Watch GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Featurette on Baby Groot, Plus James Gunn Interview

Is Groot invincible as long as he gets stuck in water?
That’s an unanswered question: Is Baby Groot, Groot? Or is Baby Groot actually Groot’s progeny?

Wow, like how if a nut falls off a tree and then its seed eventually grows a new tree, those are two different trees?
Exactly. It may be answered in the future, but that’s the question.

So does Groot look exactly the same when he grows up again, or is each Groot iteration, like a snowflake, unique?
You’ll have to wait and see until it gets big! He’s still a baby right now.

The talking tree in your movie has inspired a lot of philosophical questions.
It comes from Vin Diesel’s philosophical approach to doing the character, I think.

You animate things before the voice comes in, but were there tweaks to the Groot animation once he did the voice work?
Oh yeah, for sure. We shot Vin with all the dialogue, just like we shot Bradley with Rocket and we shot my brother with Rocket, and that stuff was used. And we shot me for doing certain things for Groot. That was the way we developed the character, in part using those human references.

You were the dancing model for Baby Groot. Were there any animation moments that you had to provide your body for?
Yeah, a lot, at the beginning of the movie especially when we were designing Groot’s walk, because Groot is sort of this amazing slacker, which isn’t brought up much. But he is really lazy in comparison to the other Guardians of the galaxy, and he’s got this very slow slacker pace and he’s always lagging behind and he’s always looking at something other than what somebody is talking about. I don’t think Groot is involved in 90 percent of the conversations that the Guardians have, because he’s always looking and thinking about something else.

And so when we were originally doing the movement test of Groot, of how he moved, and also how he would sit down and his branches would become a part of the chair, and he’d stand up and break away from that, that was all stuff that I shot early on, both in a [motion-capture] suit and just me.

Rocket is an animal, but really has a human mind with his modified human brain. But with Groot… The question is always: Goofy is the human dog and Pluto is dog dog. So is Groot a human tree or a plant tree?
I think he’s an alien life form that is very different from what we are, and to say he’s an animal or a human, both of those things would diminish the importance of what a Groot is.

Are there other Groots?
There may be! There might be! Who knows?

It looks like Gunn is definitely interested in the idea of exploring Groot/Baby Groot in future movies, or just maybe in a different format separate from the movie.  Who knows when it comes to superhero comics.

When asked about the other upcoming Marvel movies, Gunn had this to say:

I actually try to keep Guardians as much its own thing as possible, and they’ve been pretty behind that. I think with the success of the movie, it has made it that Guardians is more the cosmic wing of things. There will be moments where they’ll intersect, but for the most part, it’s not about the Guardians and the Avengers teaming up. That doesn’t interest me. We don’t want to be subservient to The Avengers — I think we’re equal to the Avengers.

James Gunn has definitely proven that Guardians is Avengers’ equal and they can work perfectly well as separate entities, without the help of the other.  Although it would be fun to see the characters together on screen, I definitely approve of them being on their own.

You can read the rest of the interview here.