“Superman” director James Gunn compared the image of the DC hero, bruised and bloodied, to the United States of America.
He made the statements when the new trailer was released last Thursday. “We do have a battered Superman in the beginning. That is our country,” Gunn said during a press conference.
“I believe in the goodness of human beings, and I believe that most people in this country, despite their ideological beliefs, their politics, are doing their best to get by and be good people — despite what it may seem like to the other side, no matter what that other side might be,” he continued. “This movie is about that. It’s about the basic kindness of human beings, and that it can be seen as uncool and under siege [by] some of the darker voices are some of the louder voices.”
“I’m excited for people to get to see the essence of what we’re doing because it really has been like this private secret that we’ve all been hoarding,” Gunn told Variety of the upcoming film, which is slated for release on July 11.
“We felt really good about it, like from a moral place, even from the beginning. We all felt like we were doing something good, both in terms of quality and in terms of actually something that’s not a fascistic power fantasy.”
“I’m not saying that about other hero movies in general. But it felt good to be doing something that was about a person’s kindness,” he added.
The trailer is getting a lot of good reception online. It’s an action-packed ride that only includes one line of dialogue when Superman (David Corenswet) says to his dog Krypto, “Home. Take me home.” It features snippets of scenes with several other characters all set against the backdrop of “The Superman Theme” by John Murphy, which is a “modern day reimagining” of John Williams’ original music from 1978.
“Superhero movies have taken these characters and said, ‘Okay, it’s Batman [or] it’s Superman, but it’s not any of the other stuff,’” Gunn said. “We’re embracing all of the Superman mythology. He has friends who are other superheroes. He has people he doesn’t get along as well with who are other superheroes. He has a lot of the things that we love from the Superman comics that we haven’t been able to see as much of in filmed media, and definitely haven’t been able to see in a grounded way, which is what I hope we’ve created.”
Gunn didn’t get into specifics on politics during the press conference, but he has spoken critically about president-elect Donald Trump in the past.
In 2017, he called Trump “an incompetent President forging a full-blown attack on facts and journalism in the style of Hitler and Putin.”
He also caught heat for making an inappropriate joke about Trump on X, saying an interview for any potential employee would include the questions, “‘Do you know anything about the position?” and ‘Are you on my d***?’ The person that answers ‘no’ and ‘yes,’ respectively, gets hired,” IndieWire reported in 2017.
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Gunn was previously fired from Disney’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise when inappropriate tweets he made about 9/11, rape, and pedophilia were exposed. The director was reinstated a year later after making a public apology and having multiple meetings about the incident, per The Guardian.
“My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative,” Gunn said at the time. “I have regretted them for many years since – not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don’t reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.”
