With Avengers: Age of Ultron in cinemas from Thursday April 23, returning writer-director Joss Whedon discusses what's in store for fans.
Can you explain what brings the team back together for Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron?
Joss Whedon: Obviously this film picks up sometime after the first Avengers movie, and after the events of the next Thor and the next Captain America, so things have changed a lot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Our guys are still connected but their lives are very different; they are not being run by anybody so they are creating their own style.
Why is Ultron the villain in this film?
Ultron has been one of the greatest Avengers villains for decades and decades. When I would read the comic books, he was always popping up in one incarnation or another trying to kill them all. Even before I took the first film, I knew in the second one we had to have Ultron. He has got great power. He is a robot but he doesn't behave like one necessarily. He is much more interesting than that and has a lot of rage issues and daddy issues. So he is formidable and he can recreate himself, which means he comes with an army. So he seemed like the only guy that can really give The Avengers a run for their money.
Do you have a personal history with him being your favourite?
Ultron in the comics is a little one-note to me. He tends to be like, 'I will destroy you. I am still destroying any minute now. Once again, I have come back to destroy you'. He has this big angry face. I like the idea of taking that into the movies to create something that is a little more textured; somebody who really is that angry and actually has to wrestle with his idea of who he is and why he can't stand these people. What they have done to him by creating him.
Tell us about James Spader as Ultron.
I've admired James Spader forever. I don't remember the moment, but I was thinking of Ultron's voice and I didn't want to go with the obvious choices for the guys who do 'robot and grandeur'. Ultron, in my head, has this very hypnotic power, but at the same time he can throw a hissy fit. He can get very angry about certain details. Spader's got this very hypnotic voice and he can be broadly comic. He's really funny without ever taking away from the gravitas of what's around him, so I thought I'd just ring him up. But Marvel had already met with him and wanted to work with him, so it turned out great.
Check out our Avengers: Age of Ultron London premiere gallery here.
The first film was to start the team dynamic where they come together. How does that go in the second film?
There is an element of 'We put them together, let's tear them apart'. You definitely want to find out, once you have your origin of a team story, what the next story is really about. Can that paradigm sustain? Can these people actually stand each other once they have digested their shawarma? It is interesting because we see a lot of new loyalties and friendships and conflicts, and we get to get further into the heads of all the characters and see why they work as a team and why they don't, and the mistakes they are going to make and the solutions they are going to come up with.
Now that there is less set-up to bring the guys together, what do you want to do with this film?
It is about finding darkness and finding their weaknesses. They are enormously strong and they are a team, so you have to dig the knife in where you can and sort of dismantle them a little bit. It is a more personal film than the first. We have more opportunity - now that they have met and the audience has met them and understands their world - to dig into their psyches. And not everything in there is pretty.
How difficult is it to balance all these characters?
Balancing all these characters is horrible. I swear, I keep saying my next film is going to be To Build a Fire. It's one guy and a dog - and I might cut out the dog.
It is very difficult, but the point of the thing is that everybody matters and their interactions - when they conflict, when they work together - highlight who they are as much as anything. It's difficult to make sure everybody shines, but at the same time, it's glorious because everybody does.
So much of this has been about the way they deal with each other and how that starts to fracture and what it says about them. That helps enormously because each member of the team, good or bad, comes together, falls apart, or whatever it is. In a way, it lifts itself by its own bootstraps.
It still requires an enormous amount of dialling in, but it is my job and I'm working with producers who really understand that we need to get the most out of every single moment and every single character. I write too much at first but that's part of the process; I write War and Peace and then gradually we boil that down to War.
What can the fans expect from Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron?
It's difficult to sum these things up or it's difficult for me, anyway. But what was so grand about this weird, disparate group coming together is that we also know that nothing lasts forever and that there is a dark side to everything. It's going to be a little more grown-up than the first one. A little scarier. A little funkier. But in the end, it's got the same values; it's got the same extraordinary characters and a lot of humour. And yes, there may be some punching.
What do you want from this movie?
I want humanity. I want texture. I want ideas. I want the movie to be about something. It's very important for me to have something to say. I don't just want to point a camera at something pretty. I don't want to amuse people and then have them forget that I did. I want people to incorporate what they saw into their own mythos and for that to go forward.
Every artist, I think, wants that. But just to make a long summer entertainment is a waste of the ridiculous amount of talent coming from that cast and that crew and the potential of this movie. I want it to be a movie that speaks to people on a human level while it's entertaining the hell out of them.
The fact of the matter is there is entertainment that's not great art and that's fine. There is no great art that is not entertaining. So there is no shame in trying to make it work the way the audience wants it to work.
