JAMES GUN: Hello, everybody, this is James Dunn.
I am the writer and the director of Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Two.
A movie which I spent basically
the past nearly three years working on
and has just come out in theaters as we record this, just a few days ago.
And I'm really, very proud of this film.
It's a continuation of the story that we told
in Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume One,
but it also goes a lot deeper into the characters,
and we get to know the characters a little bit better.
Last movie, we had the Marvel Studios' logo a little later,
after the flashback at the beginning.
But the Marvel Studios' logo has gotten much longer since then,
so it was a little strange when we tried that this time.
Here we start off in Missouri.
St. Charles, Missouri, to be specific.
Um, this is right near where I grew up in reality,
and I thought it was a great place for Star-Lord,
a character, of course, whom I relate to quite a bit.
We have a Ford Mustang Cobra, 1979.
And most obscure Easter egg of all time,
the license plate was the license plate of my Buick Electra
when I was in high school.
"Brandy, fetch another round"
GUN: There we have Meredith Quill
and Kurt Russell, playing the character of Ego.
He is made much younger by a great company called Lola,
who has done wonderful visual effects on his face.
The way we do that is we shoot Kurt acting out the scene.
We have a great guy standing by, who's watching,
and he watches him, and then he mimics him in the same shot,
doing exactly what he did.
And then basically, we merge his skin onto Kurt's face
to create young Kurt Russell,
who looks almost identical to Used Cars-era Kurt Russell.
I actually think that Ego is a little bit older than Meredith Quill here.
I didn't want to make him too young.
I think that she is very young. She is probably 19, 20 years old.
We've actually made her a little younger, as well as Kurt.
And she's very taken up by this older, dashing gentleman
who she knows is a spaceman,
um, and he's stolen her heart.
And as we learn later,
she tells people that
the father of young Peter is an alien,
especially after she has brain cancer.
And people think that she's gone insane, that she's crazy.
And it ends up being a difficult time
for young Peter Quill and his time here on Earth.
(MUSIC FADING UP, "BRANDY (YOU'RE A FINE GIRL")
We're traveling through the plant, we're seeing the light.
And here we are, 34 years later.
Now a lot of people notice
that this movie takes place in 2014.
That's nearly three years before,
exactly three years before, the movie actually was released.
That's because this movie takes place
only two months after Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume One.
Baby Groot, he's only a couple of months old.
Now, when I was writing the screenplay,
I really wanted to...
At first, I was going to actually have Groot full grown in this movie,
but something seemed repetitive about it.
Something seemed not exactly right.
And so I suddenly came upon the idea to have Baby Groot still be a baby.
I know he was very popular in a stick form
at the end of the first movie.
And I thought he would be a fun character to have in the film,
and ends up being one of the favorites of the movie,
along here with Dave Bautista as Drax, of course, who people love.
Blame Quill. He's the one...
GUN: We shot this scene on the very first day of shooting the movie.
This was everybody coming back together,
and I was really happy with how everybody had upped their game.
They had all learned a lot from the first movie coming out.
All of their performances were better.
They all took less direction in many ways.
Although I was much harder on all of the actors in this movie.
Really trying to get the performance as great as I possibly could.
(G ROWLS)
G U N N: Here comes the multi-dimensional beast
named the Abilisk,
who is wanting to eat the batteries.
(YELLING)
GUN: So this shot here is one long shot.
Um, that is, Baby Groot is about to dance.
I was the motion reference for Baby Groot dancing.
So somewhere in secret vaults
there is me doing all of these dance moves for Baby Groot.
This shot was not finished until about a week and a half
before the release of the film in Europe.
And it took a long, long time.
There were over 4,000 iterations of this one long shot.
It was an incredibly difficult shot,
one of the biggest visual effects shots of all time.
I think I need to give a shout out to
Chris Townsend, our visual effects supervisor,
who was really, truly one of my primary partners on this film,
and added, in every way, to making this a great movie.
And just went out of his way to
not only make the visual effects shots as perfect as possible,
but also would listen to me and go through a lot of different versions.
And I had very specific ideas about everything,
from the way the characters moved to the eye movement to the colors.
In the background, there is Matter Splatter.
That's what we call it.
It is definitely influenced by my Work with Suda51
on the video game Lollipop Chainsaw.
This combination of incredibly brilliant, bright, beautiful colors
and the darkness of what's happening around them,
which is exemplified by Baby Grant's dancing.
I think this scene is actually really good for the Guardians
in terms of what they're about.
This is... Basically, this is a movie that has
all the spectacle and dynamic scenes of any big spectacle film,
but really, it is about the interaction between the characters.
It is, in many ways, an independent film,
just with a lot of enormous, enormous scenes and explosions.
But what we focus on are the characters.
And we're focusing on Baby Groot here,
even though there's this enormous battle going on in the background
With this wonderful Abilisk,
who I tried to design after a pinky mouse, his skin,
and he's got this little fur on him
that's incredibly disgusting when you see it up close.
But I like the Abilisk a lot, he's a poor guy.
We'd make a lot of jokes of him while we were doing this scene.
That he really just wants to come down and have friends
and is now being brutally attacked by the Guardians for no reason.
But that's not real, that's just a joke.
You're gonna see a lot of me during this movie
talking about my friends in the movie.
I know on the last commentary I did for Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume One
I got some criticism because everybody is my friend.
And listen.
It's gonna be worse on this movie, because I really did put
all of my very best friends in this film.
You'll see that throughout.
So this is the end of that one long shot.
So this whole entire time was one shot,
we put it together through different elements.
Part of it is completely visual effects.
Part of it is elements that we shot.
Basically, you know, like I said,
that scene took almost the entire length of shooting to put together.
I turned it over, right a few days into shooting
because it was exactly what we planned out from the beginning.
I drew those storyboards for that shot
probably in October or November of 2014,
and it eventually came out
just a couple of weeks before the movie was finished.
So it took a long, long time to do that shot.
I realize that.
(YELLING)
GUN: Dave Bautista, really, I'm gonna mention it again,
just really, just killed it in this movie.
He's an amazing actor, a tremendous talent.
He's incredibly funny, and he's got such warmth and depth to him.
I really love him.
I love this shot here of Rocket shooting at the Abilisk.
These shots took a long time.
This whole opening sequence took a long time.
Framestore is the visual effects company
that worked on this sequence.
They were the ones who basically created the character of Rocket,
and how he moved and who he was.
And they came back into this movie.
They taught the other visual effects companies how to create Rocket.
And Rocket, of course, takes a lot of work.
He actually takes a lot more work than Baby Groot does to create.
Uh, Zoe Saldana actually did that stunt there of falling down the beast.
She's an incredibly athletic performer.
And she was a dancer, and she's able to do so many of these stunts herself.
There you get the hair on the Abilisk.
It looks like inside the ear of an old man.
...vanquished the beast! (LAUGHING)
What?
GUN: I created a really complex color pattern for the movie,
with different colors for every scene.
So the first thing I do is I write the screenplay,
and the second thing I do is I create a color story.
So I take color swatches
and, for every scene in the movie,
I create one or two or three different colors for each scene
that talk about...
You know, that basically will be what the production designer
and the costume designer will base their colors on.
For instance, here it's gold and this navy blue color.
So everything is really centered around those two colors.
We keep things much more simple in this movie.
We got a lot more shout outs for how visually arresting
Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Two is.
But we actually have fewer colors. They're just bolder choices.
And we have many fewer of them per scene,
but they also get a little bit more complex as the story goes on.
And they go in and out of brighter colors and darker colors
that tell the story in and of themselves.
...repulsive.
I'm not into that kind of casual...
Oh, please.
GUN: Elizabeth Debicki plays Ayesha,
and she was an absolute joy to work with.
I'm famous for auditioning hundreds of actors
for each role that we cast.
For instance, the role of Mantis, which is coming up later,
I auditioned probably a couple hundred actresses for that role.
Elizabeth Debicki's character was different.
We auditioned one actress who I liked a lot,
and then we auditioned Elizabeth Debicki.
And I was like, "This role is tailor-made for her."
Um, she's a beautiful and stunning woman.
Absolute incredible presence to her.
She's 6'3", I believe.
And was perfect for the role of Ayesha, and so I cast her there on the spot.
And she's a dynamite person. Australian woman.
And your father?
He ain't from Missouri.
GUN: Here we have Peter Quill.
We set up the story of he and his father.
That is the center of this movie.
There is, I think, kind of, three or four different stories
that are the center stories in Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Two.
More so than Volume One, this is a multi-protagonist film.
We have Rocket's story, which is very specific.
We have Gamora's story, which is very specific.
And we have Peter Quill's story, which is very specific.
Those are generally the central stories of the movie
and each one of them has something to overcome.
ROCKET: You wanna buy some batteries?
G U N N: But with Peter Quill, it's his search for a father
and what he needs to get out of that.
I think so much of this movie was really influenced by
a time when, on the first film,
Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, and I
were backstage at an Apple iStore,
I don't know what they call them.
An Apple Store Event. A podcast in England.
And the first movie was about to come out.
Here's Lake Shore Drive by Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah.
(ALIOTTA HAYNES JEREMIAH'S "LAKE SHORE DRIVE" PLAYING)
This song is one of my favorites in the movie.
This is a song that was only a regional hit in...
And I'll get back to the other story in a second.
But it was only a regional hit in, like, St. Louis and Chicago,
so people only from the center of the country know this song,
but it's a classic there. It plays on classic rock radio.
And it's an incredibly catchy song,
and I think one of the most exciting things
about putting the soundtrack together
is that we're bringing these songs
to people all over the world that might be forgotten.
And I think this is one of those songs.
I think that Volume Two, the soundtrack is a little bit different
in that it's a little bit more mature than the soundtrack to Volume One.
The songs were for kind of a younger child in Volume One.
A little bit of an older child in Volume Two
because Meredith Quill knows how old her son is obviously.
And, um, we have a mix here of incredibly popular songs,
like Fleetwood Mac's The Chain
and Cheap Trick's Surrender and George Harrison's My Sweet Lord.
And then songs that hardly anyone knows, like
Lake Shore Drive, or at least anyone outside of St. Louis and Chicago.
And then Wham Bam by Silver, which I didn't know.
These are, you know...
It's a much different soundtrack than the first movie.
But I think my promise to the fans is really that
these Guardians of the Galaxy films are going to keep changing.
And they're gonna be different. They're going to evolve.
They're not going to remain the same.
One of the difficulties of making a sequel,
and one of the challenges, one of the pitfalls,
is that you can just try to recreate the first film.
So, you think, "Oh, well, we had a dance-off in the first film.
"What was our dance-off scene gonna be?
"What's our 'We are Groot' scene gonna be?"
And that's what I tried to avoid in this film.
I think it goes in its own path.
It is a much more emotional film,
which is probably the thing people talk about the most.
But I just allow the characters to grow and to change.
I think the relationship here between Gamora and Nebula is one of them,
where you see them grow and change the most.
In the first movie, we think that
Nebula is absolutely evil and Gamora's a hero.
And in this movie, I think we learn that
the story is a little bit deeper than that.
And that their background is not so cut and dried.
(CHUCKLES) Anyway, I was talking about
Dave Bautista and Chris Pratt and I at the Apple Store Event in London.
And we were backstage, about to go out on stage,
and we put our arms around each other, and we could all feel
that something really big was about to happen with Guardians of the Galaxy.
That something was going to be very different about this project,
something very special for all of us.
And it was gonna probably change us.
And we said to each other,
"You know, guys, let's just promise that we will remain ourselves
"and remain down to earth,
"you know, put our relationships first and put our integrity first."
And it was a moment, sort of, without ego,
in a moment when I knew that ego was about to attack all of us.
Chris Pratt was about to become the biggest movie star in the world.
Dave Bautista was about to have a kind of cinematic success
that I don't think he ever dreamed of.
And I was about to become a director
who went from doing $3 million movies and $10 million movies
to making one of the biggest hits of the year.
And I think that moment Of humility
and that moment of love between the three of us
is really what drove this film,
and it's what drives me with these movies.
I don't think I would keep making Guardians movies.
And, as many of you probably know,
I'm already signed on to do Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Three.
And I'm hard at work at it already, even though this movie just came out.
I don't think that I would ever do that
without the love that I share with those guys
and with their help and helping me remain down to earth.
And, you know, when you have a guy like Chris Pratt,
who is a truly kind person, a kind human being,
and he's number one on the call sheet,
you really create a different atmosphere on set,
amongst the crew, amongst the cast,
and I think it's the important thing
about the Guardians, is that...
