This week, Edgar Wright returns to multiplexes everywhere with his wickedly fun, crime musical comedy action movie “Baby Driver.” It’s a film that sees the director arguably at the height of his powers, with scene after scene featuring a dazzling combination of style and technique (seriously, the editing alone on this movie is nuts). For the folks over at Marvel, there must be some second thoughts about how Wright’s exit from “Ant-Man” went down, and while the director still feels the sting of losing that job, he’s taking the high road.
Chatting with Uproxx, Wright reveals that not only has not seen “Ant-Man,” it’s probably going to stay that way. However, he nearly saw it accidentally.
“I haven’t seen it and I haven’t even seen the trailer. It would kind of like be asking me, ‘Do you want to watch your ex-girlfriend have sex?’ Like, ‘No, I’m good,’ ” he explained. “The closest I came to it was that somebody sitting near me on a flight was watching it. And when I saw that the person sitting next to me was going to watch the movie, I thought, hmm, maybe I’m going to do some work on my laptop.”
Through of all this, Wright has remained pretty classy about the falling out with Marvel, and he’s not planning to rip into them anytime soon.
“I’ll never be pressed into kind of bad-mouthing it, because the truth of the matter is my friends are in it. Paul Rudd is a friend of mine and we’re still very good friends. And in fact, I saw him in New York the other week and we had dinner and it was the first time we’d had a chance to properly sit down since that whole thing,” he said. “And the one thing I’ll say about that movie is I’m pleased that I got a writing credit on it, because it sort of makes up for having worked on the script for like eight years. Two is that I got my friend, Paul, a part in a major film. And I did say to Paul – he knows I haven’t seen it – I said, ‘You know, I haven’t seen the movie, and I will never watch it. I did see you in ‘Civil War,’ and you were the funniest bit.’ ”
At the end of the day, Wright seems to have dusted himself off and his mentally moving on. “I have no regrets about not doing the movie. I still get paid for the writing residuals. People shouldn’t cry for me too much. But it’s like, I got to make an original movie instead, and I feel happy about that,” he stated.
Indeed, if the end result of not making “Ant-Man” is getting to make “Baby Driver,” we should be pretty pleased about that.
