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BATMAN V SUPERMAN (Dragonlord's Review, post #1)
- Thread starter Dragonlordxxxxx
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Explain how the Martha scene makes any sense.
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People who hate that Martha scene probably didn't say anything about that completely cheesy ending of Guardians of the Galaxy. Now that was some serious cheese. Distracts the big bad guy who is one hammer swing away of completing his goal of destroying that planet but he stops because Peters dancing. And then the "we're the guardians of the galaxy bitch"
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The MG in that scene is an M60, which is belt fed and can have a box attached on the left side of the gun. Which it has:
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Update: April 8, 2021
BATMAN V SUPERMAN Screenwriter Chris Terrio Blames "Corporate Meddling, Poor Franchise Planning, and Tone-Deaf Decisions" for the Film's Failures
Chris Terrio is not pulling his punches anymore. For five years the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Argo kept his mouth shut about his work on the DC films Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, even as scorn from critics and fans exacerbated already-painful behind-the-scenes memories. Worst of all, he agreed with many of their complaints.
He described the films that Warner Bros. released to theaters in 2016 and 2017 as incoherent misfires, undermined by corporate meddling, poor franchise planning, and tone-deaf decisions that prioritized costly VFX sequences over coherent storytelling. Terrio believes that Zack Snyder’s director’s cuts of both are much stronger, if still imperfect movies—an overall vindication of their work together.
In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, the screenwriter said the #SnyderCut of Justice League, recently released as a four-hour-plus event on HBO Max, righted a kind of cinematic wrong perpetrated by studio leadership that has now almost entirely moved on from Warner Bros.
Terrio first joined the DC Universe to rewrite an existing Batman v Superman script because its Batman actor (the director of Argo) had qualms about the project. “I think the studio brought me in to appease Ben Affleck, because they thought, Okay, well, we have this movie star who is reluctant about doing this, so why don’t we bring in his guy?” Terrio said.
The screenwriter was frank about trying to make sense of the film’s warring heroes, turning their fight into a metaphor for a divided America, while attempting to fix elements he too found nonsensical or offensive. Studio officials then demanded that 30 minutes be removed from the theatrical cut, most likely because shorter run times mean more daily screenings, often resulting in higher box office earnings. Terrio said that act sabotaged the narrative.
Even the title of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a disaster, he said, that primed audiences to roll their eyes at the film well before its release.
Vanity Fair: Can we start at the beginning with Zack? You worked on Batman v Superman. Can I assume that was a good experience, at least with him, since you signed on to another movie?
Chris Terrio: Ben [Affleck] called me and said that he was working on this film, which was a Superman film in which he was going to play Batman. So he asked if I would read the script and consider doing a rewrite. He asked if I would do some character work. So it was already determined and storyboarded that Batman was going to be trying to kill Superman and that Batman was going to have gone down a dark road. He was branding criminals, and it had certain dark elements that were nonnegotiable and already in the story.
What did Affleck want you to do?
My job was to create a story and a tone, really, in which Batman could be that person, and in which two heroes could get to the point where they’re fighting to the death.
What was your approach?
I came into it thinking the only way that this could work is as a fever dream or as a revenge tragedy. I thought, How do we create a story in which Bruce Wayne is traumatized by the war of Krypton coming to Earth, and in which he enters into this kind of madness? He becomes Captain Ahab, and he won’t listen to saner voices, like Alfred, for example, who are telling him to just see reason. He’s a man possessed.
So the film was dark by its nature. As I worked on the movie, it seemed to me that it was a snapshot of what I was feeling on the ground in the country, which maybe didn’t become apparent until the madness and division that came about from the last presidency. I thought this superhero movie could be about getting into our worst natures, but then coming out of that into a redemption.
What did you want to avoid?
I didn’t want to make it a sitcom joke that Batman and Superman are trying to kill each other. If I’m going to work on this movie, it’s going to be dark and operatic, and it’s going to be uncomfortable. Zack and I come from very different approaches to filmmaking, but I immediately liked him because he isn’t cynical and he wears his heart on his sleeve. I’m cynical enough for any room that I enter into.
How did things develop from there?
