With Christopher Nolan on board, we had long suspected that the upcoming Superman reboot might be a tale of Clark Kent’s beginnings, and director Zack Snyder confirmed as much this week in an interview with Hero Complex.
“Literally, the one thing that everyone can start to think about is that we’re making a movie that finally goes with the approach that there’s been no other Superman movies,” Snyder explained.
“If you look at Batman Begins, there’s that structure, there’s the canon that we know about and respect but on other hand there’s this approach that pre-supposes that there haven’t been any other movies. In every aspect of design and of story, the whole thing is very much from that perspective of respect the canon but don’t be a slave to the movies.”
This marks a stark change from Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns which was conceived as a sequel to Superman II and struggled to some extent under the weight of Richard Donner’s films of the 70s and 80s.
However with Batman Begins, Nolan triggered something of a watershed in superhero movies, seeing them return to square one rather than deal with an excess of previous material (The Amazing Spider-Man sees the Marvel hero going back to his roots next year..) Snyder is understandably thrilled to have the Dark Knight director on board.
“It’s been really great. Chris is awesome,” he said. “He’s super-respectful but super-helpful, too. You can’t imagine a more generous guy… once he sort of got what I want to do with it, he was like, ‘OK,’ and once he said, ‘You know what, that’s awesome,’ now he’s 100%.”
“If I say, ‘What do you think of this?’ he’s like, ‘That’s awesome,’ and then there’s a great give-and-take about it, a great conversation that we can have about it and making it better everyday. And by the way he’s hilarious, too.”
