Suicide Squad director David Ayer wants no part of your typical superhero movie. While speaking to Empire magazine, the director promised a tougher, fresher take on the genre.
Ayer pitched Suicide Squad to Warner Bros. while they were in Michigan shooting Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. "We were figuring out our path through the expanding DC Justice League universe," producer Charles Roven explained. "Then David Ayer came in and pitched his take on Suicide Squad. It had this darkness and edge, while still tonally in the zone of what we're trying to do with these movies. And it's impossible that you could get a big tentpole picture from pitch to start of principle photography any faster than we did."
Ayer worked on the script for Suicide Squad while he was in the middle of editing his last movie, Fury. Ayer said that the first character he connected with was Harley Quinn. "When you follow her story, it's about her breaking free of the Joker and becoming this fully actualized, independent person. That really is a metaphor for everyone's journey here."
Once Ayer picked his characters, his next challenge was to reinvent The Joker, who had just been portrayed brilliantly by the late Heath Ledger. "The Joker is the thrid rail of comic-book movies," Ayer told Empire. "There's a power to that character, and by some freaking miracle, through the incredible things Jared has done and the photography and all of the other millions of things that went into it, we've cooked up something transcendent. He's scary."
Then Ayer dropped some F-bombs and took a little jab at movies like Marvel's and even Man of Steel... "You know, all these movies are about defeating the evil alien robot from f*cking Planet X, before it destroys the world with its ticking clock. And who the f*ck cares? But you do a story about struggle and isolation and people who have been shit on, that suddenly get thrown this lifeline... that's not so bad. I like to think of this as Comic-Book Movie 2.0."
SOURCE: Empire (December 2015)
