THE SUICIDE SQUAD
There’s never before been a big-budget spectacular pitting a bunch of miscreants against a giant starfish. Well, there is now. James Gunn and his core team of cast and crew talk us through how they willed THE SUICIDE SQUAD onto the big screen
We kick off our celebration of James Gunn with a deep dive into his latest movie, a superhero action comedy with a serious body count.
James Gunn DOESN’T DO NORMAL.
He made a sci-fi superhero film starring a talking raccoon and a living tree, for crying out loud. But with The Suicide Squad he’s outdone himself. It’s his bloody tribute to war flicks of yore, like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes. Only it features a dude in a polka-dot costume. And a walking shark. And a colossal, monstrous starfish. Named Starro. What the what?
A not-really-sequel to a not-much-loved original, The Suicide Squad is a messed-up movie on a mission — just like its motley assortment of antagonistic protagonists. They are set loose on a coup-ridden South American island named Corto Maltese to lay waste to an ancient Nazi fortress-laboratory. And the movie itself? “I just wanted to make it as fun as possible,” Gunn tells Empire. “There is emotional stuff in there, but I wanted it first and foremost to be an entertaining ride. So that what-the-fuck-ness of it just comes out of, you know, what I think is entertaining.”
Talking to Gunn and a dozen of his collaborators, it is clearer than ever that what he finds entertaining is just damn weird. And wild. And massively ambitious — making this the most epically unhinged shoot any of them had done...
THE CRAZY LINE-UP
James Gunn (writer-director): Warner Bros. came to me not long after I was fired from Guardians Vol. 3 [temporarily, for a social-media furore over some old, offensive tweets] and offered me pretty much the entire DC catalogue. They were incredibly surprised that I didn’t wanna do Superman or Green Lantern.
I wanted to do Suicide Squad. I thought I could do something completely outlandish that had never been seen before, with a sad-sack group of second-rate supervillains forced to fight for something they probably don’t believe in.
Peter Safran (producer): James had a clean slate, but there were clearly some interesting elements in the first film and he was able to cherry-pick those. I mean, who doesn’t love Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn?
Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn): I was curious to see what James’ take on Harley was. She’s a little steadier on her feet in this, and she’s in mission mode. This is her version of showing up to work, I think. Yes, she’s back in Belle Reve [Prison] and has to do this mission to cut time off her sentence, but I think Harley looks at it like a fun outing. She doesn’t mind getting that call from Amanda Waller, because something crazy happens every time she does, and she gets thrown into this group of new people to pick at and play with.
Gunn: A lot of it was id on my part, because I was just kind of throwing these characters in there. But I do think Idris Elba’s character in a lot of ways is the centre of it. Though casting him was a rare situation. I knew I wanted to work with Idris. I’ve loved him since he was Stringer Bell on The Wire. And I knew who that lead character was, in terms of his characteristics, and the über-masculinity he has that’s confronted by these other forces, most of them feminine. But I didn’t know what superhero I was gonna use.
Idris Elba (Bloodsport): James and I made it clear we weren’t reprising Will Smith’s Deadshot. And it wasn’t a replacement, either. There was lots of discussion around that. But I was comfortable with the fact that James didn’t exactly know yet what it was. We just really wanted to work with each other and I trusted that James had a vision. Gunn: I actually called [then DC Entertainment CCO] Geoff Johns and said, “Who are the guys that shoot guns?” Because I already had
Peacemaker, and I knew these two were gonna have the same abilities and have a toxic-masculinity fight. So eventually I came to Bloodsport. Elba: He is a mercenary who’s incredibly skilled at fighting and shooting and killing, basically. It was so much fun working with John Cena as Peacemaker. He’s a genius improviser, so it was fun to go back and forth with him and build that natural rivalry.
