James Gunn Weighs In On Superman Trailer, Krypto’s Appearance & More

The trailer for James Gunn’s Superman dropped today, and Gunn spoke about the trailer and film in a Q&A at the launch event. As noted, the teaser for the DC Universe film, which stars David Corenswet as the Man of Steel, arrived on Thursday. Gunn and the cast spoke about the film and teaser at the launch event, and you can see some of Gunn’s comments below (per JoBlo):

On bringing Superman to a new audience: “The truth for me is I didn’t come in here to write a Superman movie and say, oh, I want to honor this and honor that, and also be new and open to the fans. Those are the kind of thoughts I had along the way of writing the script originally and along the path of making the movie. But for me, I wanted to tell a story that excited me, moved me, and felt authentic. And it really just started in that. And it took a while to get to the place where the movie was able to begin. Some of it was, and some of the stuff that you see in the trailer here, but I knew that I wanted to have a Superman who stayed true to his origins of being the ultimate good guy.

“And I think that it was a movie about kindness. It was a movie about being good. I remember talking to these guys when we had our cast dinner the night before we started shooting or something like that. I’m like, at the end of the day, the world doesn’t always seem to have so much good in it, and this movie has to truly be that. For it to truly be that, we had to be good to each other. We had to be good to the crew, and then it had to be that authentically. And so, for me, the movie is about that more than anything else.”

On casting David Corenswet: “The thing I think that connects him so much in some ways to Christopher Reeve is he has a lot of deep training. I’ve never worked in my entire life with such a rigorous actor. He challenged me on a daily basis to really get the most out of his character and get the most out of the story. Everything he does in the movie is utterly true. You don’t ever have a moment even watching dailies where you go, ‘David did something that feels stupid, that doesn’t feel real, that feels like he’s faking it, he’s phoning it in,’ never. He’s always completely present. It was sort of miraculous that the funniest thing was that I got both Rachel’s and David’s self-tapes on our very first day of casting. So, the thing that I was the most worried about was casting Superman at the beginning of this process. And after the first day, I was like, I think that guy’s pretty good.”

On the opening of the trailer and Krypto’s appearance: “I think that we are seeing that from the beginning. We’re seeing a little bit of a different side of Superman than what we’ve seen normally on screen, and this movie, at the end of the day, is not about power. This movie is about a loose term of the word, a human being, and who he is as a person and as a person who’s struggling with his day-to-day life. And we see a different aspect of him at the beginning. So I thought it was a cool place to start the trailer and the movie, frankly. His relationship with Krypto is complicated. He’s not nearly the best dog in scenes. There’s a lot more to Krypto than you see in this trailer.

“But yeah, I also thought that it was a way to say that yes, we’re embracing all of the Superman mythology. There’s a way that superhero movies have taken these characters and said, okay, yeah, it’s Batman, but it’s not any of the other stuff. It’s Superman, but it’s not any of the other stuff. It’s boom, boom, boom, boom. But in our world, he lives in a world with superheroes. This is an alternative history fantasy world where superheroes exist, but it’s also incredibly grounded. It’s about real people having real lives. There just happens to be metahumans there, but Superman exists. He has friends who are other superheroes. He has people he doesn’t get along with, but who are other superheroes? He’s got a flying dog. He’s got a giant fortress that springs from the ground. He has giant monsters. He has a lot of the things that we love from the Superman comics and the Superman mythology 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.”

On the score: “Yeah, I think that I knew from the beginning what I wanted to do with the music. I had thought about it a lot. Are we going to do something completely different? Are we going to use the Williams theme? Williams seems one of my [my favorites]. The soundtrack is one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. When I was a kid, the thing that I loved the most about the movie was the music. That was the thing I took home with me more than anything else, but I knew we were doing something that was heartening back to the past. I was also looking forward to the future, and so it was about finding that balance. John Murphy is a composer who I love working with, and he started working on the music before the script was even finished and was one of the first people I gave the script to, along with Peter Safran and a couple of others, so that he could start writing music for it. And I said, I want to use a version of the Williams team, but I want to do our own version of it. And so that’s what you hear.

“What’s really amazing is how that leads into a lot of other pieces, some of which harken back to the Williams score, but some of which are purely John Murphy, and it’s used beautifully throughout the movie. John’s been working nonstop for almost two years, putting the score together. As a lot of people know, I write the score and the basic elements of the score beforehand. We play those on set while we’re shooting, and we did it with this, but it’s about finding with everything with this movie, it’s finding that balance between the novel and the traditional and where is that line, and it’s accepting both of those things.”