Superman Homepage

2014 Movie News Archives

April 17, 2014: Zack Snyder Discusses Superman/Batman Movie

Forbes.com has conducted an exclusive interview with "Man of Steel" director Zack Snyder, in which they ask him about the upcoming Superman/Batman film, how Batman became involved, and the feelings of Superman fans towards his movie. Here are a few excerpts from the interview...

MH: When you came aboard Man of Steel, were you thinking in the back of your mind, "I could be the guy who gets to reboot Batman on film too!"

ZS: I gotta be honest, it definitely was a thing that... after Man of Steel finished and we started talking about what would be in the next movie, I started subtly mentioning that it would be cool if he faced Batman. In the first meeting, it was like, "Maybe Batman?" Maybe at the end of the second movie, some Kryptonite gets delivered to Bruce Wayne's house or something. Like in a cryptic way, that's the first time we see him. But then, once you say it out loud, right? You're in a story meeting talking about, like, who should [Superman] fight if he fought this giant alien threat Zod who was basically his equal physically, from his planet, fighting on our turf... You know, who to fight next? The problem is, once you say it out loud, then it's kind of hard to go back, right? Once you say, "What about Batman?" then you realize, "Okay, that's a cool idea. What else?" I mean, what do you say after that? ...But I'm not gonna say at all that when I took the job to do Man of Steel that I did it in a subversive way to get to Batman. I really believe that only after contemplating who could face [Superman] did Batman come into the picture.

MH: When I first saw Watchmen, I came out thinking "That's the way to approach a DC superhero team-up universe where the characters exist together, pseudo-realism and peering into the political implications and social backlash that would exist against costumed vigilantes, and really showing us the true nature of the sort of violence that would occur rather than sanitized bloodless, restrained application of force." Can we expect some of those same kind of sensibilities to inform your approach to this next film? Not storywise, but that idea - which you mentioned earlier - of putting these realistic elements on screen, but also alongside some of the more fantastic things like Dr. Manhattan for example, but it all fits so perfectly?

ZS: ...I think with Superman we have this opportunity to place this icon within the sort of real world we live in. And I think that, honestly, the thing I was surprised about in response to Superman was how everyone clings to the Christopher Reeve version of Superman, you know? How tightly they cling to those ideas, not really the comic book version but more the movie version... If you really analyze the comic book version of Superman, he's killed, he's done all the things - I guess the rules that people associate with Superman in the movie world are not the rules that really apply to him in the comic book world, because those rules are different. He's done all the things and more that we've shown him doing, right? It's just funny to see people really taking it personally... because I made him real, you know, I made him feel, or made consequences [in] the world. I felt like, it was the same thing in Watchmen. We really wanted to show it wasn't just like they thought, like the PG-13 version where everyone just gets up and they're fine. I really wanted to show the violence is real, people get killed or get hurt, and it's not fun or funny. And I guess for me, it was like I wanted a hero in Superman that was a real hero and sort of reflected the world we live in now...

Read the entire interview at the Forbes website.