I wrote drafts of the Batman/Superman movie, which wasn’t called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice by me. I did not name the script. In fact, I found out what the movie was called along with the rest of the world on the internet. I was not consulted on the title of the film, and I was as surprised as anyone. I would not have named it Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Was that Zack’s choice?
I don’t know exactly who named it, but I suspect it was the studio and I suspect it was marketing, to be honest with you. It might have been the first step toward creating ill will for the film. I suspect that putting the words “Batman” and “Superman” into the title had some marketing component to it.
I think you’re right that that title did rub people the wrong way.
I heard it and I thought, It just sounds self-important and clueless in a way. Tone-deaf. The intention of the film was to do something interesting and dark and complex, not quite as Las Vegas, bust ’em up, WWE match as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
How did you feel about the version of BvS that was first released?
I was proud of the script when I completed it, but it turns out that when you remove the 30 minutes that give the characters motivation for the climax, the film just doesn’t work. As we learned from the two versions of Justice League, you can’t skip on the character and think the audience will give a shit about the VFX. That stuff was later restored in the extended version. I guess it’s called the—
The Ultimate Edition, remastered and released on HBO Max this March.
So this house of cards that had been built in order to motivate this clash between America’s two favorite heroes made no sense at all. That was what happened with Batman/Superman. The movie was always was going to be dark. There were always going to be people who just didn’t want to see that version of a comic book world, and I get that. But what hurt was the criticism that the script was not coherent, because when I turned in the script to the studio—which they, by all accounts, were happy with—it made sense.
Do you feel like the title, and the cuts for length, made it harder for people to appreciate things that did work in Batman v Superman?
That’s exactly right. The audience has to know that they’re in good hands. The minute that you lose them from a story point of view, they lose the desire to look at it generously. Once the critics decide a movie is incoherent, it’s just a pile-on. Then they attack everything. There’s a line at the beginning of the film where a warlord says to Lois Lane, “They didn’t tell me the interview was with a lady.” And Lois replies, “I’m not a lady, I’m a journalist.” So one reviewer held up this line as proof positive of my stupidity and my inability to write Lois, or to write at all.
Well, the character of Lois in the movie was inspired by the journalist Marie Colvin, who was of course killed in Syria. She was one of the most intrepid journalists who ever lived, in my opinion. And there’s a story in Vanity Fair, “Marie Colvin’s Private War” [by Marie Brenner], and the line that Lois says is almost exactly the line that was in that article, where a Chechen warlord said he wouldn’t shake her hand because she was a woman. Marie Colvin replied, “There is no woman in this room, only a journalist.” So that line was my tribute to her. But then in the pile-on, a line like that is held as proof positive that I don’t understand either women or journalists or human beings, and that I’m a shitty writer.
Sounds like you feel you lost people before they even saw it.
That was the climate in which the film dropped. Anything and everything was attacked because the reviewers questioned the motives behind the film. And to some extent, I don’t blame them. The marketing promised this mindless fight movie, and any attempt to make something real or complicated was just met with anger and vitriol because [the audience] just didn’t assume good intentions.
Another complaint was that Snyder’s DC films were too grim and heavy. Did you feel blamed for that?
The studio seemed to take this position after BvS that my writing was too dark and that this was their problem. But what they didn’t mention was that, for example, in the draft of the Batman/Superman script that W.B. had developed—[which was] the draft I was handed when I joined the project—Batman was not only branding criminals with a bat brand, he also ended the movie by branding Lex Luthor.
That ending was a point over which I explicitly went to the mat with the studio again and again. I argued that Batman cannot end the movie continuing this behavior, which amounted to torture, because then the movie was endorsing what he did.
What was your argument to them?
It’s one thing if Batman begins the movie as a dark version of himself whom we don’t recognize, but he has to see the error of his ways and remember his better self in the course of the movie. By the end of the movie, he needs to be the Batman we know, and he has to be ready to go and create the Justice League. Otherwise, I said, what was the point?
What else did you push back against?
