Original subtitles

"Nerds." "Geeks." "Sweaties."

Look how far we've come. We rule the world.

But it wasn't always this way.

Let's go back to a time

when there was no comic book cinematic universe,

when you had to wait three years to get a superhero movie,

back to a time when Batman used a credit card.

This is a film about a superhero movie that didn't get made.

In 1998, a movie called "Superman Lives" was in production.

It was going to be directed by Tim Burton

and star Nicolas Cage as Superman.

I've been fascinated with this since I first heard about it.

From the concept design to the various scripts

to the people involved,

this would've been the most craziest, cosmic Superman movie ever made.

( crowd chattering )

Schnepp: What do you think the "Superman Lives" movie

that Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage were going to make,

what do you think that movie would've been like?

Nicolas Cage is probably

one of our generation's definitive actors.

I don't know if he'd be able to pull it off or not.

But it would've been interesting. It's one of those "what ifs."

I saw some of the artwork,

and I just didn't-- It just didn't fly with me.

There's nothing about his face that fits, nothing about his voice

that fits that deep Superman voice that you can trust.

It just seems kind of hilarious.

I'm sorry, God. No.

Nicolas Cage is a great actor,

so I think he could've played that really well.

We all watched George Reeves and I watched Christopher Reeve.

I wasn't like, "That's George Reeves. Chris Reeve."

It was Superman.

Nic Cage, he, like-- That's Nic Cage as Superman.

Nic Cage would've been awesome.

I mean, I-- Still one of my favorites is "Wild at Heart" with him.

I just figure that guy as Superman would be awesome.

The attempts to make superhero movies in the '90s

weren't particularly successful, I felt.

Dick Tracy did the same

or the Joel Schumacher "Batman" movies did the same,

with the costumes super bright and primary-colored,

and the idea of trying to create what a comic would look like on screen--

Obviously, it would've been interesting to see it.

It'd be pretty weird to see Nicolas Cage as Superman.

"Superman Lives" was basically written by three different screenwriters:

Kevin Smith, Wesley Strick and Dan Gilroy.

All three scripts revolved around the same story

basically taken from the comic book series,

"The Death of Superman,"

where Superman fought the villains Lex Luthor,

Brainiac, and the killing machine, Doomsday.

Doomsday killed Superman in the comic books,

and then he came back to life using Kryptonian technology.

This revitalized the comic book series.

Warner Brothers took their cue from the comic books

to revitalize their movie franchise.

On the set of "Superman Returns,"

at any moment in Video Village,

Bryan had sort of a little, like-- It was like a little binder.

No one could really touch it.

And inside he had this photograph of Nicolas Cage

from Tim Burton's aborted version of "Superman."

Oftentimes we'll be in studio executive meetings,

and people will bitch about the fact that Brandon Routh's costume

is so similar to the comics,

that it has the underwear, that it looks a little kitschy.

And so, Bryan, whenever that would happen in a meeting,

would snap his fingers and have his assistant pull out this photograph,

and it would instantly shut them up.

He would reach over to Video Village,

pick up his book, and he would say, "You know,

you guys were gonna make this.

We're not making this."

Schnepp: Sometimes the interest in the "what if"

is stronger than the actual final product

because it fills your mind with the possibilities

of what could've been.

That's something that interested me when I saw

the concept art for "Superman Lives."

Amazing, strange designs, cosmic ideas,

creatures, aliens, Superman with a strange metal "S."

All these things interested me, and I wanted to find out why

it never got made.

Morrison: Imagine a distant planet

in a far-off star system,

light-years from here.

We've never seen it in our telescopes, we know nothing about them,

but they look a bit like us.

A star in the last days of its life,

and imagine that their planet is under threat of destruction,

and those fantastic scientists say there's only one thing they can do,

and that's to send a child out into space

who might carry the physical attributes and mental attributes

of these people have engendered over the centuries.

And imagine then that this child coming to Earth

suddenly is gifted with powers that come from a great society

that it gave birth to,

and he not only brings those powers but he brings a morality.

Just imagine what he could do to our world

with the aim of changing it and making us better.

( upbeat music plays )

"Superman Lives--"

or "Superman Reborn" and then "Superman Lives"

and then later "Superman Returns,"

was meant to be kind of, like,

let's kick-start Superman again

in a bit more earnest way.

Not the spit-curl and wink

of Chris Reeve and Dick Donner.

They wanted a '90s version of Superman,

even though when I was writing,

all I was writing was Chris Reeve.

I thought Bryan Singer's version forgot to put in--

- Action? - Yeah, like, fuckin'--

He didn't get to punch anybody. He punched an island.

