Last month Valhalla Rising Director, Nicolas Winding Refn
dropped hints about wanting to make a "Wonder Woman" movie. And while many thought he was joking, this new interview with , "VanAirsdale" from
MovieLine, shows that hes really interested in bringing the Amazon Princess to the big screen.
MovieLine:
I found this awesome comment on your IMDB page: “If you do wonder woman, don´t make her violent, like that cartoon, that i would never show my children. Wonder woman cut the head of an enemy in it…not so good to look at…” How would you respond to that?
Nicolas:
I would say I could never do that, because I have kids myself who would go watch Wonder Woman. But one of the things I encounter is that a lot of people have more opinions about me than have actually seen my films.
When I was younger I was vocal about things, and I didn’t mind sharing my opinion, and not always for the best reasons. Now that I’ve gotten a bit older and more relaxed, I’m a bit more at ease with things. Sometimes it annoys me that people have this idea that I make violent films. I don’t consider my films particularly violent compared to other films — films like The A-Team, where I don’t know how many people die in two hours. I think that my films can be very violating, so they can seem much more violent than they are. But it’s a different thing: Being violated is different than seeing violence.
It’s the context.
Yeah. And I guess in a way I’ve always felt that cinema, even though it’s a visual medium, is about subliminal images. It’s not about what we see; it’s about what we don’t see. That’s when it becomes effective.
At the same time there is, because the real origin of Wonder Woman is: What if women were more powerful than men? What would the world be like? That’s a subliminal theme.
But knowing what we know about Hollywood, is that the only way you’d make that movie?
No, it’s not the only way, but I think that would be a starting point for looking at it. You need a great, extravagant, marketable action film — and everything that comes with it. But I think that when Christopher Nolan did the Batman movies, I think he very cleverly went back to the source material and took themes that had maybe not been exercised. And he was able to make very good and successful films with them. So I think the audience is very much out there. It’s just how you do it. And I think that some of the films that have worked over the years have worked for different reasons than people sometimes think they do.
And where Wonder Woman on one hand is a great female character who can be included in many great fight scenes, she doesn’t have great villains against her. OK, so you create some. She doesn’t have a Joker or those classic Batman kinds of guys. But she does have her whole world that she comes from, which is fascinating. The whole idea of a woman who is basically more powerful than any man — and who will always be that, and comes from a society of women who are more powerful than men — is an interesting theme that I think can be very contemporary.
They try to justify [Hollywood being very weird about violence toward women] for ridiculous reasons. Which is interesting, because when they’re remaking all these ’70s and ’80s horror movies of exploitation material — which is very mean toward women — they always try to justify them to be released by major studios by changing a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But it’s still essentially the same thing.
But if you were to show Wonder Woman in this context, getting pummeled by a male villain? Would it have to be a female villain to get your true point across?
Well, that’s when it gets interesting, because you have to create a great countervillain to her. They tried in Catwoman — with not particularly good results. The trick with Wonder Woman is to find that antagonist who worked so well in the Batman concept — his villains are equally if not more exciting than Batman himself. Here, it’s basically coming up with who would be a great counterpart to Wonder Woman. Is it her mother who’s the real enemy? Something that’s biblical in a sense.
Head over to
Movie Line for the full interview.
DCMF: Along with "The Flash", we know DC/Warner Bros currently have a "Wonder Woman" movie in the works, and that the potential film has had a lot of problems in the past. But do you think they should give Mr. Nicolas Winding Refn a chance?