John Cena (Peacemaker): The first day we were filming, I was trying to be very much like Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket: very angular, very condescending, disciplined by destruction. But James said, “Stop, that’s not who this guy is. He’s like a douchey, bro-ey Captain America.” And that was the start of what Peacemaker is. I was given a lot of freedom to be idiotic, and I think that’s where a lot of the jokes come from. But everybody on set, man. They were all so much better than I am, and in turn made me better. Margot, Idris, even the template of King Shark, Steve Agee. Everyone made me a better performer.
Steve Agee (on-set King Shark): King Shark is just a big dope. He’s really what you would imagine a shark to be if it could walk: driven by his baser instincts.
Gunn: King Shark’s fun to work with because his emotional ability is incredibly limited. He’s a fish, at the end of the day. I wrote him thinking of Sly [Stallone, for the voice], who I’ve known for a while and like a lot as a guy. But I got talked out of going to him, and strangely enough we hired two different voice actors who just weren’t right. I was like, “Man, does the character just suck?” I was really looking for that Vin Diesel Groot moment. So finally I called up Sly
personally and said, “I created this character who is a cannibalistic, incredibly dumb human-shark hybrid, and I wrote it for you…”
Peter Safran: The immediate answer was yes. It was the easiest and fastest yes I’ve ever heard. I think Stallone loved how integral a role King Shark plays in the movie, and it didn’t hurt that he’s clearly a big fan favourite. In fact, I’m wearing a King Shark T-shirt today, as we speak.
Daniela Melchior (Ratcatcher 2): My character is a typical millennial. Like me, she’s from Portugal. She’s lazy and has bad posture. She doesn’t know how to run, how to shoot someone, how to kick somebody’s ass. But she has the biggest heart, I think, of everyone in the Squad. She’s always trying to find some love in the other members. And she can control rats. You might not think she’s strong enough to be in the Suicide Squad, but by the end of the movie you will understand why.
Peter Capaldi (The Thinker): I’m an evil genius! I’ve always wanted to play an evil genius. The Thinker is very smart, very manipulative and wicked, and also rather decadent.
Agee: James does a really good job of taking these characters that nobody has heard of — Polka Dot Man?! — and making them so layered and complex and tragic that people are gonna love them.
David Dastmalchian (Polka Dot Man): If you Google Polka Dot Man, I think he comes up as DC’S worst villain of all time. But here his power is a curse. It’s something he’s endured. I myself have vitiligo; I have splotches of no pigment all over my body, and I was teased a lot about it as a kid. So as I started reading and learning about Polka Dot Man, I felt all these connections between us. There are no throwaway characters in James’ films. He doesn’t create fodder.
THE CRAZY VISUALS
Gunn: I liked the idea of these disparate aesthetics, as if you’re bringing in each of these characters from a different movie or TV show. So Peacemaker is from a 1970s TV show; Bloodsport is more of a modern, scary, grimdark character; Ratcatcher 2 is from some Saw horror film; Javelin [Flula Borg] looks ridiculous; Savant [Michael Rooker] is kind of cool, but also kind of Def Leppard in the wrong ways; and Harley is Harley! And they’re thrown together in this sort of natural, real world that we present with Corto Maltese, which is very grounded.
Robbie: It was evident that James was going for this kind of ’70s war-film kind of vibe, which is absolutely one of my favourite genres of film.
Judianna Makovsky (costume designer): I decided to start with the hardest costume first: Polka Dot Man. How do you do that and not make it idiotic? So I based it on a real garment. It’s not tights or a jumpsuit, it’s a flight suit, which I think helped make the character more accessible.
Gunn: About a week later, I walked into Judianna’s office and I look at this computer and there’s this drawing of Polka Dot Man that’s exactly how he looks in the movie today. I’m like, “Well, I guess this movie isn’t gonna be as hard to design as I thought it was!”
Cena: I remember seeing Peacemaker’s helmet, and James had a devious look in his eye, thinking I would hate it. And I fucking loved it. It’s awesome.
Makovsky: We did so many variations of the helmet from the comic — which, as Bloodsport says in the trailer, really does look like a toilet seat — until we had something you could probably put on. We thought John would only wear it a couple of times in the movie, but he wanted to wear it all the time!