And then somebody pointed out,

they're like, "Superman doesn't get to punch everything

every movie," and I thought about it

and looked back, and sometimes he didn't punch shit.

He fought some video game-type things in "Superman III."

Fought good taste in "Superman III."

- Fought himself, remember? - Turned purple and--

Drinking whiskey, burning the peanuts.

Smith: I can see why Bryan Singer was sucked into doing

a quasi sequel to the Dick Donner Superman movies.

Those were our Superman movies. They were so fucking magical.

And they found a way to make them work

where your parents could sit there and be like,

"Yeah, all right. He's fighting General Zod. I get it."

They're not like, "This is horseshit." They're like, "I can get behind this."

So, there's a pull to it because it's the classic lore

and Dick Donner did such a great job with it.

Jon Peters: "Superman" was something I had seen with Dick Donner and I loved,

and I was mesmerized by it.

So that was the granddaddy of all the superheroes.

I've made over 100 movies,

movies that I did with Polygram Pictures

and all the movies that we've produced and everything.

I was the chairman of Sony, and I was leaving.

Peter and I were splitting up.

And they said to me, "You're not going to believe this,

but we think Superman is available.

So I got into negotiation with the Salkinds and their lawyers

because Warner Brothers had not picked up the option.

They didn't know that. It was before computers.

So they would have to send someone in a back room, "bing, bing, bing,"

going through these things that-- It's not on a computer--

Would-- Would be normally red-flagged.

I got a call from Terry Semel, who was the head of Warner Brothers

who said, "We want you to come back to the studio."

And I said, "I'm working on something now which is really what I want to do."

I had made "Batman." And he said, "What?"

And I said, "I think I bought the rights to Superman.

He said, "You idiot. Warner Brothers owns it. I own it."

I said, "No, you don't. Check."

Came back and said, "You're right. You do."

Essentially, if you read my script for "Superman Lives,"

it's like fan fiction.

It's-- It's-- And-- And, fuck, I was so nascent in my career.

I was 26 years old, 27 years old. '96, '97.

So, I sat down and met with

a creative exec named Basil Iwanyk.

He goes, "What would you think about 'Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian?'"

I said, "That exists?"

He's like, "Yeah, we've been trying to figure out 'Beetlejuice' for years."

I was like, "What's to figure out? Burton cracked the code."

He goes, "Well, you know, we've been working on--

Trying-- Working a Superman."

And I was like, "Superman?" That was no part

of the meeting that I was going in for, it just came up in conversation.

But he had given me the Superman script to take home.

And, oh, good Lord. Terrible title from the jump.

It might as well have just said:

It was just not the Superman movie I ever would've imagined.

There was a scene in it I remember specifically where

Clark Kent's going to a psychiatrist and talking about

having this "I'm Superman" conversation,

and the psychiatrist is like, "No, you're not."

This is something for a comic book fan,

particularly at that time and place in my life.

I was like, "Oh, why don't you just piss on the Gospels, fuck!

Why don't you just make Jesus do dick jokes? This is ridiculous!"

Why not just reach out to the guys who do the comic books?

They would get it. This guy don't get it.

And he goes, "Yeah, but those guys are comic book guys."

I swear to you. That was 1996 mentality.

Get another call from my agent, he goes,

"You made it all the way up the chain, dude.

You're going to meet with Lorenzo di Bonaventura,

the head of Warner Brothers."

I was like, "Really?"

I was the executive in charge of it

for quite a period of time at Warner Brothers.

Jon Peters came to Warners and said,

"Listen, I think we can put all these rights together."

We put the rights together.

Kevin Smith came in with a really great take.

Lorenzo was the first one to ever say this

of everyone I met with:

He goes, "All right, what would you do differently?"

And I was like, "Oh. Well..."

I changed the title. It wasn't "Superman Reborn."

I wanted to call it "Superman Lives."

I thought that sounded cool,

plus "Fletch Lives" had always sounded cool to me.

So I was like, "Let's borrow that from "Fletch Lives,"

call it 'Superman Lives.'"

More of a, "Yeah, that's more than Superman Reborn."

Same idea, but to me, a little bit better.

He's going, "I want to send you over to meet with Jon Peters."

I know who he is, he's a producer, you know, he's a producer

with Peter Guber of "Rain Man,"

of 1989's "Batman," of course.

His history is that he was a hairdresser--

A stylist, whatever-- I don't mean to diminish.

He did hair, coifs, whatever they're called.

So, he was a hair man, and he worked for Barbra Streisand.

They would up being in a relationship and stuff like that.

He wound up being a producer. What an American dream.

You go from hair-- Barbra Streisand's hairdresser to producing "Batman."

