WONDER WOMAN 1984
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13. Which meant it was time for a world-exclusive peek at Patty Jenkins’ nostalgia-tastic sequel to her groundbreaking superhero flick.
WHERE DO YOU GO AFTER YOU’VE CHANGED THE WORLD? WONDER WOMAN 1984 FOR DIRECTOR PATTY JENKINS AND STAR GAL GADOT, IT WAS CLEAR: BIGGER, BOLDER, BRIGHTER. WE HEAD ON SET TO MEET DIANA 2.0 WORDS HELEN O’HARA
Oh, everyone knew the 2017 film was coming, but nobody expected the scale of its success. It had been budgeted as, and written about, like just another superhero movie, a niceto-have while we got ready for the real business of Justice League. Despite the long history and popularity of the character, and the warm reaction to Gal Gadot’s first appearance in the role in Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, when it finally arrived, the film still had the air of a sleeper hit.
“We were underdogs,” Gadot tells Empire now. “It was the first time for all of us to shoot a tentpole movie by ourselves, and I don’t think anybody thought it was going to perform the way it performed.” That was to the tune of $800 million worldwide, bigger than Justice League and significantly better reviewed.
Little girls turned up to screenings in costume; at Comic-con, Gadot posed with them and cheered them on. Companies rushed out Wonder Woman slankets and
“Daughters Of Themyscira” bombers.
It felt like a sea-change in who gets to make an impact in the cinema, changing the game in the same way that Bridesmaids or Get Out did. Tweeter @megsauce summed it up: “NO WONDER WHITE MEN ARE SO OBSCENELY CONFIDENT ALL THE TIME I SAW ONE WOMAN HERO MOVIE AND I’M READY TO FIGHT A THOUSAND DUDES BAREHANDED.”
Just one catch: that success meant they’d be asked do it again, without the element of surprise. And just because Zeus is your dad, it doesn’t mean that lightning will strike twice.
“I was very supported [on the first film], but there was fear because I was shifting the direction and the tone,” says director Patty Jenkins when Empire sits down with her in LA in January 2020. “This time, people understood that it had worked and that she was great. But now I wanted to make something new.”
This time, they were not underdogs. “Patty and myself, we came with so much more experience and know-how of what to expect,” says Gadot. “We knew what the process was like, what we needed to do, how things work.” So they went for it.
Jenkins never even considered playing it safe. This time, she wanted to revel in her heroine’s power, to take her around the world, and to push every aspect of the film: bigger stunts, bigger stakes, bigger hair. Hair? Yes, because she also decided to hop forward in time by 66 years, picking up the adventures of Diana Prince/wonder Woman in the much-changed world of 1984. It would require some Elnett.
“My ambition raised high enough to make it an even harder film to make,” admits Jenkins. “There was a story I wanted to tell. The best location to do that story was in the
’80s. And I really miss grand spectacle films [where] you’re seeing real people do incredible things, and you’re going to real locations and seeing incredible vistas. So I said, ‘Let’s try to make a massive, epic journey on screen.’”
The process of taking that journey proved to be way tougher than expected, she says. Not because anything went wrong: the cast loved each other, Jenkins’ established department heads returned and the studio supported her location requests — even when she wanted to fly Amazons out to the Canaries for a blue-screen scene, just to get the right sunlight on their faces. But the scale of the challenge that Jenkins set herself was immense, and involved enormous stunt rigs in desert landscapes and closing down more of Washington DC’S Pennsylvania Avenue than during a Presidential Inauguration.
Wonder Woman 1984 has taken the ‘more, more, more’ ethos of the ’80s to heart. Go big or go home.
Jenkins came up with the sequel concept while shooting the first movie. She told Gadot and Chris Pine, who plays love interest Steve Trevor, at once, explaining the planned ’80s setting and the themes she wanted to explore. Crucially, she had found a way to bring Steve back for the sequel, following the inconvenient case of death he picked up at the end of the last film.
