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February 6, 2007: Al Gough Talks “Smallville” and “Superman Returns”

IF Magazine sat down with Al Gough to ask him a few questions about "Smallville", whether there will be a Season 7, what he thought about "Superman Returns", and more. Here's an extract from the interview...

Q: It's pretty rare to have a feature film [SUPERMAN RETURNS], while you're still on TV. When you first started the show, you told me D.C. was nervous about you and Miles dipping into the comic book well too much because of the revisionist SUPERMAN movie in development. Did they get concerned when SUPERMAN RETURNS was finally greenlit since it is more in line with the original films, much like SMALLVILLE is?

GOUGH: The great thing ultimately, was our biggest savior was Bryan Singer. Bryan was a fan of the show. We had a gentleman's agreement. Miles, myself, Bryan, [SUPERMAN RETURNS scribes] Dan [Harris] and Mike [Dougherty] the writers, we would keep each other in the loop. Bryan invited us down to Australia. We sort of pitched out Season Five. Bryan offered to let us read the script and we said "well, quite frankly we don't want that responsibility. But you tell us if any of this is conflicting or things that are not going to jive and things you want us to stay away from." For a television show, you have that flexibility. And it was a great working relationship. Before that, when it was the McG version of the movie and it was another origin story and Krypton didn't blow up, and Lex Luthor was a Kryptonian -- there was a year there where it was very tough, in that weird kind of way. We were in the weird position of arguing 60 years of comics history to them, where they were willing to have a planet where Superman is on Earth but Krypton still existed. It was bizarre. Thankfully Bryan came in and said, I don't want to do SMALLVILLE, I want to do a SUPERMAN movie, and he did SUPERMAN RETURNS.

Q: What did you think of the movie?

GOUGH: I enjoyed the movie a lot. I think that airplane sequence is great. I thought Brandon did a very good job. I like Kevin Spacey. Doing the show every week is a little weird and it's a little weird to watch the movie, because to me Lex was a bit of a hybrid of [Michael] Rosenbaum and Gene Hackman. Some times he was really vicious and other times he was sort of goofy. All and all I enjoyed the movie, I think Bryan clearly has great affection for the character and I'm looking forward to the sequel, because in a weird way, he did another origin story. Now that's all sort of been set up, I'm curious to see them bring in a villain that's not Lex Luthor and curious to see where they take that "Superman has a son thing," which was a huge thing and very daring. There are a lot of places to go with that story and I'm curious to see what they do.

Read the complete interview at the IF Magazine website.