'Guardians' Director: This Movie Needed Me!
Marvel's cinematic universe of superheroes has become one of the most successful movie franchises ever. So it's easy to forget that less than a decade ago, Iron Man and Captain America weren't even on the radar of many filmgoers.
Now, Marvel's pinning its summer blockbuster hopes on an outer-space misadventure that features heroes from one of its more obscure comic book titles: Guardians of the Galaxy. They're hoping to create a Star Wars-scale epic — with a director who's never directed anything this big: James Gunn.
"The Guardians of the Galaxy are a bunch of criminals and misfits, most of them are orphans of one type or another who don't fit in anywhere else in the world," he tells NPR's David Greene.
They include a would-be interstellar outlaw called Starlord, Gamora the green woman, a walking, talking tree named Groot, and a homicidal raccoon named Rocket, who's voiced by Bradley Cooper. "Many of them are the only members of their species, and they come together and find a cause greater than themselves," Gunn says.