When James Gunn was a kid, he kept the universe in a cardboard box in his room.
He was the oldest of six siblings — five boys, one girl — all born roughly a year apart starting in 1970. They lived in a small two-story house in the semirural St. Louis suburb of Manchester, Missouri. His dad, an attorney, was often out of town for work, and his mom was usually focused on whichever sibling was the youngest.
So Gunn began creating worlds that were just his own.
For each planet, he drew out everything he believed would matter to an alien society — the style of the houses, the shape of the pets, even the design of the plumbing — and then he placed these artifacts for his burgeoning creative universe in a box that just kept getting heavier.
"It wasn't really storytelling," Gunn said, almost sheepishly, at the memory. Which was easy for him to say from his office on the Disney lot in Burbank, where he had just put the finishing touches on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the latest — and, Gunn hoped, greatest — addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On a mid-April afternoon, more grown-up artifacts surrounded him: Printed screenshots from the movie he both wrote and directed papered the walls, posters were piled on a nearby table for him to sign, and a model of his old Dodge Hellcat with Guardians action figures sprouting from the roof — a gift from Gunn's realtor, of all people — sat beside his desk. It was hard not to notice how far Gunn had come to get to this moment.
"We grew up in our own little miniature society in which play and laughter and imagination were the highest commodities," he explained about his family. "I just always found that ability to create these universes, whether it was a Marvel comics universe, or Tolkien's [Middle Earth] universe, to be really fascinating."
"His work has a ton of heart, but there's a darkness."
At 46, Gunn's imagination is now in command of a creative landscape more vast and inventive than he could ever have hoped that box in his room would hold. He's spent five years of his life working virtually nonstop on the first two Guardians movies — the first of which earned $773.3 million worldwide in 2014 and the devotion of many fans as their favorite movie ever to come out of the most successful cinematic universe in Hollywood history. With Vol. 2's success all but assured — it's earned $132.9 million in its initial international release so far, before opening domestically on May 5 — Gunn has already committed to writing and directing the third Guardians film.
He is also set to play a crucial role in helping the MCU grow its self-proclaimed "cosmic" universe of movies well into the 2020s — perhaps because he's easily the director whose work feels the most distinctive, rather than the product of a well-oiled, wildly successful corporate machine. Next to Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, Gunn could end up as one of the most influential creative forces at the single most lucrative creative organization in filmmaking today.
But the path Gunn took to get to such a rarefied position is as unlikely as a foulmouthed, spacefaring raccoon named Rocket winning the hearts of a grateful nation. Prior to his career supernova that was Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, Gunn had only directed two features, 2006's Slither and 2011's Super. Both are R-rated, extravagantly violent movies that made a meager $13.1 million between them worldwide — and they're saturated with a pitch black comedy that doesn't exactly scream please hire me, Disney, to make your next blockbuster movie!
"He rides that fine line of appropriateness," Guardians star Chris Pratt gently said of the director who made him a movie star.
Tromeo and Juliet
Troma / REX / Shutterstock
To wit: In between making Slither and Super, Gunn created a satirical web series for Spike.com called James Gunn's PG Porn that is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Then he birthed a batshit insane web short Humanzee, about a man who sends his sperm to Bratislava to create an ape-human hybrid offspring. His affinity for the freaky and the fringe stretches back to his first break in filmmaking, writing 1997's Troma Entertainment schlockterpiece Tromeo and Juliet — in which the titular heroine deliberately transforms herself into a cow with a giant penis.
"There's a punk element to James that is very spiky and edgy and different," said Joss Whedon, Gunn's friend and Marvel Studios fellow traveler. "He's really funny, his work has a ton of heart, but there's a darkness."
That darkness has lingered through just about every facet of Gunn's life, sometimes to his great distress, often at his open invitation. It has also fueled his peripatetic Hollywood career, and helped him shape the filmmaking voice that first caught Marvel's attention.
“I was able to do exactly what I wanted, and exactly be myself, and it worked,” Gunn said of Guardians of the Galaxy. “It's 100% my life. I'm 100% committed to it. There's nothing else. I have a girlfriend, but I don't have a family. I have pets. That's it.”
He burst into laughter at the intensity of his commitment. “That’s the other thing: I'm a fucking maniac.”
James Gunn (left) directing Chris Pratt on the set of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios
Having five younger siblings is ideal upbringing for a future filmmaker: You're never without actors, and you're never without material. “I was the kid in the neighborhood that was directing everyone else,” Gunn said. “I was director from the time I was a child.”
"Jimmy would use me as, like, a plaything, and put me in his little movies that he made," recalled Gunn's youngest brother Sean Gunn — who'd later go on to appear in almost all of James' films, including both Guardians movies.