That kindness is a part of what we do,
and that humility is a part of what we do.
But I won't say it hasn't been without its challenges.
It hasn't been...
You know, having a successful franchise has been difficult at times.
And you meet a lot of people who want a lot of different things from you.
And you can easily get sucked up in it all,
and I think that this movie is really about
(CHUCKLES) my journey with Chris and Dave and the rest of the cast
in terms of not letting ego destroy us
and, instead, destroying our own ego, to some degree.
Ah! So this is a space chase!
This was one of the most difficult scenes to take...
You know, to tell, in the movie.
We spent a lot of time...
Framestore, again, was the company that did the visual effects for this.
And we spent a lot of time shooting inside and outside.
One of the things I tried to do...
There's a lot more camera movement inside the spacecraft.
One of the things that always bothered me about space operas
is you have all this outside moving camera,
and then inside is kind of like one basic shot of whoever's driving.
And I wanted to avoid that in this scene.
I storyboard the entire movie very early on.
Every single scene in the movie,
I draw the first pass of the, sort of, stick figure versions
of what's happening in every shot.
And, to me,
the most creative, the most fun part of making a movie,
in a lot of ways, is the initial part.
Because it's writing the story, it's coming up with the visuals,
it's trying to create what happens in the movie.
The rest of it gets to be, sometimes, very difficult work
because it's just trying to create on-screen
what I visualized in my head from the very beginning.
And this movie in particular,
I felt like I had the ability to do that
because of the budget and because of the freedom.
And like I was saying earlier, I worked very hard
with both the camera people...
Henry Braham is our cinematographer,
and I had a very good relationship with him.
And with the actors,
in terms of really taking my time and pushing the actors
to make sure we get the best performance out of each of them.
And really taking my time and pushing the camera people
to make sure that every shot is as beautiful as it can possibly be.
I think on the first film I was coming from independent movies,
and I came from a place where my previous film, Super,
was a film I did 52, you know, 54 set-ups a day
with one camera, meaning, you know,
54 different shots a day at times
with a single camera.
And I was moving incredibly quickly.
And that's the only thing I could do to finish that movie
because it was a complicated movie shot in 20-something days.
Five clicks!
GUN: On this movie, on Guardians One,
I still had this sort of need to move very quickly.
And I think it actually was something I regretted on the first movie.
I think that there were, you know, performance moments in there
that I didn't think were as good as they could've been.
The thing that doesn't cost you that much money
is to take a little bit more time shooting on set
to create the movie that you really want to create.
And never, never settling for second best in anything.
And so that's what I did with all of this.
That's the jump point! Go!
L'£'S a QUY-
(DRAX SCREAMING)
Oh, my God.
He's still out there?
(DRAX CONTINUES SCREAMING)
(GRUNTS)
(STRAINING)
-(YELPS) -(SCREAMING)
(STRAINING)
GUN: This is the crash onto Berhert.
There's Baby Groot eating candies.
I get a lot of messages on social networking sites asking me,
"What kind of candy is Baby Groot eating?
"Is that Skittles? Is that M&M's?"
And the answer is no, it is space candy.
It is, in fact, the space candy that we see
all over the ship in the first movie from...
That Peter Quill likes to eat. He's a big candy fan.
In fact, his shirt, which many people ask me,
"What does his shirt say on it? Is it 'Yehab beachy'?"
Um, no, it is a foreign language that means "Gearshift,"
which is a type of candy that Peter Quill particularly adores.
He's got a very big sweet tooth, Peter Quill.
That last shot there...
I think that might have been the last shot that was finished
making the movie from visual effects.
Those little guys...
I gave those guys a name, I forget what they're called,
but I think we're gonna see more of them in the future.
I like those little dudes.
Here is the crash landing site on Berhert.
This entire forest was inside of an incredibly huge soundstage.
We built an enormous forest,
and we shot there for an awful long time
because we shot this scene,
we shot a bunch of other scenes that you'll see.
All the stuff that takes place
with Rocket and Baby Groot and Nebula on this planet.
answer to "Star-Munch." - I did it because...
GUN". I loved this day, shooting this scene.
We had a great time shooting the characters acting.
We were having a particularly fun time.
Sean Dunn plays Kraglin in this movie, who's a great character,
but he also plays Rocket on set.
And we use a lot of Sean's facial expressions for Rocket,
and this was a scene in which he was particularly good.
That's all Sean right there.
That looking back and forth. It's very much him.
Company called Method did Rocket,
and the visual effects in this scene, and many others in the movie.
ROCKET: I've had it with you! QUILL: No! Back up!
NEBULA: Someone followed you through the jump point.
GUN: And there we have Ego's spaceship for the first time.
It took a long time to design it.
I very much wanted a very simple egg shape that had a technology to it
that was different from the technology that was in other spaceships
that we see within the Guardians-iverse.
Um, so it's kind of an unexplainable technology.
We don't quite understand how it moves through space.
Certainly isn't the motorized
Ravager ships that Quill and the Ravagers drive
that use jump points through space to move around.
I think trying to set up a little bit more how these characters
move through space was one of things we wanted to do with this movie,
and so we created this idea of jump points through outer space.
And who the hell are you?
GUN: There we have Pom Klementieff as Mantis and Kurt Russell as Ego.
Kurt Russell, of course, is one of my heroes.
I spent a lot of time as a kid running around in my backyard
pretending to be Snake Plissken from Escape From New York.
Or, you know, Rocky Balboa or John Rambo,
which are roles that Sylvester Stallone played.
And I got to work with both of them in this movie, which was fun.
There is Molly Quinn, who you might recognize from Castle,
as Howard the Duck's friend.
Molly is a good friend of mine, and her boyfriend, Elan Gale,
I actually introduced them, who's a producer on The Bachelor.
You'll see him again as one of Sylvester Stallone's henchmen.
I love this shot of Yondu.
I think we come to him on Contraxia.
He looks pretty darn miserable.
TULLK: Yondu!
Come on down!
GUN: Tommy Flanagan plays Tullk,
the character that was dancing down there.
He's a fantastic actor, really amazing.
Now, we're going to get into the part where there's all my friends.
Because there on the left, you have Jimmy Urine,
on the right, you have Stevie Blackehart, who plays Brahl.
Jimmy Urine plays Half nut.
All of the Ravagers really truly are my best friends.
You will not be able to come to a party without seeing most of them.
Michael Rosenbaum as Martinex, who's one of my best friends.
And Sylvester Stallone as Stakar,
who is also known as Starhawk in the comics.
And we see now that,
in the same way we took the character of Yondu from the comics
and we made him a little bit of an older guy
played by Michael Rocker,
we also have taken the rest of the original Guardians of the Galaxy.
The ones who were the original
Guardians of the Galaxy in the comic books
and turned them all into heads of the Ravager families.
The MCU is not the same as the Marvel Comics universe,
which is the 616 universe.
It's different. It's a reflection of it,
and we take the same characters and their archetypes
and build them in a different way into a movie.
I told you before! I didn't know what was going on!
You didn't know because you didn't want to know because it made you rich.
I demand a seat at the table! I wear these flames, same as you.
You may dress like us...
but you'll never hear the Horns of Freedom when you die, Yondu.
And the Colors of Ogord...
will never flash over your grave.
Ir you think...
GUN: Michael Rocker, in this movie, is really perhaps
the stand out of all the performances.
Turns in an incredibly nuanced and beautiful performance
as this lost pirate who has sort of given up his humanity
and lost everything that he's ever wanted.
We learn here that he has done
something wrong with delivering children
and dealing in children, which is the reason
that Stakar and the other Ravagers kicked him out of the Ravagers.
They exiled him.
And all of the terrible Ravagers followed Yondu into exile.
So he's got all of these bad people.
Like there's Gef the Ravager, played by Steve Agee,
(CHUCKLES) and Joe Fria, who plays the pink Ravager there,
and Tommy, and my friend Evan Jones, who plays Retch.
They really, truly are all my friends.
Chris Sullivan, who you might recognize from the...
Maybe you probably don't recognize him.
He's on the TV show This ls Us, plays Taserface.
And here are some of my favorite shots of Elizabeth Debicki as Ayesha.
Judianna, our costume designer, did an amazing job on these costumes.
And there's Hannah, who plays the chambermaid.
We see a bit more of her in this movie.
And this nice moment of the blue skin against the white snow
falling down over Yondu's face.
And he's confronted with some sort of choice here
by these wonderful golden people.
Or terrible golden people, depending on which way you look at it.
I have a proposition for you.
EGO: I hired Yondu to pick you up...
when your mother passed away.
But instead of returning you...
GUN: Here's the campfire scene.
It was one of the first days I got to work with Kurt Russell.
It was a lot of fun. Kurt and Chris and I
spent time working on the scenes beforehand in rehearsal.
I like to rehearse with all of the actors before we shoot,
so we have a couple of weeks of rehearsal.
People ask me all the time, "ls there ever improv in the movies?"
And really, there's very little improv.
I like to have things pretty tightly scripted, you know.
My experience in the past is when you start to get too improv-y,
you start to do things that people find very funny on set,
and then are not as funny as what was originally written,
which took, you know, years to write and put into place.
Usually, you have the best possible thing.
Every once in a while, you find little moments of improv
that are great, but, for the most part, things are very tightly scripted.
However, if there ever is any improv,
it usually comes while we are doing rehearsals,
where I'm kind of making sure that the dialogue I've written works,
that it fits the actors who are saying the words,
and wondering if there's places where I can improve
or make things funnier.
And you find little moments that you can use while you're shooting.
You know exactly what to focus on.
I change my storyboards at that time because I see
what works in terms of movement or not.
Then I draw pretty complex maps
for the sequences with camera angles and so forth.
Here we have... He's whistling Brandy,
the song that is pretty important to this film.
-(WHISTLING) -(URINATING)
GUN: And here we have Pom Klementieff as Mantis.
She's a really important, new cast member,
and she's someone I've come to truly love and appreciate
throughout this process.
I do not know if I've ever written
any character who an actress has come in
and more completely fulfilled that role perfectly.
I think the one that's the closest, actually,
is sitting right next to her, is Dave Bautista.
Because I can't imagine anyone in the world playing Drax
except Dave Bautista, and, in the same way,
I can't imagine anyone playing Mantis but Pom Klementieff.
I'd say the only difference is that Dave...
You know, I've actually changed Drax a little bit more to suit Dave
over the past few years, whereas, you know,
Pom just came in, and she slipped into the role perfectly.
I liked it very much!
I just made it up!
(BOTH LAUGHING)
QUILL: Give me a break!
After all this time, you're gonna show up, and all of a sudden...
-you wanna be my dad? - GAMORA: I hear you.
QUILL: And by the way, this could be a trap.
The Kree purists, the Ravagers...
-they all want us dead. - I know, but...
But what?
What was that story you told me about Zardu Hasselfrau?
Who?
He owned a magic boat?
David Hasselhoff?
Right.
Not a magic boat. A talking car.
Why did he talk again?
To help him fight crime, and to be supportive.
As a child, you would carry his picture in your pocket...
and you would tell all the other children...
that he was your father, but that he was out of town.
Shooting Knight Rider or touring with his band in Germany.
I told you that when I was drunk. Why are you bringing that up now?
I love that story.
- I hate that story. -(SIGHS)
It's so sad!
GUN: This is kind of a combination of taking a dramatic scene in the movie
along with a comedic scene, talking about David Hasselhoff
and what he means to Peter Quill.
David Hasselhoff, of course, was star of the show Knight Rider
and the show Baywatch.
You know, Peter Quill pretended he was his father,
and this seems like a throwaway scene about Hasselhoff.
But as the movie goes on,
Hasselhoff becomes an incredibly important part of the film.
GAMORA: He's not a fox.
Shoot her if she does anything suspicious.
(GRUMBLES)
- Or if you feel like it. - ROCKET: Okay.
It'll be just a couple of days.
We'll be back before Rocket's finished fixing the ship.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
GUN: This is Fleetwood Mac's The Chain.
Again, a very important song in the movie.
A beautiful song, a wonderful, amazing song,
and we get to hear it here.
You know, I've been very lucky in that
every single song I've ever asked to be cleared by our music supervisor
Dave Jordan, on both Volumes One and Two, has been cleared.
I've never asked for a song that hasn't been cleared, which is great.
Because I can really tell the story I wanna tell.
To get everybody to hate you?
Because it's working.
(FLEETWOOD MAC'S "THE CHAIN" PLAYING)
And if you don't love me now You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying You would never break the chain
GUN: People ask about how I put the soundtrack together a lot,
and, the truth is, I have a list of about 500 songs
that I think of as Meredith Quill songs,
songs she would really love.
