Guardians of the Galaxy’s principal cast and director James Gunn gathered in London last week to answer some questions about what is perhaps the most unlikely joy-ride of the summer season.

Here’s what we learned…

 

THE GUARDIANS ALL HAVE A SPIRIT ANIMAL…

CP: “I guess for me, Peter Quill’s spirit animal would be a Golden Retriever. He’s like a puppy, you know? He’s still kinda that 9 year old boy who got taken away, but he’s like, ‘ah screw it, I’m gonna chase my tail, and chase Frisbees!’”

DB: “I’d probably be a big dumb dog, a Great Dane or something like that.”

KG: “What animal takes itself way too seriously? Maybe a sloth. No, wait. Those are passive! I don’t know, what’s a serious animal for Nebula? A tiger?”

JG: “Shark?”

KG: “SHARK! That one.”

 

…EXCEPT ZOE SALDANA.

ZS: “Usually I always find an animal for the characters I play. We do all have an animal personality, and that’s a good way of connecting with somebody and finding a level. But this time, Gamora wasn’t an animal. You might be thinking she would have been a reptile, but she wasn’t.

“She was more of a bullfighter. She might not be able to outfight a man with her strength, but she can certainly outwit him. So I thought bullfighters are able to seduce a bull into surrendering onto the sword – which obviously is not a thing that I appreciate – but psychologically, during that moment, it’s something worth noticing.”

 

 

CHRIS PRATT CAME UP WITH HIS OWN CHOREOGRAPHY

CP: “Yes, I did. That was sort of a throw-back. Like everything about Peter Quill, it had to be 1988 or earlier, so I borrowed Michael Jackson, some moves from the disco era, a little bit of early hip-hop.

“I remember around that time in my life my brother and I would have dance-offs in our basement, so there was that spirit in it. But yeah, those are my moves. Oddly, I never got paid as a choreographer. At least not yet!”

 

JAMES GUNN ENJOYED THE FREEDOM MARVEL AFFORDED HIM

JG: “For me that was the whole appeal of this project in the first place, was to create not just a world, but many worlds. I think I would have a very hard time doing a sequel to another Marvel movie, or even setting up another character to be in the Avengers, but I felt a lot of freedom in creating this movie.

“And I’m very grateful to Marvel, because every time I came up with some crazy idea, like, ‘let’s just have a seven page scene when the characters argue about stupid stuff at the beginning of the third act’, and Marvel’s like ‘Oh, that’s great, we love it!’, and let’s have all these bright colours like old 50s/60s movies – ‘we love it!’ – and let’s have Michael Rooker who’s totally insane, and they’re like ‘we love it!’ For some reason, I was allowed to go hog-wild.”

 

GUARDIANS WAS NEVER GOING TO BE DARK AND HEAVY

JG: “It was fun to create that sort of thing. So many movies today are so dark and brooding, to be able to create something that’s a little bit more fun, and yet also has the emotional weight and the heart to it as well was great.”

 

THERE SHOULD BE PLENTY OF HOME RELEASE BONUS MATERIAL

JG: “There’s a few deleted scenes that we have. There are also outtakes of things, because we would goof around on set, and sometimes those are used in the trailers too, but not the movies.”

ZS: “There are a couple of scenes that we shot, between Gamora and Nebula, that explains that dysfunctional relationship, and I would love to see those used.”

KG: “Me too!”

 

 

THE MARKETING WAS AN UNEXPECTED SUCCEESS

JG: “The marketing’s amazing! The truth is, I’ll be completely honest with you, we went out and tested those original trailers that we did, and we had a really mainstream one that made it look all serious, and made it look like a very normal science fiction space movie.

“Then we had the trailer that we did, with ‘Hooked on a Feeling’, and all that stuff, and we took ‘em out and showed people, and people were kinda like ‘I don’t like any of these’. So, well, if they hate them all, we might as well go with the most that’s most honest and true to the film, which was the ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ one which really gave you a flavour of what the movie was.”

“And it just shows that you that that stuff is all bullshit, because people then loved the trailer! We beat every other movie in our timeslot, we had three times the amount of hits that Man of Steel had on the first day, and nobody knows who the Guardians of the Galaxy are! So it worked really well, and it was just because it was true to the movie, and that’s been our philosophy every step of the way.

“And this is really a testament – I’ve given tribute to Marvel – but it’s Disney, the Disney Marketing team, who decided to have the balls to sell this movie as what it is, and not try to make it into something else that’s more palatable to what they think of as ‘middle America’. And that has been a pretty cool experience. And marketing, the tests would have said, ‘don’t do that’, but somehow it seems to have worked pretty well!”

 

ZOE AND CHRIS HAVE SOME SONG REQUESTS FOR THE NEXT FILM…

ZS: “We need some Abba in it. Some Hall and Oates.”

CP: “I wouldn’t mind Peter Quill trying to seduce someone to Lionel Richie. [singing] ‘Hello, is it me you’re looking for’, and it turns out that’s how he’s been getting with all these aliens, it’s just this one Lionel Richie song. And she’s just crying because it’s so beautiful. It’s super-easy to hook up with aliens, all you need is Lionel Richie.”

 

…AND HE STILL WANTS TONY STARK DEAD.

CP: “That would be the song to kill Iron Man to. [singing] ‘Hello, is it me you’re looking for…’ *machine gun fires* Credits roll. ‘It’s seven minutes into the movie?! What’s going on!’”

 

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