Joss Whedon talks The Vision and Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron

I still can’t get over the how jam-packed this year is; the amount of giant genre films coming out is staggering. Not every single one will be gold but I think it’d be a safe bet to put AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON up on that pedestal. There’s no way Joss Whedon would disappoint us…right? RIGHT??

Joss recently sat down with SFX and discussed the two most talked about characters of the upcoming sequel; Vision and Ultron.

On the character of Vision, Joss said:

Once again, he's someone who's completely different than anybody else in terms of his powers, his look, but also his perspective. He's artificial life and he's not caught up in the in-house bickering and the pain and self-doubt. He shows up and he's very certain. But we're not certain what he's certain of! And Paul's great, because he's so gentle, so compelling, but at the same time you're like 'He's nice but… what if murdered me?'

Joss had plenty to say about Ultron has well:

You know, he's really been a mainstay of The Avengers, but for me it's a robot who's angry and that was a gateway for me to a robot who's completely irrational. I wanted to write a robot what we really haven't seen in this kind of movie, who can basically talk all the logical robot things, but then has hissy fits! He also has a real perspective on who the Avengers are, and a real beef with them. He's not a straw man. The thing that worked about Loki was that he was able to get inside everybody's head a little bit, and Ultron, he's got the same thing. He knows pretty much everything there is to know about these guys. The only way you can attack Earth's mightiest heroes is from within.

I’m fully expecting James Spader to be the breakout star of this film. Everything we’ve seen of his interpretation of Ultron so far has been just fantastic and it’s clear Joss thinks so as well:

Everything I've ever given to Spader he's just knocked out of the park, but – and James and I talked about this – every now and then he'll have to do a non sequitur. And James is like 'I have to pull out this emotion from something that's not happening in this scene!' But that's who Ultron is. He's clicking on all these different cylinders. And James really took to it. It means that you can pretty much say anything sometimes! He's very much en scene, but at the same time, if he doesn't have a little bit of free associative lateral now and again, he's not going to be as much fun.

Whedon was also asked what drew him to Ultron and how he will differ from the Ultron we've seen in the comics:

You know, he was an angry robot. Angry all the time! That's one of the things that drew me to him – this guy's angry! Angry for like 50 years! You know, they reinvented him in Ultimates and stuff. At one point he was a beautiful woman… I'm not doing that one! I loved him when I read the comics as a kid, because of the scope and the sci-fi and what the team was going through, but I never looked to Ultron himself in the comics for why I love Ultron. I had an idea that I sort of extrapolated from that, so in that way he sort of a new guy. "But he's been a tricky one to nail down. Not because the voice eluded me, but just in terms of 'How much of his agenda is he revealing? How much of his agenda does he even understand?' And then of course there's the inevitable over-explaining that we do in these things, where you're watching and you're like 'Okay, he said it enough, people know!'

There's not many directors out there who get as excited about a project as Joss Whedon does, but it's something I love to see. That pure exuberance and love for the characters is hopefully going to translate into one heck of a film when AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON hits theaters on May 1, 2015.