In Focus
June 2006
This article reprinted by permission of the
National Association of Theatre Owners, © 2006.
Lost Son of Krypton
by Mike Russell
creenwriters Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty worked 24/7 to help Bryan Singer resurrect the Man of Steel, pitting Superman against his mightiest foe: roiling angst!
uperman’s return to the big screen is one of the most convoluted — and expensive — development stories in Hollywood history.The behind-the-scenes saga is long, silly and mind-bogglingly pricey.
• Tim Burton (“Batman,” “Planet of the Apes”) subsequently developed a version that reportedly jettisoned both the classic costume and Superman’s ability to fly, with Nicolas Cage donning whatever replaced the cape and tights.
• Wolfgang Peterson (“The Perfect Storm”) developed a “Batman vs. Superman” film.
• McG (“Charlie’s Angels”) and Brett Ratner (“Rush Hour”) were at different times attached to direct a controversial script by J.J. Abrams (TV’s “Alias”) that completely re-invented the Superman mythos against the backdrop of an interstellar war.
Dougherty and Harris had some experience with chaotic superhero franchises: They cut their teeth as a screenwriting team on the set of “X2” — working around the clock to help director Singer find a third act mid-shoot.
And when Singer came up with a clever (and more traditional) idea to resurrect the “Superman” franchise in 2004, he brought Dougherty, Harris and much of his “X-Men” production team with him.
With Donner’s blessing, Singer chose to continue, rather than re-boot, the “Superman” series — aiming to capture the spirit (if less of the slapstick) associated with “Superman: The Movie” and “Superman II.” The film follows Clark Kent’s (Brandon Routh) return to Earth after a multi-year trip to the cold remains of his original home, the planet Krypton. He comes back to a more complicated world — one where Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has a fiancé (James Marsden) and a son, and where a just-out-of-prison Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is plotting an elaborate revenge that may or may not involve technology stolen from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
In Focus talked with Dougherty and Harris about Superman, the late Marlon Brando, Lex Luthor, Bryan Singer, Richard Donner, 24/7 screenwriting — and whether “Superman Returns” really is the unofficial “Superman III.” An edited transcript follows.
_____
SUPERMAN’S
EMOTIONAL RESCUE
SUPERMAN’S
EMOTIONAL RESCUE
DAN HARRIS: And that’s literal.
MICHAEL DOUGHERTY: Well, you know, he has to perform certain kinds of rescues and go underwater.
DH: Just wait and see. We’re taking him places he’s never been before. We have the technology.
Q. It must be tough to talk about this film and not be able to say anything.
MD: Actually, it’s kind of fun. Everybody wants to open their Christmas presents early these days.
MD: Mm-hm. It gives people a lot of small appetizers. But it also calms people’s fears — because there was definitely a concern that we were gonna take things in some weird, wild direction after all the other incarnations [of this project].
Q. Because Superman is essentially invincible, his best crises tend to be spiritual — whether or not to use his powers for selfish ends, his love life, his adoptee status. What are his spiritual struggles in your movie?
MD: Well, they’re not so much spiritual as they are emotional.
What he’s dealing with [in “Superman Returns”] is that he’s come back to a world that’s changed in his absence — and what’s worse, the person he wants to build a relationship with, Lois Lane, has moved on.
Q. And has a kid.
MD: And has a kid. It’s a situation that completely throws him for a loop.
DH: We have this problem, where the guy’s indestructible and stands for “Truth, Justice and the American Way”: very strong moral values that aren’t necessarily outdated, but we’ve seen them before. And you can’t change that about Superman — [those values] are as indestructible as he is.
It was Bryan’s big idea to send him away for a number of years, then bring him back — and have the world kind of move on and change. Bringing Superman back into a world he doesn’t fit in was the heart of the drama.
Lois Lane has moved on. His mother has moved on in certain ways. He comes back to situations that aren’t cats in trees.
DH: It’s been distorted in the last 20 years. That’s at the heart of Superman’s struggle.