“She’s a fountain of ideas, constantly,” says Pine. “On this film she was talking about the Amazons and maybe a TV series she was gonna do about that. But she was working on the second one during the first.” Gadot loved the concept. “I was all on board,” she gleams. It promised an entirely different feel from last time, which had been set mostly in the mud of the Great War’s trenches and filmed over a miserably wet winter. This one would be coloured by neon rather than mustard gas, offering a poppier, more summery world to explore.
“In the first movie, we got to see the birth of the character, but we didn’t have enough time to dig deep, deep, deep,” says Gadot. “This time, because we’re already familiar with her character and because we find her in a different place to where we left her, there’s a lot more to explore, and there’s a lot more for her to discover. And for me as an actress, I also wanted to dig deeper, to show her journey.”
The story picks up in 1984, with Diana working at the Smithsonian museum in Washington DC and living in the Watergate complex. The DC setting means she’s positioned to keep tabs on the government of a superpower, and her apartment gives her a view in every direction. The Smithsonian job also allows her to look out for any dangerous, mystical items that might crop up. “It’s a world with other gods and other lores,” Jenkins reminds us.
But Diana’s living near the world rather than fully engaged with it, doing superheroics but trying to avoid notice as she does so, foregoing close relationships because she’s wary of losing friends. “The first movie was a coming of age, it was Diana becoming Wonder Woman,” explains Gadot. “She was very naive and she didn’t understand the complexities of life. A fish out of water. In this movie, that’s not the case whatsoever. Diana has evolved. She’s much more mature and very wise. However, she’s very lonely. She lost all of her team members and she’s guarded. And then something crazy happens.”
That “something crazy” is the return of Steve Trevor, through means that have not yet been revealed. Cue a role reversal from the first film: now Diana is a befuddled Steve’s guide through a strange, new world. “That was actually a bit hard for me,” admits Pine. “I haven’t played earnest in a long time because usually they want guys my age to play the world-weary, furrowed-brow thing. It’s
fun to play deeply stoned-curious, like you’re on a great mushroom trip. Therapist guided, of course. Undertaken at Johns Hopkins. Part of an important study.”
Bringing Steve back from the dead is a risk: will it seem too implausible? Will the audience feel cheated of his sacrifice? Then again, not doing so is a risk too: Pine was a huge part of the first film’s success in both Gadot and Jenkins’ estimation, and the love story worked. “Chris was an integral part of the movie, and of its success,” says Gadot. “And because he and I and Patty really enjoyed working together, we all wanted to have him back. And Patty and [co-writer] Geoff Johns found the best way that serves the narrative to bring Steve back.”
For Jenkins, he was necessary to Diana’s arc. “She has her own journey in this movie,” says Jenkins. “It’s not just a flatline hero [story]. During the course of the film she comes to life within the era that she’s living in, and everything that’s going on with it, for better or for worse. He ends up bringing her to this world really, and planting her feet on the ground where she is.”
But if Batman v Superman is canon, Steve won’t be around forever — and within the story itself, his appearance could be linked to trouble brewing elsewhere.
Trouble this time will come not from some Greek god or anthromorphic personification of war; now Jenkins is sinking her teeth into two of Wonder Woman’s most iconic comic-book foes. Initially for her villain, Jenkins thought of Cheetah, the snarling were-cat whose claws and bottomless jealousy provide a serious threat to Diana. But she liked the Barbara Ann Minerva version of that character, who starts as Diana’s friend and then goes spectacularly off the rails. That meant that she needed another force to introduce this “outside element of corruption” and spark that transformation, which is where Pedro Pascal’s Maxwell ‘Max’ Lord comes in. He’s a self-promoting businessman who promises your heart’s desire, and “all you have to do is want it”. This is the character who Jenkins says is “completely invested” in the ’80s business ethos that greed is good and more is always better than enough.
Pascal had worked with Jenkins before on a TV pilot called Exposed, and when the call came for Wonder Woman 1984, he was ready. “There wasn’t anything she could tell me that was going to make me not want to do it,” he says. “It could be like, ‘He’s naked and wet the whole movie,’ and I still would have done it.”
