Holding Out For The Hero
Gal Gadot’s back as Diana Prince – aka Wonder Woman – and facing off against Kristen Wiig as Barbara Minerva, aka the Cheetah. But in real life, the pair couldn’t be having more fun together if they tried…
OU MIGHT THINK, GIVEN THE universal love for Wonder Woman, that her 2017 debut solo feature film was surely just something that was simply long-overdue or delayed.
“Nobody thought that it would succeed,” director Patty Jenkins says, matter-of-factly, sitting with SFX in a swanky LA hotel. “There were very low expectations. Everybody thought a woman superhero wouldn’t succeed.”
Yet here we are, just a few years later, with the sequel Wonder Woman 1984 arguably the most highly anticipated superhero movie of 2020. That anticipation has only grown, given its slight delay due to world affairs.
“This one had new pressure,” Jenkins grins, “which is, ‘Can you follow up, can you do it again?’ It’s a very familiar state of being.”
Did Jenkins herself not expect the success and worldwide adoration that the original generated? “I was not expecting it,” she stresses. “I was hoping for it to succeed. I was surprised by what kind of thing it became. It became so powerful and for a little while I was surprised by that.” She notes at one point that they went into the first movie “with 100% of the industry thinking that it could not succeed, and that women couldn’t direct action.”
A box office of $822 million and a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93% suggests Jenkins proved a few people wrong. And, SFX offers, it seems to have – finally – become a long-overdue turning point for female superheroes.
“I’d like to think,” Jenkins agrees. “I’m so overjoyed about that, because I definitely knew that it would be a massive negative if it had failed. So the fact that its success turned into a big positive for other people is so awesome.” Now it seems impossible to consider a Wonder Woman movie not being a success. But, to people like Jenkins and readers of SFX, it’s almost an alien concept that such a thing would have been up for discussion.
“I know!” she exclaims, wide-eyed. “That was why it was funny. And that’s the part of me that wasn’t surprised. Because when everybody would say, ‘Ooh I don’t know, Wonder Woman’, I’m like, ‘Look, go out on Halloween and look at all the women dressed up as Wonder Woman.’ And nobody’s done a show since the ’70s! Talk about IP! This is a major character. Why would she not succeed?
“But I do think that it was super important that she be true to her and that they were in danger in earlier incarnations of losing that by trying to update, modernise or make her tougher, sassy or something. That’s not Wonder Woman. You need to be true to Wonder Woman, to the people who are fans of Wonder Woman and that I think was very helpful to our success.”
I was hoping for it to succeed… I was surprised by what kind of thing it became
Jenkins’s first experience of the Amazon princess was, of course, watching the ’70s television series starring Lynda Carter. Re-runs of the 60 episodes were shown in syndication throughout the ’80s. “Mind-blowingly alluring in every way,” she says, reminiscing about being the “little kid identifying with a superhero” the first time she saw her. “Lynda really was that for me on the playground – she’s everything you want to be and she looks the way you would want to look. I thought that was so amazing about that incarnation of Wonder Woman, so feminine yet so strong.
“It’s also interesting to me, the gay following and all kinds of people. There was something about her, because we only had the male stereotype of a very certain type,
all of us who are outside of that. A lot of people found themselves in Wonder Woman – she was this other way, this feminine way. For those of us that didn’t identify with being masculine and that version – I love that about her – I think it’s such an important thing about Wonder Woman.”
So there’s something even more joyful when it turns out that Jenkins is now on close terms with her childhood hero.… “I talk to her all the time!” she beams when asked about Carter. “She’s one of my dear friends now. We literally talk all the time. She was one of the first people I called when I booked Wonder Woman 1 – it was super important to me that I say to her what an inspiration she had been. And, also, that I didn’t want to reinvent Wonder Woman. I wanted to carry the torch forward.”
Jenkins reveals their families have since become firm friends – “I adore her” – and that Carter attended the premiere. “She was hugely relieved and happy,” she says of her take on the first film. “But of course it’s got to be so scary for somebody who is Wonder Woman. She is our Wonder Woman, she’s walked around the world being Wonder Woman alone for so long.
“The fact that she and [creator William Moulton] Marston’s granddaughter Christie said, ‘That’s Wonder Woman,’ it was a huge relief for me. And I think probably for them that they felt it was the same character.” Jenkins reveals that Carter came on set during filming of the sequel in Washington DC and that she has considered
having her appear in a scene. She laughs at the obvious delight this brings to SFX. “I’ve thought about it before, but it’s not easy. I’ve definitely thought about it. And we may have plans in the future. We’ll see.”
Not a sequel in the traditional sense, but not a reboot, Wonder Woman 1984 sees the action jump forward 66 years. Diana’s youthful complexion can be put down to the slow-ageing of Amazons, whereas Steve’s appearance is as yet unexplained.
“All I can say is that it came very naturally once I realised what I wanted the story to be,” Jenkins teases. “So it was not at all like, ‘Oh, how do we jam Chris Pine into this?’ Once I realised what the story was we were going to tell it was an essential element to the story. It’s such a big question to people who haven’t seen the movie, but the people who did see early tests of it, it was not a question at all. Chris has to come back.”
