James Gunn Is Certified Super

Superman hit a high tide line with Superman II back in 1980. Since then it has failed to every reach the heights the first two films with Christopher Reeves achieved. Things got particularly dire when DC tried launching their cinematic universe with a dark gritty Batman inspired tone to set itself apart from Marvels pack of films. This left director Zack Snyder to drag Superman through the dirt for a good decade. Henry Cavill is a fantastic actor, and as Superman looking as they get, but he isn’t super enough to salvage the mess he was given to act in. But a new dawn is rising, and a new star is born as David Corenswet (The Politician, Twisters) takes his biggest role to date under the watchful eye of Director James Gunn.

The new Superman film, in it’s bombastic, lighthearted optimistic energy has managed to snag critical acclaim from critics at a time when most DC films are sinking without a trace. It’s nabbed an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, slightly edging out A Dark Night Rises and on par with Superman II. Finally the guy who wears his undies on the outside is getting the respect he deserves.

James Gunn has had his fair share of hero flicks. In fact he made one of my favourite subversions of the genre ever “Super” starring Rainn Wilson and Elliot Page. From there he did The Guardians of The Galaxy series and The Suicide Squad (the good one). In interview he talked about how he got to where he is today.

Why did you opt to debut DC Studios’ feature film slate with a Superman film?

I think that was a really practical thing. Number one, I’m sitting here not because of my dreams, I’m sitting here because of Peter Safran’s dreams. It has been his dream his entire life to make a Superman movie. And so, I have to acknowledge the importance that played in him gently goading and manipulating me into writing, directing and making this film. But I also think that Superman is the start of it all. He’s the first superhero. He’s an incredibly important character to DC. There’s a trinity, and it’s Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. But we’ve seen a lot more of Wonder Woman and Batman over the past few years than we have of Superman, so I felt like it was important to really put our best foot forward with DC Studios, and that was to start with Superman.

You had a vision to do something unusual in the genre today: to create a story about doing good. Being good. Where did that come from?

When I took on Guardians of the Galaxy, I knew that we had had 25 years of sort of dark and dreary science fiction movies, where everything was supposed to be real because it was dark, and I felt like there was a place for color. Kind of like the old school look of fiction that had been missing from movies. Superman is a character who’s really about as good as a human being could be. He’s good natured, but just being purely good doesn’t mean he always does the right thing, logically. The movie is about a character who is purely good in a world that isn’t good, and I think that’s something we don’t really see. Everybody’s an anti-hero, and I think that when characters seem good, there is a tendency to kind of make fun of them and see them as goofy. But this character is noble and he’s beautiful, and he’s not always right and he makes mistakes. I get emotional because what this movie is about is—why do we love Superman so much? Is it because he can punch planets or pick up skyscrapers? I don’t think it is. I think it’s because of his innate goodness and, and his humanity, even though he’s an alien, and the fact that he is okay with being pollyannaish, it’s okay that he’s being optimistic, it’s okay that he’s vulnerable.

How do you think the character has changed over the years and what were your main influences for your version of Superman?

Superman’s powers have changed drastically throughout the years, kind of up and down, not really just in one direction. When he started out, he was just a really strong guy that could leap a tall building in a single bound, but not fly. He could punch people, but he wasn’t invincible. Bullets would bounce off of him, but that was kind of the limit. And then he kept getting more and more powerful until in the 1970s, before the John Byrne era, he was reshaping planets with a punch. Or even in the first movie, making the world go backwards in time. There were times when he was so powerful that it was hard for me to imagine him being as interesting as I would want him to be, or it was hard for me to imagine relating to him, but then a couple of things happened. Number one was Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, which was incredibly influential to me. I fell in love with the character in All-Star Superman, and I wasn’t a child when that book came out. To me, All-Star Superman showed how Superman’s power is actually part of his appeal. He was this good-natured, jaw forward, always-doing-the-right-thing, gung-ho guy who’s incredibly pure, and that was an interesting character to me. Grant really gave him something that I just loved and his goodness was a big inspiration. It’s that side of his personality that became the foundation of the Superman in this movie. In our movie, I’ve made Superman less powerful. He’s not making the world go backwards in time. He’s not punching planets. He’s very strong, he can lift a skyscraper, but he’s not completely invulnerable. In the beginning of the movie we see a Superman who’s bleeding. To me, when I imagined that happening, I thought, “How, how did we get here?”

How did you approach flight differently in this film?