His first day on set was spent filming Lord’s infomercials, an almost shot-for-shot recreation of real ’80s ads that instantly immersed him in the character’s absurd materialism, with Jenkins shooting whatever Max would consider impressive. “Girls!” Jenkins laughs. “Playing cards, on a boat! That equals success [for him]. Five girls in bikinis on a boat.”
But if Lord is ridiculous, he also unleashes dangerous forces. One of his targets is Barbara, another Smithsonian scientist. “I like that the evil comes from within our own storyline,” explains Jenkins. “What makes Barbara turn into Cheetah is feeling like she’s never been as good as someone like Diana. She reminds me of certain people I’ve known who have such low self-confidence that they’re always holding themselves back. Then once they start to embrace change, out comes this ugly resentment built up over all those years.”
To chart that evolution to Cheetah, Jenkins turned to Kristen Wiig. “Having Kristen portray this character was the best idea because she has so many different faces to her,” says Gadot. “She can be insecure and vulnerable, and then funny and charming, and then she can go really dark.”
Indeed, under Lord’s gaze, Barbara seems to blossom. “In the very beginning, Barbara’s [prone to] nervous laughs and she’s a little hunched over and insecure,” says Wiig. “She’s not really with it but she desperately wants to be.” At first, it looks like positive evolution as she becomes more self-confident and daring. But then she takes more extreme measures and risks much more as she slowly transforms into Cheetah. Diana’s attempts to warn her friend about the dangers of her new life only sound like more of the condescension Barbara has always resented,
fuelling her fury.
“It’s like she becomes a different person,” says Wiig. “I had to constantly be reminded, ‘Shoulders back! You’re Cheetah!’” Barbara adopts first a harder-edged, leather-clad look before her final transformation, in a process that’s as heartbreaking for Diana as it is threatening. “It really is like a falling apart of a friendship, with this real misunderstanding at its core,” says Jenkins.
Cheetah’s final form remains to be seen, though there are tantalising tidbits. We’ve seen Wonder Woman’s ‘Golden Eagle’ armour, the winged suit she has worn in the comics in moments of great peril or full-on war. She once wore it to wrestle Cheetah into a moment of emotional connection, which would certainly fit Jenkins’ conception of Diana’s character. But it’s also possible that Diana needs it against conventional weapons: this Wonder Woman is not entirely bullet-proof. It’s not always easy being a goddess.
For Diana’s fighting style, Jenkins felt she needed to find something bigger and better than the first film, especially as her heroine faces off against such a fast and ferocious feline opponent. “Men fight like men,” says Gadot. “We were mindful of that. I don’t want to be trying to look like a man. We need to fight like women.”
There were some things, like headbutting or punching, that, says Jenkins, “instinctively and inherently felt wrong” for Diana, who fights, as a rule, to protect and not to kill. The stunt team figured out a style that worked for the Amazons: they would show no delight, no attempts at domination, just a professional determination to finish the fight. But Jenkins wasn’t sure how to take it further until, one night, she and Gadot took their children to see a Cirque du Soleil show, and something clicked.
“It was beautiful,” says Gadot. “And then Patty said, ‘This should be the inspiration for the fight sequences.’ I looked at her like, ‘How do I do that?!’ She said, ‘Don’t worry, you never know how you do it until you do it.’” Jenkins was confident. “I was sitting there and I thought, ‘That’s it,’” she says. “If they have incredible skills and can be airborne in their big jumps, what an incredible way to do it.” So Cirque du Soleil were hired to design the fighting. “For months we worked on crazy wire rigs to figure out how to make it work,” says Gadot. “It’s so original, so fresh and powerful, but yet so graceful and sexy. We pushed it to the next level.”
Empire gets a glimpse of the results of that in summer 2018, when we visit the set at Leavesden Studios, loitering near a gang of off-duty Amazons. They’re here for a flashback to Diana’s childhood in Themyscira, and a scene where she competes in a sort of Amazon Olympics against adult warriors, determined to prove her toughness. On a high platform above, camera operators and stunt team members surround more Amazons as they stretch or crouch, ready to throw themselves off and sprint, on wire rigs, across a series of high poles: think Gladiators without the padding. This is Jenkins’ Cirque du Soleil dream, writ large: a bigger, bolder, more beautiful fighting style befitting its film.
