lighting.
  • He’s more into the controlling the ants because it’s a weirder power, and there’s more freedom to create situations with them.
  • They used real ants mostly for reference and focus marks.
  • He felt like he was the beneficiary of really great casting choices, especially Michael Doulgas playing Hank Pym.
  • The movie doesn’t reference any specific heist film, but it has “the rhythms of a heist movie.”
  • He says one of the fun things is that because there are flashbacks, he gets to deal with different eras of the Marvel universe.
  • You won’t know how it’s connected to the larger Marvel universe until the end of the movie.
  • He believes the current Marvel Studios would entertain his idea of a period-era Fantastic 4, but at the time, Fox said, “No, we’re not doing it,” and rejected the idea of “day-time superheroes”, i.e. heroes who didn’t have secret identities.
  • He believes that Phase Three of the MCU will “embrace the weirdness, which I like.”

Industrial Light & Magic

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Image via Marvel Studios

[Last week, I visited Industrial Light & Magic to take a look at some of the scenes from the film and participate with other movie journalists in a Q&A with Reed.]

  • The de-aging on Michael Douglas looked terrific. It’s like he stepped out of the 1980s. The same people who did the “Skinny Steve” on Captain America: The First Avenger handled the digital de-aging effect.
  • “Photorealism was the mandate,” says Reed when it came to the micro-level aspect.
  • When you see the microverse, it’s like being on an entirely different planet, and it looks amazing.
  • Paul Rudd’s flying ant, Antony, has a little saddle.
  • The used the comics to pull key frames for the movie.
  • The heist set-up plays very much like the beats of a heist-movie: characters look over a plan, and then we cut to the thing they say the need to do.
  • You’ll see a lot of Pym’s strong opinions in the movie.
  • They used big objects to help create comparisons to Ant-Man’s size. It not only kept the focus on Ant-Man, but also helped with perspective based on camera lenses.
  • Reed says he spoke to Captain America: Civil War directors Joe and Anthony Russo about how to not only do the Ant-Man effects, but also the character of Scott Lang.
  • They decided to use a “disco trail” to capture the shrinking animation.
  • The suit is a Pym Particle regulator, and the Pym formula is a liquid that gets distributed throughout the suit when a button is pressed on the glove.
  • Scott is a thief, but a “Robin Hood” type.
  • Darren Cross will differ from pervious Marvel villains because he was Pym’s protégé, and he also has a bond with Hope.
  • Reed likens Pym to Oppenheimer or Nobel—a scientist who created something that could be used as a weapon of destruction, and now wants to repent for it.
  • Reed also says he would love to come back for Ant-Man 2.
  • Ant-Man will be the perfect end to Phase 2, says Reed, because it comes back down from the supehero mayhem and goes for a more character-contained movie.

Closing Thoughts

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Image via Marvel Studios

You may have seen the small glimpse of Ant-Man that I saw when I went on my set visit, but we both have yet to see the bigger picture. It’s a unique film in the MCU in multiple ways: It switched directors and screenwriters during pre-production; it’s Phase Two’s only origin story; and it’s the movie sandwiched between the behemoths of Age of Ultron and Civil War. After what I’ve seen from Ant-Man, I don’t think we should just root for the little guy; I think we need him, and I think this movie will be a fine addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Ant-Man opens July 17th.  For more of out set visit coverage, click on the links below: