Director puts personal spin on ‘Wonder Woman 1984’
Film takes place in important era, city in filmmaker’s life
The new Wonder Woman 1984 might have all the eye-pop pyrotechnics and green-screen wizardry of a studio popcorn movie, but it’s the personal expressions of director Patty Jenkins that often hold up the tentpole.
Jenkins delivered a breakout hit with 2017’s Wonder Woman by meticulously laying down the trackwork of an origin story. For the second go-round starring Gal Gadot — out in the U.S. theatrically and on HBO Max after a pandemic delay — the filmmaker seized the increased freedom to tackle heartfelt themes great and small.
Writing and guiding the sequel meant “really getting to do whatever I wanted,” Jenkins said this month in a Zoom call from the Los Angeles area. What she wanted was to place Wonder Woman and her civilian alter ego, Diana Prince, in the Washington of Jenkins’ own ’80s youth.
“When you think about different towns that are synonymous with different superheroes, there’s something right about Washington” for Wonder Woman, says Jenkins, who has praised Lynda Carter’s ’70s TV series, in which Diana Prince worked in the nation’s capital.
“First of all, where would Diana go?” Jenkins says of the Amazonian warrior from the isle paradise of Themyscira, who headed to World War I’s European theater in Wonder Woman. “She would go to the heart and center of where power is.”
Once Jenkins and co-writer Geoff Johns were settled on setting, the director plunged deep into her own memories of Washington, where she often visited before moving to the area as a teenager in 1987, staying for a bit over a year.
“The style of D.C. is so wonderful” for Wonder Woman, says Jenkins, who shot numerous scenes on the National Mall, in the Georgetown neighborhood and in northern Virginia. “Having her live at the Watergate, the modernity of it, cut against the Reflecting Pool and the Hirshhorn — it just felt elegant and beautiful and intellectual and pop at the same time.”
To summon visual specifics as if pulled from a dusted-off scrapbook, Jenkins decided “to lace little things of that era throughout the film,” such as re-creating the punk/new wave retail shop Commander Salamander, which closed on Georgetown’s Wisconsin Avenue a decade ago.
“Geoff Johns and I were arguing about it when we would pass the script back and forth to each other,” Jenkins says of including Commander Salamander, noting that it was “the best punk-rock store in the country.”
By the time Jenkins moved to Washington, “the best days of D.C. hardcore had kind of already peaked and were going away,” says Jenkins of the city’s influential punk scene of the early ’80s that included Bad Brains.
The filmmaker, who liked to frequent such night spots as the Hung Jury Pub, notes: “Some of my favorite D.C. bands were not around so much — I was there for kind of the tail end of the stuff that the D.C. hardcore scene is famous for — but I tried to weave a ton of that into this film because it was all raging in ’84, at the height of it all.”
In the film, Diana visits the Hirshhorn Museum — a moment that includes a visual punchline about just what qualifies as art.
“I spent a huge amount of time at the Hirshhorn — I was going to art school and working on my portfolios,” the director says.
On another level, far weightier than the film’s retro fanny packs and futon couches, she wanted to explore American politics of that era, as well as this one, through a personal lens. Wonder Woman is “a great avatar for me,” Jenkins says. “I don’t feel like I’m Wonder Woman, but I feel like she’s my idealized self.”