James Gunn bounced back rather spectacularly after being fired from Marvel years ago. He was fired after some deeply problematic old tweets came out, and he did not go away quietly. Like most white guys who have a track record of making money for the studios, Gunn was given a million second chances. He’s currently 58 years old and the co-CEO of Warner Bros’ DC Studios, and Gunn directed the new Superman movie. Which is why he gave a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone – go here to read. A lot of the superhero and comic-book talk went over my head. It’s fine if that’s your thing, but on Martin Scorsese’s side on that issue – hilariously, Gunn once said that Scorsese was clout-chasing superhero movies. However, Gunn said one thing in this interview which I think is so, so important. Some highlights:
His movie was originally called ‘Superman: Legacy’ and now it’s just Superman: “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.”
He was able to crack the Superman story: “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.
Eddie Murphy once said that nearly every bad movie happens because of Hollywood’s habit of setting a production date before they have a finished screenplay. “Yeah, totally. 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.
I’m soooo glad that someone is saying it outloud and that someone is involved with studio franchises. It’s become a HUGE problem – studios are setting the release date for a film and reverse engineering everything from there, including the script. They know when a production should start but not what the story should be or what the actors are going to say. If you followed the years-long Star Wars-at-Disney saga, the “unfinished screenplay” issue was the biggest problem. That’s basically the reason why they’ve had to put the films on hold for years, because they were making Star Wars movies without completed scripts, without stories locked down in preproduction. The superhero movies have had a similar problem for years – they knew the big setpiece action sequences they wanted and they built the story around those setpieces, even if the stories didn’t make much sense. Finish your scripts before the production starts! This is not hard.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
