SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot developments in “Superman,” which is now available to purchase on digital VOD.
James Gunn provided a rare and fascinating look inside the process of making “Superman” on Friday, when he posted an extended clip from the making-of documentary of the film that features an intense debate the writer-director had on set with star David Corenswet.
The scene involved Superman’s climactic speech to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), after Lex screams at the last son of Krypton, “You piece of shit alien!”
“That’s where you’ve always been wrong about me, Lex,” Superman says back, before launching into a monologue about how all of his fallibilities and flaws make him human. While filming the speech, Gunn kept pushing Corenswet to make his performance bigger and more intense.
Then, as Gunn describes in “Adventures of Making Superman,” “all of a sudden, David stops, and I’m like, oh no, David’s doing his thing.”
As Gunn and Corenswet both explain, the actor’s theater training has led him to pepper his directors with questions. “I love talking about text and what each word means and what each punctuation mark means, and I can piss people off doing that,” Corenswet says. “I need it to make sense. I need to know what I’m trying to do.”
What follows is something audiences almost never get to see: the star and director of a massive Hollywood production having an extended and passionate debate in front of the entire crew. At issue was Corenswet’s confusion about why Superman would be so emotional while telling off Lex, after his adopted father, Pa Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince), reassured him earlier in the film that his own choices determine who he is, not the revelation that his biological Kryptonian parents sent him to Earth to rule it.
“I feel weak with me yelling at him,” Corenswet says on set, while Gunn is some 50 feet away watching the scene at the monitors, speaking via a microphone.
“It’s the moment of you acknowledging your own weakness, your own hurt feelings, so that everyone that hears Superman knows that that’s OK for all of us to feel that way,” Gunn replies. “And it’s not OK for the Lex Luthors of the world to be telling us we shouldn’t feel this way.”
Corenswet isn’t convinced: “But, now I know that Pa Kent gave me what I need. If [Lex] says, ‘You’re an alien,’ that doesn’t do what it did to me before, right?”
“Except, I think it’s not a magic bullet,” Gunn says.
At this point, Corenswet comes off set and speaks to Gunn directly, still passionately — but respectfully — advocating for his point of view.
“If I say, ’That’s what it is to be human!’ that feels like I’m trying to prove it still, as opposed to, I really know it,” the actor says, screaming the line. “I felt like shit about myself since the recording came out. It’s just been like, ‘I don’t belong, I’m shit, everything’s a lie, I’m not who I thought I was.’ Is this not the moment where I go, ‘I was wrong to feel that way?’”
Gunn, who has been listening intently, stands up and approaches Corenswet, as whoever is filming this exchange scrambles to get a good angle on their conversation. “That’s where the issue is, right?” he says “Because what [Pa Kent] didn’t tell you was it was wrong to feel that way.”
Gunn starts jabbing his fingers into Corenswet’s chest. “Your feelings about feeling bad are OK,” he says. “It’s not wrong for you to feel that way. … And in this moment, for you to talk about how it’s OK to be vulnerable, you have to be vulnerable, which means showing Lex that your fucking feelings are hurt.”
Finally, it clicks for Corenswet. He charges back onto the set and delivers the speech again, with all the hurt and vulnerability Gunn was pushing him to bring. The performance brings Gunn — and Peter Safran, the film’s producer and DC Studios co-chief with Gunn — to tears.
“There’s no anger in any of this at all,” Gunn says of his exchange with Corenswet. “There’s a reason why he’s asking all these questions. Because it makes it better.”
Watch the full clip below.