The way we chose to shoot the flying was very complicated. It had David in a lot of different rigs. We’re very lucky that David is a very athletic guy, so he was able to do all of that well. But we worked with Wayne Dalglish, who’s our stunt coordinator, to create a type of flying that was as real as we could possibly make it, to feel it viscerally. I took a lot from watching footage of jet fighters and what it would be like for a human being to actually fly through the air. You realize there are certain things that you’ve never seen in a Superman movie. For instance, somebody will be speeding through the air at supersonic speed and their hair is just doing a little bit of a wiggle from the wind. We wanted to be able to show his hair really moving in the way it would be if you’re moving beyond the speed of sound. And so it was a really complicated but fun thing to figure out. From the very beginning, I wrote about four pages on the theory of the action and how we were going to shoot it and what we were going to do, because we also wanted to treat the cameras as if they were generally being held by other flying people. The cameras needed to have some movement to them, as if we were actually trying to track these guys that were flying throughout space. It was a lot of fun to do that, fun stuff for me to shoot.

To introduce the world to your vision for Superman, you cast David Corenswet—what made him your ideal Superman and Clark Kent?

I think anybody that sees the movie knows why David Corenswet is Superman. David is somebody who I saw in my friend Ti West’s film Pearl, and thought that guy should audition for Superman. It was very interesting because people start auditioning usually with self-tapes that they send in to John Papsidera, our casting director. I got the first round of self-tapes and it was a lot of actors, maybe 30 Supermans and 30 Loises. But within that, in that first day, were both Rachel Brosnahan reading for Lois and David Corenswet reading for Superman. Now, Lois I thought I would find, because Lois is not as physically restrictive, where Superman is very specific. And I was afraid of not being able to find the right Superman. Luckily, I saw David reading on the first day, and he was amazing. One of the main scenes that the actors were reading from was a scene where Superman is arguing with Lois about his place in the world. David was great, when you see him in that scene in the movie, you realize this guy’s just a fantastic actor, and he also happens to look and sound a lot like Superman. He’s also a square in real life, like Superman. He listens to old jazz standards and swing music.

It’s at a rare point of vulnerability in the opening of the film that you introduce a character who has long been a favorite in the comics, Krypto—what prompted you to include him?

Krypto the Superdog! An often frivolous character from DC Comics who I’ve always liked. That beginning of the movie was the beginning of the story for me, that was me finding out how Superman got to that place and what happened. Having Krypto come to his rescue at the beginning of the movie was adding the whole spin to what this Superman movie was. It wasn’t the Donner Superman. It wasn’t Zack [Snyder]’s Superman. It is a different Superman, where there’s a superdog that flies around and also can shoot beams out of his eyes, where there are other superheroes. It’s a world where metahumans have existed for years and Superman just happens to be the greatest of them, although we’re meeting him at a time before he’s quite reached that stature.

Can you share a little about the origin of Krypto—your version of Krypto?

Krypto was inspired by my dog, Ozu. He’s named after the great Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. We got him from a rescue with all these dogs, and he was the one dog that was terrified of me. He was very scrawny and skinny, but he had one ear sticking up and it was like a beacon to me. So, for some reason, I was attracted to this silly dog, and I brought him home. And he didn’t know people. He was about a year old, he had never really been touched or interacted with human beings, so he didn’t have much use for me whatsoever. And he loved my other dog, instantly followed her around everywhere really bothering her. He also proceeded to destroy my house. He tore up all our furniture. He destroyed every shoe he could get his paws on. He ate my laptop. For real. Destroyed my laptop. And every time anything vaguely resembling an animal came on screen, he would attack the television screen and attack the furniture around the television screen. He was the worst dog you’ve ever seen in your life. He was biting my feet constantly and so I had to wear shoes around the house when I normally like to be barefoot in my house. He would bite my feet when I was on the phone, so I couldn’t scream at him and also I couldn’t scream in pain. Instead I would sit on top of my kitchen counter and cross my legs and try to get over in a corner, and then all of a sudden, he would jump up onto the counter and start biting my feet anyway. And for some reason, I thought, “Oh, what if this awful, terrible, maniac dog had superpowers? We’d be in real trouble.” And then I thought, maybe Krypto is terrible, and that was the start of the movie, adding this unexpected element, this terrible dog. So, Krypto is Ozu. We literally brought Ozu in and scanned him, because Ozu could never be a stand in. We had a wonderful dog by the name of Jolene, who is every kind of respectable, a smart dog, not an idiot dog like my dog Ozu. So, we scanned Ozu, enlarged him a bit and turned him white, and that’s Krypto in the movie.