James Gunn Doesn't Need to Shout — Inside His Journey to The Suicide Squad

Tim Molloy: You’re Catholic, right?

James Gunn: Yeah.

There’s this idea in Catholicism, and a lot of people don’t like this idea, but that everybody’s a sinner, and none of us are perfect. And we all make mistakes. And that’s why we all need forgiveness. And it’s almost a joke in social media fights that as soon as you go after someone, someone will find something in your Twitter feed, and you’ll also be taken down. Because all of us have done something wrong at some point in our lives. And we’re all flawed.

Absolutely. And there’s a big difference between — you know, listen, I mean, there’s certain people that have been canceled that I don’t want to see their movies. If you tried to molest 14-year-old kids, then I don’t want to see your freakin’ movies. I don’t care. And maybe that’s not separating the art from the artists, but it ruins me seeing your stupid face on screen. I don’t want to see it. So I don’t care if you’re canceled. …There are things that are reprehensible. I don’t want to work with those people.

But also, there are other things that people don’t pay attention to, which is, every time I make a movie, we do a background check on the people. Not with private eyes. But by calling people they’ve worked with. There is no amount of fame or whatever that is worth working with an asshole. I want a creative partner who’s going to be good at what they do and put their all into it and be my partner. There’s a lot of people in this industry I won’t work with, not because they’ve done anything morally reprehensible offstage, but simply because I don’t want to deal with a jerk.

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James Gunn and Idris Elba on the set of The Suicide Squad. Photo by Jessica Miglio, courtesy of Warner Bros.

So DC came to you and offered you Superman, as I understand it?

No, that’s not exactly what happened. The first thing they brought up was Superman. They’re like, “What does James want to do? Does he want to do Superman? Does he want to do something else?” Probably the second thing they brought up was Suicide Squad and doing whatever was next with that. They basically said, “Does he want to do anything? We’re open.” And so I played with a couple of different ideas, and started whittling down what my potential ideas were. And I felt like this was a really healthy thing for me, because I’ve taken on gigs in the past, where I have an idea for something and then I go pitch it, and then I sell it, and then the idea excites me, but the actual story doesn’t excite me that much. Where I’m like, oh, this is just a great high concept—and I don’t know how it’s a three-act story.

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And with these different projects that I started working on, I actually just took a month or so, and every day I worked on a different project. And one of the things that I worked on was The Suicide Squad. And that became the thing that just excited me—I loved the story the most. And I just thought it was something that I could completely have fun with, doing it in a completely unhinged way. And I thought it would be just the most entertaining I’d ever made. So that’s what I went for.

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David Dastmalchian, John Cena, Idris Elba and Daniela Melchior in The Suicide Squad, from writer-director James Gunn. Photo by Jessica Miglio/Warner Bros.

Why are the Suicide Squad so fun?

James Gunn: First of all, [DC Comics writer] John Ostrander created the idea of The Dirty Dozen meets Z-grade supervillains who get sent out on black ops missions to different parts of the world — sometimes in very grounded stories, sometimes with science fiction elements, or occult elements or whatever. And so his stories were really good. And I love the basis of that. I love old war movies, I love old war caper films like The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare. So being able to put super crappy supervillains in those situations was a lot of fun to me.

And because they’re super villains, you really don’t know what’s going to happen. Like, when you see The Guardians, it’s like the first movie — they’re kind of bad guys. They’re rogues, they’re rakish. There’s a scene in the bar where Rocket is drunk. And Drax is there and Rocket is going on about his terrible life, and he’s threatening to shoot Drax in the face. But I don’t think anyone in the audience thinks that we’re actually going to shoot Drax in the face and murder him in that scene.

And in The Suicide Squad, not only can that happen, that stuff does happen.

Our digital summer cover of James Gunn. Photograph by Art Streiber

Some of the characters are good, some are bad, some aren’t so bad. They’re really just human, and they’re as fallible as we are. Some of them might be sort of heroic at their core, but we get to see that develop and those stories unfold. And it gives it a complexity that is actually fun. And it’s not a complexity for the sake of being complex, but for the sake of telling the best story I can.

What makes a crappy supervillain crappy?

I mean, naming yourself Polka-Dot Man, you’ve got to have a problem with you. Like, the first time he makes his costume, there’s probably guys you go to — the high-end guys who make superhero costumes, the low-end guys — he probably goes to the low-end guy. And he puts it on and he looks in the mirror and he’s like, that is cool. I’m the next Batman. That’s what he thinks, right? Polka-Dot Man thinks he’s gonna be a hero at first. I think that it’s the lack of self-awareness, which is sort of beautiful, because it’s like a lot of us. A lot of these guys are doing things they think are cool. I mean, Peacemaker and Polka-Dot Man and Javelin, those guys think they’re super cool, but they’re all kind of goofy.

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Bloodsport is scary. Idris Elba’s character, he’s mean. He has a creepy costume. And he kills people for money. I wouldn’t want that guy to be coming through my house with his weird sort of skeleton face. … He’s not crappy. He’s pretty good at what he does. So is Peacemaker. Peacemaker’s great at what he does. He’s just an idiot.

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Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in The Suicide Squad, written and directed by James Gunn.

I think Harley Quinn is legitimately cool.

Oh, yeah. She’s the best. I mean, to me, Batman is probably the greatest DC character and Harley Quinn’s the second-greatest DC character. And I love the character. I love the way that Paul Dini wrote her originally, and I thought this was an opportunity to take the character and take the essence of who I thought that character was from the early animated films and the early comics and really just let her live in her full, all-out lunacy and power, and give Margot Robbie, who I’m a huge fan of—I was a huge fan of before I made the movie, I’m an even bigger fan of her since working with her—give her a chance to really stretch her wings a bit with the character. And simultaneously see some facets of her that maybe we haven’t seen before.

We interviewed Margot Robbie last year and she seems like an actual team player.

If you ask me, what’s so unique about Margot Robbie as a movie star is that most movie stars do have a streak of either crazy narcissism, or a really ambitious, just, alpha, fight mentality — male, female, whatever. They just really are pushing all the time and controlling about things. And that is not Margot. Margot is 100 percent an actor first. She cares a lot about what she does. We talk a lot about what she does, but she does not have that need to prove herself. It’s a sort of quiet confidence, and seemingly — I don’t know the inside of her brain — but sort of a happiness with herself and who she is. And she doesn’t have this constantly domineering thing that some people do. Like me.

The Suicide Squad, written and directed by James Gunn, is now in theaters and on HBO Max.

This story was originally published on July 15 and has been updated.

 

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