Cena: I am not afraid of making fun of myself, and I’m not afraid of being embarrassed. If you’re invested in what you do, it adds to the absurdity.
Melchior: I think I have the coolest costume, with all its belts and pockets and things. I love the fact that it’s not sexy. That’s really cool for an actress in her first American role. I’m not showing anything!
Makovsky: Bloodsport’s was the hardest costume to do, because we weren’t quite sure what his powers were in the beginning.
Gunn: In the comics, he reaches into a secret war chest in another dimension and can pull out any weapon he wants. I thought, “How can I adapt that to the screen in a way that’s cool?” So our cinematic equivalent of that is this suit which has all these different pieces to it that transform into different weapons.
Makovksy: James wanted everything practical. There’s not a lot of CG. He asked me for something where pieces of the costume come out and turn into his weapons. I thought, “I don’t even know how to do that.” It was a serious challenge, but it was very collaborative with props, figuring out how those things worked.
Kelvin Mcilwain (visual-effects supervisor): I come from this background where I really do believe in doing things physically wherever possible, trying to capture it with the camera. But one of the big challenges was King Shark. James really wanted people to believe this character, and there’s so many ways you can take a shark and join it with a human body and make it go wrong. It took a lot of effort and time tweaking him so you could find some emotion in his eyes.
Capaldi: Working with talking sharks and giant starfish? Once you’ve been Doctor Who, that’s just a day in the office. Although hopefully sometimes they’re gonna be more convincing!
Elba: There was a running joke about the starfish. I was like, “Really? Couldn’t it have been any other animal? Why a starfish?” And James always had this cheeky glint in his eye.
Gunn: I thought Starro the Conqueror would be a perfect antagonist for the Suicide Squad, because I loved him as a kid. He’s generally a Justice League antagonist, so I like the idea that we’re letting the Suicide Squad fight an antagonist that was normally meant for the ‘big guys’. I was very scared of him, yet he’s also completely ridiculous.
Mcilwain: Starro was a unique challenge. He’s this bright-pink character with a blue back and a giant eye in the middle. Even before we started shooting, we worked with Weta Digital to figure out, how does this thing walk? It’s such a bizarre-looking creature. But everything’s always grounded in reality. We went to Colón, Panama, to shoot this massive third-act sequence. It was a really
difficult place to shoot, but we scanned over 500 buildings there and built all of that into our CG work.
Beth Mickle (production designer): We shot a lot of exteriors in Panama for Corto Maltese, but almost everything else we built at Pinewood Studios in Atlanta. Including a giant backlot set, which is the exterior of [Nazi-era prison laboratory] Jotunheim… And a beach.
Capaldi: One day, the other actors said, “We’re off to the beach now!” I thought, “Oh, that’s nice. I didn’t know there was a beach in Atlanta.” I mentioned it to someone and they said, “No. They’ve built a beach.” I said, “What?”
Safran: It was the largest construction budget that Warner Bros. has ever approved. We built the interiors of the palace. We built the jungles. And Beth’s team built a 260-foot-wide beach on the backlot.
Gunn: It’s crazy. We had an ocean, with working waves. It was an incredibly pleasant place to be, because it was like being on a real beach, but without having to worry about the generators and the waves and changing tides.
Robbie: I remember when we tried to figure out scheduling, they were like, “We’ve got to start on this date, because the palm trees will die if it gets too cold in Atlanta.” I was like, “Palm trees? How many palm trees are they bringing in?”
THE CRAZY ACTION
Makvosky: The first day of the shoot was on the beach, with explosions. I thought, “This is really like an old-fashioned movie, where everything is practical. We’re squibbing people, there’s blood. We don’t do that much anymore!”
Safran: Our genius special-effects guy is Dan Sudick, who’s done all the Marvel movies. He has said on this movie there are more special effects than all the Marvel movies combined.
Charles Roven (producer): There is a tremendous amount of destruction.
