A LEAGUE OF HIS OWN JUSTICE LEAGUE
RETURNS FOR ANOTHER ROUND - BUT NOT AS YOU’VE SEEN IT BEFORE. IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, DIRECTOR ZACK SNYDER TELL TOTAL FILM HOW HIS VERSION OF THE SUPERHERO TEAM-UP GOT AN UNLIKELY REPRIEVE.
Not seen the theatrical cut of 2017’s Justice League yet? Don’t worry – neither has the man credited as its director. Although Zack Snyder worked on DC’s superhero team-up from its inception, he’d left the movie long before it hit cinemas. He hasn’t felt obliged to watch it since.
Justice League was supposed to be Snyder’s answer to Marvel’s Avengers, an epic crossover bringing together Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and DC’s other biggest capes to fight off extra-terrestrial bad guy Steppenwolf. It was also the continuation of a story Snyder had started with Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
But a combination of family tragedy and creative differences with studio Warner Bros prompted Snyder’s departure. The movie was shepherded to release by replacement helmer Joss Whedon, and subsequently very different to the one the 300 and Watchmen director had originally conceived.
Snyder’s version seemed set to remain one of Hollywood’s great ‘what ifs’, something to file alongside Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man, and Chris Miller and Phil Lord’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. Fans refused to let it go, however, and the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag started to gain traction on social media.
Eventually, the fan movement was strong enough to persuade Warner Bros to put out the alternative – original? – version of the movie on its new HBO Max streaming service. This four-hour behemoth would dwarf Whedon’s 120-minute cut.
“Because I’ve never seen the theatrical version of Justice League,
I don’t know exactly what from my movie is in that movie,” Snyder tells Total Film. “But I have heard from people who were on my crew and then continued on [with Whedon], there was about an hour of reshoots. So I guess they used about an hour of my footage, and they pretty much touched every shot, whether it was for ADR or whatever. I think my movie is a chance to get into the characters and the story beats a lot more.”
ORIGIN STORY
Justice League’s unlikely, Supermanesque resurrection is possibly one of the strangest superhero stories ever told in Hollywood. When it landed in cinemas in late 2017, the film was neither a box-office hit – it’s $658m take was seen as a relative disappointment, and it neither made the top 10 grossers of the year, unlike standalones Wonder Woman, Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming – nor was loved by critics. Instead, it felt like a strange chimera, where Snyder’s bleak Batman V. Superman vision – itself not to everyone’s tastes – had been sprinkled with extra Avengers-style quips.
It’s easy to understand why. By the time DC and Warner Bros were readying Justice League for release, they were languishing way behind the allconquering Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only were the MCU films frequently breaking the billion-dollar barrier at the box office – who’d have believed at the turn of the century that Iron Man 3
would significantly out-gross Man Of Steel? – their easy sense of fun felt at odds with the darkness in Snyder’s movies. While bleak had been embraced when Christopher Nolan set up shop in Gotham, it had started to feel out of step with what audiences were looking for. The studio moved to shift the tone of the movie.
“[The original plan] was absolutely being twisted during production, but y’know, I was there to fight them,” Snyder recalls. “Even though there was pressure on me to make it funnier and lighten it, I would persist as much as I could to keep the tone as much as I could. I added a bunch of things for them, and I was always careful to make sure I covered things both ways, so that it didn’t affect the movie story-wise. It was my hope that, in post-production, I’d be able to force my will upon them.”
But Snyder never made it to that point. After the tragic death of his daughter, Autumn, in 2017, he decided to stand aside, and Whedon – who had previous experience of wrangling super-teams from the first two Avengers movies – stepped in as an uncredited director.
“After what happened with my family, I was slightly crushed and my will was kind of broken a bit,” says
Snyder. “Upon my leaving the movie there was a feast that went on. I left it open and [the studio] operated with impunity at that point, I guess.”
But Snyder’s association with the Justice League wasn’t over. The hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut captured a wave, and while not all of the conversation was wholesome – with toxic elements of fan entitlement coming to the fore – there were also plenty of positive sides to the movement. In fact, the campaign has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention.
“I guess there was this sort of unprecedented passion,” says Snyder. “It’s hard to put your finger on the exact moment when the tide turned. A lot of the fan campaign was for suicide prevention, with their fundraising and all that. That allowed the movement to not just be this fan-centric thing, where they were saying it’d be cool to see the movie. I think it was something that they felt was more important than just a movie.”
FRESH CUT
Putting out a ‘lost’ director’s cut of a superhero blockbuster isn’t unprecedented – Richard Donner’s version of the Christopher Reevestarring
Superman II was released on DVD in 2006 – but it’s still an unconventional move for a major studio. Then again, with a new streaming service to promote, and a movie that few loved on the big screen, it starts to seem less of a gamble. (Whedon’s brand is also now tarnished, after Cyborg actor Ray Fisher’s allegations about the director’s behaviour during reshoots led to an internal investigation.)
Yet even when Warner Bros and HBO Max agreed to foot the bill to turn Snyder’s incomplete cut into a movie – unconfirmed reports place the cost in the region of $70m – even Snyder was reticent about returning to a project he’d left three years earlier.
“I knew how much work it would be,” he admits. “I’d seen that fans were into it and I’d post a bunch of stuff for them [on social media], but never [with the aim] to actually release the movie. Finishing my version of the film was going to be a huge undertaking.
And I didn’t know that there was an appetite from the studio – I mean, it’s good for HBO Max and it’s a cool thing, but I don’t know how good it is for the powers that be who made the decision to change the movie the way they did, y’know?
“The good news was the cut was pretty much complete,” Snyder continues. “It was just a matter of trying to get the visual effects sorted – we feel like 80 or 90 per cent of the effects shots we did have never been seen – and there were some sequences that we were able to expand a little bit, because we were kind of able to dive back into it. But I’d say that it’s pretty much the cut that I had finished in late December/early January of 2016/2017.”
As well as working on new effects shots, Snyder brought back some of the cast for additional photography to fill in some holes in the narrative. These extra bits aren’t quite as substantial, however, as the rumour mill may have suggested. “We only shot a little bit of material, two small scenes,” Snyder says. “It’s a fourhour movie with maybe 8-10 minutes of new photography. We shot it over the course of three days, and on stage. It was great to be with the cast again – and fun – but it wasn’t a big
‘I GUESS THERE WAS THIS SORT OF UNPRECEDENTED PASSION’