6 Shocking Things We Pretended James Gunn Said on the Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Audio Commentary Because We Need Them Clicks, Baby!

Audio commentaries can be a wonderful source of dishy, juicy, insider info, but if you’re a pop culture writer who has to crank out a preordained number of timely news items every day, they can be more. Yes, if you listen to the right ones, and are multi-tasking and maybe running errands or doing other work, you can sometimes get a decent article out of one that doesn’t take up too much time and makes sense from a cost/benefit, time/reward perspective. 

But sometimes commentaries just aren’t that interesting, so they need to be jazzed up a little. And sometimes you just need to start fucking making shit up in search of those precious, precious page-views. That was the case with us and James Gunn’s commentary for Guardians of the Galaxy. To be honest, we didn’t even actually bother to listen to it, because we knew nothing on it could be as salacious and viral-friendly as the following quotes we made up out of thin air because we need them clicks, baby!  

1. Gunn on the madness of Kurt Russell’s unusual method: “The first time I met Kurt Russell he said to me, “I am Captain Ron. I will only answer to Captain Ron, on or off set, and I will only wear Captain Ron’s wardrobe and do Captain Ron dialogue. And he’s fucking deadpan and I’m loving this, you know, because it’s Kurt Russell and he’s a personal hero, and I’m thinking, “Man, this is an amazing bit. I can’t believe he’s goofing around like this right out of the gate. Not what I expected at all. 

Kurt Russell on the set of Guardians of the Galaxy 2

So it turns out he’s not kidding. At all. Weird fucking dude He lived up to his word. Wouldn’t break character, and as he fucking told me on day one, for some reason known only to him, that character was Captain Ron.

Needless to say, everything we shot with him was unusable but CGI is so advanced we were able to completely replicate him digitally, and pieced together all his dialogue from earlier audio recordings of his voice. 

So on one hand, it was amazing seeing the creative process of one of the great actors and icons of our time. On the other hand, fuck that lunatic. His bizarre eccentricities cost us something like 40 million dollars. Why couldn’t he have just said his damn lines, which I wrote by the way?” 

2. Gunn on his leading man’s proclivities” “First day of shooting, Chris Pratt says, ‘I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t stop fucking corpses. I am just a doggone corpse-fucker, is what I am.” And it’s almost charming, you know, but, again, he’s not kidding and he says, 'Christ, no one must learn of my insatiable need for posthumous nookie or my public image will be ruined and my marriage to beloved comic actress and national treasure Anna Faris will be over.' And I assured him his perverse, unforgivable urges would never become public knowledge. Which means that, wait, can we rewind? Never mind. No one listens to these things except for pop culture writers mining them for juicy tidbits.”

3. Vin Diesel: Diva? “So Diesel would never do a clean read of “I am Groot.’ Never. Not once. He’d do it one word at a time, and most of the time he wouldn’t even say a whole word at once. Do you realize how obnoxious you have to be to only begin to say “I”, “am” and “Groot” and never finish? We got so annoyed we just had a PA with a deep voice to do it instead. Diesel still got to keep his 30 million dollars, and we’re still gonna do an Oscar push for him for best Supporting.” 

4. Rocket Raccoon is real: “So it turns out Rocket Raccoon is a real dude, and actually played himself. Nice guy, too. Surprisingly chill, with a really grounded take on the character’s popularity. But Bradley Cooper has a really good agent, so he’s still credited for doing the voice. I was as surprised as anyone, but aliens are real, and some of them are raccoons that wear people clothes. It’s weird that information is only going to come out in this audio commentary.”

5. Gunn is no fan of comic books: “Let’s face it: comic books are nothing more than funny animal stories for small children. I feel that way. I know Chris Hardwick feels that way. Every reasonable adult feels that way. Guardians of the Galaxy is no different. There’s a talking raccoon in it, for Chrissakes. And a tree that says three words! That’s just dumb. And for babies. Give me a nice Merchant/Ivory costume drama any day.”

6. Sylvester Stallone was cast accidentally: “I really wanted to cast Frank Stallone as Stakar Ogord but my agent assumed I meant Sylvester Stallone so they offered the role to him. Don’t get me wrong or anything: Sly seems like a nice guy, but Frank is the real talent in the family.”

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