As long as I’ve been talking to Zack Snyder, “Sucker Punch” has been bouncing around in there somewhere, a constant concern of his. When we first sat down to talk, he was in post-production on “300,” and he talked about how there were things he wanted to do that were original, something he was writing, and at the same time, he also had “Watchmen” sitting in his office, an active concern for Warner Bros.
He moved from “300” directly into that adaptation of one of the sacred texts of the comic world, and it was something that Warner Bros. really wanted to make. The train was moving, and he hopped on. And even so, even as he did his third adaptation in a row of existing material, he was still working on developing his original idea, and it was only after he delivered that film that he finally took the plunge.
Now here we are, and “Sucker Punch” arrives in theaters on Friday, and sitting down to talk to him about the movie, it feels like he’s graduating from school all over again. This is a film he had to make before he moves forward in the rest of his career, a dare he posed for himself years ago, and whatever you think of the finished film, the ambition on display is outsized, an artist betting on his own sensibilities without a safety net. It was great to hear him talk about what he’s actually done as opposed to the hypothetical of what he might do or could do or wanted to do. This is the moment where audiences finally see Zack Snyder without anyone else’s sensibilities grafted onto what he does, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens.
I think “Sucker Punch” is a dense piece of text, and it’s not the sort of film where a simple binary reaction can sum up everything about the movie. Even in this short conversation, we cover a lot of ground, and one of the things we specifically cover is how careful he was to try and deliver a PG-13 to the studio, and that was one of the hardest things to navigate in a film that deals with subjects as dark as “Sucker Punch.”
More importantly, though, we wrapped things up by talking for a quick moment about his next film, and I asked him the one question that matters to me about Superman and his return to film. It was just one question, but his answer made me very, very happy.
We’ll have some more of the “Sucker Punch” cast for you later today, but for now, enjoy Snyder, and check out “Sucker Punch” in theaters everywhere tomorrow.
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