And he’s a good person who doesn’t lie — he doesn’t break up relationships.
It’s the problem that’s almost impossible for him to solve.
_____
SUPERDAD RETURNS
SUPERDAD RETURNS
MD: It was really important to us. Bryan’s original pitch involved bringing Brando back. It wouldn’t feel right to have some other actor or sound-alike appear as Jor-El.
DH: He was so iconic. If we could work him in without faking or denigrating anything, how special would that be?
Q. Did it take a lot of negotiating to get the Brando footage?
MD: There was the typical hassle, but it wasn’t a drawn-out process. I think we were all surprised how quickly things worked out.
Q. Did you have to write around the old Brando footage, or?…
DH: There’s no faking or voice-alikes. There won’t be any of that.
DH: Uh, in a sense. It’s very cool the way it’s done; I can’t really get into it. It’s partly things we remember Jor-El being part of.
_____
IS THIS
'SUPERMAN III'?
IS THIS
'SUPERMAN III'?
MD: [sighs] OK, um, it’s funny — I think Bryan and Dan and I need to sit down and discuss this answer.
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 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 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. 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 you’re expected to use well.
DH: 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!”
_____
SCREENWRITING
24/7
SCREENWRITING
24/7
MD: Oh, God, yes.
DH: [snorts] God, have we had any 3 a.m. writing sessions…. I spent two birthdays in Australia working, and the majority of those nights were 3 a.m. sessions. And, you know, we’re all better people for it.
MD: When you’re working on a film like this, you have to be available 24/7. Even now that we’re in post, there are always new ideas creeping in. I’m not surprised if I get a random phone call.
MD: Red Bull. It’s that simple. Red Bull, Red Bull, Red Bull.
DH: The difference between “Superman Returns” and “X-Men 2” is that the three of us nailed out the story of the movie very early on.
We took a vacation on July 4, 2004, and we started coming up with the idea. And we were all in such agreement that it all kind of poured out at once. We put together 80 or 90 percent of the movie in three days.
We worked all weekend, and on the plane ride home, we worked on the treatment. The good news is that it really hasn’t changed much since then. We had a strong backbone. So from one draft to the next, it wasn’t like “X-Men 2,” where we were constantly re-writing the third act. It’s mostly character work, trying to get our story as clear as possible, trying to get our dialogue as witty as possible.
Q. The scene I’m most looking forward to seeing is the one featured in the teaser trailer — where he’s floating alone, above the Earth, listening to the planet.
DH: Yeah. It’s turned into one of the more iconic moments in the movie. It was in the first treatment.
The question was, “How does Superman know who to save? Let’s clarify those rules.” And so we decided he has a perch where he goes, high above the Earth, and he hears every single sound on the planet all at once, and he whittles them down by importance, basically — until he finds that once sound he’s gotta go after.
It solved a logic issue for us, and became a beautiful kind of metaphor.
_____
THE JOY OF LEX
THE JOY OF LEX
MD: That was always one of the hardest parts about the film, finding the right tone for Lex. Because as much as we enjoyed Gene Hackman’s performance, there was a large segment of the population that was like, “Can we get a more serious and menacing villain here?”
DH: We know Hackman’s classic performance, and when he was on, he was really on — but some of the comedy doesn’t work nowadays. How do we change that character and move him forward?
MD: But at the same time, he enjoys what he does. You want to like the guy. He’s not as grim as someone like Magneto, say, or as serious or heavy-handed. We had to throw in a dash of comedy — but black comedy.
Q. Some recent comics have given Lex Luthor a very valid point of view: Superman is an alien being. Maybe we shouldn’t trust him.
DH: Yeah. In this movie, someone says, “Well, you’re not a god, Lex.” And he says, “No, I’m not a god. Gods are selfish little beings who fly around in red capes and don’t share their powers with mankind.”
I think people are going to be afraid for that confrontation between Superman and Lex Luthor that finally happens, because it’s so built up.