But then, why the ’80s?
“The truth is, I wanted to see Diana in our modern world,” Jenkins explains. “And 1984 was kind of the pinnacle of Western civilisation that has created everything that we’re living in now. So it was a way to go to a period of
I loved art in the ’80s… I thought that was great art, fashion, music
time that was a belief system like, ‘We can have it all, a wonderful world and this goes on forever and never changes’. And we could have fun with that. But also be talking about the truth that we’re dealing with in our times via juxtaposition to what that all turned into.”
1984 AND ALL THAT
Diana isn’t spending her time catching up on the decadence of the decade, however. “We see the ’80s through her eyes,” Jenkins says. “She’s not seeing all the beautiful things. She’s focused on just fighting crime. But I also think that she is confused by the messages that are being sent. She gets caught in the same trap as everybody else in the movie of what the belief system is of the world.”
Setting the movie in familiar surroundings meant that Jenkins got to do a little time travelling of her own. “We built that mall completely that you see in the trailer,” she grins. “The mall was so trippy because it was exactly a mall to those of us in America that you would have gone to, with all the stores and everything. And there was this, like, allure that you didn’t want to leave. Because it was almost like the naïveté of the past. So you would sit in there and you’re like, ‘Ah, remember when it just was, like, everything was great, it was going to go on forever.’ It was like there was something intoxicating about being there, even though you know the hammer is going to drop on the person who just threw the trash on the ground and the excess of everything. It was a trip!”
If you’re getting the impression that Jenkins had a blast, you’d be right – even down to stealing a Duran Duran cassette from the set.
“I loved art in the ’80s,” she says. “I thought that was great art, fashion, music... It’s such an interesting period of time because it was us at our most excessive but out of that came some pretty amazing stuff and that was really important to me in the movie. I felt like I’ve seen a lot of ‘making fun of the ’80s’ movies, which are fun, and we do a little of that too.
“What I haven’t seen as much of is truly celebrating the beauty and the elegance of the ’80s and the great fashion and like you saw [in a party scene SFX viewed prior to our interview] with that Frankie Goes To Hollywood [soundtrack] and the dress and the walking in the neon. It was cool. There was cool stuff going on. There was great avant garde cutting edge stuff going on there. So that’s my favourite thing about the ’80s.”
Settings and super powers aren’t what’s at the heart of Wonder Woman 1984 though, Jenkins explains. “It’s paramount about making a great film, and using your superhero to tell a great metaphoric story Continued on page 30
How was this compared to the first Wonder Woman movie?
Gal: It was like coming back home again. The process of shooting these movies, doing all of the prep work, is a long time. We shot the movie for eight months, sometimes six days a week. It’s very, very intensive. We really got lucky with the people that are working on this movie. We were literally like a basketball team: you know, you throw the ball to someone and then they score. It was such a mutual, joint effort. And so much fun, as much as it was demanding and intensive.
How did both of you establish a rapport?
Kristen: It was pretty instant. [Laughs] It was like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. Let’s hang out.’ I was a fan and I loved the first movie. You can get a little bit of a sense of a person when you watch them on screen, I think. And just in watching Wonder Woman and seeing her in an interview or whatever, I just knew that she was someone that I would get along with and would love to hang out with.
Gal: Bribe goes a long way. [Laughs]
Kristen: But when I got to London [where a large portion of the film is set], I mean, that’s hard. I was really nervous. I’ve never been in a movie like this, something so big – this huge superhero franchise and picking up my life and moving to London for nine months. Then walking on the stage and meeting Gal, seeing Patty again, just felt so welcoming, so warm. We got right into it.
Gal: We write songs, we have a band. We’re gonna announce it very soon but here’s a scoop. We wrote songs, we recorded it, we shot videos.
Kristen: You’ll see!
Some fans online hoped that perhaps Diana and Barbara were on a date together...
Kristen: I did not know about that! [Laughs] Oh, for a lesbian thing?
Gal: The sexual tension is always there, I can tell you that! [Both laugh]
Was there pressure bringing the first live-action portrayal of Cheetah to the screen?
Kristen: Yes! Doing anything in a comic book world, there’s extreme pressure because there are extreme fans. Even when I was cast, people just had opinions about it. You just have to make it smaller in your brain and treat it like an indie film and say, “I’m going to do the best I can and people are going to embrace it or they’re not” and I hope they do.
There are different versions of Barbara and how she gets her powers. For me, I just relied on Patty and how she saw the character and where she wanted her to go.
There’s so much stunt work in this movie – was that easier this time round?
Gal: No! No! The thing is, when you do a sequel – I hate to say it’s a sequel, but it is a sequel – you raise the bar, right? The bar was originally high and now you need to push it even higher. When you go see superhero movies, usually the hero is a guy and he fights like a guy and then when you do a female movie like that, we don’t fight like guys. I’m a woman. How do women fight? Who knows? We don’t. So, Patty and I, before we even started prepping for the movie, we took our kids to see the Cirque du Soleil show. They have cables they fall from and they do crazy things with them – it was beautifully done. Patty said, ‘That’s an amazing inspiration for the fight’. Feminine, graceful and sexy, and [it] could be very strong and sharp, and it became our inspiration.