Lilly Aspell, returning once more as young Diana, watches the Amazons with an expert eye after doing the same run already. “The team say that I’ve been doing more stunts than a lot of stuntwomen have done,” she says. Aspell had a hard time from mean girls at her school after the first film came out, jealous of her success. Her mum prompts, “But what do we kill them with? Kindness.” “Punches,” suggests the young Diana simultaneously, with a grin.
Going back to Themyscira was not originally in Jenkins’ plan, but she realised that she needed to show Diana’s home to establish the contrast with her detached, lonely existence: “It made sense to start again with where she comes from, to have the juxtaposition to who she is in our world.” In their tawny, mock-leather sportswear, the Amazons look not unlike a pride of lions; there’s the same suggestion that they’re chilling out right this second but could leap up and kill you if they had to.
Later that evening, Empire heads back into London, where glitzy venue One Marylebone has been transformed into a processing centre for hundreds of 1980s partygoers. In its own way, it’s just as grand as Themyscira. Men are having bouffant toupées and fake moustaches applied, while the women’s hair is curled and teased and piled up to cascade over a shoulder or puff. Some of the make-up team worked for the BBC in the ’80s and are recreating those glory days of blue eyeshadow and fuschia lips. A disorientating fug of hairspray extends down the stairs and out into the street; everywhere you look, someone is backcombing something. We’re definitely in 1984. Excess abounds.
The crowds then make their way around the corner to the Royal College of Physicians, transformed into the venue of a posh Smithsonian fundraiser thanks to iridescent screens and gold lighting. Diana has to make her way through the crowd searching for Max Lord, with men leering at her in her white gown (a look balanced exactly halfway between Dynasty and Olympus) as she goes. “Tell those guys to be much cockier,” says Jenkins after one take, as Gadot sips cold brew through a straw (“Rum and coke,” claims her assistant. “Don’t expose me!” laughs Gadot). They run the scene again; this time, the come-ons are even more comically awful, but Diana remains fixed on her target. Until, that is, she sees someone who reminds her of Steve Trevor and everything else — Max, Barbara, the last 66 years — goes straight out of her head.
Excess is not just decoration in Wonder Woman 1984. It’s no coincidence that that Smithsonian gala is titled ‘The Dark Side Of Desire’. All of it comes back to a question about whether greed really is good, after all. The 1980s setting, then, is not just an excuse for a killer ‘Blue Monday’ remix, a lot of neon or even, Pine says, “nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia”. For Jenkins it was more about identifying the evils of our own time in that earlier era. Max’s promises make him like a precursor to the Instagram star, selling the glorious but empty image of a perfect life that’s all about fame and fortune. “That’s the American dream that the ’80s gave birth to,” she says. “I really thought about that a lot when I was doing Max Lord’s thing. It’s like, you deserve to have it all.”
But it’s also about getting back to the big, ambitious physical filmmaking of the ’80s, globetrotting like a James Bond and pushing the stunt envelope like an Indiana Jones. Jenkins pushed to make this a “global experience” — and to make sure that Wonder Woman is not just an American heroine but a worldwide one. And if that means pushing for bigger stunts or another far-flung location, so be it. “I used to call her ‘the Japanese sword’,” smiles Gadot, beaming about her collaboration with Jenkins, and the film they’ve made. “She knew exactly what she needs to do and how to get it in the nicest and most effective way.”
So can Wonder Woman 1984 hit the jackpot again? The team certainly can’t be accused of tonal repetition. With a backdrop of modernist art and architecture and hit pop music, there’s a Dayglo feel to this that should balance the story’s heavier and maybe even more tragic elements. A blend that could — if Jenkins has hit her mark —recapture the feel of those ’80s Amblin movies in their mix of action, adventure and emotion.
Maybe lightning can strike twice — or at the very least, Diana can lasso it and hitch a ride.
WONDER WOMAN 1984 IS CURRENTLY SCHEDULED TO BE IN CINEMAS FROM 14 AUGUST