_____
FLEISCHER-ESQUE
FLEISCHER-ESQUE
MD: Yeah, they were. Fleischer had a way of making Superman move that I don’t think we’ve ever seen on the big screen in live action. Only now, with today’s technology, can we make him move as fluidly as Fleischer did. There’s a certain … ease that he has when he’s flying in this film.
Donner did an amazing job with what he had in the late ’70s — but Superman was almost always flying in kind of a straight line, or landing, and that’s as far as he got. But getting that sense of stopping in mid-air, and then darting in an entirely different direction? We can do that now.
Q. It’s great to have a former animator writing this.
MD: We’d be watching the pre-viz — which is kind of an animated storyboard — and I kept finding myself giving criticisms or advice. Bryan would say, “His takeoff doesn’t look right!” And I’d say, “That’s because he has no anticipation — that’s when a character bends his knees before jumping in the air.” That’s an animation term. “His cape needs more secondary action.”
_____
'THIS TOWER OF
VIVID COLOR AND RIGHTEOUSNESS'
'THIS TOWER OF
VIVID COLOR AND RIGHTEOUSNESS'
MD: That’s a first. Yeah.
When we dealt with Brandon on-set, it was like we were dealing with two different people. When he was Clark, he was approachable. But when he was Superman, he had such an imposing presence, it was hard to make eye contact with him or even talk to him. I think we felt like the characters in the film — Superman is this celebrity who makes you nervous.
DH: The second he walked in the makeup room — and he had the curl done, and he was like 6-foot-6 with the boots — we all went, “Gad. Holy shit.” He was this tower of vivid color and righteousness in that all-white room with grey floors. Ever since then, it’s been a whole other movie.
I felt myself reacting to a character, not an actor. I think the only other person I’ve felt that way around was Patrick Stewart as Xavier. There was something reverent about Patrick in that wheelchair.
_____
READ MY LIPS:
NO NEW POWERS
READ MY LIPS:
NO NEW POWERS
Was there a conscious effort to pare down of that sort of thing for this film?
MD: There was never any effort to pare down his powers — but we definitely did stay away from trying to introduce any new ones — like, say, telekinetic finger rays and cellophane “S”es. His powers are being used in, I guess, a realistic fashion.
So no. No strange new abilities.
Q. No magic amnesia kiss?
MD: Yeah.
Q. Singer had a yen for explaining every comic-book convention in his “X-Men” films — even seemingly silly elements like Magneto’s helmet always had a purpose. I’m dying to see how he explains the Super-suit and the “S.”
MD: Well, you know, we didn’t really try to go out of our way to do that. The suit, we all agreed, has a Kryptonian origin, but we didn’t go into detail about that. And as for the “S,” it’s definitely a family symbol.
Q. Yeah, that was pretty clearly established in the first film.
MD: In fact, I believe that was Donner’s idea. And we just continued that.
DH: It was just a matter of exploring it. When we see the “S,” is it just something we saw on a tinfoil suit? [laughs] Was it part of the architecture somewhere? What does it mean?
Thank God there was that swath of fabric in the baby’s pod [in “Superman: The Movie”]. That’s the suit. He didn’t make it himself.
Q. Yeah, Donner laid a lot of good groundwork. He really was the man for his time and place.
DH: He really was. And in our development of this movie, we happily echoed what he was doing.
_____
This article reprinted by permission of the National Association of Theatre Owners, © 2006.
Penguin Pop
That Old Bat Magic
Making Moviegoing Magic
The Quest for Quiet
Impossible Movie Force
Kudos Edition!
Multi Tasking Multi Plexes
Fun with Dick and Jane and Judd
Hearing Products Report: Gaining Some Insight by Nanci Linke-Ellis
Three Dimensional Thinking
A Year of InSight
Bringing a Voice to Silence -- The Citizen, © 2004
Finally, big-screen movies for the deaf -- By BRAD BURKE
of the Journal Star July 9, 2004