"In our family, we always had a sense that he saw himself as a sort of creative visionary," Sean added with a laugh. "I can joke about it, but he is a creative visionary. Growing up with one is an interesting and unusual thing." He recalled one time James and their other brother Brian put him in a box with little wooden blocks when he was young. "They taped it up, and then they were rolling it around the room," Sean said with a smile. "He thought he was tormenting me, but I was, like, laughing and squealing with delight."
The tight-knit, rambunctious Gunn household was also steeped in pop culture — and, for James especially, comic books. "He had boxes and boxes and boxes of comic books," said Sean. "Tons of them. He already had a huge collection by the time I was old enough to notice it."
Gunn's passion for comics has certainly served his career well, but as a child, it was not something he was eager to share. "Comics were not something that as a young kid you could say you were into in Manchester, Missouri," he said darkly. His voice, usually a couple notches louder than necessary, dropped to a murmur. "Kids did not read comic books back then. I hid it from people. … [It was] a very parochial town. Very Catholic. I think my brothers and my sister and I always had an open way of thinking about things, and that wasn't always a valued commodity within the town I grew up."
Starting around fifth grade, Gunn said that his school became dominated by "pretty maniacal bullies" who made his life hell. "It's become such a thing to say that you were bullied or fucked with or whatever, but that's what my upbringing was like," Gunn said. "I was, like, 11 and 12 years old, and I was in a school where people were fucking and doing drugs and drinking. I guess I thought that's what kids did."
The catalyst for that behavior, according to Gunn, was his school's monsignor, Russell J. Obmann. At the time, Gunn said he knew Obmann was giving young boys in his class alcohol and pornography — it was only much later that he understood the full magnitude of Obmann's behavior. "I didn't realize that the priest was molesting these kids, and that created this incredible society of fucked-up-ed-ness in my class," Gunn said as he began restlessly swiveling in his chair with discomfort. "It even became a thing where, like, these notes were found by the teachers in my school of people passing notes, talking about drugs and sex. This was in fifth grade."
“I was, like, 11 and 12 years old, and I was in a school where people were fucking and doing drugs and drinking.”
Gunn said Obmann never targeted him, and eventually the priest relocated to a different parish. (Obmann died of cancer in 2000; his St. Louis Post-Dispatch obituary notes he retired in 1993 after serving in multiple parishes, but does not mention any abuse. A representative for the St. Louis Archdioceses did not respond to a request from BuzzFeed News to comment.) Still, the experience was scarring for Gunn, in part because he said no adults in his life seemed to take it seriously.
"I love my parents very much," Gunn said. "They're very embarrassed by it today, but I would say, 'Hey, mom and dad, Father Obmann is taking the kids over to the rectory and he's showing them porn movies and giving them beer,'" he recalled. "And they're like, 'Aw, Jimmy.' You know, this was back in the '80s, before people were sensitive to that stuff. They just thought we were making up something about the monsignor at our school."
Deeply alienated from so many of his classmates, and disillusioned by the authority figures in his life, Gunn burrowed further into his pop culture obsessions. He especially delighted in horror, particularly the classic Universal monster movies. "Every time I could, I would watch Creature from the Black Lagoon or House of Frankenstein or the original Dracula," he said. Seeing as this is the guy who would eventually turn a lethal-if-lumbering talking tree and a green-skinned assassin into beloved movie characters, it's clear his attraction to these films weren’t just about being afraid. "Mostly, I was into the monsters,” he said. “I think I loved the monsters. I even felt sorry for Wolfman and Dracula and all of them."
He paused. "I think I felt like the monster."
As a teenager, Gunn's fixation with movie monsters shifted to more flesh-and-blood "rock-and-roll villains," namely punk icon Johnny Rotten and shock rocker Alice Cooper. "I would go to Alice Cooper shows, and everybody would be like, 'Hang him! Hang him!'" Gunn said with a growl. "It was always so fun!"
A younger Gunn (far right) in his band The Pods.
Courtesy of James Gunn
So much fun that Gunn yearned to experience that kind of adulation for himself. He started playing music in high school, and by his late teens and twenties, he was headlining bands and touring. But his ambition never matched how he assessed his own abilities. "I just wasn't great at it," he said with a sigh. "I wanted to be great at something. I thought I was a really potentially great songwriter, and I was a really great performer. But I just was not a great singer."
Next, Gunn tried to become a novelist, enrolling at Columbia University's graduate fiction program in the mid-'90s. To satiate his lingering desire to be onstage, he started performing monologues on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that he called "a cross between stand-up and a one-man show and a poetry slam."
Which is to say, he needed money. A happenstance connection through his brother Matt landed Gunn an interview at Troma Entertainment. The New York-based ultra-low-budget film company existed on the outskirts of the filmmaking galaxy, first rocketing into cult cinema infamy with its 1984 exploitation horror hit The Toxic Avenger.
