WAY OF THE GUNN
After a decade-and-a-half of whipping up widescreen carnage, James Gunn has learned a few things about filmmaking. He shares his seven key lessons
Gunn talks us through his unique methods, whether he’s working with Scooby-doo, Michael Rooker, zombies, Michael Rooker again, a talking tree, and Michael Rooker one more time.
AT THE TENDER age of 12, James Gunn started making movies. Down in his basement or in the woods near his home, with an 8mm camera and a cast typically comprising his four younger brothers. Today, four decades on, he’s just completed The Suicide Squad, his third big-budget superhero movie, and his fifth film since making his directorial debut 15 years ago, with the gruey, screwy sci-fi-horror-comedy Slither. So it comes as something of a surprise when Gunn announces to Empire that, while making The Suicide Squad, he felt, for the first time in his life, like a real director.
“For the first time I could walk on set and go, ‘Okay, I think I have enough information now that I can actually do a good job,’” he says. Partly, he explains, this is because as “a kid from Manchester, Missouri”, it’s taken him ages to get over the sheer novelty of walking onto sets, moving cameras and meeting movie stars. But it is also because, when it comes to filmmaking — he writes all the scripts he directs, and produces movies too — “there is so much to learn.”
Gunn is more than happy to dispel the “bullshit mystique” that surrounds his craft and take us through the big filmmaking life-lessons he’s learned, from his homebrewed childhood epics to his mega-budget blockbusters.
D ON’T CROSS THE L I NE
As a youngster, Gunn feasted on movie magazines: Fangoria, Starlog and especially Cinemagic, which he says was “a pure delight from start to finish”. From these he learned you could create gore with Karo syrup and tissue paper, or a raygun-blast by scratching the 8mm film itself. But above all, Cinemagic taught him not to cross the line. And not in the sense you might expect.
“Crossing the line is jumping from one side of the line in a room to the other. If you do that, it causes disorientation in the human head,” he explains. So if you cut from a shot of someone walking left-to-right to a shot of them from the other side, they’ll look like they’ve suddenly switched to walking right-to-left. “It’s one of the things you learn first when you’re reading about the basics of filmmaking, and I took it to heart more than a lot of other people. I’ve always maintained that sense of geography and space in a real, strict, fundamentalist way — more than most other filmmakers today.”
L ISTEN TO THE AU D IENCE
In 1995, Gunn joined Troma Entertainment in New York — the shock-schlocky, B-movie outfit best known for The Toxic Avenger. Under the mentorship of Troma president Lloyd Kaufman (who’s cameoed in several of Gunn’s films), he received his soup-to-nuts training in practical filmmaking and wrote his first movie script, the Shakespeare-regurgitating Tromeo And Juliet. But the biggest lesson Gunn learned during his Troma years didn’t come until Tromeo And Juliet’s test screening. Yes,
you read that right: test screening.
“People don’t imagine that Troma movies are test-screened, but they are,” laughs Gunn. “And I learned more about filmmaking in those two hours than most of the rest of my life combined.” Essentially, he says, “it taught me everything I needed to know about my relationship to an audience.” He observed what worked well and what didn’t, and noted that a lot of what he personally thought worked best didn’t land so well as he’d expected.
“I am off-putting and abrasive sometimes,” he admits, “and when I did Tromeo And Juliet
I didn’t know the difference between eccentric things that were entertaining and fun, and eccentric things that just fucked people up and made them feel weird. So since then I have tried, for the most part, to stay within the stream of the stuff that’s a little bit more inviting.”
DIRECTING IS YOUR FINAL SCRIPT DRAFT
When he moved to Hollywood and started writing scripts at the turn of the millennium — among them Scooby-doo and Dawn Of The Dead — Gunn had to mentally readjust from the “incredibly harsh” New York indie scene to the “kinder” vibe of LA. “I had to let go of my ego,” he says.
Even so, letting go came with a cost. As the studio notes kept arriving for Scooby-doo, he slid from loving his work to not really caring anymore. “I got tireder and tireder, and I kept getting other jobs, so by the end I wasn’t worried about it being good or anything,” he says. “Being a screenwriter, you have to do the best you possibly can to make yourself happy at the same time as making the studio happy. And that is a difficult thing to do.”