I don't think people get over the fact that I started as a hairdresser.

If I went to Harvard, it would probably be less different.

Jon Peters comes in: "I hear you've got a take on 'Superman.'"

And I was like, "Yeah, yeah."

He's going, "Okay. Well, let me tell you-- Let me hear it, let me hear it."

Kevin came in.

I felt free with him. He was kind of an interesting character.

We talked about a lot of different things.

He was such a nut, and he had-- He was so animated,

and he talked a great game, that I trusted him.

And he goes, "Okay. Three things I want with this picture.

"I'm gonna send you on your way, do your thing, come back.

Number one: I don't want to see him fly."

I said, "Okay. Ever?"

He goes, "No, I think it looks fake. I hate all that flying shit,

so I don't want to see him fly." I said, "Okay."

"Number two: I don't want to see him in that suit."

I was like, "Which suit?"

And he's going, "That suit. The suit he's always wearing."

I was like, "The Superman suit

with the cape and the blue and red and yellow?"

He goes, "Yeah, I don't like it." His words, not mine: "Too faggy."

I said, "Uh, all right."

You gave him some notes and said, "Three things I don't want:

"I don't want him to fly, I don't want him in that costume..."

That's-- None of that's true. None of that's true.

Of course he has to fly. He always flew.

Superman you're talking about? Of course he's in the co--

None of those are true. Is there a third?

Smith: Number three is he has to fight a giant spider in the third act.

I said, "Okay-- Really?"

- Then he has to fight a giant spider. - That was a Thanagarian Snare Beast.

"What is this based on?"

He goes, "Well, do you know anything about spiders?

Spiders are the fiercest killers in the animal kingdom.

You've got to be careful around spiders.

So if you have a big one, imagine how deadly they are.

I'm looking for my moment in this movie,

like "King Kong" when I was a boy and they opened the gates

and you saw the giant monkeys."

Going, "I want to open up the gates, and then you see

this gigantic spider coming at him.

Superman's got to fight the spider. It's a vision I have."

I was like, "Okay, man, I'll spider it up for you and stuff."

If I remember correctly,

I acted as the director for a while

by bringing in people and starting some of my concepts on paper

so that ultimately when I brought in Tim or whoever we brought in,

I could sit down and say, "This is where we are, what we've done."

Jon Peters wanted to convince

the higher-ups to invest in a movie

that is going to have something other than

another guy in Spandex fighting Superman.

My initial job was to come up with this big scary frickin' thing

with a body kind of based on a black widow

but a face more like a tarantula.

And I threw in maybe a little crab and stuff in there too.

One of the illustrations was what--

It was a Giger-esque kind of thing

and it's what they called the Opening of the Yanni,

and all these little face-hugger mini spiders

are coming down and covering Superman.

He's not going up against a super villain.

He's going up against the Alien or the Predator

or something that will try and kill him

and maybe eat him or lay eggs in his eyeballs.

That to me is super cool, 'cause it takes it to a different level

that we haven't seen before.

This was all out of my mind.

The Thanagarian Snare Beast,

I stole it from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

This giant squid who tries to swallow up this submarine.

- With the big, snapping squid-- - Giant nautilus, maybe.

Yes. So Superman would fight every tentacle,

getting closer and closer and closer

to this beak till he killed it.

It would've made an amazing sequence! Amazing!

I had appeased Warner Brothers by not calling it a spider.

- I called it a Thanagarian Snare Beast. - Another Hawkman reference.

A little Hawkman reference. The planet Thanagar, something like--

Just little things to throw in. And the Warner Brothers execs were like,

"As long as it doesn't say ‘spider,' we don't give a shit.

We know it's a spider. Call it what you--

I mean, ‘snare beast'? Come on."

What made you want to tell the death of Superman?

I love dramatic structures, so the idea

was "The Death of Superman: Chaos Rules"

really I knew could be amazing.

I just felt it in my bones.

They wanted to do the "death of Superman" storyline

that had been done very successfully in the comics a few years before.

"Death and return" storyline.

Schnepp: It was 1993, exactly seven years

since the theatrical and critical bomb "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace."

"Superman" comics were just not selling anymore,

so D.C. Comics decided to do the unimaginable

and kill Superman.

We had thought of doing "The Death of Superman" before.

We had sort of lightly kicked the idea around,

and it felt like this could be the time to do it.

My frustration in working on the comic book was that

he didn't seem to have anybody he could have

a knockdown, drag-out, bash-'em-up,

take-down-half-a-city fight with.

With Doomsday, we wanted a creature and a villain

that was not cerebral in any way, shape, or form.