"They're trashy, mutant, sex and violence movies," Gunn said of Troma's reputation. "I think I was hoping that I was going to get a job working on special effects or something in making blood."
Instead, after their first interview, Troma chief Lloyd Kaufman offered Gunn the opportunity to write Tromeo and Juliet — a trashy, mutant, sex and violence adaptation of Shakespeare's perennial love story — for $150.
Director Lloyd Kaufman (center, left) and Sean Gunn (center, right) on the set of Tromeo and Juliet.
Troma / REX / Shutterstock
"I remember lying in bed in my little shitty apartment on the Upper West Side, and I was like, Holy shit, my name could be on a movie," said Gunn. "Forever. That freaked me out." In an instant, Gunn’s childhood hobby of making movies had transformed into an abiding, lifelong passion. "I have to say, I feel a weird sort of calling in filmmaking that I didn't feel with other things," he said. "I feel like there are things in life you want to do, and then things you are called to do, and hopefully you can allow yourself to want to do whatever you're called to do."
The experience working on Tromeo and Juliet gave Gunn a crash course in what would become a crucial skill for joining the MCU: learning how to weave his own creative impulses into a vivid, and rigid, cinematic style. "The genre was Troma," said Gunn. "But within that, there was a bunch of stuff that was this mix of really, really dark stuff and light stuff, slapstick almost, at the same time. That was the stuff for me." For example, Gunn said it was his idea to allow the two star-crossed lovers in the movie to survive, learn that they were full-blooded siblings, and still decide to run off together and have a family of deformed children. (Gunn also recast Friar Laurence as a pedophile priest.)
As exploitation movies go, Tromeo and Juliet was a genuine hit. The New York Times even raved that the film was "deliriously grossed-out" and "goofily exhilarating." With his buzzy cult success, Gunn decided to move to Los Angeles to start his career in the movie business.
But when he arrived, he said, "Nobody gave a shit."
Matt Sayles for BuzzFeed News
It was the late '90s, and comic book movies were still living down the kitschy humiliation of Batman & Robin. But that didn’t keep Gunn from writing a comedy called The Specials, which followed a second-rate superhero team through the petty tribulations of a regular day. His irreverent, human-scaled approach stood out as a bracingly fresh approach to the genre, and the script attracted a solid cast, including Rob Lowe, Thomas Haden Church, Paget Brewster, and Judy Greer. (Gunn also secured supporting roles for himself and his brother Sean.)
The night before the film began production, however, Gunn was filled with dread. "I was lying in bed thinking, This is not going to go well," he said. "I could tell by how it was being made that it was just not going to be good."
His instincts proved accurate by at least one brutal measure: According to Box Office Mojo, The Specials opened on Sept. 22, 2000, in only two theaters, and grossed a grand total of $13,276.
That might have been it for Gunn's career, but the movie managed to capture a rarefied fanbase of industry professionals who saw an invigorating new voice in genre filmmaking. "I think that movie is vastly important," said Whedon. "Nobody had done a modern version of deconstructing superheroes so perfectly. It informed how we write superheroes as much the most ponderous, 'I have the weight of the world on my shoulders' kind of thing. I make everybody I know watch it." (Whedon said his enthusiasm for The Specials, in fact, was what first led Marvel to consider Gunn for Guardians.)
“I don’t think through anything I do, and it’s landed me in huge amounts of trouble.”
After working on a few projects that ultimately didn't get made — like a half-hour comedy TV pilot with Whedon called Cheap Shots, about a low-budget horror movie company — Gunn was hired to adapt one of his favorite TV shows as a kid, Scooby-Doo, into a live-action feature. The movie that ultimately opened in 2002 was a PG-rated family-friendly comedy, but that's not the film Gunn set out to write. "I mean, I wanted Wes Craven to direct it," Gunn said with an impish grin. "I wanted it to be funny and crazy and then scary as fuck."
It was almost crazy as fuck: When the MPAA first screened the finished film, according to Gunn, they balked at a scene in which a voodoo priest "said something that sounded like, 'I don't eat pussy' or something like that," said Gunn. "That was the insinuation." It was easy enough to cut out, but when the studio realized they wanted a kids movie instead, Gunn said they also lost a scene in which Sarah Michelle Gellar's Daphne and Linda Cardellini's Velma kissed. The producers even used CGI, he said, to erase the actors' cleavage.
The toned-down film was a hit, and Gunn's next two screenwriting gigs — a modern remake of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead, and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed — both opened at number one on back-to-back weekends in March 2004. Gunn was able to parlay his newfound heat in the industry into finally securing his directorial debut, the original horror comedy Slither.
Actors Brenda James, Nathon Fillion, Don Thompson, and Jennifer Copping in 2006's Slither.
Moviestore /REX / Shutterstock
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