And in that list, I keep that on a, you know, files on my computer
and as I'm writing the screenplay, actually as I'm writing the treatment
before the screenplay,
I'll go through it, and I'll find songs that fit a moment
or a place that needs a song.
And I'll search out a song that'll fit the moment.
Sometimes, I'll have to go outside of that list of 500 songs
and go a little bit deeper and find something that is
more appropriate, which I'll do at times.
But I write them all into the treatment, and then when I give
everyone that original story, I'll give that story to Marvel.
And I'll give them a compact disc,
an old-school compact disc with the songs on it,
so that they can listen to all the music along with the treatment,
and they know exactly what we're getting into.
And we really... We do that from the beginning.
We play into...
When we're playing the music on set, we play it on set.
We'll put earbuds in the actors' ears
so that they can hear the music that's playing.
We'll put earbuds in the camera people's ears,
so that they can move to the songs.
And we don't only do this with the soundtrack songs,
we do this with the score as well.
Um, we have...
Well, here we have Pom as Mantis
using her superpower for the first time, which is she can touch someone
and she can feel their feelings.
Not their thoughts, but their feelings. She's an empath.
And then she can also touch people and mildly change their feelings.
She can make them do what she wants or make them feel the way she wants.
Maybe not do, but make them feel the way she wants.
Anyway, I was talking about the score with Tyler Bates.
I'll give Tyler Bates the screenplay very early on,
and he will write songs or write, you know, score to the scenes.
And then we will play that music during those scenes on set.
I find that music and sound in general is an undervalued part
of the cinematic experience.
People concentrate on the visuals a lot, and so do I, obviously.
But I also think that sound is often underutilized,
and when I first came into Hollywood and started making movies,
I was astounded that
people were not choosing songs for the movie
until after the movie, you know, was finished.
And sometimes not even,
you know, already edited and putting songs in.
Not even editing to the songs, which I thought was just ridiculous.
Songs are so important. The music is so important,
such an important emotional element of the filmgoing experience,
you'd think people would take more care with it,
and so that's why the score and the soundtrack
is so incredibly important to me.
He lies awake at night thinking about his progeny.
Do one of those on me.
Sleep.
(SNORING)
GUN: We are now back on Berhen' with Rocket and Groot, and Nebula,
and we get to see the Ravagers approaching.
(GLEN CAMPBELL'S "SOUTHERN NIGHTS" PLAYING)
This song is Southern Nights by Glen Campbell.
This was my favorite song when I was a very, very young child.
I was very lucky, a couple of years ago, to go to a Fourth of July party
at Jane Seymour's house of all places, and Glen Campbell was there.
And he sat down around a campfire with maybe eight of us,
and he played his songs, you know, for one of the...
You know, one of the last concerts. I guess "concerts."
(DISTANT SINGING)
(GRUNTS)
- ROCKET: I love this song. -(BEEPING)
(ALL GASP)
GUN: That is Jimmy Urine from the band Mindless Self Indulgence,
who also happens to be one of my best buddies in the world.
We hang out a lot. We travel together. We've been friends for a long time.
Baby Groot and Rocket in this sequence
were done by a company called Trixter.
They did marvelous work. They really, really nailed it.
-(BRANCH SNAPS) - Huh?
- There! -(ALL YELLING)
GUN: We'll see some interesting shots here in a second.
It's something that I did a lot in this movie.
This shot was incredibly intense.
That's all real...
Not all real explosions, but almost all real explosions.
It's a real camera move through real trees.
And then we put Rocket into it, and we had all these explosions.
This shot here is multiple layers
of different actors moving at different speeds.
So at the very top layer, we have a guy by the name of Jae, who's a stuntman.
And we have him moving in incredibly slow, phantom speeds,
you know, a thousand frames or so a second.
And then, right below him, the next layer is a little bit faster,
a little bit less frames per second.
And below him, those guys are a little bit faster,
so that there's this weird sort of
accordion feel of them coming towards us,
but they're all moving at different speeds.
These variated speeds are something that I do throughout the movie.
In particular later, and I'll talk about it more then,
when we get to the arrow sequence.
We do it, like, I don't think anyone's ever done it before.
These were all difficult shots for us to do
because we have a lot of really interactive shots
with Rocket interacting and jumping along these guys' heads
and hitting them and knocking them around.
Here we have Rocket about to face
my best friend in the world Stevie Blackhart.
He's one of the few people
that's acted in two different roles in two different Marvel movies
because he played the Dispatcher in Knowhere
in the first Guardians of the Galaxy,
and now he's back again as a character in makeup, Brahl,
who doesn't last that long. Spoiler.
And here we have this... That's also a practical shot
moving through the forest, and then the arrow was put into it.
So, that isn't CG! background, CG! arrow.
It's a CG! arrow with practical background.
I always like to use practical when it works,
just like I like to use CG! when it works.
I don't buy into this belief that practical is always best.
It isn't.
I don't believe that there's any way that we could create the type of emotion
that we're about to see in Baby Groot, for instance, right there,
uh, through practical effects.
You can't create a puppet like that.
He's just got too much movement,
and the same thing, even more so with Rocket,
a more complicated character.
A much more complicated character with his eye moves,
and, you know, the meniscus in his eyes,
which we spent a lot of time talking about,
the spotlights in his eyes. The way he looks.
You couldn't create that through a puppet.
But when something can be created practically,
I think it's best to go that route.
So if you can create a set practically, you should.
So, again, the forest,
it's almost all practical here behind them.
We had a difficult time lighting this scene because it was...
It came out a little bright,
and so we did a lot of dealing with
Steve Scott, who does our DI, our color timing,
to try to make it look like it's morning.
It's just starting to be morning.
So this is the scene where the Ravagers start to break up.
A mutiny starts to occur.
That's my brother, Sean Dunn, who also plays Rocket on set.
He plays Kraglln in this movie, and he actually
turns in an incredible performance.
I find his performance deeply touching,
and he's great in the movie.
And Chris Sullivan as Taserface, a real S.O.B.
And then so many of these Ravagers are friends of mine.
There must be some kind of peaceful resolution to this.
GUN: This is really the beginning of the end.
We see the really bad Ravagers
against the merely bad Ravagers, and then we have
the moment here with Nebula.
Sort of a Sergio Leone face-off there with the close-ups of the eyes,
and she strikes him down.
This was a big controversy around the editing offices,
whether we should keep in that moment when she spits out the yaro root.
This is one of my favorite shots in the movie, by the way.
Beautiful, beautiful shot.
(GEORGE HARRISON'S "MY SWEET LORD" PLAYING)
Yeah, people thought that maybe we shouldn't have
that joke moment for Nebula,
that we should make her more cool in that moment,
but I was a big proponent of leaving the laugh in.
And actually during our first couple test screenings...
We do test screenings, in which we show the movie to audiences,
and, you know, they give us scores on, you know, whether they like the movie
or don't like the movie and all this stuff.
And that's somewhat helpful,
but what's really helpful about test screenings is,
you see what people understand, what they don't understand.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
Here we have George Harrison's My Sweet Lord playing
during the revelation of Ego's planet,
which we're about to learn is Ego himself.
He is a living planet,
and this Kurt Russell form is merely an avatar of that planet.
I feel very lucky that George Harrison's estate
allowed us to have this song.
He is a Beatle, and this is one of my favorite albums of all time.
So I think it's... We're really lucky. It's a beautiful song.
It also speaks to sort of, you know, Hindu mythology a bit,
and I think that there's a lot of Hindu mythology, creation myth,
in the story of Ego's coming into being.
It used to be a little bit more on the nose in earlier drafts,
but this sequence coming up
was one of the most difficult sequences in the movie.
We didn't cut too much from this film in terms of entire sequences.
One of the things we cut was a fountain scene here where they're...
You can see in the deleted scenes.
And this shot, I think here was
one of the last shots we turned in to the movie.
I'm what's called a Celestial, sweetheart.
GUN". This is where Peter Quill learns that he is part god.
And I think this is sort of the change.
This is where Peter Quill is in the very first stages
of starting to buy into his own ego,
in that there's something important or better about him than other people.
This is really a story of the seduction of Peter Quill.
Ego, you know, as we find out, is a really terrible, terrible guy,
and he is seducing his son
for the purpose of destroying the universe
and taking over everything with his own ego.
And, uh...
And he is able to be seemingly very warm and loving,
but it's questionable about how warm and loving he really is.
EGO: ...layer by layer...
the very planet you walk on now.
Whoa.
But I wanted more.
GUN: We spent a lot of time working on these shots, which are...
I think of them as giant, sort of, Hummel figurines,
Jeff Koons-inspired artwork, porcelain statues.
I described it to Chris Townsend, our visual effects supervisor,
as stations of the cross. Sort of.
We went through a bunch of different visual versions of what this could be,
and we weren't happy with them.
We did a moving oil painting, and that didn't work.
We did these shifting sand sculptures, and that didn't work.
And, you know, it was difficult
because we just didn't know what would be the best.
Here we have one of my favorite Dave Bautista moments in the whole movie,
which is him talking about Ego's penis.
And, in a moment, he gives a nice little look to Ego's penis,
which I laughed hysterically when he did it.
Which is coming up, right there.
(CHUCKLES) I think that's one of my favorite little moments.
...and all the accompanying junk.
I wanted to experience what it truly meant to be human...
GUN: This moment here is the ship taking off of Ego's planet.
You know, basically we learn that Ego is a brain
that was left out in space, and he sought...
That's my niece, Grace, as a statue, which is pretty cool.
He started out as this brain floating in space,
and we learn that he was able, over billions of years,
to learn how to control the molecules around him,
where he built a body which was the planet.
And the planet existed and was completely alone,
so, through that, he built another type of life,
this form that we see now as Kurt Russell.
And he went off in search of meaning and life,
and when he went and he found life, we find it didn't soothe him at all.
It wasn't what he wanted.
He found out in many ways that he was a predator,
that he was not who he says he is now,
which is a loving father towards Peter Quill.
In earlier versions of Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Two
I had Star-Lord
much more willing to buy into Ego's line of thinking.
For instance, the David Hasselhoff scene in the forest,
I had Gamora going, "I don't believe any of this."
And Quill saying, "No, you have to believe me."
I found a great jump forward in storytelling
came when I shifted that story,
so that instead of having it be that Gamora was the cynical one,
Quill was the cynical one.
And she was the one that had to talk him into going.
And I thought that served a couple of purposes.
Number one, it served the purpose that we see this deepening relationship
between Gamora and Peter Quill,
that she really cares about him, and they've developed a friendship,
which is deeper than just a love relationship.
Although there's some romance within it as well
she's definitely not comfortable with,
and he is, you know, very desirous of.
So it showed that she had come a certain amount of ways with that.
But also, I think it does the opposite of what you think it would do.
Because Peter Quill is very cynical about his father,
and, you know, to an audience member,
I think they see that he's cynical about his father.
And so that is the typical father-son story that you see in movies
where they would come together,
and you would think that Ego ends up being a good father.
And that's what a lot of people think
when they're watching the movie early on.
When it used to be that Peter Quill thought
that his father was great from the beginning,
then you expect the opposite to happen because it's a story,
and it's going to have pivots and switches.
And you're not going to know what's going to happen.
So I thought that was a big move forward for us.
Because you're weak.
-(GRUNTS) -(ALL CHEERING)
GUN: Here we have the Ravagers absolutely, brutally beating up
Yondu and Rocket.
And we end up having a very comedic scene,
one of the more comedic scenes in the movie,
where there's a play on Taserface's name.
Taserface is, of course, a pretty important character
in the Guardians of the Galaxy universe in the Marvel comics.
He's actually a bad guy who's taken rather seriously.
And when I first got the job for Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume One,
I kidded around on Facebook
that I was going to make Taserface the bad guy,
and it was a joke because I thought he was goofy.
So that's sort of a nod to the real Guardians fans of taking Taserface
and actually making him an important character in the Guardians comics.
But no one thinks his name is a good name.
I think probably the Ravagers
have been talking behind his back for many years
about what a stupid name "Taserface" is.
They all think it's ridiculous.
But he doesn't realize it
because he is, at the end of the day, an oaf, a sort of fool.
And Rocket plays him like a fiddle here.
His whole thing is to not get Yondu killed.
And here we see a sort of heroism of Rocket
as he saves Yondu's life, who's about to get killed
by all of this nonsense of appealing
to the crowd of making jokes.
