James Gunn Almost Skipped The Meeting That Landed Him Guardians Of The Galaxy

To understand the following story, you need to know a little bit about L.A. traffic. 

Traffic in Los Angeles sucks. A friend in Hollywood can call you, a citizen of the Westside, and invite you to a movie that starts in two hours. Although the drive is only about 10 to 13 miles, you know you'll never make it on time. Los Angeles citizens love to watch TV shows like "24," and listen for lines of dialogue like "I'm in Sylmar. I'll be in Marina Del Rey in 20 minutes." No, a-hole, you will not. You'll be in Marina Del Rey in 120 minutes if you're lucky. 

So one might understand director James Gunn when he says he nearly skipped out on a meeting with Marvel because of the drive. In a recent video interview with Michael Rosenbaum, Gunn recounted the story of how he landed the gig directing the 2014 hit "Guardians of the Galaxy," and how far ... how very, very far ... Marvel Studios was from his house. In the early 2010s, Gunn lived in Studio City, the neighborhood right next to the Universal Studios amusement park and northwest of the Hollywood Hills. Marvel Studios, meanwhile, was still located in Manhattan Beach. That shudder you just heard was a collective response from everyone who lives in Los Angeles. 

Studio City and Manhattan Beach are 28 miles apart. Even if the traffic is good, that's a 95-minute drive. Gunn, feeling that the drive was a pain in the neck, was sorely tempted to turn down "Guardians" on that basis alone. He felt that he didn't have a legitimate shot to direct a Marvel movie anyway, so taking four hours to commute — plus a stop for food — was not how he wanted to spend the day. 

Luckily, James Gunn eventually thought better of it. Although he recalls the awful drive well. The filmmaker said:

"[T]his was like, I'm gonna have to drive home in rush hour. So I was gonna have to drive from Studio City into Manhattan Beach so they could pitch me and they could check me off their list and it's not really something that I'm gonna want to do. [...] I think I'm wasting four hours of my day, right? But I'm like, 'Okay.' I drive down there. I remember stopping and getting a bite to eat because I was early and talking to my agent — or my lawyer Andrew Hurwitz on the phone — and being like, 'Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna go on this thing, it's silly but ...' And I go in there, and they pitch me 'Guardians.'"

Seriously, the distance was Gunn's primary concern. When Marvel called him, his first response was merely, "Goddammit. Because Marvel was far away at the time. Now it's in Burbank. But at the time it was in Manhattan Beach." 

Gunn was disheartened in the early 2000s. The kind of mid-budget movies he wanted to make — the studio films that only cost $30 million to $50 million were becoming rarer and rarer. More and more of studios' resources were going into high-profile, effects-based blockbusters, which Gunn had no experience with. Not that he wouldn't have been delighted; Gunn was always a comic book fan and long dreamed of making a comic book movie. But he felt that the industry was changing, and he was honestly ready to give up.

James Gunn didn't like where the industry was headed. He started in the trenches of Troma and was involved with several low-budget indie productions. With such a résumé, Gunn knew that he had a shot at making smaller movies, and definitely not the bigger ones. He said: 

"I was ready to quit directing, you know? 100%. I was like, listen. I was seeing how the tide was turning. I was seeing that, you know, they were stopping making mid-budget films, and that I always liked creating things that were somewhat within the zeitgeist, and I was seeing that most of the movies that they were going to let me direct, the $30 million movies, were gone. And that everything was big Marvel movies, and they're never gonna give me that, and yes, I would love to do a Hulk movie. That was like the big one at the time."

Gunn revealed that he had actually been on Marvel's radar for a while, as he once pitched a feature film version of the 2010 Marvel character Hit-Monkey, a character who was an assassin as well as a Japanese macaque. Incidentally, Marvel eventually made a Hit-Monkey TV series without Gunn. The director, meanwhile, had just made a hit video game called "Lollipop Chainsaw," and felt that television was the way to go. He said: 

"I told my agent, 'Quit putting me out for movies, because I'm gonna focus on television and gaming.' I had just tried to get some movie that I couldn't get, which I seemed perfect for. And then Marvel called up and said, 'Will he come in, we want to tell him about this thing we're doing.'"

After a terrible commute, the rest became history.