The interview is great and below is a few excerpts - but I recommend you go to to the site to read the full interview. There is a link to the interview at the bottom of this page.
Tom Mankiewicz worked on a series of Bond films, but that wasn't the only screen hero that Mankiewicz helped shape and define. When director Richard Donner needed to rewrite the unwieldy and excessively campy scripts for Superman: The Movie and its sequel, he turned to his old friend Tom. Mankiewicz conjured up just the right tone and the delicate balance of humor, heart, and romance for the first two Superman movies. Though Mankiewiz was officially credited as a “creative consultant,” Donner has often sought to make it clear that Mankiewicz was the primary writer on both films.
What was the key to understanding Superman’s character? What did you have to keep in mind when writing for him?
The fun thing is writing for Clark Kent, not letting anyone know that he’s Superman. That’s the fun of the character. If Superman didn’t have the Clark Kent alias, he’d be pretty boring. What I tried to do was to give him a sense of humor.
The thing that finally made the movie work was the scene where Superman landed on Lois’s balcony. In the original script, it was about two pages long, but it was missing something. Late one night it hit me. I called Dick [Richard Donner] in the middle of the night and I said, “After she interviews him, he takes her flying.” He said, “My God, that’s it. That’s what we’re looking for.” I expanded it to about nine pages. That’s more important than the explosions and rockets. He takes her flying. If you make Superman a romantic figure – he has a crush on Lois – the character has greater dimension and he becomes more appealing.
But he also has a higher duty from his father and his planet to be there for “truth, justice and the American way.” There’s no way Superman can be married to anybody or to have a steady girlfriend. He’s got a job to do.
Dick had a motto for the film, which was “verisimilitude”. We had signs in our office saying “verisimilitude”. If you write it like it’s really happening, the picture is going to work. It is too easy is to stand back and show the audience that you’re smarter than the material. That’s camp. The old Batman series on television was camp. It can work for 22 minutes on television but it has never worked for a two hour dramatic movie. You can’t make fun of your characters. You’ve got to treat them seriously – especially Superman, who is a piece of American mythology.
How malleable is Superman as a character?
It’s interesting because Chris [Reeves], who was a wonderful, wonderful guy and was very idealistic in many ways, really thought that the mantle had been passed to him to make something out of this character.
[Richard Lester’s 1983] Superman III was not as successful as the two we did. Terry Semel and Bob Daily at Warner came to Dick and me and said, “Would you guys do the next one and put it back on track?” I explained to them that the biggest problem with Superman III is that it’s a Richard Pryor movie – not a Superman movie. It’s got to be about Superman.” Even though it was going to be terrifically lucrative for us to make the movie, we decided not to do it because we thought that we had done everything in the first two.
Then as Chris got more control over the film, because he was Superman, he did that very ill-advised movie [Superman IV:] The Quest for Peace, which was a dud. [While they were still writing the script] I said to Chris, “Here’s what you got to look for Chris: don’t ever mess with anything that Superman can take care of on his own. You want total elimination of nuclear devices? Superman can do that in an hour. He can just hurl them all out into space. If you’re writing about Superman, don’t put in a sequence of a tsunami. He can stop a tsunami. All those people don’t have to die. Don’t talk about famine. Don’t talk about poverty because he could fix that. So, you’ve got to be very careful when you write to do the kind of things that he can handle”. So, I said, “Chris, it’s not going to work. As much as I’d like it to work, as it’s an honourable thing to be talking about, you got to look out at what your characters can do.”
Do you believe that the true identity of the character is Superman or Clark Kent?
See that’s something that Chris, Dick and I would talk about a lot. Obviously, the real person is Superman because that’s the person that arrived on Earth. The little baby that held up the car is Superman. But that little baby who grew up, went to school, who met Lana Lang, who moved to Metropolis and became a reporter, that’s Clark Kent. We never wanted to get into one of those anxiety-ridden, “I have a split personality” situations. We wanted it to make it more fun. He exists in the everyday world as Clark Kent. But who knows what happens when he goes into the bathroom? Does Superman shit? I don’t know. He does eat that meal, but he’s not human. There are questions along these lines that it’s best to stay away from.
You can find the full interview here.
Great interview from Empire I am sure you will agree.