And then we see here another side of Rocket
where we realize all along that he really just is drawing him in,
and he doesn't care about him,
and I don't even know if Rocket cares
that much about dying at a certain point.
He is a sad and lonely character.
I think in this movie we get to see that a little more deeply,
that he's a deeply injured, damaged soul
who has never known tenderness, he's never known love,
and he's never known affection.
And so when he starts to become friends with the Guardians,
as he did in Volume One and going into this movie,
he becomes a real jerk. He becomes an ass.
He's not able to deal with the intimacy or the tenderness of friendship,
and so he pushes them away in a very harsh way.
And that truly is, in many ways, the heart of this story,
even as much as the father-son story,
or as much as the Nebula-Gamora story,
which we're about to hear here in a second.
This is a scene that ends up being
a funny scene between Kraglin and Nebula.
But really what it is, is giving us some background on Nebula,
and who she is and where she comes from.
And I think for the first time we start to say,
"Oh, wow. She is not...
"Maybe there's a little bit more to her than we thought."
And we discover that
she was forced to battle her sister
throughout her entire life as a young child,
and Gamora always won.
She was the younger sister. She was the weaker sister.
And every time she lost,
Thanos would replace a piece of her
with some types of bionics or machinery,
so that she became less and less and less human as time went on.
And the reason she became less human
is because her sister was brutally beating her,
basically, seemingly without caring.
So that's what's caused
this incredible anger in her towards Gamora,
and towards Thanos, of course, who she also hates,
more so than Gamora does even.
ANYWAYS, happy trails.
GUN: Here we have the Meredith Quill statue, looking quite pretty and simple.
And we have probably the most dramatic scene
that we've ever shot in a Guardians film.
It's pretty much straight drama between Peter Quill and his father
where he confronts him on what a terrible father he is,
who left him and, uh,
you know, left his mother, who had brain cancer,
and sent a pirate to come pick him up and deliver him to him for money.
And that's the heart of the story.
Now, one of the things I think in retrospect
watching this scene is that
Kurt Russell's playing Ego, and he's lying.
I don't think that most of this is true.
He has done this to countless children.
And I do think that Ego, perhaps, had a special love for Meredith Quill.
But I also think that he has done this many, many times.
And he is absolutely full of it when he talks about this,
and he's seducing his son.
He's bringing him in because he wants to use his power for his own purposes,
and what he's doing is pretty evil.
This is Animal Logic, who did the effects in this scene.
This is Maxfield Parrish-inspired.
I wanted to create this incredibly lush,
beautiful world that was also very alien.
And Maxfield Parrish is definitely the key influence on this scene
as well as many of the exterior Ego scenes.
Here's where Peter Quill learns that he has some power.
He's been basically the weakling in the Guardians of the Galaxy,
who's just a human being
who's kind of good with guns and good with his charm,
but he doesn't have any special powers.
He's not strong like Drax or Gamora.
He doesn't have the incredible intelligence of Rocket.
He can't stretch like Baby Groot.
He discovers here something about himself
that he thinks he's special.
And even more special than the other characters.
And then he receives here the moment between he and his father,
in a somewhat outlandish way, of space catch. (CHUCKLES)
Which he talked about earlier in the movie
that he wanted to be off, like the other kids,
playing catch with their dads, and he never got that.
And again, I think Ego's feeding right into
what Peter Quill most wants in his heart, and this is it.
(MUSIC PLAYING)
Great score by Tyler Bates. You know, wonderful father-son theme.
I think that one of the interesting things we did with the score here
is we created this father-son theme that we hear playing throughout
when Peter Quill is touched by his father.
And yet it plays out at the end with Yondu.
That's when the father-son theme really comes into play
because he is the true father, and Ego is the fake father.
Pom Klementieff.
We shot this on her first day of shooting, I believe,
and she's incredible in this scene.
And there was a difficult cut in this scene.
This is many people's favorite scene in the movie because of the emotion in it.
And when Pom touches Drax...
And again, we have a character here who we're getting to know better.
He's a doofus.
And he obviously has a difficult time
relating to other people and talking to other people.
He's calling Mantis "ugly."
We later learn the reason he doesn't like Mantis
is because she's too skinny.
Something we talk about a lot is that
Drax likes incredibly overweight women,
and that's what he's attracted to.
But here in this moment, we have this guy
who's a goofy character. He's awful silly.
And we see at the heart of him is something really, horrifyingly sad.
He's lost the woman he loved. He's lost his daughter. They're dead.
And now, Mantis is experiencing all the emotion.
Pom Klementieff, in that moment, had a speech that she had given
that was basically saying,
"I have never experienced love
"like the love between you and your friends.
"It, you know, both hurts and soothes the soul."
And it was a beautiful speech.
But when I cut it out of the moment,
I found that the moment was more potent,
that we felt everything she was saying
just by seeing her face and seeing the two of them.
Him sitting there stoically
and her sitting there completely emotionally,
it was more powerful.
What are you talking about?
GAMORA: Mantis...
can you show us where we'll be staying?
Why are there no other beings on this planet?
GUN: This scene was a reshoot actually.
We shot it later,
to, sort of, give us a little forward momentum
to explain Gamora's shift between the earlier scene,
where she is telling Peter Quill that he should go see his father,
and in the scene that's coming up pretty soon,
where she is telling Peter Quill
that there's something not right about this place,
that she doesn't believe it.
So we shot that later in post-production
to sort of fill in the blanks of what was happening there.
Because, to me, Gamora looked a little bit crazy.
Which she is, but not that crazy.
Hey, tell the other guys we said...
"Hi," Taserface!
(SIGHS)
GUN: Particularly funny line here of Steve Agee, as Gef the Ravager,
saying he's going to smash it with a rock.
'Cause I was saying earlier, Steve Agee is one of my best friends.
He's part of this little group of guys I have.
And if you come to any party at my house,
and you're all invited, of course,
you'll see Steve Agee there,
Jimmy Urine, Michael Rocker, Sean Dunn.
You know... (CHUCKLES)
These are all the guys that are my buddies that are in the movie.
...all I needed to do was adhere to the code.
GUN: We learn a little bit more about Rocker through this scene.
This scene was tough because it is a talking scene
among a lot of other talking scenes in the movie.
And again, this movie is a character-based film.
And in many ways, it is an independent film
with the spectacle all around it, and there's talking in it.
And we're getting to know these characters better.
We're getting to learn who they are,
but there's a center to the movie where it's a lot of talking.
And I feel like that's something that adds to the film,
that makes it different, and makes it beautiful.
We have to pay attention for it really to fully come together,
and it all makes everything else pay off.
But this moment between Rocket and Yondu is important, I think.
We see a moment earlier, where Rocket looks at Yondu
and we see Rocket has a moment of compassion for him.
It actually reminds me a little bit, in the first movie,
when we see Peter Quill looking at Rocket's back,
and he has a moment of compassion for him.
And Rocket's back is all scarred and filled with, you know, electronics,
(STAMMERS) and he feels for the little creature.
And I think that's true here with Rocket,
but the difference is that the minute Rocket feels that compassion,
he calls him a "drama queen." He starts to be snarky.
ALL: (CHANTING) Mascot, mascot, mascot...
GUN: This shot was difficult
because we actually had to build up the entire stage,
so that we could get inside of the stage
to shoot this shot revolving around Baby Groot.
And, of course, when we're shooting it, there is no Baby Groot there.
That's my friend Evan Jones,
pouring nothing onto nothing
that we turn into Baby Groot by Framestore.
This entire scene was a question about
how rough they should get with Baby Groot,
because they kick him here, which was definitely gonna happen.
And then there was some talk about
whether we should keep in this curb stomp
because it is particularly harsh.
But Baby Groot is about to brutally murder that guy,
so we figured we'd leave it in.
Come here.
GUN: This is one of the more well-known sequences in the movie.
It was one of the scenes that we cut and finished very early on
because we showed part of it at San Diego Comic-Con in 2016.
Baby Groot is probably at his very best here in the whole movie.
They did a remarkable job, Framestore, with his animation in this sequence,
and Rocket as well. He looks incredibly real.
But this is one of the more straight-up comedic scenes in the movie,
but the little details of it are really what worked so well to me.
This smile by Rocket, where he's not really smiling.
There's an Easter egg. That's a character named...
I don't know what the stuffed animal is,
but he's a character that I have on my Snapchat.
A lot of stories about him.
And he's making his appearance, that little stuffed animal thing.
And people were excited.
My Snapchat followers were very excited
about his appearance in the movie.
(RAVAGERS SNORING)
GUN". It was hard to make space underpants actually.
We didn't want to make them look too much like Earth underpants,
so they had to take the fly out,
but yet still look like underpants.
So what are space underpants?
And I guess that they just don't have a fly.
There's an orloni. That's the name of that animal, and we use them a lot.
Those are the things that Peter Quill is kicking
at the beginning of the first movie.
They are sort of like...
They're very much like interstellar rats.
They show up everywhere. They breed incredibly easy.
And they're even on planets like the Sovereign,
which are pretty clean planets.
So they're everywhere,
and they're definitely on Ravager ships in droves, most likely.
(LAUGHING)
That's a desk.
GUN: This scene was pretty easy to shoot.
We shot most of the movie... Most of these shots aren't moving,
but if you see, there's a lot more moving shots in this film
than there were in the first film.
And part of that is because
I allowed myself to take a little bit more time to shoot the movie,
and part of it is because we used a rig called Stable Eye,
which is like a combination between a dolly and a Steadicam.
And it's a fun rig to move around.
I'm talking about this rig in a scene where it doesn't exist.
What? No!
He thinks you want him to wear it as a hat.
GUN: This little moment between Rocket and Groot
talking about the hats and why he hates hats
is one of my favorites because (CHUCKLES)
he doesn't like hats because,
you know, if you look at someone from a distance with a hat,
you don't know if it's a hat or a part of his head.
I don't know why that makes Baby Groot so furious,
but for some reason that angers him.
And there's a lot of things that, you know, make Baby Groot furious.
(BURPS)
KRAGLINI That ain't it.
GUN: Here we have a nice little bit with Sean Dunn,
proving that maybe he's not as bad as he came out to be,
and he's always been noncommittal about the mutiny,
so I don't think it's too big of a surprise that he's made a turn.
Get the third quadrant ready for release.
GUN: My direction for Baby Groot in this scene was,
"You know when you see a baby in a movie who's looking around,
"and he obviously doesn't know he's being filmed?"
I wanted him to be like that.
He's looking around as if he's just a baby being held
and not really aware of acting.
Here we have Jay and The Americans' Come a Little Bit Closer.
I believe it's the oldest song, maybe.
It's one of the two or three oldest songs that we've ever...
One of the two oldest songs that we've ever used
in a Guardians movie, from the '60s.
But I think it fits the scene really well.
It was one of the earlier scenes I had music for.
(JAY & THE AMERICANS' "COME A LITTLE BIT CLOSER" PLAYING)
The arrow. This sequence took a long time to finish,
but also was something that was
very carefully planned out and storyboarded,
and it's remained almost exactly the same
from the moment I first drew those shots.
There are a couple scenes in the movie that were drawn more than written,
and this is one of them.
The other one is the battle between Gamora and Nebula,
which was drawn before it was written.
Here we have the callback to the first movie
with the guys walking down the hallway
and a little gangster
Baby Groot.
These are all incredibly complex shots.
These took a long time to shoot.
This is all shot mostly with the Phantom camera,
so that we can slow down to incredibly slow speeds,
and then ramp up and kind of move between those different speeds.
That overhead shot there was difficult to get.
It's also difficult to get...
Here's a variated speed shot where
people are falling at a much slower speed
than Yondu is walking.
That's Richard Christy from The Howard Stem Show
who says, "Down there." He's been a friend of mine for a while.
This is probably the second-most complicated shot in the movie,
after the opening dance sequence.
And again, variated speeds, many, many, many different layers
that we shot of these guys falling and put on top of each other.
They're walking at a much more quick rate,
but still in slow motion than the people are falling around them.
It's incredibly complex shots, the "It's Raining Men" shots.
One of the crowd-pleasing moments here where Baby Groot kills Retch.
(GROANS)
-(YELLING) -(SCREAMING)
GUN: And also, I think, is a little bit, you know...
Some people, when they first saw Baby Groot,
they thought we were going to over-cute-ize him,
and, you know, it's hard for him not to be over-cute-ized.
"He's a living emoji" is one of the ways I first described him
when we were designing him, and I think that...
(STAMMERS) You know, he's not just cute.
There's a sort of harsher side to Baby Groot.
My friend Steve Agee.
