Director/Writer/Producer James Gunn is the prolific filmmaker behind some of today’s most notable pop culture content and the Co-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of DC Studios alongside Peter Safran.
Gunn’s film and television credits include the Warner Bros. feature “The Suicide Squad,” Marvel’s entire “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise, the Emmy-nominated HBO Max television series “The Peacemaker,” cult classic features “Slither,” “Super,” and many more. Most recently, Gunn wrote and directed the third and final “Guardians” feature, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” which was released on May 5, 2023. At the end of its opening weekend, the film exceeded its global expectations and had earned a whopping total of $289.3 million from international and domestic audiences and just recently passed $835 million worldwide ahead of its digital release. In 2019, Gunn produced the drama/thriller, “Brightburn” starring Elizabeth Banks for Sony and produced the horror feature “The Belko Expirement” starring John Gallager Jr. and Tony Goldwyn for Orion Pictures.
BACK TO SUPERMAN FILM
Why did you opt to debut DC Studios’ feature film slate with a Superman film?
I think that was a really practical thing. Number one, I’m sitting here not because of my dreams, I’m sitting here because of Peter Safran’s dreams. It has been his dream his entire life to make a Superman movie. And so, I have to acknowledge the importance that played in him gently goading and manipulating me into writing, directing and making this film. But I also think that Superman is the start of it all. He’s the first superhero. He’s an incredibly important character to DC. There’s a trinity, and it’s Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. But we’ve seen a lot more of Wonder Woman and Batman over the past few years than we have of Superman, so I felt like it was important to really put our best foot forward with DC Studios, and that was to start with Superman.
What was the moment like when you cracked the case, so to speak, of how to approach a Superman story?
It was the first few pages. I had played with a lot of different things, but it really was the moment with Superman beaten in the ground in the middle of what looks like the Arctic. And then seeing Krypto coming—who’s just a little jerk, coming and trying to play with him, but beating him up and hurting him—and then going into the Fortress of Solitude with the Superman robots. Then intercutting that with Lex and this scheme that he has, masterminding all these different people that are working for him. I think that’s when I really knew where it went after I had been trying to crack it for years and years and years.
You had a vision to do something unusual in the genre today: to create a story about doing good. Being good. Where did that come from?
When I took on Guardians of the Galaxy, I knew that we had had 25 years of sort of dark and dreary science fiction movies, where everything was supposed to be real because it was dark, and I felt like there was a place for color. Kind of like the old school look of fiction that had been missing from movies. Superman is a character who’s really about as good as a human being could be. He’s good natured, but just being purely good doesn’t mean he always does the right thing, logically. The movie is about a character who is purely good in a world that isn’t good, and I think that’s something we don’t really see. Everybody’s an anti-hero, and I think that when characters seem good, there is a tendency to kind of make fun of them and see them as goofy. But this character is noble and he’s beautiful, and he’s not always right and he makes mistakes. I get emotional because I what this movie is about is—why do we love Superman so much? Is it because he can punch planets or pick up skyscrapers? I don’t think it is. I think it’s because of his innate goodness and, and his humanity, even though he’s an alien, and the fact that he is okay with being pollyannaish, it’s okay that he’s being optimistic, it’s okay that he’s vulnerable.
When did you first fall in love with the character Superman? The comics? Previous films?
I’ve always liked Superman. I think as a kid I was really attracted to the Superman family comics, with Superman and Supergirl and Krypto and the whole gang. And I was a huge fan of the Richard Donner film as a child—the score and everything about it just kind of blew my mind. It was at a time when I was starting to become more aware of how important films were to me in my life, and that was different from how important films were to other people in their lives.
How do you think the character has changed over the years and what were your main influences for your version of Superman?
Superman’s powers have changed drastically throughout the years, kind of up and down, not really just in one direction. When he started out, he was just a really strong guy that could leap a tall building in a single bound, but not fly. He could punch people, but he wasn’t invincible. Bullets would bounce off of him, but that was kind of the limit. And then he kept getting more and more powerful until in the 1970s, before the John Byrne era, he was reshaping planets with a punch. Or even in the first movie, making the world go backwards in time. There were times when he was so powerful that it was hard for me to imagine him being as interesting as I would want him to be, or it was hard for me to imagine relating to him, but then a couple of things happened. Number one was Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, which was incredibly influential to me. I fell in love with the character in All-Star Superman, and I wasn’t a child when that book came out. To me, All-Star Superman showed how Superman’s power is actually part of his appeal. He was this good-natured, jaw forward, always doing-the-right-thing, gung-ho guy who’s incredibly pure, and that was an interesting character to me.
Grant really gave him something that I just loved and his goodness was a big inspiration. It’s that side of his personality that became the foundation of the Superman in this movie. In our movie, I’ve made Superman less powerful. He’s not making the world go backwards in time. He’s not punching planets.
He’s very strong, he can lift a skyscraper, but he’s not completely invulnerable. In the beginning of the movie we see a Superman who’s bleeding. To me, when I imagined that happening, I thought, “How, how did we get here?”
