Director Tim Miller
gave us the lowdown on the film's previous trailer a few months back, but this time finds himself joined by producer Simon Kinberg to discuss some of the juicy new tidbits on offer.
Consider this thorough rummaging through Deadpool's sack our Christmas present to you.
Go hard or go home
TM: Deadpool’s kind of shockingly different from most Marvel characters and it’s a nice thing that we can kind of ease people into this character and the really different sort of space he inhabits from usual comic book films.
SK: And the viral pieces I think have done that too. There’s obviously a huge viral presence with this character more than any other mainstream character I’ve ever seen and a lot of the tone people have been getting from those pieces online.
Pre-post apocalypse now
TM: I always like the way the writers described the city in the script which was ‘a pre-post apocalyptic Detroit’. And that's about as specific as they got. And I liked that. You know, it doesn't say that it's anywhere specific. I think there are some certain geographical clues in our story in that everybody knows that the X-Men live in upstate New York-ish and so we can’t be too far away. But the idea was that it should look like a shytty place because you want to set Deadpool and his world apart as something different: grittier, nastier, you know, more like Daredevil where it's down in the streets where he’s dealing with small-time shyt that the X-Men and their shiny hi-tech world don’t deal with.
DeADDpool
TM: He’s like a kid with ADD who’s had too much sugar and he can’t sit still - he’s constantly fidgeting and looking to entertain himself. I’m sure there’s a word for it that therapists have for those kids who need constant input! But he’s definitely that guy. He needs to talk. He’s a fidget.
Merry Christmas, everyone
SK: I guess I would say - without ruining anything - it’s Christmas for his character. But his character isn’t necessarily connected to all of the reality of our world. But we did plan the film to be a heartwarming holiday classic - we had to work Christmas in there!
Say hello to my spiky friends
SK: They’re part of the group of people who turned him into what he is and that’s about it. He’s going after them to fix what was done to him. And you know the villain of the movie is Ajax, and so he obviously figures prominently as part of that group.
Weapon of choice
TM: Those are his Desert Eagles. The classics. If you haven’t ever held one of those things, they weigh about 50lbs each. They’re huge, heavy pistols that can basically blow your head apart. So they’re pretty powerful!
The Recruiter will see you now
TM: His character is the guy that sort of puts the bait out there for Wade at his most desperate time, so, you know, whether he’s a mutant or not, we don’t really say, but he certainly is very, very good at convincing people to do things that they shouldn’t do when they’re vulnerable.
Going under
SK: We’ll keep some of it a secret, but it is a facility: it’s a workshop where Wade has willingly come to try to fix his life but it gets a lot more broken. And it’s sort of a big turning point in the movie for his character.
TM: And you could say it’s a poor man’s Weapon X, right?
Gina Carano: Wonder Woman
TM: I mean, Gina was amazing, Her powers in the comics are - she’s a little like the Hulk, in that the angrier she gets, her adrenaline sort of activates this super strength. So the angrier she gets, the harder she fights and stronger she is, so that’s her power in the comics and we try to play that up a little bit in the fight sequences. But Gina herself, she was amazing: in hindsight, I can’t even imagine considering an actress who didn’t have the kind of history that Gina did, because just on our budget level and the way we wanted to do these fights to keep them grounded there was no way that a stunt person could step in and do what she did, which was just incredibly physical. She would do these scenes with the stunt guy and then we’d take him out and she’d do them by herself so we’d have these clean actions and it was amazing. She’s got photographic reflexes and every fukking take she was going all out. It was great.
T.J. Riffer
T.J. Miller’s improv. How much could he go off-piste?
SK: We have an embarrassment of riches of T.J riffing lines, some of it scripted and obviously a lot of it is improvised with T.J. and he also works closely with Tim and the writers. But for that particular moment that he’s reacting to seeing Wade scarred for the first time, I mean, he just went and went and went. Honestly... There was one take that was probably ten different versions of it - they were all improvised and were all fukking hilarious. And they’re so specific and insane and I think could only come out of T.J.’s brain. Like, eventually a gag reel or something on the DVD somewhere we’ll put it all together and just show some single takes of it and you can see how gifted and scary his brain is.
TM: Yeah, you can’t stop him once he gets rolling. And even, you know, long after I’d said ‘ok, great, we’ve got it’, he would go, ‘let me go again, let me go again. Wait, wait, wait, I’ve got another one, hold on, go again’! And we literally had to say, ‘ok, we’ve got to move on’, because he really is uncontrollable in the best possible way.
Blind Al
TM: She plays a role similar that she does in the comics, although in the comics it has some darker aspects as to why she’s with Deadpool that we don't really explore, but I think she’s great. And it’s funny, because we filmed all the stuff in the apartment - that was the first stuff we filmed, it was the beginning of our shoot - and for the first time, I mean, for me, even living with the script for so long, I really just felt this love for Wade as the character because I could see their interaction and ‘I like ya’. Ryan’s likeable in and of itself, he can be doing horrible things to children and you would still like the guy, because he’s just that nice. But, in this case, Deadpool does some things that are hard to stomach and not normal things that heroes would do, but to see their relationship was a really, really beautiful thing. And I think where it falls in the movie really makes us root for him even more because he's going through this horrible thing but he still has very human scenes with [Al]. And Leslie’s just fukking amazing. She would do anything, I mean, I would go, ‘ok, Leslie, say “sounds like you’ve got a dikk in your mouth”’, and she’d go, ‘sounds like you’ve got a dikk in your mouth’! There was no restraint. She would just do whatever was needed to get a great shot and a great scene. I
love her, one of my favourites.