That premiere the other night was amazing. What was your impression as it was all unfolding?
[Long exhausted pause] My brain is a hard thing to explain, so that's a very complicated question. I try not to judge anything in life. I just try to move forward and take it all in. But if you're asking me if I think it went good or bad, it seemed to go quite well. I was very touched by all the people who came from so far away to come see the movie, and I was very touched by all the tweets I received this morning from all the people the movie affected. So that, to me, made it very worthwhile.
The subculture we've seen growing around SUPER in the last few months -- especially over Twitter and social media -- is kind of unprecedented. It's a community. Can you explain a little bit about building that community and why you wanted to be a part of that?
When I was a kid, I met a couple of people -- Joe Strummer was one in particular -- who were very nice to me. I was at a record store one day, and I went up to him and I said, "Mr. Strummer, you don't know me, but I think you're great. Thank you for everything you've done." And I shook his hand and went to walk away. And Joe Strummer followed me and hung out with me for about 20 minutes, talking to me about life. I thought that was a great thing. Another thing is that I wrote the comic-book artist John Romita Sr. when I was a kid, and he would write me back, and we would talk. Having contact with these guys... I mean, I was from Manchester, Missouri. I didn't have any contact with these people I thought as sort of beyond me. By having contact with them, it was really important to me. I'm not sure that without those three or four people who were successful in the entertainment industry being nice to me as a kid I'd be doing this today. So I feel like having communication be two ways with people who are my fans -- or not even my fans, but who are just interested in moviemaking and how you go about doing it -- I feel good about it.
Another relationship whose influence is conspicuous in SUPER is Troma, for whom you worked on projects before moving on to Slither. How did those years inform what you're doing now?
To be honest, most of what I got from Troma was production. There's a production experience with Troma that you don't get anywhere else. There's a way to do things very expensively that you don't learn how to do anywhere else. But also, one of the reasons I think Lloyd Kaufman and I get along so well and that we're such good friends is because Troma wasn't bound by any one genre. When he came out with those movies -- especially The Toxic Avenger -- that combined slapstick, splatter/gore, action and the superhero movie in a way that had never been done? He invented that! That was very influential to Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, everybody. I really admire that -- the ability to mix genres.
There are bad examples of ways people have tried to transcend the genre. There's a great quote from Joss Whedon where he says, "I don't want to transcend the genre; I want to embrace the genre." And I think it's accepting genre conventions and wanting to play with them -- not in a way that makes you better than them, but being able to use things in a way that's even more entertaining than what you'd originally seen. It's a dangerous thing to do. I did it with Slither, which made a very difficult road for that movie. And so I'm doing it again, but I feel a little bit more confident this time in the way I'm going about it and what the movie is. This is truly more of an art film, even though it has grindhouse aspects to it. It's different than Slither.
What made you more confident?
I directed a movie! I was always very confident with actors, but on Slither, maybe there were times I held back a little bit on dealing with the camera. I'm not a DP. And there were times I held back even from actors sometimes. I'd hold back saying what I really thought. On SUPER, I went into this movie saying, "There is nothing I'm going to hold back." Directing a sex scene with Ellen Page and Rainn Wilson is not easy! To be sitting there and saying, "Ellen, move your arm in this way so it looks like you're jerking him off..." That's a hard thing to say on set! And it used to be something I'd maybe shy away from. But any time I held back, it was really to the detriment of the film. So I wanted to really go all out there with any thought, any feeling I ever had.
I'll be completely honest: On Slither, it was still very important for me to be liked by people. And I like being liked. It's great! But I'd rather make a good movie than be liked. I'm not saying I'm going to be a jerk, but I'm not going to walk around couching what I say as opposed to just coming out and saying exactly what I mean every morning and always being true to that vision of what SUPER was. Because what SUPER ended up being was exactly what I intended SUPER to be when I first started writing the movie. Nothing has changed. I stayed true to the original vision. Right or wrong, it is the movie I wanted to make. I was committed to speaking up and staying true to that vision -- as outrageous as some of the ideas seem at times.
The flip side of that vision and candor is that you have to cast actors who are game, and you most definitely did that.
It all hinges on Rainn. Try to think of somebody who could play that role. I don't know anybody. We had funding for this movie five years ago, but I couldn't find anybody. There were a lot of actors who wanted to play that role -- some pretty famous actors -- but there was nobody who could do the comedic stuff, who could do the dramatic stuff, who you could believe was a big enough doof that he was getting picked on by the dishwasher at his diner but was also physically present enough that you could imagine him beating the sh*t out of people. And it wasn't until Rainn -- whom I'd known for five years and never thought of -- came along that it was like, "He's perfect."
One of the things that makes this movie fun for me is that I love Rainn, I love Ellen, I love Liv, and giving them the opportunity to do something different from what they usually do -- to see Rainn as something completely different than Dwight [Schrute, his Office character]. I was honest with him from the beginning. I told him, "If I see you do anything that's Dwight-like, I'm going to shut you down. We don't want to be reminding people of Dwight during this movie; we want to take it someplace different. With Ellen, we don't want her playing this wise-beyond-her-years character who's tongue-in-cheek and smart as hell. She's not smart! She's an idiot! Not in a bad way, but she's got a lot of issues. And to let her really express that energy onscreen -- the sexual energy, the crazy energy that she's able to bring forth -- and let those actors be seen in a new light was very important to me.
Conceptually you don't hold back either. There are places you go in SUPER where I thought seconds before, "Oh, he won't go there." How much of a consideration was that?
Listen, I love Karate Kid-like endings, or Rocky -- actually, not Rocky, because the ending is f*cked-up -- or romantic comedies where you know what's going to happen. There's a comfort to that. Those movies are well-told and they can be a great joy to watch. But I wanted to have a movie where you didn't know what was going to happen next. I spaced characters differently -- Ellen becomes a major character halfway through the movie -- and the things that happen to those characters are surprising to people. And we do go places that people don't think we're going to go -- both in terms of what happens to the characters and in terms of the choices the characters make. And also the tonal choices the characters make; it's not a light comedy.
It was also important to me that the movie built, and the last act was the best. To do that meant the movie's getting progressively more in-your-face than it started out. That means we're offending a few people, but that's OK.
The spiritual components of this film -- the prayers, the Holy Avenger, the finger of God -- are really interesting. What inspired them?
Well, I'll be completely honest: I'm a spiritual guy. I relate to Frank in that journey. A lot of the ways Frank feels called to put on that costume and do what he's doing, I felt called to make this movie. That's the way it is. I don't know what to say about it other than that, except that Rainn is, too. There was one actor we almost cast a few years ago, and at the end of the movie, he couldn't see that part of the film. And I knew I couldn't make the movie with him because of that. He was a popular actor -- he was going to get the movie green-lit -- but he didn't see it the same way I did. He thought Frank was a buffoon, basically, and I don't. I love him, and I think he's got a lot of nobility.
It seems like you're working out your spiritual issues in the film. There are send-ups of Christian TV programming, but these still are noble characters with ambitions and goals.
Listen, the movie's a fable. We're raised in a society where we're told what's right and what's wrong, and there's another part of us that knows what's right and what's wrong. Sometimes what we know is right is not what seems like it's right, whether you're falling in love with the wrong person -- that you know you're not supposed to fall in love with but you know you belong with. Or you need to take a stand when you're a kid and everybody else is doing something different. That's what this movie is about for me: Frank is doing something that, for all intents and purposes, is absolutely mad. But in his heart, he knows it's the right thing to do. It seems like a terrible thing, but it's right. And I believe that. I believe in what Frank does -- as messed up as it is -- while saying in real life I wouldn't hit someone with a pipe wrench who butts in line in front of me.
[Top photo of James Gunn by Patrick Jube/Getty Images]