After decades skewering the genre, James Gunn chooses sincerity.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
The season-one finale of writer-director James GunnsPeacemakerends with a large-scale comic action scene.
The dynamic between parents and children in your work is fascinating.
Is it often a tragic love that children in your stories feel for their parents?Yeah!
Thats definitely true with Chris, more so than any other character in something Ive done.
Leota and Wallers relationship is much more nuanced than that I mean, its notexactlythe same thing.
Chriss father has neither the willingness nor the ability to love Chris.
Yet Chris is constantly trying to earn his fathers affection, at least through the early episodes.
Then something starts to change in him.
ButPeacemakers a little different because everything involving the government is so behind-the-scenes.
Were not killing anyone who doesnt deserve it.
Thats what Murn says.Yes.
Which is like a Get Out of Jail Free card for your conscience?Yeah!
And Harcourt says, Yes.
Probably not even realizing shes saying yes until after she says it.
But thats what her belief system is.
She and Peacemaker, in that respect, are almost exactly the same.
Now, the difference is, Harcourt wouldve never killed Rick Flag.
She wouldve never done that in a million years because she prioritizes those fellow soldiers ahead of the orders.
I knew it was gonna be hard to get that right.
This is a guy whos trapped in his own ideals, which were born from trauma.
Hes been trapped in this prison of his ideals.
At the end of this show, he does the exact opposite of what he did inTheSuicide Squad.
He put his ideals second to his personal love of his friends.
Its a really complicated moment.
She makes a lot of sense.
In that moment in the end, he takes a different path.
Your Peacemaker is bisexual.
Being able to make a show with people I really love around me is my favorite joy on earth.
He actually is a pretty bad guy.
Being able to see how he got that way and where he could possibly go was exciting to me.
I also think hes the most socially relevant character inThe Suicide Squad.
Chris stands in for a lot of people today, or at least aspects of the norm.
But hes also a very nuanced character.
Theres a depth of sadness and brokenness to John Cenas performance that caught me by surprise.
I went into this tight closeup of his eyes.
On set, Im always on the microphone talking over everything while were shooting.
I see him go to this incredibly sad, vulnerable place.
At that moment, I knew John had thatthing.
Its a thing a lot of big actors dont have, and that most wrestlers turned actors dont have.
Dave Bautista also has it.
Thats the reason I hired him forGuardiansin the first place.
Tell me about the piano scene.
The thing that works so well for me about the piano scene is that Chris himself is an artist.
Hes not a killer, hes sensitive.
Hes not at all the mean bully that he comes off as.
Hes become thatbecausehe is so sensitive.
He was socialized as a bully to suppress that part of himself?Yeah.
Hes been totally fucked with and turned into something else as a reaction to those sensitivities.
Hes like many extremely sensitive people, of which I am one.
We see who he truly is for the first time when hes alone at that piano.
And that links to the beginning of the trauma.
Hes in his brothers death at the piano.
Hes playing the last song he played with his brother before he killed him by accident.
Thats a perfect excuse to jump to another thing I was going to ask you about: language.
Its at the core of everything.
Its true even of people who are thought of as having great expressive powers.
I have a large vocabulary.
Im able to express myself very well.
Even that, in a way, can become a shield to prevent a connection with another human being.
Everything can be a shield.
Are you a fan of Steven Spielberg?
Not just because of that but because Spielberg is the guy that made me understand what a director was.
I sawRaiders of the Lost Ark.
I was like, Wow, who made this?
Theres a guy in a hat in this movie, but he didnt make it.
Whos the person whomadethis movie?
You have an interesting relationship to comic-book material.
I also think theyre the dumbest things that have ever existed.
I dont think life got much better than that.
You think thats cool?
But inTheSuicide Squad, you got guys wearing yellow costumes and all this stuff.
I decided to go for what it would really be like.
Treating these people like gods is like, Whaat?
Hes got the mask on, and also the eye makeup under it!
Theres a silliness to it that I cant deny.
Not because its making fun but because it seems to me that the silliness is what is real.
And yet, Bloodsport actually looks cool.
I dont want to see that guy coming at me in an alley, that would be pretty awful.
Ratcatchers dark and creepy.
But Javelin, T.D.K.
The relationship between these super-characters and authoritarian or fascist tendencies seems like its never far from your mind.
Thats problematic in and of itself.
Im not saying itsalwayswrong.
But youve got to acknowledge the thing for what it is.
And you set up Adebayo saving the day by putting on a helmet and rocketing into the wall headfirst.
Would you call that a signature?Yeah, thats the thing I do in so many movies!
So its a different kind of Chekhovs gun?Yeah, exactly.
Its Chekhovs shitty gun!
That whole concept scares me more than anything.
A lot of the movies I love the best are about that.
The idea of body takeover is very scary.
But youre still talking about people losing control over their bodies and identities.
Its a very fluid concept.
I love the first twoInvasion of the Body Snatchersmovies.
Ones a very conservative film and ones a very liberal film.
One is about fear of the Red menace and the other is about fear of conservatives.
They tell totally different stories in totally different worlds, and I love them both completely.
Going back toTromeo and Juliet, the first movie I ever made, the music was important.
I wrote that one but didnt direct it.
They didnt choose a lot of songs for that one until after we had shot the movie.
Why wouldnt you know the songs ahead of time?
InGuardians, his love of that music is about his connection to his mother.
The music represents the sensitivity in Chris that his father hates and wants to destroy.
Its the poetry in him.Yes.
Its the part of Chris that wears makeup.
Its all of those things in one.
The way he talks about music tells us about the capacity to love that Chris has within him.
You might not think he has that because of who his father is.
Why dont you just go ahead and direct a musical?Ive got to find the right thing.
I would love to do it, but its a difficult thing to put on film, a musical.
Its easier to do in theater.
But I think about it all the time.
A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to T.D.K, otherwise known as The Detachable Kid.