I’m the one who had been saying that we can’t make a joke out of Superman raining hell upon Black African Muslim characters in the desert, as Lois promises that Superman is not going to go easy on them because they punched her. But somehow I’m the person with the dark sensibility? I wanted to say, “I’ve been saving you from yourselves! I’ve been working with the director to bring a voice of conscience and sanity to the almost perversely dark film you’ve been developing for years, but I’m the problem here?”
Did you feel you were able to significantly change that Africa scene with Superman for the better?
I removed the punch [of Lois], for one thing. Just think about the optics of that. I was able to add material to the film and asked the movie to grapple with what that [battle] meant, so that it didn’t seem like a casual scene of Superman intervening in this way without reckoning with the consequences of intervention. I placed that in context of a moral question. Superman says, “Think of what could have happened,” and Lois says, “Think of what did.”
Later, when I realized that so much of the plot was going to be cut out, I began to think, Well, they didn’t really want this kind of story. The last things to get cut out always are the stunt scenes and the special effects scenes because they cost so much. By the time they’re all in there in the assembly, enormous amounts of money have been spent on every frame. So when you’re looking to cut time, the things that get cut out tend not to be the big effects sequences or the fights or the stunt sequences. The things that get cut are the...
The nuance?
Yeah. The scenes that actually give meaning to those bigger action sequences. I think that’s a problem not only with this film, but I suppose for all tentpole films.
Given your concerns about the BvS structure you inherited, why did you sign on to Justice League?
I agreed to write Justice League because I wanted the chance to write these characters with love and hope after getting through the darkness of Batman v Superman. The end of my version of Batman v Superman includes Bruce seeing the error of his ways and promising to change. It’s the return of conscience after an ethical nightmare. And in Justice League, Bruce does do better.
Read the full interview: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/chris-terrio-justice-league-batman-v-superman
BATMAN V SUPERMAN Screenwriter Chris Terrio Blames "Corporate Meddling, Poor Franchise Planning, and Tone-Deaf Decisions" for the Film's Failures
Chris Terrio is not pulling his punches anymore. For five years the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Argo kept his mouth shut about his work on the DC films Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, even as scorn from critics and fans exacerbated already-painful behind-the-scenes memories. Worst of all, he agreed with many of their complaints.
He described the films that Warner Bros. released to theaters in 2016 and 2017 as incoherent misfires, undermined by corporate meddling, poor franchise planning, and tone-deaf decisions that prioritized costly VFX sequences over coherent storytelling. Terrio believes that Zack Snyder’s director’s cuts of both are much stronger, if still imperfect movies—an overall vindication of their work together.
In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, the screenwriter said the #SnyderCut of Justice League, recently released as a four-hour-plus event on HBO Max, righted a kind of cinematic wrong perpetrated by studio leadership that has now almost entirely moved on from Warner Bros.
Terrio first joined the DC Universe to rewrite an existing Batman v Superman script because its Batman actor (the director of Argo) had qualms about the project. “I think the studio brought me in to appease Ben Affleck, because they thought, Okay, well, we have this movie star who is reluctant about doing this, so why don’t we bring in his guy?” Terrio said.
The screenwriter was frank about trying to make sense of the film’s warring heroes, turning their fight into a metaphor for a divided America, while attempting to fix elements he too found nonsensical or offensive. Studio officials then demanded that 30 minutes be removed from the theatrical cut, most likely because shorter run times mean more daily screenings, often resulting in higher box office earnings. Terrio said that act sabotaged the narrative.
Even the title of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a disaster, he said, that primed audiences to roll their eyes at the film well before its release.
Vanity Fair: Can we start at the beginning with Zack? You worked on Batman v Superman. Can I assume that was a good experience, at least with him, since you signed on to another movie?
Chris Terrio: Ben [Affleck] called me and said that he was working on this film, which was a Superman film in which he was going to play Batman. So he asked if I would read the script and consider doing a rewrite. He asked if I would do some character work. So it was already determined and storyboarded that Batman was going to be trying to kill Superman and that Batman was going to have gone down a dark road. He was branding criminals, and it had certain dark elements that were nonnegotiable and already in the story.
What did Affleck want you to do?
My job was to create a story and a tone, really, in which Batman could be that person, and in which two heroes could get to the point where they’re fighting to the death.
