The Wall Street Journal posted a great interview with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice screenwriter Chris Terrio today. Terrio is best known for winning an Oscar for writing Argo, the 2012 movie that Ben Affleck directed and starred in. Now he’s taking his talents over to the DC Extended Universe.
In the WSJ interview, Terrio admits that he didn’t read comics growing up, though Superman 2 was the first movie he ever saw. What really got him interested in the genre was Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. “Nolan helped establish a space in which super-hero movies can be taken more seriously. We thought a lot about those films, to a point where I had to stop watching “The Dark Knight” because I found I was rewriting it,” Terrio explained.
To prepare for the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice script, Terrio read a lot of Batman comics by writers like Frank Miller and Grant Morrison.
Terrio wrote Justice League: Part One and says that it won’t be as dark as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. However, Terrio isn’t sure if he’ll come back to write Justice League: Part Two.
Was there any question in your mind you’d write “Justice League” as well?
I initially thought I wasn’t the guy to do “Justice League” and went off to work on something else. But the first day I went to the set, I saw Jesse [Eisenberg] in a scene with Holly Hunter and I really did feel like I was watching some strange, great performance in an independent film.
At that moment, I thought, “I’m not done with this yet. I want to go back and keep telling the story.” “Batman v Superman” is a bit of an “Empire Strikes Back” or “Two Towers” or any similar middle film in a trilogy. The middle film tends to be the darkest one. I do think from “Man of Steel” through “Justice League,” it is one saga really.
I expect “Justice League” will be tonally not quite as dark as “Batman v Superman.” From that point of view, I felt compelled to go back and try to lift us and myself into a different tonal place because I think when you write a darker film, sometimes you want to redeem it all a bit.
There are many more DC movies to come, including a second “Justice League.” Will you be writing more?
I have written “Justice League Part One,” but I won’t necessarily write “Part Two.” This has been the most rigorous intellectual exercise I’ve had in my writing life. For “Batman v Superman,” I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies to the huge canon of DC Comics to Amazon mythology. For “Justice League,” I could be reading in the same day about red- and blueshifts in physics, Diodorus of Sicily and his account of the war between Amazons and Atlanteans, or deep-sea biology and what kind of life plausibly might be in the Mariana Trench.
If you told me the most rigorous dramaturgical and intellectual product of my life would be superhero movies, I would say you were crazy. But I do think fans deserve that. I felt I owed the fan base all of my body and soul for two years because anything less wouldn’t have been appreciating the opportunity I had.
Head on over to The Wall Street Journal at the source link below to read the full interview with Chris Terrio.
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal
