Quantumania Director Peyton Reed Discusses Finding The Voice Of Kang [Exclusive Interview]

You mentioned Paul Rudd’s contributions. He’s actually credited on the script for both of your previous “Ant-Man” movies as well.

That’s right. Yeah.

And you mentioned in the press conference, too, that it was sort of his idea to explore the quantum mechanics of it all in the first place. Did he have any other contributions to the script, or even just ideas that he threw out there, that you can remember?

Yeah, on the first movie, Adam McKay and Paul were doing rewrites on the script, and we all talked about the Microverse from the comics. And McKay is a super comics nerd, too. For that movie, it gave us this extra thing in the third act of, we’d seen a lot of shrinking at that point in the movie. Let’s go down even further and create this sort of cautionary tale of Quantum Realm. But Paul’s always great about whatever point he comes in. Even with Loveness on this thing, we’ll sit around, talk about it, and figure out alternate ways to come to a scene, to get from point A to point B, and always keeping it in Scott Lang’s voice.

But also, we’ll do a version of the scene, but whenever you take a scene from the written page to the stage, you start to block it and get it on its feet, and you’re working in three dimensions now and, “Oh, the thing that’s on the page doesn’t really work anymore.” Paul’s always great about living and being in the moment and making sure that there’s an immediacy to what’s going on, and coming up with weird, left-field ways to approach a scene. He’s brilliant at that. He’s a really talented writer in his own right.