What was your approach?
I came into it thinking the only way that this could work is as a fever dream or as a revenge tragedy. I thought, How do we create a story in which Bruce Wayne is traumatized by the war of Krypton coming to Earth, and in which he enters into this kind of madness? He becomes Captain Ahab, and he won’t listen to saner voices, like Alfred, for example, who are telling him to just see reason. He’s a man possessed.
So the film was dark by its nature. As I worked on the movie, it seemed to me that it was a snapshot of what I was feeling on the ground in the country, which maybe didn’t become apparent until the madness and division that came about from the last presidency. I thought this superhero movie could be about getting into our worst natures, but then coming out of that into a redemption.
What did you want to avoid?
I didn’t want to make it a sitcom joke that Batman and Superman are trying to kill each other. If I’m going to work on this movie, it’s going to be dark and operatic, and it’s going to be uncomfortable. Zack and I come from very different approaches to filmmaking, but I immediately liked him because he isn’t cynical and he wears his heart on his sleeve. I’m cynical enough for any room that I enter into.
How did things develop from there?
I wrote drafts of the Batman/Superman movie, which wasn’t called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice by me. I did not name the script. In fact, I found out what the movie was called along with the rest of the world on the internet. I was not consulted on the title of the film, and I was as surprised as anyone. I would not have named it Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Was that Zack’s choice?
I don’t know exactly who named it, but I suspect it was the studio and I suspect it was marketing, to be honest with you. It might have been the first step toward creating ill will for the film. I suspect that putting the words “Batman” and “Superman” into the title had some marketing component to it.
I think you’re right that that title did rub people the wrong way.
I heard it and I thought, It just sounds self-important and clueless in a way. Tone-deaf. The intention of the film was to do something interesting and dark and complex, not quite as Las Vegas, bust ’em up, WWE match as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
How did you feel about the version of BvS that was first released?
I was proud of the script when I completed it, but it turns out that when you remove the 30 minutes that give the characters motivation for the climax, the film just doesn’t work. As we learned from the two versions of Justice League, you can’t skip on the character and think the audience will give a shit about the VFX. That stuff was later restored in the extended version. I guess it’s called the—
The Ultimate Edition, remastered and released on HBO Max this March.
So this house of cards that had been built in order to motivate this clash between America’s two favorite heroes made no sense at all. That was what happened with Batman/Superman. The movie was always was going to be dark. There were always going to be people who just didn’t want to see that version of a comic book world, and I get that. But what hurt was the criticism that the script was not coherent, because when I turned in the script to the studio—which they, by all accounts, were happy with—it made sense.
Do you feel like the title, and the cuts for length, made it harder for people to appreciate things that did work in Batman v Superman?
That’s exactly right. The audience has to know that they’re in good hands. The minute that you lose them from a story point of view, they lose the desire to look at it generously. Once the critics decide a movie is incoherent, it’s just a pile-on. Then they attack everything. There’s a line at the beginning of the film where a warlord says to Lois Lane, “They didn’t tell me the interview was with a lady.” And Lois replies, “I’m not a lady, I’m a journalist.” So one reviewer held up this line as proof positive of my stupidity and my inability to write Lois, or to write at all.
Well, the character of Lois in the movie was inspired by the journalist Marie Colvin, who was of course killed in Syria. She was one of the most intrepid journalists who ever lived, in my opinion. And there’s a story in Vanity Fair, “Marie Colvin’s Private War” [by Marie Brenner], and the line that Lois says is almost exactly the line that was in that article, where a Chechen warlord said he wouldn’t shake her hand because she was a woman. Marie Colvin replied, “There is no woman in this room, only a journalist.” So that line was my tribute to her. But then in the pile-on, a line like that is held as proof positive that I don’t understand either women or journalists or human beings, and that I’m a shitty writer.
Sounds like you feel you lost people before they even saw it.
That was the climate in which the film dropped. Anything and everything was attacked because the reviewers questioned the motives behind the film. And to some extent, I don’t blame them. The marketing promised this mindless fight movie, and any attempt to make something real or complicated was just met with anger and vitriol because [the audience] just didn’t assume good intentions.