We shot a post-credits scene, actually,
with Steve Agee there, who gets killed, as Gef the Ravager.
We actually shot a post-credits scene
where Mantis and Gamora are talking
on the quadrant at the end of the movie,
and they hear a screaming somewhere in the distance,
and then we cut to where we push in
and Steve Agee is still down there alive,
very wounded but screaming.
You know, and it just ended up not making much sense.
The callback was too small of a moment.
But I would say, in the future, there's always a possibility
that Gef the Ravager has survived all of this
and is still somewhere on the Guardians' ship, hiding from them.
(WHISTLES)
-(GAsPs) "(LAUGHS)
GUN". I like that moment where Rocket says,
"You blew up the whole ship," and Baby Groot smiles.
Now, as you see, Yondu has a huge fin in these sequences now,
which is a callback to the comics. It's funny.
I never know what comics fans are gonna get upset about,
and I took a lot of leeway with these characters
when I started doing Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume One.
Drax's personality became completely different than it was in the comics.
Groot became an innocent, which he wasn't in the comics.
Rocket is somewhat similar,
but he's a lot nastier in the movies than he was originally in the comics.
And all of these different elements of these characters
I took and changed.
I changed Nebula. I changed, of course, Yondu.
Yondu became a space-pirate
and not a sort of a Native American-inspired
spiritual warrior that he is in the comics.
But people very rarely get upset about any of that stuff.
It seemed like the one thing that people got upset about
was Yondu's small fin.
That they somehow thought it was important that Yondu had a big fin.
I don't understand what comics fans get upset about
over something else that they don't get upset about.
That something so sort of just physical and small
would be the thing they'd get upset about, but they did,
and so, in a nod to the fans, who I'm appreciative towards,
we gave them the big fin.
And now we're going to the jump scene
where Rocket is making them go to Ego.
Now, Ego is incredibly far away,
so he's gotta go through way more jump points than is healthy,
but he was trying to sneak it in
before Kraglin and Yondu could do anything about it.
But now he's screwed because they're gonna go through this
incredibly torturous thing
where their faces are distorted, and they become really goofy.
It's sort of a Large Marge moment.
That shot in particular, of Yondu with his big, open mouth,
makes me laugh so hard every time I see it.
I love that sequence, it's funny,
and it's a lot of fun.
I think there were two scenes that were the hardest to shoot,
when people ask me, "What scenes were the hardest to shoot?"
One of them was this scene,
and the other one is the one coming up with Yondu and Rocket.
And the reason is, is because they're very intimate scenes
between two characters,
and I had to really keep shooting and shooting,
and pushing and pushing.
I think one of the roles of a director
is really to push people further than they think they can go.
And on this day, I really, especially on the inside stuff,
I incredibly exhausted Chris and Zoe.
I kept pushing them and making them do it again and again
until I got the performance I wanted.
You know, it's like when you have a physical trainer in the gym,
and they push you to do one final rep beyond what you think you can do,
and then they keep doing that and doing that and doing that.
That's one of the things I see as my role as a director.
Here we have the Steadicam moving around the two,
and you see it's a little bit of a different movement than...
I'm sorry, not the Steadicam, the Stabileye moving around them,
and it's a little bit of a different movement
than a Steadicam or a dolly.
But that's, I think, my job as a director,
is to push people beyond where they think they can go.
So when someone's working on a costume design
and they keep bringing it back,
I'll keep making them do it again and again and again
until it's the best it can possibly be, you know.
I think that's what Kevin Feige does with me
when I'm making this movie.
People ask, "What's your collaboration with Kevin Feige like?"
And I think that he is someone who pushes me
beyond where I wanna be pushed,
and we finish a cut of the movie, and it's great,
and the audiences love it that watch it in the screen test,
and Kevin says to me,
"Well, maybe there's somethin' more you can do here in the middle."
And I think, "Oh, God, I don't want to.
"It's perfect and I'm tired, and I don't wanna make any changes."
And yet, I go, and I look, and I see what I can do differently,
and then I make some changes
because, at the end of the day, I'll do whatever I can
to make these movies as good as they can possibly be.
I'm only half human, remember?
That's the half I'm worried about.
Oh, I get it. You're jealous...
because I'm part-god...
GUN: I love this scene, and I love the way the camera moves in it.
I love the way the two actors are in it.
I love the fact that it, again, combines
humor with real dramatic stakes between the two of them.
And you see that how Gamora is closed off to him,
but also how he's getting overtaken with this sort of ego
and pushing her away.
This moment from Zoe is fantastic, you know, where he says...
I finally found my family. Don't you understand that?
I thought you already had.
GUN: Yeah, "I thought you already had."
I love that moment.
This next sequence is one of my favorites in the movie.
You'll notice it has no music,
which is unusual for a Guardians of the Galaxy scene
because we really chock it full of both soundtrack and score.
But, in this one, I really wanted the sound to be a big part of it.
This is what we called the North by Northwest scene
because it's definitely inspired by the North by Northwest movie
directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in which the crop duster attacks Cary Grant,
and, in this case, the crop duster is an M-ship driven by Nebula
and Cary Grant is Zoe Saldana.
And after this it becomes something much more extreme
than is in North by Northwest.
The chase keeps going on,
and Cary Grant really didn't have a chance against the crop duster,
but Gamora, well, she's a different story.
She has a little bit more of a chance against an M-ship than Cary Grant did,
although it's still not really a fair fight.
Psychopath!
GUN: The other thing that inspired me in this sequence was
Spy vs. Spy, the comic strip
where the two spies are fighting and one gets one-up,
and then the other one gets one-up, and the other one gets one-up,
and you see that the power position shifts
a couple of times throughout this fight.
I also thought one of the main relationships in this movie,
in both movies, is the relationship between Gamora and Nebula,
and their sisterhood, and how that manifests itself.
And this physically combative scene,
I think, is pretty accurate representation of what exists internally
in many siblings' lives and in their relationships.
This need to one-up one another,
this unspoken need to vanquish the other.
And, uh, I've seen a lot of siblings who don't get along
as well as my siblings and I get along.
And this is that relationship.
Luckily, Sean and I don't shoot giant guns at each other
or try to mow each other down with spaceships
because that would be really terrible.
And I definitely would never have cast him as Kraglin, if that ever happened,
if he ever chased me with a spaceship.
I also think this scene is very important, as I talked about a little bit earlier,
because we learn that this relationship is not what we thought it was.
We thought of Nebula as the villain and Gamora as the hero.
And in this scene, when Nebula opens up,
we learn that, I think, historically,
Gamora is the villain and Nebula was the innocent.
I think that they came together as little children.
They were both adopted by Thanos.
Gamora was older and tougher,
and Nebula looked up to her, and she loved her,
and she wanted the love of her sister.
And that's really all she wanted,
and instead Gamora just beat the crap out of her regularly.
And Gamora was into being a warrior, and Gamora was into being strong.
And she didn't have much feeling for anyone else.
And the more sensitive of the two sisters is not Gamora.
The more naturally sensitive of the two sisters is Nebula,
and it is that sensitivity
which has caused her to become so incredibly mean.
Because she needs to, because otherwise,
life is just too harsh, and too tender, and hurts too bad.
I think Karen Gillan is just marvelous in this scene.
It was incredibly moving to see on set.
I really loved her, and she was great in the fight sequence, as well.
She's a marvelous person.
And I'm glad to see
how much attention she has gotten for this role because she really is great,
and I think in the first movie her role was slight.
Karen came in for the first time to meet with me
about Guardians of the Galaxy, on the first movie,
and I showed her the designs of Nebula, and I said,
"Listen, you know, it's not that big of a role.
"She only has a few lines and a fight scene in this movie.
"It's not a huge role.
"But my plan is that Nebula becomes a Guardian of the Galaxy,
"and that's where this is going.
"She isn't that big now, but she's going to become a Guardian of the Galaxy."
And a lot of times people tell you this, and it's not true.
Or I'll tell people things like that, or I hope that's where things are going,
and things don't work out exactly like you hope they do
because the story is always the master of itself,
and when you're writing a story, you have to really listen to the truth
of what the story is and where it goes.
And sometimes it doesn't go where you expect.
It goes in some place new and more magical, and more interesting.
But in this case, I was very happy
that Nebula ended up being
such an important pan' of Guardians of the Galaxy.
And I think now is as important a part
of the Guardians of the Galaxy as Gamora is.
...you listening to this song.
- You know... - Brandy?
By Looking Glass?
(CHUCKLES) A favorite of your mom's.
GUN: Brandy, by the band Looking Glass,
has been one of my favorite songs for a long time.
And it's embarrassing and maybe not regular for a director's commentary,
but it's very true that when I was a young man,
I was in love with this woman,
and there was something about it that maybe wasn't working out right.
I was still living in St. Louis. I was going to Saint Louis University,
and I spent part of the night with this woman,
and then I went to drive home, and when I got into my car,
oldies radio was on.
I liked to listen to oldies radio
because radio in St. Louis at the time was not so great.
And the song Brandy came on, and I heard the lyrics for the first time.
I heard what it was about.
And I was struck with this incredible sadness
because I related to the song, I related to the story of the sailor.
And, yes, I don't know if it's sappy or not,
but I absolutely related to the song.
And it spoke to my own life
that I was not going to stay in St. Louis.
I was not going to stay with this woman.
My love was the sea, and I needed to go out,
and I needed to follow my dreams and do what I needed to do
within the world of entertainment.
And I always related to that song,
and it's always sort of haunted me in the same way
that I, for some reason,
am not allowed the pleasures that other people have
because I've committed my life to a life of filmmaking.
And I'm trying to combat some of that in my life.
I'm trying to be a person who allows love into my life,
that allows friendship,
and that I'm able to have fun sometimes
and not everything about my life is work.
And not everything about my life is just making movies.
It's a personal struggle for me.
So I relate to that song, and I relate to that conversation
between Peter Quill and his father.
Not in terms of being a god,
(CHUCKLES) but just in terms of being someone who has a calling.
And I do believe I have a calling.
I believe that very much,
and it's important to me, and it's important to why I do what I do.
I'm sorry.
But I like a woman with some meat on her bones.
What?
I tried to let you down easily by telling you I found you disgusting.
No, that's not what I...
(RETCHING)
What are you doing?
I'm imagining being with you physically.
Drax...
I don't like you like that.
GUN: I love this scene between Dave and Mantis. (CHUCKLES)
That moment where Dave says, "No need to get personal."
That was not in the script.
That was something I thought of
while Dave was doing his vomiting thing,
and you know, he, uh...
And, you know, he turned to her...
(CHUCKLES) And I thought of it when I was sitting at the monitor,
and I went in and told him to say that,
and it made me laugh pretty hard when he did.
I think that that was a scene that we had that we deleted from the last movie
where Bautista was looking at this incredibly beautiful actress
and talking about how she made him want to vomit.
I thought it was funny, but it didn't belong in the movie,
and so we cut it.
But I always liked the joke,
and I liked the through line of Bautista, or Drax.
Sorry, I call them often by their actor names.
Of Drax being disgusted by beautiful women,
and that's something that he doesn't find appealing.
...disappointing.
And that is when I came...
GUN: You know, this is probably one of the darker moments
in any Marvel movie ever.
It's a moment in which we really see
this whole sequence, how incredibly dark Ego is.
And we learn that what Ego has been doing
is that he has been looking for a way to take over the universe,
and that is his meaning, that is his purpose.
His purpose is to take over everything
in the same way our egos can take over
everything around us and destroy everything.
That's what the story is about. It's very simply about ego.
It's not that complicated.
And here we have Peter Quill looking into that moment,
in a wonderful acting moment by Chris Pratt.
I just think he's great in that shot.
And the women discover the skulls.
And these are all the skulls of Ego's children,
and if you look closely in those skulls,
you'll see some pretty, pretty cool Easter eggs.
(ALL SCREAMING)
G U N N: (CH UCKLES) Another great moment with Michael Rocker as Yondu.
You know, I was talking earlier...
Here we have the Stan Lee cameo.
Um, Stan Lee is with the Watchers.
A great deal has been made of this moment, because...
Does it mean that Stan Lee is a Watcher?
You know, doesn't look like a Watcher.
It looks like he's reporting to the Watchers,
so who knows what Stan Lee is?
And there's a great vomit moment by Baby Groot.
I know my roots in B-movies,
and I'm still not unwilling to resort to the lowest common denominator,
which is a baby tree vomiting.
I talked earlier about the hardest scenes in the movie to shoot,
and this was the other one, I think,
where I really had to push Michael Rocker,
who's a close friend of mine, a very, very close friend of mine.
