Ant-Man DVD: 10 Things We Learned From Director's Commentary

9. Making Scott Lang The Right Amount Of Criminal Was Hard

Paul Rudd makes an interesting point that the character of Scott Lang was a hard balancing act. They didn't want him to appear too saintly, after all, in order to give him a redemptive arc, but nor could he be a complete b*stard. The crime that Scott went down for, his noble break-in of Vista Corp, ended up being the perfect tightrope walk. It implied that Scott had done a number of other non-heroic robberies before the Vista job (as no one gets that good at crime the first or even second time out), so while Scott was a self-sacrificing pariah for his good-bad deed, he had also implicated himself as having a far dodgier past. It's a win-win, character-wise. The protagonist remains a badass whilst also being sympathetic to the audience - a difficult thing to achieve, as Rudd so succinctly puts it himself.