Black Adam Filmmaker Compares The Rock’s Take on Character to Dirty Harry

– Speaking to Variety, Jungle Cruise and Black Adam director Jaume Collet-Serra discussed his interpretation of Black Adam for the upcoming film, which is slated to start Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in the eponymous role. Collet-Serra will be teaming with the Jungle Cruise star once again for the upcoming DC film. Below are some highlights.

Collet-Serra on why he wanted to do Jungle Cruise: “There have been opportunities to do big movies before, but they were all sequels. And I wanted my first big movie to be an original piece, so I’d been deliberately waiting for something like ‘Jungle Cruise’ for many years,” he says. “I wanted it to be something that was purely mine. I read this script and saw that opportunity that I had been waiting for, to really start something from scratch. I wanted to create a world that didn’t exist, and you know that when Disney is going to do something, they do it right.”

On Black Adam being like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry: “Having just done a romantic adventure comedy where he’s very light, I was really attracted to getting the dark version of Dwayne. Basically, turning him into Clint Eastwood in a Western. I was like, ‘You’re like the Dirty Harry of superheroes.’ I didn’t have to convince people that I was right for this one in the same way that I did for Jungle Cruise. It’s like things I’ve done with Liam [Neeson], that tough-guy antihero who has a heart. The world is not black and white. The world is in gray areas, so you need these people that are riding that gray area.”

On he and The Rock having similar tastes: “Dwayne and I have similar taste in a lot of things. A movie like this cannot just have comedy and fantastical elements — you also have to have emotion. The moment that Emily Blunt came into the picture, that energy was elevated. From there it was apparent that my job was just to orient the camera and get out of the way.”

Black Adam is currently in production for a July 29, 2022 release date.