We wanted him to be a hurricane personified,

a force of nature, a raging beast,

because that's something that is very different than Superman.

And that's what we wanted Doomsday to be.

It was one of those jobs where I was just like,

"Fuck it, write your dream movie," you know you what I'm saying?

It's the dream job. Go crazy. Because whoever's going to direct it

is going to change anything they don't like anyway.

I had the Eradicator in there. I had Cyborg Superman.

Lex Luthor was in there, Doomsday was in there.

Brainiac was the villain. It was packed.

One of the things that your script actually brought in

that now everyone's doing is the crossover.

You actually had not only a lot of different villains,

like, Deadshot was in it, but you also had Batman.

That's right. There was a sequence where

it was during Superman's funeral, very dramatic.

It was clearly written by a Batman fan.

It was almost the whole reason I took the job

was just to write this cameo.

It's kind of like Times Square. They got TVs everywhere.

And then they all just go, ( imitates cha-chunk ).

They've just taken over

and there's a big bat symbol, and then he comes on

and gives them this message of encouragement.

Like, "People of Metropolis, your hero has fallen."

Like, real fucking, like, wank stuff if you're a huge comic book nerd.

Turn it in, Lorenzo's like, "I like this."

Basil's like, "I like this."

And Jon, his people,

like Tracy Barone, who was running his company at that point, Tracy goes,

"You're going to come over tomorrow to have a meeting with Jon, right?"

I said, "Talk about the script?" She goes, "To read the script."

And I go, "What do you mean, ‘Read the script'?"

And she's going, "He likes to have the script read to him out loud."

And I was like, "Get out of here, man.

Do you want me to, like, tuck him in after I'm done?"

She's going, "I'm serious."

First of all, I'm not a good reader, number one.

Number two, everyone sometimes reads things differently.

But you can-- When you see it,

it's pretty much what you see.

I said, "I understand I'm going to read you a script."

He's going, "Totally. Let's do this, man."

He lays down on his couch, tennis shorts on and stuff,

and he's looking up at the ceiling, and he goes like this.

He was making director hands as he was laying there,

and this was the movie screen that he was placing onto his ceiling

so that as I was reading, he was seeing it on a canvas.

I'm a visual guy,

so, I-- I... Most things I do by visualization.

Every script I ever get, I have someone read it to me,

and I just lay back and listen,

and I run it on my screen in my brain.

And at one time he stops and goes, "Oh, nothing's happening.

"You've got Brainiac coming to the Fortress of Solitude.

There's no fight. Where's the fight?

Fuckin' have somebody up there, man.

Have him, like, Brainiac fighting Superman's guards."

And I go, "Well, it's called the Fortress of Solitude."

Like, nobody's fucking up there, dude. He's alone.

Plus, why would Superman need guards? He's Superman, dude.

Like, think about it.

And he goes, "Well, what about polar bears?"

And I go, "Polar bears?"

And he goes, "Polar bears are the fiercest killers

in the animal kingdom."

I'm sure there were 50 other ideas we could've come up with,

but at the time, we wanted to animate those things

or whatever we created as something he could fight.

And there's nothing more ferocious

than a 3,000-pound giant,

12-foot, 15-foot polar bear.

I remember reading a version-- I don't know if you're--

There's two drafts that are-- Of yours that are online--

There's one has Brainiac going to the Fortress of Solitude,

and there's two polar bears that-- Who see him--

- Smith: Right. - ( snarls )

Schnepp: And I was like, "Are they the guards,

and he fucks one up...

- and the other one scamps away? - ( cries out )

- That's it. - Okay, but then

this one that I was reading earlier this week,

that has the polar bears just as statues outside.

Because I was reading, I was like, "Am I tripping?"

So I was combing through it, trying to find--

But I think it was-- I don't know if it was Tom Lassally or Lorenzo going,

"Why is Brainiac killing an animal?"

And I was like, "Because Jon thought that he needed to fight

Superman's guards up at the Fortress of Solitude."

Lorenzo's like, "Why would Superman need guards?"

I was like, "I know, right? But whatever."

Who else was on your plate for directing the Superman film?

Tim Burton was my number-one choice.

And obviously, I didn't want to make a "Superman"

that anybody else had made, and I really wanted to run Superman

through his brain.

And they were like, "Who do you see as director?"

And I was like, "Tim Burton."

Look what he did for "Batman."

I know this is a fundamental different character,

but it's Tim Burton.

You can't go wrong.

If you're going to bring a superhero back to the big screen,

you tap him again.

I had no idea when I said that I was just signing my own

"You're fucking fired, fat boy" warrant.

- Kevin handed in his draft... - Right.

