AUDIO COMMENTARY BY

JAMES GUNN (Writer/Director)

An excellent *must* listen commentary that delves even deeper than the first film’s track into Gunn’s process.

My favorite takeaways…

- Track is recorded just a few days after the theatrical release of the film in wonderful Burbank, California!
- Film takes place 2 months after the first film.
- Gunn says the movie gets a lot of compliments for being more colorful than the first film but claims there’s actually fewer colors than the first film they just made them bolder bigger colors.
- Gunn says the soundtrack for the first film was for a “younger crowd” and the soundtrack for this film is “more mature” since Quill’s mother was acknowledging that her son was older and would want to listen to more mature music.
- Gunn regretted moving too fast on shooting the first film like he usually does on his indie movies because he thinks a few performances suffered from it. With this film he took his time with shooting the movie.
- Quill’s shirt is an alien language that translates to “Gearshift” which is an alien candy brand.
- Gunn originally had Quill way less resistant to Ego at the beginning and the David Hasselhoff convo between him and Gamora was switched. But he realized by making Quil resistant it deepened the relationship between him and Gamora and was made less conventional of a father/son and than most movies do.
- The Drax, Mantis, Gamora walking scene after Mantis and Drax’s touching scene on the steps was a reshoot to help sell the audience more on why Gamora shifts her stance on Ego.
- Of all the liberties Gunn took with the comics, he says the one he got the most blowback on was making Yondu’s head fin smaller. So in this one he wanted to give him a bigger one to make the dans happy.
- The two hardest scenes to shoot were 1) the intimate dancing scene between Quill & Gamora, because he pushed them as actors beyond where they wanted to be pushed and 2) Yondu/Rocket talking how they are similar people.
- Drax fake vomiting by the idea of sex with a beautiful woman was something filmed for the first movie but got cut and Gunn loved the joke so much he brought it back for 2.
- Gunn points out that one of the female figures Kurt Russell is making out with is a turtle person and that when Ego visits the turtle woman he has a turtle avatar that looks nothing like Kurt Russell.
- “A part of him wants a friend, which is what he wants out of Peter Quill, but another part of him wants a tool to take over the universe.”
- “It’s not product placement! Dairy Queen was incredibly important to me.” - Gunn commenting on criticisms he got for trying to incorporate product placement, he argues DQ was a nostalgic place for him for his childhood and the 1980s.
- “The two people who are best on set of pretending to look like they are doing something are Michael Rooker and Zoe Saldana.”
- Gunn had never heard of “Wham Bam Shang-A-Lang” by Silver until putting it into the movie.
- Originally Gunn wanted Yondu to be saved after his sacrifice because he didn’t want to make a movie without Michael Rooker, but deep down he knew that would feel false to what the story was supposed to be.
- Gunn’s absolute favorite moment in the movie is a moment Karen Gillan improvised during rehearsal that Gunn wrote into the movie of Nebula reluctantly hugging Gamora at the end of the movie.
- All the post credits scenes were written into the script except for the Sly Stallone led OG Guardians scene which Gunn thought of after shooting.
- Adam Warlock was originally going to be made early in this movie but he was scrapped due to too many characters.