People have a very proprietary relationship with Superman. It's important to respect the iconography and the canon, but at the same time, you have to tell a story. Once you land on who you think the character is and what his conflicts are, you have to let that lead you.
— David S. Goyer
Ever since I was a little kid, I told my mom that I want to go to Hollywood and make a 'Batman' movie.
I am an artist, and I understand the pros and cons of being an artist, and the pressures of being an artist, and how much being an artist can be torture to people around you; you know, you friends and your family and how material you can be, and how it's hard to take criticism and all the things like that.
I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.
Hollywood loves pre-validation. Even if someone has a property that was first published as a comic book that sold only 5,000 copies, for Hollywood, that is a stamp of approval. 'Oh, it was already published in another medium? Must be good!' They get assurance from knowing that someone else already took the risk.
It's ironic: In movies, the most successful films of all time have been sci-fi or fantasy. By far. But a lot of people won't even read science fiction books.
You have to decide what kind of story you're going to tell. For instance I would argue a movie like 'Toy Story 3,' which isn't realistic at all, is really emotional and involving. It just depends. I played this game called 'Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP' for iPad that is totally old school 8-bit, which I found very moving.
I will say that adapting a character like Da Vinci really wasn't that dissimilar from doing Batman or Superman. Because all three of these guys are really iconic figures, and yes, Da Vinci was historical, but there's clearly been a lot of mythmaking about him, and a lot of things have been attributed to him that may or may not have happened.
Superman has evolved continually in the comic books over the course of 75 years. He couldn't even fly for years in the original comic books. Kryptonite wasn't added until the '60s. All sorts of things like this. If a character is going to remain vital, he does have to change with the times.
What Christopher Nolan and I have done with 'Superman' is try to bring the same naturalistic approach that we adopted for the 'Batman' trilogy. We always had a naturalistic approach; we want our stories to be rooted in reality, like they could happen in the same world we live in.
Once we start seeing video games that have more memorable characters, you'll see better movie adaptations.
I think Wonder Woman is a very difficult character to crack. More difficult than Superman, who is also more difficult than Batman. Also, a lot of people in Hollywood believe that it's hard to do a big action movie with a female lead. I happen to disagree with that.
It took a while for the first 'Blade' to get made, and Marvel decided they liked the Whistler character so much, when Blade guest starred on the 'Spider-Man' cartoon, they put Whistler on the cartoon, and the movie hadn't come out yet.
I did three or four weeks of work on 'Godzilla;' it wasn't a page-one rewrite or anything like that. The term is 'script doctoring,' is what I did on it.
The thing about 'Batman Begins' is that he's a character that people thought they knew a lot about, and yet you're able to identify the spirit in his life where even in the comic books it's not explored that much.
I honestly love nothing better than digging into a really good serialized show, whether it's 'Breaking Bad' or 'Game of Thrones' or 'Justified.'
I think if we ever encountered aliens, even communicating with them would be really, really difficult.
'Batman Begins' came out and it was really successful, and it had gritty naturalism. And suddenly... I can't tell you how many movies I was pitched where it was, 'We want to do what you did with 'Batman' but with 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' or whatever.
There's a theory in gameplay, particularly in first person shooters, that sometimes you don't want to have that much of a character because then it destroys the experience of the player being that character.
There's been a long lineage of a stranger in a strange land, whether it's 'E.T.,' 'Starman,' or other movies about trying to connect with humanity; it struck me that's what a Superman story really is.
During my career I've enjoyed re-invigorating and contextualizing classic characters that are relatable to contemporary audiences.
Superman is not as innately cool as Batman.
I think there's really only been one successful video game adaptation, and that was probably 'Tomb Raider.' Whether or not you thought it was a good movie, it was successful financially.
I love casting against type and doing things you wouldn't expect, because I think you get more interesting performances that way. Hollywood loves to pigeonhole people, and there's nothing an actor loves more than to do something different.
'Flash Forward' was one of the big heartbreaks of my career. It was just this very frustrating experience. If we'd been allowed to tell the story we wanted to tell, I don't know that it would've been more successful or not. There's no way to know.
I relate to the feeling that Da Vinci was often plagued by the idea that what he did wasn't good enough, that he was his harshest critic. He'd sometimes destroy what he was working on.
Mysticism and the supernatural are embedded in the show - it's called 'Da Vinci's Demons' for a reason, and it's not just metaphorical.
I like telling stories of imperfect people because most people are imperfect.
I always felt that if we ever encountered an alien species, they wouldn't look like us or even be humanoid, like 'E.T.'
'Call Of Duty' initially cut its teeth on World War II simulation stuff, and then we gradually advanced to the end of the Cold War, but you can't keep doing the same thing over and over again. And I think that because 'Call Of Duty' cut its teeth on presenting 'realism,' in quotes... verisimilitude.
I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history. There's no question that various victors throughout history have flat out lied about certain events or written themselves into things, and then you come along and you find out that this disproves that.
When Superman was originally created, by Siegel and Shuster, they were two Jewish immigrants that were desperately trying to assimilate into America. They were having a hard time because they were Jewish. They wanted to get in to mainstream publishing but they couldn't. That's why they, and a lot of Jewish guys, went into comic books.
What I really like to do is write 'genre' stories without a cartoonish element. I did the same with 'Da Vinci's Demons,' and I'll do the same with 'Man of Steel.'
New platforms are emerging: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and Xbox. And film actors are gravitating towards television, because there are basically better roles there. Television is making the kind of epics and genres that the movie studios used to make, and often doing it better with more complex narratives and corresponding budgets.
As the CG in motion capture made it look realistic, it put more of an onus on the game makers to make the dialogue they're saying more realistic. It doesn't matter what they say when they're 8-bits, but if they look almost photo-real, it matters. More and more, the games industry is realising that.