Another complaint was that Snyder’s DC films were too grim and heavy. Did you feel blamed for that?
The studio seemed to take this position after BvS that my writing was too dark and that this was their problem. But what they didn’t mention was that, for example, in the draft of the Batman/Superman script that W.B. had developed—[which was] the draft I was handed when I joined the project—Batman was not only branding criminals with a bat brand, he also ended the movie by branding Lex Luthor.
That ending was a point over which I explicitly went to the mat with the studio again and again. I argued that Batman cannot end the movie continuing this behavior, which amounted to torture, because then the movie was endorsing what he did.
What was your argument to them?
It’s one thing if Batman begins the movie as a dark version of himself whom we don’t recognize, but he has to see the error of his ways and remember his better self in the course of the movie. By the end of the movie, he needs to be the Batman we know, and he has to be ready to go and create the Justice League. Otherwise, I said, what was the point?
What else did you push back against?
I’m the one who had been saying that we can’t make a joke out of Superman raining hell upon Black African Muslim characters in the desert, as Lois promises that Superman is not going to go easy on them because they punched her. But somehow I’m the person with the dark sensibility? I wanted to say, “I’ve been saving you from yourselves! I’ve been working with the director to bring a voice of conscience and sanity to the almost perversely dark film you’ve been developing for years, but I’m the problem here?”
Did you feel you were able to significantly change that Africa scene with Superman for the better?
I removed the punch [of Lois], for one thing. Just think about the optics of that. I was able to add material to the film and asked the movie to grapple with what that [battle] meant, so that it didn’t seem like a casual scene of Superman intervening in this way without reckoning with the consequences of intervention. I placed that in context of a moral question. Superman says, “Think of what could have happened,” and Lois says, “Think of what did.”
Later, when I realized that so much of the plot was going to be cut out, I began to think, Well, they didn’t really want this kind of story. The last things to get cut out always are the stunt scenes and the special effects scenes because they cost so much. By the time they’re all in there in the assembly, enormous amounts of money have been spent on every frame. So when you’re looking to cut time, the things that get cut out tend not to be the big effects sequences or the fights or the stunt sequences. The things that get cut are the...
The nuance?
Yeah. The scenes that actually give meaning to those bigger action sequences. I think that’s a problem not only with this film, but I suppose for all tentpole films.
Given your concerns about the BvS structure you inherited, why did you sign on to Justice League?
I agreed to write Justice League because I wanted the chance to write these characters with love and hope after getting through the darkness of Batman v Superman. The end of my version of Batman v Superman includes Bruce seeing the error of his ways and promising to change. It’s the return of conscience after an ethical nightmare. And in Justice League, Bruce does do better.
Read the full interview: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/chris-terrio-justice-league-batman-v-superman
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Can't polish a turd DC. Stop making shitty movies DC.
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So they had a sit-down with Chris Terrio about BvS and they didn't asked him if he wrote the infamous Martha line...
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According to Snyder in a past interview, Terrio was the first to brought up the fact that both heroes' mothers have the same name. Snyder liked the idea and it grew from there. I think the Martha line was a collaboration by Snyder and Terrio, so blame both of them.
If I didn't have hours of Pornhub links to catch up to, I would roast you MFer's with End Game AV's piling up on BvS.
End Game is just as big a pile of shit as BvS, only with a different repugnant odor.
Don't @ Me
End Game is just as big a pile of shit as BvS, only with a different repugnant odor.
Don't @ Me
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Still better than any MCU trash movie
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https://sea.ign.com/news/170659/batman-v-superman-writer-hated-wbs-original-darker-ending
So apparently WB’s idea was TOO DARK even for Snyder lol.
So apparently WB’s idea was TOO DARK even for Snyder lol.
I always blamed Goyer for the innane subplot that characterized Superman as some sort of illegal alien - because it was so noticeable in Man of Steel. I'm kind of shocked that Terrio admitted to that awful "America Divided" quasi-plot that just misses the mark. You can tell he corrected course in JL - and treated Superman as more of a Godlike character - but it doesn't hold its punch as well because BvS wasn't a strong lead in to JL.