Robbie: It was my first day on set and I got my moment to run across the beach while bombs and things were exploding all around me. My adrenaline was pumping because it was real pyrotechnics. Real gunpowder. Real explosions. I got to have my war-film moment that I feel like girls never get.
Dastmalchian: I felt like I was in the midst of Saving Private Ryan meets The Avengers. This has been the most emotionally and physically challenging thing I’ve done. And it’s also one of the most joyful experiences I’ve had so far.
Elba: The Jotunheim sequence was incredibly complex, with tilting stages and huge waterworks. It looks amazing, especially when you know there’s not a lot of CGI in those moments.
Mcilwain: An aquarium bursts above a cubicle office, so Dan Sudick rigged these massive tanks and recirculation hoses above it. In a matter of seconds we could flood that entire set, and we did it multiple times. It was a huge engineering feat.
Agee: Our second-unit director is Guy Norris, who did Mad Max: Fury Road. I got to go out to the backlot and watch him blowing up cars and buildings on the Jotunheim set — going full Mad Max, while I waited for my next scene.
Gunn: I’ve known Guy for 20 years, because I worked with him on the first Scooby-doo movie and he’s a stunt coordinator that I saw completely eye to eye with. There is an uncomfortable action mindset that’s happened in recent big movies where it just ends up being an all-out brawl at the end and it just goes on, with no real
movement to it. But Guy really understands the storytelling aspects of action.
Guy Norris (second unit director/ supervising stunt coordinator): Every piece of action has its own structure; a threeact structure, like the script itself. There’s a sequence with Harley where she progresses through these different rooms, and each room tells a different story.
Gunn: Harley beating up those guards was my favourite action sequence. I just love Margot. A lot of actors blow off stunt rehearsals and fight rehearsals, but she worked so hard.
Norris: Margot’s amazing. She’s an absolute athlete. One of my mantras is: I want to film the actor from the front rather than the double from the back. And Margot threw herself into it.
Robbie: I knew James was so excited about this sequence, so I didn’t want to let him down. But it was so fun to shoot. I remember watching it back for the first time. I was like, “Holy shit, that is one of the coolest sequences I’ll ever do in my life.”
THE CRAZY DIRECTOR
Cena: When people ask me, “Hey, what can we tell fans about The Suicide Squad?” the best I can do is just say, “They’re not ready to see it. They need it in their life. But they’re just not ready to see it.”
Norris: In James’ world, there’s no normal. Or rather, it soon becomes normal to find yourself talking about crazy, outrageous characters like Starro or King Shark!
Safran: He’s said this was the most fun he’s ever had making a movie, and that joy bled into the entire production. It was a joyful experience, because it’s really an unedited version of James Gunn.
Roven: He has an amazing vibe that he gives off. He’s having a lot of fun when he’s shooting.
Melchior: He was prepared every day. I felt like I could trust him, because he was ready to shoot this months before. We are his toys, you know?
Robbie: James runs a tight ship, but there’s music and you’re laughing and you’re having fun. It’s so nice being on set with someone who’s having a good time being there.
Elba: He’s got a wicked sense of humour. He’ll sit at his chair with a microphone and talk back to the actors, just encouraging us to go further with the improvisation. His imagination’s really out there, but as a director he’s very precise. He’s got terabytes of images in his head, of how he wants to see it done. Gunn: On The Suicide Squad I could just go anywhere I wanted to go. I mean, Marvel really lets me have a lot of freedom, but I’m still making a PG-13 movie. So I just loved the whole no-holdsbarred approach of being able to make this enormous movie — with no rules!
Dastmalchian: When I watch James at the monitor and I see his face light up when he gets the thing he’s aiming for, my heart fills with joy. And there’s no-one better to tell this story. That’s why I’m so excited to be part of his vision of the Suicide Squad, because it’s so dark, it’s so dramatic, it’s so funny, it’s so big. It’s all of those things on the hundredth scale. It’s James.