Collider.com recently caught up with screenwriter and producer Greg Berlanti to talk about his involvement with the new ABC series No Ordinary Family. The discussion inevitably turned to the Warner Bros projects Green Lantern and The Flash. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:
As the writer and producer of Green Lantern, what’s it like to see pictures from the set continuing to pop up online? "It’s exciting. I let other people deal with all that stuff. I think that comes with the territory of doing something that’s scrutinized." With space, aliens and this ring that creates things, how did you approach making Green Lantern accessible for audiences? "Interestingly enough, from the place of character. It was a melding of a traditional superhero film on earth and a space opera. It was a melding of genres. I did it with two other guys who I’d worked with a lot in television. We’re all comic book fans and we all grew up wanting to have an opportunity like that, so we just started listing all the stuff we would want to see in a movie like that, and that was a large part of where the story came from." Is it more Star Wars than Superman then? "Hal Jordan has been called the Luke Skywalker of the DC Universe, so I think it does have comparisons to that." Are you still involved with The Flash? "Yes, I’m still involved with The Flash. I’m a producer on it, and I’m working on the story with the same guys I did the Green Lantern script with." When will The Flash happen? "We’re just getting into the script. We’re just starting the script, so that’s about where we’re at." What are the most important elements in making superhero stories more human, so that people who aren’t familiar with the characters can also relate to them? "I think finding ways to ground the characters is important. You have to always try to think about them like real people first, and not just heroes. They have to be real characters. As people do more and more superhero stuff, the characters are what distinguish it, just like in cop shows. There’s a difference between Mackey and Sipowicz. It’s the characters that ultimately distinguish something." With Green Lantern, does everything that manifests from the ring come from the comic books, or were you able to come up with some of your own ideas? "Everybody is down there, working away on really creative constructs and I think the film will be loaded for them. That was definitely a blast. When we were first writing it, we were a little timid about writing all of it into the script because we thought, “How will that read? Will they think it’s too goofy?” So, in one of the initial drafts, we wrote a lot of, “A ring blast,” or “A shot from the ring.” We didn’t always get as detailed with it. And then, as we got later and later into drafts, and they could provide more artwork and really show people what the movie could be, we could be more explicit about what those things were without it coming off too goofy." Have you seen what that will look like yet? "Oh, yeah. It’s a feast for the eyes. Martin Campbell is an amazing director, and it’s going to be a pretty incredible film." Is the stuff they showed at Comic-Con really representative of the whole film, or is it just a taste? "I think it’s just a taste. They’re still shooting. They’re shooting this week." From the beginning, were you thinking of a sequel, so that you could layer that into the story? "We actually treated it a lot like the first year of a series, when we did the first movie, just because we did want to lay stuff out, to deal with the mythology in that way. Writing for series helped us in that, in terms of thinking about stuff as just the beginning, but also part of a chapter, as much as anything else." To read the rest of the interview, including details about No Ordinary Family, check out Collider.com at the link below.
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