Had Batman's conviction come from the fear that a literal God has come to Earth to rule over man - and he is as helpless to defend himself as he was to defend his parents - that makes for such a better characterization of Batman. Much better than the "I hate you because you are different - but I can like you if I find out our moms have the same name" nonsense we actually got.
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What annoyed me more was that, IIRC, Luthor wants Superman dead because he doesn't think it's wise for humans to be at the mercy of a god-like alien who could very well turn against them anytime. And it was an absolutely legit concern considering that was exactly what would've happened according to Batman's nightmare sequence.
But Luthor's solution to that was to create an even more powerful monster, Doomsday, using technology he has no knowledge of and also no knowledge of how to control said monster. And when that failed, he used that same technology to call upon ANOTHER alien Steppenwolf of which he has no knowledge of, whose boss Darkseid wants to wipe out earth just for fun.
I mean, does Luthor even want to live or nah?
Luthor is so uneven - and Eisenberg's weird take shadows the poor sensibilities of the character you just highlighted! Now there was an interesting moment where he laments about the red capes and demons from the sky - and one could argue that he's actually an unhinged intellect - one whose willing to destroy the world so long as he is the one to bestow its destruction. But his characterization is so uneven - we're left with him as nothing more than a macgruffin for Batman and Superman to trade jabs.
I didn't care for him at all and think they totally missed the mark with his character.
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Eisenberg as Luthor is one of the worst villain casting ever. Completely unconvincing. Even Mark Zuckerberg would've made a better Luthor.
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LOL at stubborn hater cult that claim BvS is better than anything marvel has done. No one deep down believes you.
And to hark on how I imagine the MCU worked, when Feige and crew hired directors such as Russos, Gunn, Coogler, Watiti, and even lower name guys like Shane Black or Jon Watts, they let that director excersie, put out a vision, try to elevate the story. I even heard Feige, Russos, and screenwriters Marcus & McFeeley would have long meetings were they would all communicate and dish in on what needs to make the big screen.
I will concur with an earlier post, though, and say Endgame was a bullshit, clunky, self glorifying itself and the past, mediocre movie.
And BvS, was dumb as hell and without the batman mowing down bad guys in bmobile or wharehouse scenes no one would like it
And to hark on how I imagine the MCU worked, when Feige and crew hired directors such as Russos, Gunn, Coogler, Watiti, and even lower name guys like Shane Black or Jon Watts, they let that director excersie, put out a vision, try to elevate the story. I even heard Feige, Russos, and screenwriters Marcus & McFeeley would have long meetings were they would all communicate and dish in on what needs to make the big screen.
I will concur with an earlier post, though, and say Endgame was a bullshit, clunky, self glorifying itself and the past, mediocre movie.
And BvS, was dumb as hell and without the batman mowing down bad guys in bmobile or wharehouse scenes no one would like it
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Update: April 8, 2021
BATMAN V SUPERMAN Screenwriter Chris Terrio Blames "Corporate Meddling, Poor Franchise Planning, and Tone-Deaf Decisions" for the Film's Failures
Chris Terrio is not pulling his punches anymore. For five years the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Argo kept his mouth shut about his work on the DC films Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, even as scorn from critics and fans exacerbated already-painful behind-the-scenes memories. Worst of all, he agreed with many of their complaints.
He described the films that Warner Bros. released to theaters in 2016 and 2017 as incoherent misfires, undermined by corporate meddling, poor franchise planning, and tone-deaf decisions that prioritized costly VFX sequences over coherent storytelling. Terrio believes that Zack Snyder’s director’s cuts of both are much stronger, if still imperfect movies—an overall vindication of their work together.
In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview, the screenwriter said the #SnyderCut of Justice League, recently released as a four-hour-plus event on HBO Max, righted a kind of cinematic wrong perpetrated by studio leadership that has now almost entirely moved on from Warner Bros.
Terrio first joined the DC Universe to rewrite an existing Batman v Superman script because its Batman actor (the director of Argo) had qualms about the project. “I think the studio brought me in to appease Ben Affleck, because they thought, Okay, well, we have this movie star who is reluctant about doing this, so why don’t we bring in his guy?” Terrio said.