So much of the action is real because Patty believes in shooting for real – so as long as we can shoot real, raw action, we did. The wire rigs they had to build for months because it was never done before. Then they need to check that no one’s gonna hit each other. The cherry on top for us, after everyone does all this work, we get to be wired and we get to dance and fight in the air. It was beautiful. For me to feel, because essentially we’re all performers, like I’m doing something that is fresh and different, but strong and badass, was amazing. We had to learn so much stunt choreography and do so much workouts to make sure we were able to do it to begin with, but it was worth it.
Exactly what sort of workouts do you have to do for wire work?
Kristen: Everything. [Laughs] No, we did! We did cardio, weights, pilates, flexibility. Running.
Gal: Learning the stunt was a workout itself.
Kirsten: But it was great. We felt amazing.
Which ’80s recreations did you particularly love in this film?
Kristen: I personally love the set design, it was incredible. This seems very ’80s without being “everything’s neon”. The wardrobe was amazing. Her wardrobe was really incredible.
Gal: Everyone’s wardrobe was!
Kristen: But yours was like high-fashion ’80s.
Gal: They spoiled me.
Did you get to keep anything from it?
Kristen: Ummm, I diiiid…
Gal: I’ve learned from the first movie, when I didn’t keep anything. And the second one I knew I’m going to keep something and then, yeah, I stole something from the set. I can’t tell you what, because I don’t want to get into trouble!
for the ages that wouldn’t matter if it was a superhero movie or not,” she says. “That’s how I feel about it. That maybe is unusual in its own way. Because there are some other superhero movies that really aren’t even thinking about that. They’re there and, good for them, they’re focused on spectacle or a massive group of people or something else. Me, I was thinking of, forget who’s in the movie. This is the movie that happens to star a superhero in our cast of characters to tell that story. So you know that that’s how it ends up being original, because that’s the story you’re telling. And nobody else is telling that story.”
UP TO THE WIRE
Jenkins’s love of ’80s adventure movies also shaped the direction of Wonder Woman 1984 – even though it meant more work. “I also really had an ambition to go back to the grand cinema of the past, where we did everything for real,” she enthuses. “CG is great, we certainly do plenty of it, but I feel like people move so fast and things go so fast that you almost lose perspective of what’s powerful and what’s not.
“We did 80% of this movie on wires. So all the stuff you see is real. You saw the opening Olympics [in the trailer]. That’s real people. That’s real people on wires – that little girl, she’s doing those stunts, she’s not CG, not in anything you saw. I remember seeing those movies that were that kind of experience in the ’80s, where you really travelled the world and you really shot these things. It’s sort of a retro way of being original right now to say, ‘No, we’re shooting it. We’re shooting it. Everybody’s doing those stunts for real.’”
And how did that work out?
“It’s a nightmare,” she laughs. “It really is. We shot this movie for nine months. That’s crazy and that’s common for this size of a tentpole. But our ambition to do it for real was something I am so grateful that Warner Bros. supported us doing. Because you could do almost all of that in the stage and CG – we went and shot on location in the desert with those trucks, which are vintage, you can’t try and get them to go fast, they’re breaking down all the time. People are literally on wires flying over the road doing things.
“So it’s incredibly hard, it’s incredibly slow. But the results have made me so satisfied. What’s interesting to me is that everything ends up being a little slower, but you feel it even more impactfully because that’s a real person flying through the air to do that thing. I love it. It’s a real car chase with a person flying around between cars.”
A new world also means new worries. After Aries, Jenkins states, Cheetah and Max Lord are two of Wonder Woman’s most famous villains, so the choice was obvious.
“I knew we were going to go to Cheetah next because Cheetah is the exciting one. But I also felt very concerned with it not being ‘girl fighty’,” she explains, making a cat noise and clawing gesture. “I wanted it to be, ‘Forget that they’re women, this is a great female villain and this is a great female hero’ and having their story progress, as it naturally would. They start out as friends, you really get to
see the history of how this villain is born and the relationship that she’s having with the hero.”
Sadly, internet theorists, the two aren’t dating. “It might have [happened] in a different storyline,” Jenkins says, “but because this storyline was so clearly about Steve coming back, the whole story was about Steve. It’s all a love story with Steve. There wasn’t room for two for Diana.”
On casting Kristen Wiig in the role of Barbara Minerva aka The Cheetah, Jenkins is full of praise. “I think she’s always been an unbelievable actress,” she says. “I wanted it to be a woman who could start as her friend who has insecurities, and yet could transform into something much stronger and she just has that latitude within her.”
If the ’80s taught us we could have more, the message is already being applied: before Wonder Woman 1984 has even hit cinemas there’s discussion about a spin-off and third outing.
“It’s all happening,” Jenkins says. “The Amazon movie will be next, Geoff Johns and I have broken the story for it and sold the pitch and so it’s just it’s headed
I knew we were going to go to Cheetah next, because Cheetah is the exciting one