James Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 will be James Gunn’s last Marvel Cinematic Universe film before he heads to DC Studios, but he has one more treat for fans before he leaves the MCU.

Next week, Gunn’s longtime passion project, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, will stream on Disney+. The one-off event pays homage to the infamous “Star Wars Holiday Special” as well as many of the better received specials that families see every Christmas.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gunn opened up about his creative process behind the Christmas special. It turned out to be an extremely easy script to write due to his passion for the subject matter and his familiarity with the cast and characters.

“I’ll be honest, I wrote the script in a couple of hours, so it just blew out of me. It was very easy,” Gunn said. “Everything about shooting was easy. Everything about getting the performances out of people was easy, while ‘Vol. 3’ was torture in every way.”

Gunn explained that because he shot the film on the same sets as next year’s feature film, he was able to achieve more production value than would normally be possible for a Christmas TV special. Besides saving money, it also allowed him to create more narrative synergies between the two projects.

“I shot them at the same time,” he said. “One of the great things about the special was that I was able to bring elements into the film that I didn’t have to explain at the beginning of the film, like Cosmo the Spacedog [Maria Bakalova] or the fact that they live in the Head of Knowhere, their new residence, or the imagining of their spaceship, the Bowie, which in real life is this four-story set. It’s the most amazing set I’ve ever been on, and that’s how we were able to bring those sets that we had the money to build to ‘Vol. 3,’ in particular. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had the money to build these million dollar sets.”

The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special will stream on Disney+ on Friday, November 25th.

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