FOR SUICIDE SQUAD DIRECTOR, DOING IT RIGHT IS A DIRTY JOB
Filmmaker embraces the craziness of Toronto-shot flick
Suicide Squad’s David Ayer isn’t one to mince words — he apologized to his Marvel Comics rivals this week after playfully uttering a rude taunt — so his comparison of filmmaking to extreme surgery hardly surprises.
“It’s like when you hack off a limb,” the brawny writer/director says from a New York promotional stop. “Just use a skin graft to fix it.”
He’s describing necessary reshoots for his madein-Toronto DC Comics summer blockbuster, opening Friday, in which a band of supervillains fronted by Will Smith and Margot Robbie are called upon to do good, despite their worst instincts.
Pesky Internet rumours had it the reshoots were ordered by Warner Bros. suits to add more comedy to the villainy, after DC’s dour Batman v. Super
man disappointed while Marvel’s rude Deadpool delighted earlier this year. The rumours were FUBAR, to use an acronym an ex-U. S. navy man such as Ayer, 48, would appreciate. He says the reshoots added action, not laughs.
“If you know about filmmaking, you can’t just go and drop in jokes like hair plugs in a scalp. It doesn’t work,” he asserts. “The tone of the movie is determined in principal photography on the set. And what happened was, the studio saw it and they knew — suspected — that maybe we had something here. They just wanted it to be the best movie that it could be, so we rolled our sleeves up and added some action.”
Like the task-oriented cops and soldiers of his previous films — he wrote Training Day, and wrote and directed End of Watch and Fury — Ayer approached Suicide Squad as a dirty job that somebody had to do right and that somebody was going to be him.
You’ve grounded previouslyin reality, madelike the films tough streetsthe historicof L.A. battlefieldswhere you of grewthe Sec-up or ond into Worldpure fantasy?War. Was it hard to shift
I like to think I successfully split the baby, where you sort of get the wonder and spectacle and beauty and the tropes of a comic movie while at the same time doing what I love as a director: really focusing on characters and relationships and the performances by the actors. That sentiment really comes through in the bar scene, also used in an early teaser, in which the Suicide Squad members bond over booze.
That scene is really why I wanted to make the movie. I imagined what it would be like to have these comic book supervillains in a very deep, realistic, well-acted and well-crafted dramatic scene, really opening up to each other, just like anybody in the real world does. I’m really proud of the work the actors did in that scene. I think they’re on fire. The notion of using evil to fight evil isn’t completely fantasy, as you point out in the film. A character talks about the U.S. government collaborating with the Mafia to fight Hitler.
Yes, it’s a complex world out there. Look, you take law enforcement and they use criminals to help them on cases all the time. And the U.S. government has definitely had to deal with some shady folks to get the job done. Will Smith’s Deadshot, Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Jared Leto’s Joker grab the movie’s marquee. But Viola Davis’s tough U.S. government official Amanda Waller, who creates Suicide Squad’s Task Force X, gets many of the best lines.
That’s the thing. It’s such a colourful, eclectic movie and cast, and yet she kind of steals every scene. She just becomes, in a lot of ways, the core of the movie. Viola has to control these supervillains and has to be almost tougher and scarier and more intense than any of them. It’s amazing, because even though she’s a government bureaucrat, she’s also one of the most terrifying characters in the film. There are quite a few laughs in the film, despite the grim subject matter and characters. But you’ve always had some comedy in even your most bleak movies.
Exactly. For me, to be entertaining, drama wears both a happy mask and a sad mask. It’s not two sad masks. And when you look at these insane characters — I’ve got a crocodile running around and Harley Quinn swinging a baseball bat — you just have to enjoy the craziness of that and embrace it.