2006 Movie News Archives

Writers

June 6, 2006: “Superman Returns” Writers Interviewed in In Focus Magazine

In Focus magazine has put online their indepth interview with "Superman Returns" scriptwriters Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty. The interview comes in the standard version seen in print, or an extended version for the website only. Here's an excerpt from the interview...

    Q: Is "Superman Returns" the unofficial "Superman III"?

    MD: [sighs] Okay, um, it's funny - I think Bryan and Dan and I need to sit down and discuss this answer before we talk to too many other reporters.

    My personal belief - and I know Bryan has been quoted as saying differently - is that this is not "Superman III." I don't feel like it's appropriate to discount "Superman III" and "IV," because a lot of people put a lot of hard work into them, and even if you don't like them or don't think they're up to a certain quality, they're still "Superman" movies.

    DH: It's complicated. If this is a sequel to "I" and "II," then everything in "I" and "II" happened. But if we're picking and choosing what we want - which is what I think is what happened, using our memories of "Superman: The Movie" to build our back story - then I can guarantee that it's not the specifics, but the broad strokes of those movies that are part of the "Superman" we're making.

    MD: The comparison I like to make is that they're closer to James Bond films. We had a series that starred Sean Connery, and then the torch is passed to another actor, all the way up to Daniel Craig. But they don't call a sequel "James Bond 19," and they don't necessarily refer to events that took place in the previous film. But you do have certain conventions and supporting characters that you're expected to use well. There's always the opening with the iris and the theme song.

    So I think we're kind of taking a different franchise in the same direction. We're not going back to square one.

    We're not doing a remake. We push the story forward.

    DH: Except we're not working with a villain of the day, or a villain of the movie.... It's a "Returns" story. What does that mean? We're trying to have our cake and eat it too - we're remembering things we loved about "Superman I" and "II," and moving forward at the same time. And we've used a big plot device to let us do both.

    MD: But I think I have to sit down with Bryan and discuss this with him, because he went to a comic-book convention and said, "Yeah, I guess you could think of this as 'Superman III.'" I just slapped my head and said, "Oh! No! No!"

Read the complete extended website version of this interview at the In Focus magazine website.



2006 Movie News

Listed below are all the Movie News items archived for 2006 organized into various categories:

“Superman Returns” Movie News:

Christopher Reeve Movie News: Hollywoodland (George Reeves) Movie News: Direct-to-DVD Animated Movie News: Other Movie News:

Back to the News Archive Contents page.

Back to the Latest News page.