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July 4, 2006: Bryan Singer Talks About “Superman Returns”

iF Magazine conducted an interview with Bryan Singer the day before "Superman Returns" was officially released to cinemas. Here are a few excerpts from the interview...

Q: You've said before how exhausting it is to do these films. Can you elaborate for those who don't really grasp the gargantuan effort it takes as a director to prepare, shoot and do post on a film of SUPERMAN RETURNS' scale?

SINGER: Normally on a film, the focus would merely be on script development and casting, and that's what you do leading up to the making of a film. With these types of films, there's so much involved in the storyboarding, pre-production design and pre-visualization, it's so overwhelming and time consuming. Combined with the script development and the casting, by the time you're done with it, you're completely exhausted and almost ready to finish. You feel like you've completed a large task and suddenly now you have to begin shooting the movie. And unlike a normal movie, which takes 12 or 13 weeks to shoot, this takes over five months to shoot. By the time you're in the middle of that aspect of it - 75 days into shooting - there's just a physical fatigue of shooting that many hours. Plus I spent a lot of time in the cutting room, combined with keeping the whole story, the plot and emotional aspect of the story in your head over that period of time, you're very fatigued in every single way. And when that's over, you can't just chill in the editing room and put together the movie, because you're rolling out visual effects by the hundreds every day. So by the time you're done, it's this two-year, non-stop commitment and it's very unusual and kind of unlike any other process. You're almost amazed when you step back and actually go, "oh wow, it came out kind of like I thought it might." It always is a miracle to me.

Q: One of the things I appreciated about what you did with SUPERMAN RETURNS is capturing that sense of wonder audiences felt when they saw that first SUPERMAN movie in 1978, but it was updated enough that it works for modern audiences. And I think that's why some of the later SUPERMAN movies failed, because they forgot what SUPERMAN was about. It's not really about the villains per se, it's more about this doomed romance that can never be satisfied between Clark Kent and Lois Lane.

SINGER: Someone was asking me this the other night. Superman is Superman, but Lex Luthor is a human obstacle, how are you going to treat that. But Luthor has always been mind over muscle, he will find a way [to battle Superman], but the real obstacle has always been this 70-year romance from across the newsroom between this kid Clark who went to become a reporter and this woman Lois Lane. The fact that he happens to also be a superhero is almost an impediment because that's who she naturally falls for. What's fun about this movie is both characters come into emotional question and that and the notion of his isolation were the two things that appealed to me -- besides the fact that I'm a huge Superman fan.

Read the complete interview at the official iF Magazine website.