And I had to push him hard to do this scene.
I made him go further, and further, and further.
And I think it ends up being one of the best scenes in the movie.
This scene was also difficult because, as you see in some of these shots,
we have Kraglin in the background and Rocket in the foreground.
As you know, Sean Dunn plays both of those roles on set,
so I had to shoot the scene first with Sean acting it out,
and then go put him as Kraglin in the background.
But because we don't have time...
Normally, when Sean comes on set, he's wearing this gray suit,
and that's his Rocket uniform when he's playing Rocket.
Then he's dressed as Kraglin when he's playing Kraglin.
But, on this day, we didn't have time to change between those two outfits,
so he would have to crouch as Rocket on the floor,
and then go play Kraglin in the background.
So during the first out of this sequence,
it's changing back and forth between close-up of Kraglin acting like Rocket
to Kraglin watching acting like Kraglin.
And it was incredibly confusing.
Who are you people?
GUN: Here we see Pom Klementieff as Mantis
putting the power of fear into Zoe Saldana,
who is taken aback by this and screwed up.
And here, we learn of Ego's plan
and basically of his ego, of him, Ego, taking over everything.
And Peter Quill is enamored of this moment.
This is sort of a Cronenbergian moment
where he pulls out a chunk of himself and shoves it into the ground
and watches it spread through the planet like a disease.
EGO: To grow and spread, covering all...
GUN: I love this piece of score by Tyler Bates.
I think it's really amazing.
It harkens back a little bit to some of the post-rock stuff we did
with the movie Super that we worked on.
She already told me everything.
I only had one problem.
GUN: And here we learn the truth about the children, that it is,
indeed, that he has simply been procreating
with women all over the universe,
or characters all over the universe,
and putting his progeny into them.
EGO: Out of all my labors...
GUN: Again, I think the statues here that we see (CHUCKLES)
are some of my favorite statues
of Kurt Russell sitting in that woman's arms,
with the horns for eyes.
All those different monsters,
and there's something that looks almost exactly like a turtle up there.
So it means Kurt Russell made love to a turtle
and created a turtle baby,
and there's a couple of other little Easter eggs in there.
But I think that those statues are there for the purpose of Quill.
Everything he does is for the purpose of Quill,
and I think in reality, probably,
Ego has different forms he takes besides Kurt Russell.
When he goes to the turtle planet, he's actually a turtle.
When he goes to the woman with horns for eyes' planet,
he's actually a man with horns for eyes,
that he changes his shape according to what planet he is.
He changes his physiology,
so that he's able to procreate with each of those different species.
You are not friends.
You're right.
We're family.
We leave no one behind.
GUN: Here we have what I think of as the Vin Diesel moment.
"We're not friends, we're family."
But, of course, we undercut it with
what he says to Nebula about, "Except maybe her."
I am truly not alone!
GUN: I think that there is a sort of...
(SIGHS)
Something in Ego where he himself, even, is...
Has some...
Part of him wants a friend,
which is what he wants out of Peter Quill.
But part of him just wants a tool, so that he can take over the universe.
I don't think the guy is without wanting company.
He wants company,
and that's what happens in these following sequences,
is he's hoping that he will both help him
to take over the universe, and he will have company.
And here we have the most...
This is the moment, in theaters at least, when people "Ah!" out loud.
Where Ego admits that he is the one
who put the brain tumor into Peter's mother.
And the reason for doing this, I think, is because he did care about her,
and he didn't want the distraction.
And he was committed to his plan.
I think he also did it to cover his tracks.
I think that's the thing that breaks through.
It's always interesting, you know,
because we talk about all these other things that Ego is going to do.
He's going to kill everyone in the universe.
He's going to kill all of his friends.
And, you know, Quill is not...
He's torn by it,
but he doesn't totally go against it until the mother thing comes up.
And here we have one of my favorite moments, of course,
and one of the audience's favorite moments,
where Zardu Hasselfrau, AKA David Hasselhoff,
makes an appearance.
And we discover here that what Ego has been doing is...
Everything he has done, everything he has crafted,
has been simply to pull in Peter Quill.
He tried to take on the right form.
He liked to try to do what he could do to take in Peter Quill.
He is simply a being of light. He is a giant brain.
And he doesn't have any sort of real
compassion, I don't think.
I think that Ego,
and there used to be more of this early on in the scripts,
but you cut out too much explanation.
I think Ego experiences emotions.
He experiences love. He experiences compassion.
He experiences sadness.
And all sorts of things.
But he doesn't ever let those things
affect his primary purpose, his primary choice.
And, I think, in me thinking about that,
I actually have some admiration for Ego
because he doesn't let his emotions
stop him from doing what he thinks of as,
I don't know, the right thing.
And I think that that makes him an interesting character.
He has these emotions, but he makes another choice.
And he does it here.
We see it in that moment where he's holding the Walkman.
He's hearing Brandy.
Brandy is bringing back to him the memories of the love
that he had for Meredith Quill,
that he actually had, that he actually felt,
but yet he overcame it and pushed it aside
for the sake of taking over the universe.
His noble calling, in his own mind.
Here we have DQ. You know, I got some messages.
You know, "Oh, I don't know if I, you know,
"want, like, the product placement with Dairy Queen."
And I'm like, "It's not product placement!"
That was incredibly important to me.
Dairy Queen was a place from my childhood
where I loved to go and eat ice cream cones.
And having something that brought up those childhood memories for me
at the beginning of the movie,
that so perfectly spoke to the 1980s for me.
And, at the same time, had had a change,
but still retained that iconic shape of the "DQ" over time,
so that we could go back to it today and see that it was many years later,
in one moment, was what was so important about Dairy Queen for me,
and why it was in the script from the beginning,
and why it was a part of the script,
and not something that we went out and sought
whoever was the highest bidder as a product placement.
It was about the story,
and that's always true about these movies.
I will never make product placement
more important than the story I'm telling. Ever.
That is only an extension...
of his true self. He will be back soon.
What's Smurfette doing here?
Whatever I need to do to get a damn ride home.
She tried to murder me!
I saved you, you stupid fox!
He's not a fox.
- I am Groot. - I'm not...
GUN: (CHUCKLES) Here, Baby Groot...
"Raccoon." Whatever.
GUN: We'd learn that somehow he's able to correct Rocket
on his pronunciation
of "rabboon" versus "raccoon"
by simply saying, "I am Groot."
How he does that, I don't know. I believe that there's some sort of...
Over time, I think that you start to understand "I am Groot."
I think there's some sort of psychic connection.
Something in which you understand what he's saying over time.
And something that not too many people
have talked about in the movies.
Now, it's getting way ahead of myself here,
but in the post-credits scene, we have
Peter Quill talking to a tween Groot, Adolescent Groot,
and he's understanding everything he's saying.
So, obviously, over the past five years, he now understands.
Because that was,
I think that's four or five years in the future from now
that he understands what Groot is saying.
That's my freakin' father!
GUN: There we have, uh...
I love this freaky father, Kurt Russell, CG],
and I also love this next shot of the sunlight coming down.
(ALL GRUNT)
GUN: The thing coming down over the sunset.
- We should be going up! - QUILL: We can't!
GUN: And here we see the Guardians of the Galaxy
come back together again,
starting to work together, overcoming their differences,
and doing what they do best,
which is Quill driving, Rocket manning the guns...
QUILL: Whoo-hoo!
GUN: (CHUCKLES) Michael Rocker doing whatever he's doing as Yondu,
working on wires.
Rocker... The two people who are very, very good on set
of being in a situation
and just pretending like they're doing something
are Zoe Saldana and Michael Rocker.
When they're sitting at a console, they're constantly just working on this
whatever stuff they're doing, and they're really good at it.
I care about the planets, and the buildings...
and all the animals on the planets.
And the people.
Meh.
The crabby puppy is so cute. He makes me wanna die!
(SILVER'S "WHAM BAM SHANG-A-LANG" PLAYING)
(some CONTINUES)
(SINGING ALONG)
GUN: Here we have Sean singing, "Soup, soup," to Wham Barn.
Wham Barn is an interesting song because I had never heard it
before I put it in the movie.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
AYES HA: Pilots...
release envoy units.
Our sensors detect the batteries are below the surface of the planet.
Dive!
(some CONTINUES)
Um... Captain?
Captain?
(TRANSMISSION BREAKING UP)
GUN". I love this stuff, with them working together,
and going through that thing,
and using those lasers to pinpoint every moment.
And it shows you how good they are at what they're doing.
So, could you?
A little.
GUN: Here we have Rocker sort of laughing at
his ability to make a ball.
This great super power he has, which is to make a ball.
And he's about to tell him that he doesn't use the arrow,
you know, he doesn't, you know...
He doesn't think it. He doesn't think it.
He feels it with his heart. It's something...
He goes from his gut when he flies that arrow.
He's not thinking.
In fact, I think it's about clearing his head of space
when he flies that arrow, in the same way a baseball player
doesn't think about hitting the ball as it comes towards him.
MANTIS: There.
GUN: This world is based a lot on the Mandelbrot an'
of a guy by the name of Hal Tenny.
When we were trying to design what the interior of Ego's planet looked like,
we brought up a lot of different references.
We tried a lot of different things
with Scott Chambliss, our wonderful production designer.
And one of the main things I wanted
in Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume Two
was a very pulp fiction feel.
I harken back a lot to Hash Gordon,
from the 1980s version especially,
but also the Williamson art from the comics.
I harken back a lot to the old Amazing Stories
pulp magazine covers.
I brought up a lot of these references for our whole team to look at
to create what the look of this movie was.
I wanted something brashly colorful.
It's '50s and '60s science-fiction inspired.
But for the interior of the planet,
we needed something completely unique,
something that we hadn't seen before.
And so we came up with this sort of...
We found this Mandelbrot art online,
which is, you know, an organic, mathematical way of things growing.
And the best person, the one who I found the most art by,
is this guy Hal Tenny. And his stuff is truly beautiful.
And so we hired Hal Tenny
to come in and help us design the interior of this planet,
and he did a great job for us, and we're very grateful to him.
We'll have to get out of here fast.
GUN: In the same way, on the first movie,
we used an artist by the name of Chris Foss
who was a famous science-fiction artist
who came to prominence in the 1970s
and did work on Blade Runner and Alien
and Jodorowsky's unmade Dune.
And also a lot of novel covers and things like that,
and he really helped to strike the center of
what the visual look of Guardians of the Galaxy is.
One of the first things I do before I ever write the screenplay
is I write a treatment.
My treatment is just the story of Guardians of the Galaxy,
but intermingled in that is what the look is like
of Guardians of the Galaxy.
And I have a lot of photographs in that.
So that treatment's about 70 pages long,
about 10 or 15 pages of that are photographs,
or paintings, or pieces of art, or movie references,
or other things that show us where we're going as a movie.
Not only in terms of the words and the story,
but in terms of the visuals and what that's going to be like.
It's an incredibly important part of these movies.
And I think one of the reasons people have loved rewatching these movies,
and this movie in particular, again and again,
is because the visuals are something that can carry you so far,
and there's so many little things you can see in there.
I also think people like to watch them
because you can watch this movie for Baby Groot.
And you just watch what Baby Groot does throughout the movie
because he's doing so many crazy things in the background.
I didn't point it out, but much earlier in the movie,
when Gamora is walking by a spaceship,
when they're talking about trash pandas,
Baby Groot looks up at Gamora, and he waves at her,
and he's very small in the background.
And it isn't something that I noticed
until I was working on the color timing of the movie.
I didn't even know because the point of the shot was Rocket.
Rocket was saying something in that shot,
and I was always looking at Rocket.
Does Rocket look good? Is he great?
Is he working? Is he moving right?
And I didn't even notice that they had a little Baby Groot
just sort of casually waving at Gamora as she goes by.
I love the relationships Baby Groot has
with the different characters in the Guardians.
And I think it's important as well. I think that you see that
Baby Groot has a father-son relationship with Rocket,
and Rocket is his father in many ways,
but he also is not always the most understanding.
But he is pretty loving actually, and he takes care of him, and he's nice.
But, in this situation, he's upset.
I think a lot of his anger is more geared towards Peter Quill
for even coming up with this idea of Baby Groot
saving all of them by pressing the bomb.
It's probably the most famous scene in the movie,
is this classic comedic moment of trying to pick the right button,
and Baby Groot being a baby, basically,
who can't tell at all what the right button is.
And then the Scotch tape moment with Drax.
QUILL: Why did you ask me if Scotch tape would work,
if you don't have any?
