After a seperate interview promoting Doritos' final Crash the Super Bowl contest, Zack Snyder chatted with The Daily Beast about guiding the DC Extented Universe from Man of Steel to next year's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and beyond. "Chris Terrio and I worked on the script, and he did an amazing job," he praised. "It's great fun, but it also has an eye toward the future — it's going toward Justice League. Early on, once we decided that we were going to put Batman in the movie, then I was like, 'Okay, good! Because you know what that means? It means the floodgates can open!'" Said floodgates will see the debut of Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and more within the cinematic landscape, further driving the film towards the two-part Justice League movie (the first of which Snyder is confirmed to be directing).
The site asked Snyder to share his thoughts on recent comments from film legend Stephen Spielberg (who contends that superhero films "will [go] the way of the Western"), weighing on the lasting legacy of the comic book cinema. "It goes to the mythological nature of the movies that we're making," he said. "I feel like he's right. But I feel like Batman and Superman are transcendent of superhero movies in a way, because they're Batman and Superman. They're not just, like, the flavor of the week Ant-Man — not to be mean, but whatever it is. What is the next Blank-Man?" A jovial jab at the competition, yes, but Snyder does raise a good point about the iconography of the movie's titular heroes.
The rumour mill was abuzz this week with talk that Warner Bros. execs wanted even more emphasis on Ben Affleck's Caped Crusader in the film, and Snyder has revealed, in truth, screentime is quite evenly distributed between the two titular icons... mostly. "Only in that because it's a different Batman than the Batman that was in the Chris Nolan movies, so we have a little bit more explaining to do — and you just had a whole Superman movie," he explained. "But I think only in that way, because you need to understand where Batman is with everything. And that's more toward the beginning, but it evens back out as it goes on."
The dichotomy between the idealogies of the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight has been discussed time and time again in the comic book community, and the director offered his overall view on their conflict."They’re actually opposite sides of the same coin," said Snyder. "It’s interesting because Batman's a man and Superman's a god, if you think about it in those terms. So their relationship is very contentious. What Superman sees as Batman's limits, Batman sees as Superman trying to control him, acting like an absolute dictator."
"What we went after was the humanity of each character," he continued. "We tried to say, 'What would Batman have to do to unravel Superman, and what would Superman have to do to unravel Batman?' Their conflict is based on each others' understanding of the other's weakness. The fun of that is when you're dealing with these mythological creatures—to make them human again, bring them back to earth. And to do that you have to know the rules before you can break them. They have to go all the way to the stratosphere before you can bring them back down." What do you make of Snyder's comments?