Interview conducted by and copyright Edward Gross
MOVIE MAGIC: The last time I spoke to you was on Sucker Punch, and one of the only questions I was able to ask you regarding Man Of Steel was about the challenge of making Superman relevant to today’s audience. Your response was, “That’s because the movies have done nothing to make him relevant.” How did you address that with this film?
ZACK SNYDER: You have to think about what makes any movie relevant. It’s not necessarily that it’s topical; like, “Ooh, it’s about the economy,” or “It’s about North Korea.” I don’t think people really care about that. But what they do care about the difference between being topical and being timeless, or a movie that is done with heart and respect for a character. Our big thing when we made the movie was, “Can we make Superman into a character that you can relate to?” Whether that makes him topical or not, I don’t know, but that was what we really went after and that was the big work of the movie. It was making you go, “Hey, if I was Superman, that’s what I would do!” Which was a thing that I thought no one had really gotten to. He was always the “other” that you could look to; this god that whose adventures you could appreciate, but really didn’t allow you to say, “That touches a part of who I am.” I feel the original intent of the character — this immigrant orphan story — was the mythology of Superman, and that’s what we went after in a lot of ways.
MOVIE MAGIC: So it’s not so much looking up to see a god among us, but more like what if one of us was elevated above just being a human being?
ZACK: Exactly! And then you still have all of the same emotional pitfalls and problems; you still don’t know where you belong in the world. All of those things are still real, and those are things we are all asking ourselves when we look in the mirror. What am I? Who am I? What is my purpose? What is my point? That’s what Superman is doing, too, everyday.
MOVIE MAGIC: Not to get all fanboy on you, but there is such anticipation to see what you came up with.
ZACK: Well, I’m a big fan of the character, too, and at first I was really skeptical. Even before meeting Chris Nolan and talking about this version of the movie and what we could do, there was a time a few years before, before Watchmen, where we talked about whether or not there was a Superman movie we could do. I was in a different sort of mindset. Watchmen and [the] Doctor Manhattan [character] is as close to Superman as I felt like I was going to get. But in doing that movie, the why of superheroes, which is so carefully dissected in that film, made me in a weird way love the mythology and wanted me to support the mythology rather than dissect it. I loved dissecting it in Watchmen, because that’s what it was about, but then when we came to Superman, it was almost like you’ve got to know the rules before you can break them. I had broken the rules, and suddenly we had this character and I wanted to get to the why of this mythology and respect it and understand it. All of my films have been slightly ironic, from Dawn Of The Dead and even 300. There’s a visual irony or irony in every story. The biggest irony of Superman is that it’s not ironic at all. It’s the most realistic movie I’ve made; the most emotionally and physically realistic movie I’ve made, which I think is fun.