The screenwriter was frank about trying to make sense of the film’s warring heroes, turning their fight into a metaphor for a divided America, while attempting to fix elements he too found nonsensical or offensive. Studio officials then demanded that 30 minutes be removed from the theatrical cut, most likely because shorter run times mean more daily screenings, often resulting in higher box office earnings. Terrio said that act sabotaged the narrative.
Even the title of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was a disaster, he said, that primed audiences to roll their eyes at the film well before its release.
Vanity Fair: Can we start at the beginning with Zack? You worked on Batman v Superman. Can I assume that was a good experience, at least with him, since you signed on to another movie?
Chris Terrio: Ben [Affleck] called me and said that he was working on this film, which was a Superman film in which he was going to play Batman. So he asked if I would read the script and consider doing a rewrite. He asked if I would do some character work. So it was already determined and storyboarded that Batman was going to be trying to kill Superman and that Batman was going to have gone down a dark road. He was branding criminals, and it had certain dark elements that were nonnegotiable and already in the story.
What did Affleck want you to do?
My job was to create a story and a tone, really, in which Batman could be that person, and in which two heroes could get to the point where they’re fighting to the death.
What was your approach?
I came into it thinking the only way that this could work is as a fever dream or as a revenge tragedy. I thought, How do we create a story in which Bruce Wayne is traumatized by the war of Krypton coming to Earth, and in which he enters into this kind of madness? He becomes Captain Ahab, and he won’t listen to saner voices, like Alfred, for example, who are telling him to just see reason. He’s a man possessed.
So the film was dark by its nature. As I worked on the movie, it seemed to me that it was a snapshot of what I was feeling on the ground in the country, which maybe didn’t become apparent until the madness and division that came about from the last presidency. I thought this superhero movie could be about getting into our worst natures, but then coming out of that into a redemption.
What did you want to avoid?
I didn’t want to make it a sitcom joke that Batman and Superman are trying to kill each other. If I’m going to work on this movie, it’s going to be dark and operatic, and it’s going to be uncomfortable. Zack and I come from very different approaches to filmmaking, but I immediately liked him because he isn’t cynical and he wears his heart on his sleeve. I’m cynical enough for any room that I enter into.
How did things develop from there?
I wrote drafts of the Batman/Superman movie, which wasn’t called Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice by me. I did not name the script. In fact, I found out what the movie was called along with the rest of the world on the internet. I was not consulted on the title of the film, and I was as surprised as anyone. I would not have named it Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Was that Zack’s choice?
I don’t know exactly who named it, but I suspect it was the studio and I suspect it was marketing, to be honest with you. It might have been the first step toward creating ill will for the film. I suspect that putting the words “Batman” and “Superman” into the title had some marketing component to it.
I think you’re right that that title did rub people the wrong way.
I heard it and I thought, It just sounds self-important and clueless in a way. Tone-deaf. The intention of the film was to do something interesting and dark and complex, not quite as Las Vegas, bust ’em up, WWE match as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
How did you feel about the version of BvS that was first released?
I was proud of the script when I completed it, but it turns out that when you remove the 30 minutes that give the characters motivation for the climax, the film just doesn’t work. As we learned from the two versions of Justice League, you can’t skip on the character and think the audience will give a shit about the VFX. That stuff was later restored in the extended version. I guess it’s called the—
The Ultimate Edition, remastered and released on HBO Max this March.
So this house of cards that had been built in order to motivate this clash between America’s two favorite heroes made no sense at all. That was what happened with Batman/Superman. The movie was always was going to be dark. There were always going to be people who just didn’t want to see that version of a comic book world, and I get that. But what hurt was the criticism that the script was not coherent, because when I turned in the script to the studio—which they, by all accounts, were happy with—it made sense.
Do you feel like the title, and the cuts for length, made it harder for people to appreciate things that did work in Batman v Superman?
That’s exactly right. The audience has to know that they’re in good hands. The minute that you lose them from a story point of view, they lose the desire to look at it generously. Once the critics decide a movie is incoherent, it’s just a pile-on. Then they attack everything. There’s a line at the beginning of the film where a warlord says to Lois Lane, “They didn’t tell me the interview was with a lady.” And Lois replies, “I’m not a lady, I’m a journalist.” So one reviewer held up this line as proof positive of my stupidity and my inability to write Lois, or to write at all.