This may sound strange, but the main thing the character was to me was the thing that made me the happiest: when strangers or friends would call me it. I didn’t grow up watching the Donner movies, the Chris Reeve movies. I knew who Christopher Reeve was and I knew that he played Superman, but we didn’t grow up watching the films. I didn’t grow up reading the comic books. I knew who Superman was as a character, but never was particularly connected to him. So, I think my first connection to the character was when somebody would say I was like him. I have a weird story. It was in college. I was living with two close friends and classmates, and the smoke alarm went off. I ran out of my room, grabbed a chair, stood on the chair, and reached up and silenced the smoke alarm. And one of my roommates said, you literally are Superman, you just showed up and saved the day. And I think anybody’s lucky to be somebody who people feel can be there in the nick of time, keep calm and positive in a difficult situation. Not that I ever felt like, or thought that I was like Superman, but I really loved when I could do even a little thing to make somebody else feel that. The upshot of that is that the character for me is bigger than any one iteration or interpretation, it’s a sort of a sense, a feeling that somebody is looking out for you and somebody knows what to do. Or if they don’t know what to do, at least they can not know what to do with a smile on their face, and they don’t panic. So that, I think, at its core, is Superman. DAVID CORENSWET – SUPERMAN / CLARK KENT –
To introduce the world to your vision for Superman, you cast David Corenswet—what made him your ideal Superman and Clark Kent?
I think anybody that sees the movie knows why David Corenswet is Superman. David is somebody who I saw in my friend Ti West’s film Pearl, and thought that guy should audition for Superman. It was very interesting because people start auditioning usually with self-tapes that they send in to John Papsidera, our casting director. I got the first round of self-tapes and it was a lot of actors, maybe 30 Supermans and 30 Loises. But within that, in that first day, were both Rachel Brosnahan reading for Lois and David Corenswet reading for Superman. Now, Lois I thought I would find, because Lois is not as physically restrictive, where Superman is very specific. And I was afraid of not being able to find the right Superman. Luckily, I saw David reading on the first day, and he was amazing. One of the main scenes that the actors were reading from was a scene where Superman is arguing with Lois about his place in the world. David was great, when you see him in that scene in the movie, you realize this guy’s just a fantastic actor, and he also happens to look and sound a lot like Superman. He’s also a square in real life, like Superman. He listens to old jazz standards and swing music.
The dynamic between Superman/Clark and Lois is key to the story you’ve crafted—what do we need to know about your version of Lois?
I think Lois has a much more tumultuous past than Superman, which is saying a lot because Superman’s planet exploded and he was sent here as a baby. But other than that one fact, Superman had this tremendously supportive upbringing with these two wonderful people who loved him dearly and he was the apple of their eyes. Whereas I think Lois’s past was a little crazier than that. She’s tough. I love Margot Kidder in Donner’s Superman, but she is on the back foot. She is in love with Superman, and he’s Superman. In this movie, you see that Lois is more than a match for Superman, and you see why somebody as cool and as powerful and as good as he is, would fall in love with her. She’s idealistic and she has integrity, but she doesn’t necessarily believe in goodness. And through this relationship, with the wisdom of Lois and the purity of Superman, they come together in this really great way.
It’s at a rare point of vulnerability in the opening of the film that you introduce a character who has long been a favorite in the comics, Krypto—what prompted you to include him?
Krypto the Superdog! An often frivolous character from DC Comics who I’ve always liked. That beginning of the movie was the beginning of the story for me, that was me finding out how Superman got to that place and what happened. Having Krypto come to his rescue at the beginning of the movie was adding the whole spin to what this Superman movie was. It wasn’t the Donner Superman. It wasn’t Zack [Snyder]’s Superman. It is a different Superman, where there’s a superdog that flies around and also can shoot beams out of his eyes, where there are other superheroes. It’s a world where metahumans have existed for years and Superman just happens to be the greatest of them, although we’re meeting him at a time before he’s quite reached that stature.
Can you share a little about the origin of Krypto—your version of Krypto?
Krypto was inspired by my dog, Ozu. He’s named after the great Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. We got him from a rescue with all these dogs, and he was the one dog that was terrified of me. He was very scrawny and skinny, but he had one ear sticking up and it was like a beacon to me. So, for some reason, I was attracted to this silly dog, and I brought him home. And he didn’t know people. He was about a year old, he had never really been touched or interacted with human beings, so he didn’t have much use for me whatsoever. And he loved my other dog, instantly followed her around everywhere really bothering her. He also proceeded to destroy my house. He tore up all our furniture. He destroyed every shoe he could get his paws on. He ate my laptop. For real. Destroyed my laptop. And every time anything vaguely resembling an animal came on screen, he would attack the television screen and attack the furniture around the television screen. He was the worst dog you’ve ever seen in your life. He was biting my feet constantly and so I had to wear shoes around the house when I normally like to be barefoot in my house. He would bite my feet when I was on the phone, so I couldn’t scream at him and also I couldn’t scream in pain. Instead I would sit on top of my kitchen counter and cross my legs and try to get over in a corner, and then all of a sudden, he would jump up onto the counter and start biting my feet anyway. And for some reason, I thought, “Oh, what if this awful, terrible, maniac dog had superpowers? We’d be in real trouble.” And then I thought, maybe Krypto is terrible, and that was the start of the movie, adding this unexpected element, this terrible dog. So, Krypto is Ozu. We literally brought Ozu in and scanned him, because Ozu could never be a stand in.