Gunn realised he’d never be happy just screenwriting. “It is simply, for me, a futile exercise to write a screenplay and watch it made by someone else. To truly tell the story, you have to direct the script. Otherwise it’s just frustrating.” Some of the movies from that period he likes. Others, not so much. Either way, they were never his. “I was just another cog in the wheel. It was just something I did merely so I could direct.”
DON’ T BE AFRAID TO TAKE A STAND
“I was happy with Slither,” says Gunn of his feature-directing debut, which starred future Gunn regulars Nathan Fillion and Michael Rooker. “But it wasn’t testing great.” The studio, Universal, called him up and informed him that, though they loved the movie, they didn’t feel it should be screened to critics. Gunn was winded by the news. “Back
then, when you didn’t do critics’ screenings, that was a sign that a movie was terrible and everybody knew it.”
Crestfallen, he went home and collapsed into bed. The next morning, he awoke suddenly at 5am, utterly convinced he had to fight the studio on this. “I wrote this long email saying, ‘We really need to release it to critics,’ and the producer Eric Newman really backed me up.” They talked Universal around, critics did get to see Slither, and it got enthusiastic write-ups.
“It was the best-reviewed American horror film in ten years,” says Gunn. “And it totally bombed at the box-office. But the truth is, you only need one of those things as a first-time director: you need the reviews, or you need the money it makes at the box office. So I think that if I hadn’t made that stand, it would have been much more difficult to get my next film made.”
ALWAYS BE FULLY INVESTED
For a time, it looked like that next film would be Pets: a big-budget sci-fi comedy in which Ben Stiller is abducted by giant aliens and kept as a pet in a kind of human Habitrail on another planet.
“It was a great concept and I sold the idea for a lot of money — the most money I’d ever made by that point — but I never really cracked the story,” says Gunn. “I also felt like they didn’t really want me to direct the movie. They wanted the concept in the most generic form possible, so I kept getting pushed to do things that took the most obvious path.” Eventually, he said, “What use is it asking me to be the director if you just want something that any director could do?” So he bowed out, and the project went up in the flames of Development Hell. “It just wasn’t exciting for me.”
DON’ T RUSH
Unlike Pets, Gunn was, years later, hugely excited about Guardians Of The Galaxy: another big-budget comedy featuring aliens. “I felt like I was created in a petri dish to make it. No-one else was gonna make that movie like me.” However, going back to his Troma years, through to Slither and his second film Super, he was used to getting the most he could out of the smallest budgets. “To this day, I still am under budget on every movie I make,” he says. “I am now currently under budget on [HBO Max show] Peacemaker.” But during the course of his first two Guardians films, Gunn realised this had a downside.
“I was in a constant state of anxiety about making my days on Guardians,” he reveals. “So I moved too fast and there are times when I wish I’d taken a little bit more care with certain camera shots and certain performances.” The reality was, he now realises, “when you’re talking about making a movie at the scale of Guardians, the amount of money it adds to get every line right doesn’t cost that much more in the overall scheme of things.”
NEVER FORGET WHY YOU STARTED MAKING MOVIES
“I’m trying to enjoy my life a little bit more now,” says Gunn, who is in the midst of storyboarding Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 when we chat. He admits that, after making
Vol. 2 in 2016-’17, he felt wiped out. “I was a mess. Just a nightmare in terms of my own brain.
I thought, ‘I can’t make another five movies like that.’ I have an anxiety disorder and I’m a perfectionist and everything is hard.”
Gunn hit pause for a moment and reassessed. “I needed to bring myself back to: why did I make movies in the first place? Because you get wrapped up in the money, you get wrapped up in the attention and what people say on the internet or whatever. And none of that matters. All that really matters is creating something in a truthful manner with other artists and doing the best job I possibly can. You know: being able to do whatever I wanted and just having fun with everybody around me.” In this sense, he thinks, The Suicide Squad was the closest he’s come to the days of making home movies with his siblings, as a 12-year-old. Only with much bigger explosions.