Well, the character of Lois in the movie was inspired by the journalist Marie Colvin, who was of course killed in Syria. She was one of the most intrepid journalists who ever lived, in my opinion. And there’s a story in Vanity Fair, “Marie Colvin’s Private War” [by Marie Brenner], and the line that Lois says is almost exactly the line that was in that article, where a Chechen warlord said he wouldn’t shake her hand because she was a woman. Marie Colvin replied, “There is no woman in this room, only a journalist.” So that line was my tribute to her. But then in the pile-on, a line like that is held as proof positive that I don’t understand either women or journalists or human beings, and that I’m a shitty writer.
Sounds like you feel you lost people before they even saw it.
That was the climate in which the film dropped. Anything and everything was attacked because the reviewers questioned the motives behind the film. And to some extent, I don’t blame them. The marketing promised this mindless fight movie, and any attempt to make something real or complicated was just met with anger and vitriol because [the audience] just didn’t assume good intentions.
Another complaint was that Snyder’s DC films were too grim and heavy. Did you feel blamed for that?
The studio seemed to take this position after BvS that my writing was too dark and that this was their problem. But what they didn’t mention was that, for example, in the draft of the Batman/Superman script that W.B. had developed—[which was] the draft I was handed when I joined the project—Batman was not only branding criminals with a bat brand, he also ended the movie by branding Lex Luthor.
That ending was a point over which I explicitly went to the mat with the studio again and again. I argued that Batman cannot end the movie continuing this behavior, which amounted to torture, because then the movie was endorsing what he did.
What was your argument to them?
It’s one thing if Batman begins the movie as a dark version of himself whom we don’t recognize, but he has to see the error of his ways and remember his better self in the course of the movie. By the end of the movie, he needs to be the Batman we know, and he has to be ready to go and create the Justice League. Otherwise, I said, what was the point?
What else did you push back against?
I’m the one who had been saying that we can’t make a joke out of Superman raining hell upon Black African Muslim characters in the desert, as Lois promises that Superman is not going to go easy on them because they punched her. But somehow I’m the person with the dark sensibility? I wanted to say, “I’ve been saving you from yourselves! I’ve been working with the director to bring a voice of conscience and sanity to the almost perversely dark film you’ve been developing for years, but I’m the problem here?”
Did you feel you were able to significantly change that Africa scene with Superman for the better?
I removed the punch [of Lois], for one thing. Just think about the optics of that. I was able to add material to the film and asked the movie to grapple with what that [battle] meant, so that it didn’t seem like a casual scene of Superman intervening in this way without reckoning with the consequences of intervention. I placed that in context of a moral question. Superman says, “Think of what could have happened,” and Lois says, “Think of what did.”
Later, when I realized that so much of the plot was going to be cut out, I began to think, Well, they didn’t really want this kind of story. The last things to get cut out always are the stunt scenes and the special effects scenes because they cost so much. By the time they’re all in there in the assembly, enormous amounts of money have been spent on every frame. So when you’re looking to cut time, the things that get cut out tend not to be the big effects sequences or the fights or the stunt sequences. The things that get cut are the...
The nuance?
Yeah. The scenes that actually give meaning to those bigger action sequences. I think that’s a problem not only with this film, but I suppose for all tentpole films.
Given your concerns about the BvS structure you inherited, why did you sign on to Justice League?
I agreed to write Justice League because I wanted the chance to write these characters with love and hope after getting through the darkness of Batman v Superman. The end of my version of Batman v Superman includes Bruce seeing the error of his ways and promising to change. It’s the return of conscience after an ethical nightmare. And in Justice League, Bruce does do better.
Read the full interview: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/04/chris-terrio-justice-league-batman-v-superman
Seems like a lot of the people involved in making this movie are happy to point out other people's failings, while desperately trying to dodge their own responsibility for making such a dumpster fire. Snyder, Terrio etc all deserve each other
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