Fifteen Things We Learnt From James Gunn Talking To Rolling Stone

From The Guardians Of The Galaxy To The Man Of Steel…

James Gunn’s Superman is out next month on 11 July and ahead of that here’s 15 things we learnt from an interview Gunn did with US magazine Rolling Stone…

1. Gunn’s involvement in the forthcoming Supergirl film is not much: “I mean at the very beginning, but I’ve been pretty busy, as you might imagine. I was really involved at the script stage, but then [director] Craig [Gillespie] has just been such a great partner. He’s just been doing his thing. You never know how something cuts together, but right now it looks amazing. It’s really cool stuff.”
2. The Superman film out next month was originally called Superman: Legacy but it went through a title change: “Yeah. I’m always cutting. “Legacy” was really — we do something called a premortem. A premortem is you get together with your group that’s doing the project. It’s usually about a couple months before shooting, and you go, hypothetically, “If it’s an epic disaster, what are the things that we’re doing today that are going to cause it to be an epic disaster? Everyone here can speak freely.” The things you find on other productions are the things that people are whispering. “Oh, God, I don’t know why they cast that actor — he doesn’t fit the role.” Or, “The production designer’s never on time.” One of the things I brought up was, it was called Superman: Legacy. Even though I was the one that gave it that title, I just wasn’t sure. First of all, I’m sick of the superhero title, colon, other-name thing. And then also it seemed to be looking back when we’re looking forward, even though it does have to do with legacy in the movie itself. And everybody was like, “Oh, yeah, no, change it.”
3. He sees that Superman is definitely a film that he couldn’t have made at any other time in his career:”I don’t think the 2020 James could. Everybody knows I was offered Superman in 2018. They also talked to me about Batman earlier than that, but I was in the middle of Guardians 3. If they had come to me in 2018 with Batman, I would’ve said yes. But, yeah, I just couldn’t quite wrap my head around it.”
4. Gunn also sees that working on Guardians offered him a way to make Superman: “I needed the right way in. And that required time to think through a few thousand options before I got to the way that I thought worked. But I do also think that my life, and career, has been a gradual softening of the edges. I still like black comedy. I still have edges. But I used to like provoking a lot. And today, although I still seem to do it, I don’t really like doing that. In my heart, I’m pretty sentimental. I just believe in basic human values. I think Guardians of the Galaxy was a good starter kit for that.”
5. He sees the appeal of Superman as fairly straightforward: “But the very-good nature of him, this really strong belief in what’s right, sometimes perhaps to a fault, is what makes Superman who he is. And that is not Star-Lord or Rocket. That’s not a guy who’s angry or covering up his emotions. He’s pretty pure. And so getting to the place where I could write that character was a journey. In the past I would’ve done it through making fun of the character, and I don’t think that’s what I do here. I’m less afraid now than I used to be. I allow myself to be purely creative more than I used to. And I thought I was being purely creative, but a lot of times it was just anger releasing itself in another way. I’m less afraid of being goofy or sentimental, or boring or straight.”
6. For him, jokes play an important part in his movies:”I have long talking scenes in Guardians, but they are stuffed with jokes. And that’s not the case here. There’s funny stuff that happens in that scene, but it’s all situational. And so allowing myself to write that scene, which is truly about two characters and the different ways they see the world and morality.”
7. Ironically it was being fired from Marvel that gave him the impetus for Superman:”There’s no doubt that without that experience, I don’t think that I would’ve written the Superman that I wrote. I definitely wouldn’t be doing this job if I didn’t get fired, but I don’t know if I’d be doing this job even if it wasn’t for that. I just don’t think that a character that pure would’ve quite appealed to me.”
8. For him, the relationship with actors has also been key throughout his career: “one of the most interesting things for me is my relationship with actors. How I got good at working with people like Chris Pratt is because he came in and I’m like, “Stop. You don’t need to juggle.” Same thing with John Cena. “You don’t need to juggle for the audience to like you. You’re a fucking movie star. You just be present and be yourself and show that natural vulnerability that’s a part of who you are as a human being.” And that speaks to people.”
9. Something that Gunn did in Guardians laid the groundwork for an aspect of Superman too:”Rocket made the world ready for Krypto. Although, in a way, Krypto is way more grounded than Rocket, because Krypto is simply a superpowered dog. He’s just a poorly behaved dog, which is what my dog is. So he’s really easy and fun to write.”
10. Tonally, the director has gone for a very specific feel for the forthcoming film:” Yeah, I think that’s the biggest tonally novel thing about this film. And it really is based on the tone of [2000s comic book series] All-Star Superman in a lot of ways. And taking that tone into a cinematic realm is not the usual thing for a superhero movie, or for any movie. So I really was thinking a lot when making the film about graphic novels more than movies.”
11. Fantastic Four: First Steps is out the same month and he does see a few similarities between it and Superman:”do you really think they’re alike? I’m really embracing the Silver Age of it all, but I don’t think that it’s as stylized, or at least not stylized in the same way. And it’s not as retro. There are retro-futuristic aspects, because we’ve got Daily Planet with a big fucking [globe]. And the robots, the machinery. So I can see where there’s certain similarities.”
12. Krypto was the key for Gunn in terms of Superman:”It was Krypto. The beginning of the movie is the first thing I wrote, with Krypto coming to Superman in the snow and Krypto taking him home. That really was about the tone of the whole movie. It’s a flying dog who wears a cape, but that led immediately to the robots, to the fortress rising from the ground, to the device that isn’t in the comics — the giant magnifying glass, which powers him up more quickly than just the regular sun would. Bringing all those elements into a Superman movie in a way that hasn’t happened — not to mention that he exists in a world where superheroes, or some form of metahumans, have existed for 300 years. It’s just a different thing.”
13. For Gunn, he sees very specific reasons as to why mainstream Hollywood is going through a tricky patch at the moment:”Listen, you can do everything right and make a bad movie. I’m really compassionate towards people that put their all into a movie. I know some people that were my former workers at Marvel — people who made some of the worst movies. There were people that were lazy and didn’t put their time in. And then there were other directors that worked really hard and maybe didn’t have the best movie come out, but they did everything they could. But I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.”
14. For him, the script is everything:”We just killed a project. Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good. And we’ve been really lucky so far, because Supergirl’s script was so fucking good off the bat. And then Lanterns came in, and the script was so fucking good. Clayface, same thing. So fucking good. So we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.”
15. For him, if he ever runs out of steam, then he’ll leave the industry and he seems quite sanguine about this question:”If I do, then I’ll go raise goats. I really am fine. There’s a lot of directors who get worse as they get older, and I don’t wanna do that. Or maybe I do — I don’t know. It’s like, if it runs out — it hasn’t so far. But who knows?”

Read the whole interview here