Nobody has any tape!
GUN: You know, but back to
Baby Groot's relationship with the different characters,
I think we see that he has his best relationship
is probably with Gamora.
That's who he really loves, and he waves at her all the time.
And she's very sweet to him, and she's kind.
You know, she gets all of the kindness that the other characters don't get.
And she's very loving and maternal towards him.
So, his best relationship is with her and with Rocket.
And then you have Drax, who he obviously has some sort of,
seemingly, some sort of hatred for, that he's constantly punching Drax,
and getting angry at Drax, and beating up Drax.
He beats him up numerous times throughout the movie
for seemingly no reason whatsoever, and Drax is mean to him.
He calls him a, you know, dumber, smaller Groot,
and he gets mad when he dances. And he doesn't like him.
Yet, at the end of the movie, what we see is...
We see that the first person he goes to when he wants to sleep
and when he needs comfort is Drax.
AYESHA: ...that your deaths are not without purpose.
They will serve as a warning...
to all of those tempted with betraying us.
Don't screw with...
GUN: Here we have the end of Ayesha, basically.
Although it is not the last we will see of her most likely.
But they do this thing between the two of them.
You know, one of the sad things about this movie is, I really think
that Nebula and Yondu would become pretty close friends.
And it's a shame that... I think we see the hints of it here.
And then I think of this stuff as very '70s album cover-type art
with those rays coming out. There's something very iconic about it.
The colors here and the darks and the brights in this scene are very cool.
And then we have the relationship between Peter Quill and Baby Groot,
and Peter Quill ignores Baby Groot throughout almost the entire movie.
There's almost no relationship between Peter Quill and Baby Groot.
Until the end.
Now there's one moment in the movie that's probably been more...
One quote in the movie that's been more quoted than any other,
and it is basically this moment
where Michael Rocker says, "I 'm Mary Poppins, y'all!"
And it's a great moment. (CHUCKLES)
I'm Mary Poppins, y'all!
GU N N: I think it's a funny moment.
I actually went back and forth a lot
about putting the moment in the script or not,
but, in the end, decided to put it in there,
and I'm really happy I did.
Because it was the biggest quote from the movie.
This shot was incredibly hard.
We used a thing called a Spidercam, which goes around.
You select all the points ahead of time
of where it goes on these wires, and it goes in all these crazy places.
And it's a beautiful rig.
And these are some just gigantic shots.
Overall, on Ego's planet there are over half a trillion polygons.
And it's incredibly complicated sets,
you know, virtual sets, and a lot of this. You know, this stuff...
I was talking earlier about how
any time you can shoot something practically, you should,
but a lot of this stuff can't...
You can't shoot that stuff practically because it's so far away and so huge.
Now, this ground is all practical, you know.
There's a lot of practical ground,
a lot of practical set pieces behind them,
but most of it, of course, is CGI.
It's done by the company Weta.
Peter Jackson, you know, company. And it's, uh...
They did marvelous, marvelous,
incredible, groundbreaking work for this movie.
And I hope they really get the acknowledgment for it
that they deserve because it's completely unique.
And it's lovely, and I just think they did an amazing job.
-(ALL YELP) -(SCREAMING)
Gamma!
GUN: And here, we start to really experience Ego as a living planet.
I think one of the difficult things about selling this movie to the public
was that we had so many surprises in it,
starting at the, you know, a third of the way through the film
that we didn't want to give away the surprises.
So, at the end of the day, we were selling a film
where we weren't telling them
who the central protagonist was, which was Ego.
We didn't want to spoil the fact that Ego was the bad guy.
And not only that, we weren't able to tell them that,
"Hey, the Guardians fight a living planet in this movie!"
Which is a pretty big deal.
It's a pretty cool thing to be able to do,
and some of this stuff with Yondu's just the best.
I just love these shots, incredibly pulp fiction,
amazing and overwhelming
and really like an Amazing Stories cover come to life.
And here we see Rocket using his technology.
He's got little bombs and a shield,
and he's always got something he pulls out of his utility belt there.
But it goes wrong, as it often does for Guardians.
So, yeah, I think that that was, you know,
one of the difficult things with this movie,
was we couldn't tell people about the coolest part of it,
which is fighting a planet.
And it has a bit of a slower pace at the beginning,
and then gets more and more amped up as we go on,
and I think that, you know, one of the cool things about it is,
this is a protagonist that isn't just a guy who's, you know,
trying to take over the universe that we have no emotional connection to.
This is Peter Quill's father,
and the fact that he's trying to take over the universe
is really secondary to the fact that he's killed Peter Quill's mother,
that he's going to kill his friends, and that he doesn't, you know...
He's betrayed him in a big way.
So the central part of the story is an emotional one
even with all of the action.
The action is all, you know, in service
of that central emotional story between the characters.
And that is Why I think that
Marvel Studios has been so great for me
in allowing me to tell a story like this.
And taking a chance
and really being happy with it through the whole process.
I have to say, this was by far the most fluid movie I have ever worked on
because it stayed basically the same from that first treatment I wrote
all the way through the end.
All of the difficult stuff was just this gigantic part of it
in getting it right, and making it look right,
and making it look cool,
and getting the shots that we wanted to get,
and getting the performances that we wanted to get.
But the actual creative process was so easy, really.
(BOTH YELP)
(ROCKET GRUNTING)
G U N N: I like that Kraglin moment we just saw too,
where Kraglin sort of becomes a hero and saves Drax.
It's pretty cool.
And a little hint of I think what's to come
for the character of Kraglin.
(GROANS)
(YELLING IN PAIN)
(ROCKET GROANING)
(GROANING)
(GRUNTS)
GUN: These shots were very hard. Those shots were also
incredibly ridiculous-looking because basically what we...
Oh, I love that shot with Baby Groot crying. It's so sad.
(STAMMERS) We have...
Nebula and Gamora were holding on to the sides of this cliff
that we actually built that had a glow inside of it,
so that we could reflect the light off of them.
And as they are holding on, Zoe Saldana and Karen Gillan
are holding on to the side of the cliff,
we have two guys in blue outfits who are rubbing their hands
over their faces and hairs and backs and sides.
That's my mom and my dad, Jim and Lee.
There's my brother Patrick, my sister-in-law Laura...
Basically, I kill my entire family in this sequence,
and I'll talk more about that in a second.
Here we go back to Xandar. We see that we...
This is where we cut most of the stuff out of the movie that we cut.
We cut some different players in there.
Why are you destroying...
GUN: Anyway, like I was saying, we have,
we had these two guys in blue suits
rubbing their hands over Zoe and Karen as they're kind of moaning,
and it looked incredibly strange, incredibly strange.
That's my nephew Griffin, my brother-in-law Alec.
(CHUCKLES) These are all the cameos of all my people in my family.
My niece Jaden, my nephews Declan and Mason.
And I murder them all. I murder every single one of them.
This moment here was originally going to be
a huge moment where the walls fall down
and we reveal statues of these moments from Quill's life.
Now, I don't know if that would've worked or not, but the truth is,
is I wanted things to get very quiet for just a moment
because I think he's going internal.
And I think it's important, and I said,
"God, maybe not everything needs to be huge all time,
"maybe we can just shoot these small moments from his life
"and have those be what drives him."
That little bit of love.
Kurt Russell asks him,
"What other meaning does life have to offer?"
And Peter Quill's answer is resounding.
It's the love he has for the people in his life.
And that includes Yondu,
who we thought of as a bad guy for the first movie.
And I think that's important.
And then we have this incredibly triumphant moment
where he has superpowers!
I mean, he is, you know, an incredibly powerful being,
and it's driven by something other than the ego and the smallness
that drives Ego with his powers.
Here we have Grandpa Quill.
There we go, little Grandpa Quill cameo.
Gregg Henry as Grandpa Quill, who's driving a van.
We actually shot a scene where Grandpa Quill saves that woman
from the oncoming wave, and they get into a car.
But it just was...
We found that audiences were much more interested in what's going on
with the characters and the threat to the characters than anything else.
What a beautiful shot there of... So incredibly pulp science-fiction
with Baby Groot and this giant brain that's pulsing different colors.
It's just incredible work by the guys.
You know, we had a lot of different versions of
what Ego looked like at his core.
He was this sort of zygote, sperm-looking thing for a long time
and eventually I woke up one day, and I said,
"I think we should just make him a brain.
"I think it's the most cool, crazy science-fiction idea."
And it also explains what he is.
That that's his brain. That's his center.
(BOTH GRUNTING)
Incredibly dramatic moments here with Zoe and Karen
climbing up the side of the cliff...
This is a 100%-digital shot.
We shot those guys flying around a lot,
but this shot is 100% Weta Digital creating it.
And here we have one of my favorite scenes.
In this scene is two of my favorite characters.
And of course, Michael Rocker is, as I said, a close friend of mine.
We've done, I think, five movies together,
a web series, a video game, two reality shows,
and he stops by my house and eats my food all the time.
And this was him saying goodbye.
And I had a hard time shooting this scene.
And I had a hard time dealing with this plot point in particular.
I'm being very honest with you,
I didn't want to kill Yondu in this movie.
I just didn't wanna do it.
And the reason was because
I've had Michael Rocker in every movie I've ever made,
and I didn't want to make a movie without him.
I love him. I've come to rely upon him.
I think he's one of the best actors I've ever known,
and he's an amazing guy, and a kindred soul and a brother.
And I did not want to have to make a movie without him.
So as I'm writing the plot and the story,
I think originally there was a moment in which Yondu sacrificed himself,
but then was saved.
But it created something that felt to me very false,
very not true,
and, at the end of the day,
my ultimate commitment is to the story.
It's always to the story,
and having the story be as true as it possibly can be.
And this was a story about a father
and his ultimate love for his son.
And that father is Yondu, and that son is Peter Quill.
And he doesn't look like a father, and he certainly wasn't a perfect father.
But he was a father, and that's what this movie is about.
When I attended the premiere,
I spoke to the audience, and my parents were in the crowd.
And I made them stand up.
And I said, "I want everybody here to know that
"these two movies are dedicated to my mother and my father."
The first movie was really about a mother and her love for her son.
And it ends with a tape that she gives him
and speaks to him from beyond.
And this story is about a father, and his love for his son.
And it's not about Meredith Quill and Ego.
It's about Meredith Quill and Yondu Udonta,
and those are the mother and father. And those are the true fathers.
And I think that that's something,
and one of the reasons why so many people who have been adopted
or come from different types of families
that aren't considered your normal family
have written to me about this movie and how much it means to them.
And I'm glad that could be the case
because it really is something that is about those people who love us.
But it is also about biological fathers who we have, who are imperfect.
My own father is imperfect, but he loved me.
And I always knew that, and that's the most important thing for me.
And the same thing is true of my mother.
anyway---...
Now we're about to see everything go really wrong for Ego.
And Baby Groot did his job.
Stop.
GUN: He destroyed this wonderful Hal Tenn y artwork.
If you kill me...
you'll be just like everybody else.
GUN: And we see what it's about for Peter Quill,
and he says to him, "What's so wrong with just being a normal person?"
And this is a sacrifice for Peter Quill as well.
He's sacrificing this power that he has.
And he's giving it up.
And he's giving up immortality for the sake of those that he loves.
And so there's a big sacrificial theme here,
both in this movie and the last movie.
Groot sacrificed himself for his friends.
Peter Quill sacrifices immortality for his friends.
Yondu Udonta sacrifices his life for his son.
And it's all about the deepest kind of love
that can possibly exist.
And, uh, you know...
(STUTTERS) People call this a comedy, but to me...
It is very funny, and I know that it's funny,
but it really is mostly about that.
He may have been your father, boy...
GUN: This scene was one of the hardest scenes
I've ever had to shoot.
They're hanging from wires this whole time,
and having to turn in these incredibly intense performances.
Yondu's smile in this next shot is just one of my favorite things.
That smile, Yondu's smile,
that's one of my favorite things
Michael Rocker has ever done on film.
There's something so incredibly sweet about it.
You don't see him smile very much in film
unless he's laughing at someone for something terrible.
And they really gave their all,
Chris Pratt and Michael Rocker, in this moment.
You'll see some acting from Chris Pratt
that I think is the finest acting he's ever done on film.
And it's very intense,
and then to think that he's doing this acting
while he's hanging from wires in the middle of the soundstage.
And we did have earbuds in,
and we did listen to this wonderful score by Tyler Bates
that was playing during this whole time.
So that score really is what drives this scene.
This scene is completely intertwined with that score.
And here we have this wonderful moment
where he touches his son, and he gives him the love.
