STRIKING GOLD

Costume designer LINDY HEMMING breaks down Wonder Woman’s shiny new look…

favouring standalone stories instead of hybridised crossover worlds. Don’t expect a more-of-the-same sequel.

“In the first movie, we really explored the journey of the coming-of-age, of how Diana Prince became Wonder Woman, and owned her full strengths and powers,” explains Gadot. “She was fresh, she was green, she was a fish out of water, she was young…er! We don’t pick up the story where we left it last, because it was 66 years ago. So she’s been living for over six decades by herself, in man’s world, serving mankind and doing good. And this story is a story of its own. I mean, the only thing that we share in both stories is probably, you know, the fact that it’s Diana Prince and also Steve Trevor. But other than that, it’s a whole new world, and the era is different, and Diana is different, and the story is new.”

“It really doesn’t feel like a sequel in that… everything’s different,” interjects Gadot’s co-star Kristen Wiig, a newbie to the franchise, and comic-book blockbusters in general. “The posters, the music, everything…” She pauses, before cracking up. “Obviously the posters are different! I meant, like the style! A lot of time, with the sequel, you want to show the connection to the first one. And this one...”

“It’s totally of its own,” adds Gadot. “It’s true. And I feel, in the first movie, a big thing that we played off was the naiveté of Diana. And she’s not naive anymore. She’s been around. She’s wiser. She’s more mature. We meet a very much evolved character in this one.”

Wiig is sitting next to Gadot, and today her short blond pixie crop and bold orange jumper don’t reflect the evolution of the look of her character, Barbara Minerva, aka Cheetah. Wiig and Gadot have an easy rapport, and are quick to finish each other’s sentences. Asked how they’d sum up the on-screen relationship of friends-to-foes Di and

Babs, Gadot deadpans, “Sexy…”

“Sexy, that’s it, just that,” laughs Wiig.

“Let’s leave it at that,” smirks Gadot.

“I think that they were surprised that they found something in the other person that they really missed in their own self,” continues Wiig, answering more seriously. “When [Barbara] sees someone like Diana, who is just so confident, and people talk to her, she just seems like...

I want to say the ‘cool girl’,

‘I HAD LIKE FOUR HERNIATED DISCS. AND I HURT MY SHOULDER, TOO. BUT NOW I’M GREAT! GAL GADOT

but she’s like the nice, sweet friend that she’s been looking for.”

“And to Diana,” adds Gadot, “Barbara seems so free and funny and vital and engaged with the world, where Diana feels like she’s not being social...” Cue Ace Of Base…

Among the scenes TF saw, several sketched Barbara’s arc. They meet at the Smithsonian museum where Diana works in cultural anthropology and archaeology and Barbara covering “geology, gemology, lithology and part-time cryptozoologist.” Diana helps Barbara up after a fall, when Barbara chastises herself, saying, “Scientists don’t wear heels,” before Diana responds, “Sometimes we do.” “What I love about it is, they genuinely start out as friends,” says Jenkins, “which sometimes I have definitely seen in films, but not often in superhero villains, where they really and truly start out as your friends. And hopefully, you’ll agree that the evolution into being foes tracks kind of organically. It’s like a friendship gone wrong – as two people go on different journeys in life. And that was a really fun thing to tackle.” Over the course of the footage, Barbara begins her character journey as a geeky outsider, before gradually growing in confidence (and power) as a leopard-print-clad badass. And you can expect her evolution to go even further as the film continues, even if this is a new interpretation of the classic comic

character. “I think the heart of Cheetah, and who she is, and being Wonder Woman’s nemesis – that’s still there,” asserts Wiig. “It’s hard to compare, because there’s a lot of different versions of Cheetah in the comic.”

“It’s the first time it’s ever come to life,” chips in Gadot. “You brought Cheetah to life. There’s no comparison.”

Wiig goes on to describe this take on the character as “not as costume-y”, before adding, “There’s a whole different version of Cheetah that you’ll see in the movie”, before Gadot stops her short of a spoiler. “To be continued!” she laughs.

MAX POWER

Diana and Barbara’s isn’t the only crucial new pairing in the film. The footage also reveals a flirtation between Barbara and WW84’s other big bad, Max Lord, played by Pedro Pascal, who is coming in hot off strong – and diverse – performances in TV series Game Of Thrones, Narcos and most recently The Mandalorian. Max is a businessman supervillain (who also has deep roots in the comics), embodying the most extravagant and morally bankrupt excesses of the ’80s. One clip was a tacky infomercial, with Max offering financial rewards (and the chance to “be like J.R.”) for what’s no doubt a very dubious investment. “You don’t even have to work hard for it,” he promises.

“I think [Max and Barbara are] drawn together by desire, of things that they want in the world,” says Jenkins. “They never become exactly a couple or anything. But I liked that. I liked that these are two separate people in search of different things who get allied by their weakness. They have a great dynamic.”

When we meet Pascal, he’s looking casual in a striped white shirt, a far cry from Max’s gaudy double-breasted, power-shouldered suits. He identifies in Max “the cultural illness of identifying one’s worth, and directly relating one’s worth to a very specific vision of success and power – the house, the car, the clothes, and all of these artificial elements that don’t build a soul… You know, excess and achievement – by any means necessary.”

