Read the Full StoryMichael Douglas has a question. “Who,” he asks, “do I have to f- - - to get out of this room?” It’s day 25 of the shoot for Marvel’s new superhero movie Ant-Man at Pinewood Atlanta Studios. Paul Rudd stars as former jailbird Scott Lang, who can shrink to microscopic size thanks to a special suit, as well as communicate with his namesake insects courtesy of his helmet. Douglas plays inventor Hank Pym, creator of the aforementioned outerwear, and Evangeline Lilly is Pym’s daughter, Hope Van Dyne. Today this trio are shooting a scene in Pym’s basement control room in which they hatch a plan to steal an even more advanced “Yellowjacket” suit from the villainous Darren Cross (The Strain’s Corey Stoll).
The sequence is filled with the kind of exposition-heavy dialogue (“Cross has the place loaded with transmission blockers!”) that starts to sound like gibberish upon repetition. The problem? There is a lot of repetition as director Peyton Reed (The Break-Up) requests take after take, either to resolve technical glitches, to alter dialogue, or because an actor flubs a line. (At one point, Douglas refers to “Howard Stern,” the father of shock radio, when he’s meant to say “Howard Stark,” the father of Iron Man Tony.) By the time Douglas raises his F-bomb query, even if he’s (kind of) kidding, it’s fair to say he’s speaking for everyone on set.
