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‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Director Shares New ‘Awesome Mix Volume Zero’ Playlist

Guardians of the Galaxy, Awesome Mix, James Gunn, Playlist

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy dominated the box office this summer, and the superhero space opera’s fantastic soundtrack, Awesome Mix Vol. 1, deserves a lot of credit for the film’s success. Now, director James Gunn (who assembled the 1970s-heavy playlist in the movie,) has revealed another “Awesome Mix” — “Volume Zero.”

In an Instagram, Gunn explained how they would often play music during the shoot to help get the pacing of a scene right, or just to keep people awake. For the movie’s intergalactic bar scene, referred to as the “Boot Of Jemiah,” he made a high-octane party playlist to keep people energized through a long night shoot. Gunn isn’t kidding when he talks about the playlist being “high energy” — instead of classic songs from the 60s and 70s, “Awesome Mix Volume Zero” is full of intense (and significantly more modern) fare like My Chemical Romance “Teenagers” and Andrew W.K.’s “Party Hard.”

 

AWESOME MIX VOLUME ZERO As many of you know, music is an extremely important part of Guardians of the Galaxy. I chose the songs on Awesome Mix ahead of time, and even included them in the script. Where possible, the songs were played live on set – when you see the gang walking down the hall to Cherry Bomb, they were actually walking down the hall to Cherry Bomb. Likewise, the score by Tyler Bates was written largely before we started shooting, and we blared that sucker on set so the actors and cameras would all move in unison. On lighter days, our master soundman Simon Hayes would also play music on set between takes to keep people’s energy up. He did this while shooting the credit sequence in the Temple of Morag, and he also did it for the Boot of Jemiah, so we could keep the extras hyped and alive and feeling like they were in a bar atmosphere. Being that these were night shoots, it helped to keep people awake as well! Simon took requests for the credit scene, but for the Boot of Jemiah he asked me to put together an AWESOME playlist of high energy party tunes. So I did, featuring some of my favorite tunes. My assistant Simon Hatt (50% of British people are named Simon) just found this list and sent it to me. So I thought I’d share it with you in case you wanted to make your own BOOT OF JEMIAH PLAYLIST – or, as known from now on, Awesome Mix Volume Zero.

A photo posted by James Gunn (@jamesgunn) on Nov 11, 2014 at 11:12am PST

The fine folks over at The AV Club assembled the songs in “Awesome Mix Volume Zero” into a Spotify playlist, which we’ve embedded below.