Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey featured a lot of men who were, well, a**holes, but Roman Sionis was quite easily the biggest! That was made clear on a number of occasions, but one of the hardest to watch examples came when the club owner humiliated and undressed a woman who got on his bad side.
Asked by The Hollywood Reporter whether that hard to watch scene was one she had to fight for, filmmaker Cathy Yan explained that it was a hard sell to execs at Warner Bros.
"I’ll be honest: We had to fight to keep that scene because it was uncomfortable. It was risky, and we had to fight to keep it at all. There are cuts of the movie without it. I’m really glad that we kept it because I think it’s important. I think that a lot of people have been very impacted by that scene," Yan revealed.
"I think it’s a huge turning point for Roman; it’s a huge turning point for Canary, and the way that we shot it was hopefully not about the sexual violence upon the woman. It was more about Roman, what he’s capable of and Canary seeing him for who he really is for the first time. Now, she can fully cut herself off from him, and I thought it was a really important scene. So, we fought for it."
Yan was also asked about a scene from the trailers showing Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn headbutting the camera and saying, "Boo!" It was nowhere to be seen in the final cut, and Yan confessed that it wasn't an easy moment to leave on the cutting room floor!
"I really loved it," the filmmaker said. "We added to a lot of the police station sequences because we didn’t have much time to shoot during principal. So, we added a lot more to the police station sequences in the reshoots, which was great. So, some things just didn’t really make sense anymore."
It's not clear whether Yan will be given the opportunity to continue to tell more stories with these characters, but she definitely appears to have a good grasp of what makes them tick.
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