However, director ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ says she is ‘super grateful’ for her time with Marvel Studios.
With “Wonder Woman 1984”, Patty Jenkins achieves just the biggest opening weekend for any film since theaters reopened. As a victory round, she came along with Marc Maron’s podcast on the WTF to talk about her journey to making blockbuster superhero movies, something many outside observers did not think was likely after her 2003 indie drama “Monster.” One major pit stop along the way was her brief stint at the helm of ‘Thor 2’, which eventually became the much-maligned ‘Thor: The Dark World’ of 2013. She left the project and was replaced by Alan Taylor, ‘Game of Thrones’, but Jenkins has not commented much in the past on why she did it.
“The message came that I wanted to do a superhero movie and to Marvel’s credit – on a movie that did not need a wife at all – they hired me,” Jenkins said. ‘So, I’ve always been very grateful to them, even though it did not work out. They wanted to do a story that I thought was not going to succeed, and I knew it could not be me. It can not be me who happened like that. If they hire a man to do it, it will not be a big deal, but I know in my heart that I can not make a good movie out of the story they want to do. ‘
So Jenkins walked away from the project, though directing “Thor 2” would make her the first female filmmaker to direct a superhero film. The implication of this is that halving a sensational comic book would derail her prospects of other directorial tent poles, something that probably would not have happened if she were a man. Given the double standards in the industry, Jenkins felt she needed to navigate the world of filmmaking almost perfectly in order to achieve and maintain a level of success. And also achieves her real goal: directing “Wonder Woman,” which she directed to Warner Bros. indicated what she wanted to do immediately after the success of “Monster” in 2003.
“I wanted to go in,” she told Maron. ‘I wanted to make a great superhero movie after’ Monster ‘. And I immediately started saying that to ‘Monster’. People were confused … I got every ‘woman’ movie, any story about women. And I was like, ‘I want to make movies about women, but I do not want to make movies be a woman, it’s so boring. I want to make movies about women who do all sorts of things. ”
Someone once told her that she could be like a woman Woody Allen, but that was not what Jenkins really wanted. “I wanted to get a chance for the big emotions.”
After her initial encounter with Warner Bros. on ‘Wonder Woman’ in 2004, Jenkins meets the studio about once every two years thereafter, during which she proposes that 30 scripts be drawn for the film. The studio ‘did not know what to do with Wonder Woman’, and ‘was chased by previous female superhero films that failed’, she said, and she even walked away when they insisted on a direction for the story she did not. wants to be part of. That’s when she went to Marvel Studios.
However, Jenkins’ journey to making superhero movies began much earlier. On the podcast, she cites Richard Donner’s “Superman: The Movie” as a formative experience for her when she was seven years old. Her fighter pilot father has just been killed.
“I was deeply moved by the film, and then the release when he became a superhero,” she said. ‘I have always appreciated the – not for all tent poles’ – for the certain archetypal, massive film that can influence an audience in such a way. It threatened great in my subconscious. ”
Jenkins calls her father’s career as a fighter pilot in a teaser produced by Lucasfilm for her next film, “Star Wars: Rogue Squadron” in 2023. She is also associated with ‘Wonder Woman 3.’
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