Along with metahumans, you chose to include a lot of other elements from the Superman universe…
I thought this movie could be different in that it could have all those sort of magical realism elements of the fantasy of Superman—flying dogs and giant kaiju and robot helpers and all of these fun things— while keeping the character himself more grounded. Superman is real and rooted in his personality and his relationship to the other characters, in a plot that was dictated by his choices, not by some external forces. The script was so fun to write because of that. It was also very different from anything I had ever written before. Sure, it has some science fiction elements, but I think in some ways, Superman is more grounded than the Guardians films because at its essence, it’s not a comedy. But it’s also more fantastical in certain strange ways. It’s more like a comic book. Really going there with all these big things like the Grant Morrison All-Star Superman does.
You’ve got an incredible partnership with your HODs, why is that so important to you?
My department heads have pretty much stayed the same for the past however many films, from Beth Mickle, my production designer, to Judianna Makovsky, my costume designer, to Henry Braham, my
cinematographer and Lars Winthers, who started as my AD on Guardians Volume II, as our head of
production for DC Studios. I work with the same people again and again and we have a way of
communicating that is intimate because we know each other, we know what each other needs and what each other wants. They know my peculiarities. They know what I focus on, and they know my strengths and weaknesses. Basically we’re a family, and having that family there around you makes the very difficult act of shooting a film more fun.
Let’s talk about some of the environments you’ve created, starting with the Fortress of Solitude, which you filmed in Svalbard, Norway.
The Fortress of Solitude first came about in a time when you could have had a fortress in the middle of the Antarctic and nobody would know. That’s not the case today with technology. So what the fortress is in our movie is actually something that sinks into the ground and comes up when Superman gets close to it, because of his DNA. The design needed to be a part of that, and we took a lot of inspiration from the original Donner movie, we took a lot of inspiration from designs in the comics over the years, and we just created our own thing. Again, we have the high tech Superman stuff with the Superman robots, very much like All-Star Superman. And Beth designed a really wonderful cathedral of crystals and we shot in Svalbard because I wanted to use the natural light and use the natural topography. You need to get things out of nature that you just can’t necessarily get out of the human imagination alone—not to mention the breath that you’ll see because it’s actually that cold. I wanted to make it look as beautiful as possible and to make sure that this is a beautiful piece of photography throughout the whole movie.
You shot in Cleveland, Ohio, birthplace of Superman—what was that like for you?
Ohio was one of my favorite parts of shooting this movie—shooting in Cleveland, the birthplace of Superman. That’s where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster came up with the idea for Superman, so that’s where he was created. But we didn’t go and shoot there because Superman was created there. We went and shot there because it has all this beautiful art deco architecture that is what we wanted the look of Metropolis to be. It just so happened to fit what we were looking for in a city, and also happened to be the birthplace of Superman. And the people were wonderful, the PAs and crew members that we used were fantastic. The Film Commission was really great to work with. We had a great time shooting in Cleveland, and in Cincinnati which is where we shot the Justice Gang’s headquarters, based on the old train station in Cincinnati. Both those cities were fantastic.
How did you approach flight differently in this film?
The way we chose to shoot the flying was very complicated. It had David in a lot of different rigs. We’re very lucky that David is a very athletic guy, so he was able to do all of that well. But we worked with Wayne Dalglish, who’s our stunt coordinator, to create a type of flying that was as real as we could possibly make it, to feel it viscerally. I took a lot from watching footage of jet fighters and what it would
be like for a human being to actually fly through the air. You realize there are certain things that you’ve never seen in a Superman movie. For instance, somebody will be speeding through the air at supersonic speed and their hair is just doing a little bit of a wiggle from the wind. We wanted to be able to show his hair really moving in the way it would be if you’re moving beyond the speed of sound.
And so it was a really complicated but fun thing to figure out. From the very beginning, I wrote about four pages on the theory of the action and how we were going to shoot it and what we were going to do, because we also wanted to treat the cameras as if they were generally being held by other flying people. The cameras needed to have some movement to them, as if we were actually trying to track these guys that were flying throughout space. It was a lot of fun to do that, fun stuff for me to shoot.
DC Studios Presents a Troll Court Entertainment/The Safran Company Production, A James
Gunn Film, Superman, which will be in theaters and IMAX® nationwide on July 11, 2025, and
internationally beginning 9 July 2025, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