Jenkins describes Max as having a sometimes mechanical purpose in the comics, in terms of getting plots rolling. “It started out as a device that we needed,” she says, “But once it started to come alive, it became a tour-de-force performance of pathos and character.”

On the surface, it might seem like there’s a very obvious comparison point for ’80s icon Max Lord, but Jenkins and Pascal are quick to defuse Donald Trump comparisons. Pascal states that he wasn’t based on “anyone in particular… And really, what I found was, [I would] directly relate what my emotional reality would be in these circumstances, and make it as true as possible, and as human as possible, no matter what the villainy ultimately became. And that was sort of purely creative and visceral, rather than, ‘Let’s walk and talk like Trump’, you know?”

The director expands further on the idea. “It’s interesting because he really wasn’t [inspired by Trump], but yet he was born out of, in the comics – and in our movie – some of exactly the same things that Trump was born out of,” she says. “It’s all this fantasy of wanting to be the big man on campus, and a successful businessman. So they’re definitely inspired by the same world. And so it ends up having those things. But no, it’s Max Lord, who has been around in the comics for a very long time.”

Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko was also a touchpoint. “Yeah, he was definitely an influence,” says Jenkins. “Because that’s who all these guys want to be, you know? There were a million corrupt businessmen who wanted to be, you

know, that guy. There was no shortage of things to draw from.”

In part, it was the counter-intuitive casting choices of Wiig and Pascal that helped set the unique tone of WW84. “They feel like comic supervillains,” says Pine. “The acting is a little broad and big and Technicolor. It’s just fun.”

Jenkins references Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor from 1978’s Superman (a film she regularly namechecks) as an inspiration – a villain you could cut away to who’s as gripping and entertaining as the hero. “I’m looking for someone who has the potential to be dangerous and scary, but I’m not looking for someone who’s scary,” she says. “This is about a superhero villain, and they all need to be delightfully entertaining and interesting.”

TAKING ACTION

Yes, Wonder Woman 1984 seems machine-tooled for enjoyment. Like the outlandish decade it’s set in, everything has been dialled up, from the aforementioned villains, to the action, to the colour palette. Even Wonders herself has had an ’80s makeover. “I loved making her costume big and poppy, and brighter colours,” beams Jenkins. “We executed the same suit in much brighter colours, and then shot the film in a very bright way. And then the golden armour was amazing [see boxout, p34].”

Influenced by the likes of Spielberg and Zemeckis, Jenkins and DoP Matthew Jensen shot as practically as possible, aiming for a result that looked and played like an ’80s adventure. One of the action highlights is set to be an Indyaping truck chase in the Middle East (the final piece of footage TF is shown), but a comparatively smaller scale action moment early on proved a particular challenge, as Wonder Woman leaps around a shopping mall, taking out goons in a sequence that was achieved practically. “I want people to look at that scene one day and notice that that is Gal, or her stunt double, flying up five floors and flipping over things for real,” smiles Jenkins. “Like, that’s all real, and done on wires. We’re not taking any shortcuts.”

That commitment to practical stunts inevitably leads to a few scrapes here and there. “I did hurt my shoulder doing like… the Cheetah workshop,” says Wiig sheepishly.

“I had like four herniated discs,” adds Gadot. “And I hurt my shoulder, too. But now I’m great.”

“We had lots of bruises!” Wiig laughs heartily.

Pedro Pascal found himself in the unfortunate position of being on the other end of the lasso of truth. “It was great,” laughs Pascal. “I wouldn’t want to be on the end of any other person’s lasso. There were so many takes we had to do with the lasso, that was actually like a lit tube. And such real wire-work, and it’s kind of just as complex, but [practical] not bluescreened sequences.”

With its bright tone and big-scale action, WW84 was always intended as a summer movie, which was why Jenkins was so happy with the initial Novemberto-June shunt. Now we wait, poised, hoping it’ll cling on to its August date. “It’s a huge, huge, strange thing to go from working on it non-stop for three years, to then be sitting in my house and washing dishes like no one ever saw the film,” ponders Jenkins. “It’s very odd.”

When TF last spoke to the director in January, she said she’d had an idea for an arc for a third Wonder Woman film (as well as a spin-off Amazon movie), but was going to wait for the dust to settle on Wonder Woman 1984 before coming back to it. Has the time in enforced lockdown seen that idea percolate further? “I’ve really hit the pause button,” she says. “Because the truth is, where that plotline was coming from was our state of being six months ago. And so I want to make sure that I’m totally absorbing whatever the result of this pandemic is. We’re not starting to work on that movie right away. I’m hoping to do this Amazon movie before we do the third Wonder Woman. And I may not do either of them. You never know what will happen in this world, you know? But yes, I think the plotline will stay very similar, probably. But I want to make sure it’s influenced by all of this.” Diana Prince versus the chaotic, destructive forces of 2020? We know whose corner we’re in.

WONDER WOMAN 1984 OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 2 OCTOBER.

‘GORDON GEKKO WAS DEFINITELY AN INFLUENCE ON MAX LORD. BECAUSE THAT’S WHO ALL THESE GUYS WANT TO BE, YOU KNOW? PATTY JENKINS