As promised, the Russo Brothers talked with Zack Snyder about the Justice League movie on their Pizza Film School YouTube show.
Joe and Anthony Russo and Zack Snyder offer great insights into the film industry and process and talked about coming up from film school, from working early in their careers to working with DC and Marvel, and more.
Regarding the Justice League movie, Zack confirms the studios is the one who wanted to move things forward with the Justice League, so as Zack and writer Chris Terrio were doing Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the pair also came up with ideas for the Justice League movie.
Zack says the original script of Justice League was much darker and weirder, and then when they presented it to the studio, the studio didn’t think it was funny enough, so they revisited the script to add humor, where Snyder says his final version falls somewhere between the two.
Snyder also defends his idea for Amy Adams’ Lois Lane falling in love with Ben Affleck’s Batman following the death of Henry Cavill’s Superman and confirms the studio didn’t like the idea and nixed it.
Zack Snyder also has good things to say about Ezra Miller as The Flash who brought humor to his movies. Check out the highlights of Part 1 below.
Zack Snyder also has his Full Circle SnyderCon coming up at the end of the month which will screen his four-hour cut of Justice League for the first time where he reveals it will have an intermission from Junkie XL not present in the HBO Max release.
Studio wanted to move in the Justice League direction
“Chris Terrio and I, after Batman vs Superman, we had talked about what Justice League would be, you know it’s called ‘Dawn of Justice,’ right, so, and the studio was very — they wanted Justice League, that was where we were going,” explains Snyder. “We always had our eye on the Justice League kind of concept as we were working, and so I believe we had an outline for Justice League that we just kind of generated while we were writing Batman vs Superman – just kind of like over to the side – because we wanted to be sure we were supporting this long look with what we were writing on Batman vs Superman, and you know there’s all this weirdness in Batman vs Superman anyway that eventually would make its way into Justice League that I was really adamant about you know post-apocalyptic or any of that stuff or I was really like I really want to do this.”
Snyder compares his post-apocalyptic Batman to George Miller’s The Road Warrior movie from 1981 starring Mel Gibson.
“When Darkseid destroys Earth, we’re going to have 10 years of no Earth, so we should figure out what Batman’s doing — yeah, you know in the Road Warrior Earth, what is Batman in Road Warrior?” says Snyder. “So that was kind of like a big thing to me, that was the thing I really wanted to get to. So Chris and I worked really diligently, and then the document that we – and it wasn’t a secret document – but it was kind of our own. There was a lot of it that we constantly were developing and then right near the end of finishing Batman vs Superman when I was the editing, the responsibilities kind of just diminished a little bit, we really started working on Justice League.
Original Justice League script was much darker and weirder
“So the script for Justice League did evolve out of that. Now, I’ll be honest that when the script… what happened with Justice League is we had a very… the original script was much darker and weirder, and then when Batman vs Superman came out and the studio was like ‘it’s not funny enough, people want funnier movies they want funny stuff in it,'” offers Snyder. “We did go back and do a big kind of lightened the movie overall, and I would say that Justice League, my kind of Justice League, is sort of in between that. I always preserved some of the more intense stuff that I shot, anyway, I thought in retrospect they would maybe want, making sure, of course, I had what was on the page but we had this other script.”
On Lois and Batman
Zack’s original ideas are said to involve Lois and Batman falling in love where it has been said Zack’s Justice League 2 ideas even go so far as to have Lois get pregnant with Batman’s baby, then Batman dies, Superman returns, and Lois and Superman raise the son to become the new Batman. Zack doesn’t go much into his Justice League 2 ideas but talks about Lois and Batman.
“I think in the original script Lois and Batman got together briefly and there’s this whole other thing that everyone was like ‘Oh my God you can’t do that’ you know, so we were we were… by the way [Russos: ‘I love that I wish you did do that’] yeah because Superman was dead. Louis is a pretty amazing person so her part in Justice League is really… we had written it… especially since I had Amy, and Amy’s like a genius, I really felt like we should lean on Amy because she’s just a great actress and I think like a force of nature,” says Snyder.
Zack continues, “I loved the idea of setting up this sort of concept. It’s sort of like when you’re you know in a movie where the husband goes off to war and he’s dead and the wife moves on and then the husband appears and ‘I’m not dead I’m fine’ — how do you deal with that? You’re super into that concept you know and then ‘oh no Superman can be brought back to life’ so now what happens with this, and Lois was like ‘I I’m still in love with Superman you were kind of a thing’ but then at that point, Batman had already fallen in love with Lois but no, but so we had done the changes for the studio.”
About Ezra Miller:
Snyder cast Ezra Miller as his choice to play Barry Allen as The Flash who can next be seen this June in his own movie.
“I’ll be frank, Chris and I are not the funniest guys in the world, we’re not like awesome joke writers. Ezra’s pretty funny, that was kind of his role you know, to be The Flash and kind of be young and kind of be not quite understanding [Jor Russo: ‘the comic relief’] and kind of like be in awe of Batman and Superman and he did a great job and that part was great,” says Snyder.
Watch Part 1 on YouTube, with Part 2 coming soon.
