James Gunn Bans the Color Purple from ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’

James Gunn banned the color purple from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

The 46-year-old director wanted the sequel to be very visual but deliberately tried to stay away from particular hues he felt had been used a lot in his original movie in order to give the new film a style of its own.

He explained: “I wanted to make the second movie have a very distinct visual look that was much different than the first movie. One of the first things I did was ban the use of the color purple. There’s purple in the movie, but there’s very little purple in the movie. Because purple was by far the dominant color in the first movie. This movie is more about yellow and blue and teal and orange. But I also really wanted to up the ante with the pulp elements. So we harken back a lot to 1950s/60s pulp novel colors and that look of ‘Flash Gordon’ – both the 1980s version and the earlier comics. Really grabbing onto this pulp feeling an bringing it alive in a bright, big, colorful way was important.”

James deliberately wrote a lot about the colors when planning each scene in the film – which stars Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and Kurt Russell – because he felt they would help the audience in their emotional responses.

He explained to SFX magazine: “One of the first things I did was I sat down and gave every scene a color palette. I wrote the story through colors and I would want people to be able to look at the way those colors move and be able to tell what the story is just through seeing those colors. A little green, a little orange, a little red – and then we get into some darker colors. It’s just the feelings they elicit. So when we go to the Sovereign world at the beginning of the movie, it’s all golds and blues, then we go to pinks and whites in the next location. Then we go to all greens for a long time, then we go back and at the end we get into some bigger colors.”