I'm getting, uh, sad.
And then Chris really just losing it.
His arms outstretched and surrendered.
And that's tough for me because I love the character of Yondu,
but more importantly I love Michael Rocker in real life,
and it was a very, very, very hard choice to make.
I just did it because I believe in the truth of these movies.
Here we have
what I think of as the Hasselhoff funeral speech,
which is one of those great moments as a writer
where I didn't know what
Chris Pratt was gonna say during this speech,
but I woke up one night, in the middle of the night.
And I rolled over, and I had this Hasselhoff speech in my head.
I never thought about it whatsoever beforehand,
and I wrote it down in my phone.
And that's what this speech is.
That exact same speech,
not a word has changed since that night I wrote it down in my phone.
And that is, uh...
That's what the scene is,
and I'm gonna be honest about this too
because we have this wonderful...
This wonderful, wonderful performance by Chris Pratt in this scene.
Again, one of the best performances he's ever done.
But let me tell you, we shot this scene twice.
I shot Chris's speech twice.
The first time I shot it I had him give the speech
in a little bit more of a guy giving the speech at a funeral.
And that night I went home, and I was like, "I don't think
"Quill is as ravaged as he would've been by losing his father.
"I think he needs to be more messed up."
And I went back to Chris, and I said, "I think we have to reshoot the scene."
And we reshot him giving the speech,
and I'm really, really glad we did that.
I am Groot.
GUN: I think it's also nice to see
how all of this seems to be about Peter Quill.
But it's not. It's about Gamora.
And, at the end, she hears what he says about
"that thing you wanted is right by your side all along."
And she thinks of her sister, and what her sister said to her,
and she goes out, and she gives this speech.
And if you ask me,
what's my very, very, very favorite thing in the entire movie?
It might just be this moment coming up in a second,
which was something that Karen Gillan did
when we were rehearsing, that I did not ask her to do,
and that I wrote into the script after we rehearsed it.
And when she did it,
I started crying in the middle of rehearsal.
And it's this little moment where they hug,
and we have this wide shot
that was always planned to be that way, it was already storyboarded.
And then she reaches her hand over, and just a moment...
You will always be my sister.
GUN: ...after Gamora says that to her...
And Nebula reaches her hand, and she hugs her sister back
for just a moment. (CHUCKLES)
I still get choked up over this stuff.
(CHUCKUNG)
I just love that moment.
That's maybe my favorite thing in the entire movie.
I think in the first movie
my favorite thing was Drax petting Rocket,
and I think that's a very similar moment.
This is this character who's completely damaged,
probably even more damaged than Rocket if that's possible,
and she hugs her sister back
for just that split second of sisterhood, of siblinghood.
KRAGLINI Pete!
Captain found this for you in a junker shop.
Said you'd come back to the fold someday.
What is it?
It's called a Zune.
It's what everybody's listening to on Earth nowadays.
GUN: People have asked me again, "Hey, is the Zune product placement?"
And I have to tell them, "No, it's absolutely not product placement."
We simply have the Zune in there because I think it's funny...
I think an iPod would just be too easy to guess.
Having somehow Kraglin...
Through a game of interstellar telephone, Kraglin thinks the Zune
is the most popular device for listening to music on the Earth,
is a wonderful little moment.
And there's the fact that Peter Quill thinks 300 songs
is just an amazing amount of songs that a device can have on it.
I also don't think that Peter Quill planned on giving that arrow to Kraglin.
I think he felt like he had to give it to him because he gave him the Zune.
He was gonna keep that arrow for himself, and he's, like, "Oh."
I wanted to come back to this moment 'cause we talked about it earlier,
that Peter Quill has never paid
any attention to Groot this whole movie.
He really has barely ever paid any attention to him.
He's a terrible, terrible father. He brings him into the battle.
He does all this stuff, and I think that's what this moment is about.
I think that this moment is really about...
In the first movie,
we see Peter Quill listening to the tape from his mom,
and he has this private moment about him,
about his mother's love for him, and how she loves him.
And he experiences that.
In this movie,
he thinks he's going to have that same moment with Yondu,
but, instead, what he has is a moment where he feels love for his son,
who is Baby Groot.
And that's what the moment is about. It's not about a selfish moment.
It's a moment about passing it on, about his love for someone else.
And that's the first time he's tender with him.
(CHUCKLES) And he's as bad of a father as Yondu was.
I sent word to Yondu's old Ravager buddies, and told them what he did.
It's a Ravager funeral.
GUN: And of course, the fireworks ending, and the Viking funeral.
The Ravagers giving their respect to a fallen comrade.
This is another one of my favorite moments in the movie,
is Sean Gunn's reaction to this.
And in some ways, this is inspired by Christopher Lloyd
at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
and their reaction to this.
It's always one of my favorite endings.
The ending to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
This line by Sylvester Stallone, my...
(CHUCKLES) He said, "How do you want that delivered, James?"
I said... I said, "Did you see the movie Babe?“
And he said, "Yeah!"
We all know Sylvester Stallone saw Babe.
And I said, "You know where he says, 'That'll do, pig,' at the end?"
And he's like, "Yeah?"
And I'm like, "This is you saying, 'That'll do, pig.'
"That's what you're saying to Yondu. You're accepting him."
And he's like, "Got it!"
And he went out there and he killed it. He just nailed it.
And he's a great guy to work with.
And he stole batteries he didn't need.
GUN: I love this moment with Rocket talking about the batteries.
And again talking about this moment, as I talked about earlier.
At the end of the day, who's the one that Baby Groot goes to for comfort?
And it's Drax.
And you see that their, sort of, feisty relationship
throughout the whole movie
is really, you know, just much different than that.
It's not that at all.
The reason they fight is because they love each other the most.
(CHUCKLES) Drax loves Baby Groot. Baby Groot loves Drax.
And then Gamora admitting her love for Peter Quill.
And we could've done this with a kiss. We almost did.
But I thought, at the end, their love is based on friendship.
It's based on something much deeper
than just the romantic and lustful moment of a kiss.
And it deserves something different than that,
and that's what that moment is.
On the inside.
GUN: And a beautiful shot.
Now there's a way
GUN: And I was very happy that, uh...
This is a moment where Rocket sees the hints of something beyond.
He's a character who doesn't believe in any purpose for himself,
or that he was made for any reason other than the cruelty of other beings.
And I think, in that moment there,
Rocket sees the hints of something beyond.
Something more than what he expects out of this life,
and that's why we end on that shot.
Except for this, of course,
which is Kraglin gaining his superpowers.
He's very bad at the arrow.
I don't think he's learned how to whistle with either his brain or his heart.
And, of course, goes terribly awry.
People ask you,
"Do you write the post-credit scenes into the script,
"or do you do them afterwards?"
The answer is I wrote this one into the script.
I wrote the Elizabeth Debicki, Adam Warlock one into the script.
And I wrote the Adolescent Groot one into the script.
The one with Sylvester Stallone and the other Ravagers
is something I came up with after shooting.
And I was sitting around one day and I go, "Oh, my God!
"That would be awesome to be able to see this other crazier,
"even darker, weirder Expendables version of the Guardians of the Galaxy."
And have them have their moment.
And perhaps, have that lead to something else in the MCU,
which we'll see in just a moment.
If you look closely, my father is credited as "Weird Old Man,"
and my mother is credited as "Weird Old Man's Mistress."
Which she loves being referred to as "mistress."
They didn't know that those were the credits they were gonna get.
You know, it's a shame...
that it took the tragedy of losing Yondu to bring us all together again.
But I think he'd be proud knowing that we are back as a team.
I'm in.
Dope.
I miss you 9UY$---
GUN: That's Kruger, Charlie-27, Martinex, Mainframe.
And Michelle Yeoh, Ving Rhames...
Ving Rhames, who I worked with on Dawn of the Dead,
the screenplay I wrote.
Michelle Yeoh is, of course, a famous Hong Kong movie star.
I'm a huge fan of hers.
And she just happens to be one of the greatest people I've met.
And she is played in a movie that was a big inspiration to me early on,
The Heroic Trio.
In fact, Hong Kong movies in general are a huge influence to me.
They were able to meld genres in a way that wasn't done before them.
They had the best action that had ever been done on screen,
especially in the 1990s, during the golden period of Hong Kong movies.
And they influence me incredibly, as well as many of those directors.
(PARLIAMENT'S "FLASHLIGHT" PLAYING)
It's always great to be at a Marvel movie
because more people stay for the end credits than any other.
And I think we let it out there that we had five post-credit scenes.
Why so many post-credit scenes?
I thought it was funny, and I know people like them.
I just wanted to cram as many in as I could and keep people around.
We also did a lot with these end credits by Sarofsky.
We made something much more visually arresting with the end credits
than are normally done in the regular crawl
at the end of a Marvel movie.
We wanted to make it something.
There was stuff to watch throughout the whole thing.
We got this old album covers inspiration,
the Guardians are on those old album covers,
and made it look as cool as possible.
I really love it.
Lots of little Easter egg moments with these hidden things
and "I am Groots."
There's Weta.
The guys who did all the end of the movie stuff.
The interior of Ego's planet.
Rocket in many scenes.
When you see all the people
that have worked countless hours on this movie,
it's really incredible.
And I'm so grateful to all of these people
that put their time and their lives into making this movie.
High Priestess, the Council is waiting.
GUN: This is actually my favorite Elizabeth Debicki scene.
I love seeing Ayesha just start to come unhinged.
There's something going very wrong with her in this moment.
And we see it happening.
And we see her thirst for revenge,
which leads to her creation
of a very popular Marvel character,
which we're about to see in a second, the cocoon of Adam Warlock.
One of my favorite characters.
In my original treatment for the movie,
I actually had Adam Warlock as one of the characters.
She made him early in the film.
But it was one character too many.
There's a lot of characters already in the movie,
so I needed to lose one, and I couldn't lose Mantis.
She was incredibly important to the central story of Ego,
and I kept Mantis and saved Adam Warlock for a different day.
But he is a character I love.
I love what we did with him in the treatment.
And I can't wait to unleash him upon the MCU.
It was also important, because in the comics...
Here we have the characters dancing, which is ridiculous.
In the comics, Adam Warlock is a big pan' of Infinity Wars.
And as you know, that movie is going to come out, Avengers: Infinity War.
It's gonna have the Guardians. I'm an Executive Producer on the movie.
But Adam Warlock was not gonna be in that movie.
He was never gonna be in that movie.
I didn't want people to get too excited about
Adam Warlock being a part of that film,
because he's a part of that storyline in the comics.
But it's gonna change for the cinematic universe.
It was also a reason I almost didn't put that post-credit scene in,
but I'm really glad I did, because I think it's important.
That's Grandpa Quill dancing, Gregg Henry,
in case you didn't know who that was.
And we have Rocker dancing.
He's a horrible dancer. Great actor, horrible dancer.
And then we have Jeff Goldblum dancing,
who will be seen in Thor. Ragnarok.
(CHUCKLES) It's a little weird, me doing my Baby Groot move.
(THE SNEEPERS FT. DAVID HASSELHOFF'S
"GUARDIANS lNFERNO" PLAYING)
Coming up now, we have the next post-credit scene,
which is Adolescent Groot.
I think it's important that people know it's Adolescent Groot.
It's not Teen Groot, it's more Tween Groot.
And he's a little jerk.
And we get to see him in his adolescent form.
And we learn one very important thing,
which is that Peter Quill can now understand Adolescent Groot.
He's been around him.
Also, he's obviously taken on the role as a father pretty well.
I also think it's a strangely important moment,
because he says at the end, "Now I know how Yondu felt."
Which means that some of Quill's negative view of Yondu
probably came from Quill, and not from Yondu.
That he wasn't quite as bad as Quill made him out to be.
Part of him was just being an adolescent jerk,
and we all know that Quill is stunted.
There's Howard the Duck.
This song is written by me
and Tyler Bates.
It is our first pop song by our band The Sneepers.
And it is David Hasselhoff here
talking about the Procyon lotor, which is a raccoon.
It was a lot of fun to make,
and it was a lot of fun to shoot with David Hasselhoff, who's a great guy.
I just want to thank everybody who's involved with this movie.
Man, there's so many people I didn't mention during this process,
but I also didn't mention all of you, the fans
who actually sat through me saying this
unless you skip forward, which is also acceptable.
I love all you guys!
We definitely are Groot.
And I'm so appreciative
to what you guys have given me over the past few years,
and our band of misfit malcontents, the Guardians of the Galaxy.
And we'll bring more to you guys very soon.
Much love, from here at Burbank, California.