I called him, and it just was no good.

It wasn't funny. It wasn't-- it had no structure to it.

It was just unimaginative.

He was an amateur writer.

He wasn't a crafted writer.

Schnepp: What were your major influences,

like, what were your favorite characters

when you were a kid, started growing up?

Tim Burton: I loved movies, mainly monster movies

and Ray Harryhausen movies,

but I guess the genre that-- You know,

horror movies, monster movies, science fiction films.

I think my favorite--

My favorite comic character was Batman.

Just getting into sort of psychology

of the superhero--

That was, at that time, sort of new territory,

and so when I got involved with "Superman,"

it was just a different sort of, you know,

sort of exploration of that kind of feeling

of being different and feeling like

somebody from another planet.

Those kinds of themes were always quite strong

in old monster movies and in some of the comic books.

The graphic novel came into play,

and the sort of psychology of the characters.

Obviously, a lot of comic book characters

fit into that kind of mythology of somebody

who doesn't fit in, doesn't belong.

That sort of exploration of feeling like an alien on a planet

and being different and having to sort of

hide yourself in some ways

and suppress certain sides of yourself,

and the sort of secretive nature

of that kind of a character.

So that, I think, was the thing that was--

the root of it was the most interesting.

Hearing Tim's inspiration for the character

was a great moment

where you were like, "Oh, God."

In a way, it's so obvious, but of course

the best ideas are not that easy to get to.

When you give him the Thanagarian snare beast

with all these characters, Tim Burton goes to work.

He is such a visualist that he makes things happen

through his mind, you know,

that sometimes are not even on the page.

There was a little school called Cal Arts

that all of us guys were at

way back in the late '70s.

It was at Disney

that we all went to following that,

and Tim and I started to work together there.

Another project that Tim and I worked on together

was an experiment with stop-motion animation for which

I took Tim's designs and created puppets

and three-dimensional sets.

It's basically the story of a little boy

who thinks that he's Vincent Price.

Heinrichs: I was just finishing up "The Big Lebowski" for the Coen brothers

and got the call from the line producer.

It sounded like a really great idea.

It was gonna be a somewhat different take on the--

on the myth of Superman.

I had worked with other great artists--

those are guys that I-- that had been part of the Hollywood scene.

The day before I got the call to do this show,

I had just signed on to do the first "Matrix."

Then had to quit that the next day because I got the call from Tim.

So I just immediately quit and said, "No, I'm going to do 'Superman'."

I'd already done two shows for Tim.

I'd done "Batman Returns" and "Mars Attacks!"

Pete Von Sholly was there

doing monster and creature designs.

Michael Jackson, the storyboard artist, gave my name to Rick Heinrichs

because they needed a bunch of monsters

for Brainiac's zoo.

He and I worked for a few weeks

and just filled a wall with monsters.

Sylvain was great because he-- he had

that Moebius kind of feel to his work-- he's French.

He worked with and knew Moebius.

I remember asking Rick, "Are you sure I'm the right person?"

'Cause I grew up in Europe.

My style as an illustrator when I was doing that work

was mostly European.

I don't have any connection

with the American superhero comic book mindset.

But Rick said, "No, that's precisely what we want."

He said, "We've already got the guys who come from comics,

and we want to diversify a little bit.

We want to see what somebody who comes from Europe

with a completely different take can give us."

So I joined the crew, and, uh...

- and entered hell. - Mm.

Veteran illustrator Jack Johnson

was doing Greek wash paintings for the production.

Jacques Rey doing lots of beautiful concept design.

Jim Carson was there.

We all worked together. Most of us worked in a bullpen.

I don't know. There was, ah, four or five of us.

There was myself, there was Jacques Rey,

Harold Belker.

Harold usually does I.D. design, vehicle design,

so it would've been something of that nature.

What about Boes?

Boes was in and out. He had an office down the hall.

Well, Rick Heinrichs, who we got to know

really well on "Nightmare Before Christmas."

He promoted me to be the assistant art director on that show,

and then I moved to L.A. to sort of start my Hollywood career.

Working on a movie lot-- you know, I'm from San Francisco,

and this was like a big deal for me.

It was a really great moment in my life.

Stage 15 has an office upstairs,

and at the beginning of Warner Brothers--

the logo, you know the logo?

It shows that moment.

It shows stage 15-- that balcony--

so it's something that I always remember.

Every time I watch a Warner Brothers movie, I'm just like,

"That's where we did 'Superman Lives.'"

I'm more of a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy.

I mean, I, you know, kind of run the operation.

I make sure that the crew is there, hired,

that we're moving along at a good pace.

You know, I got a little bit involved in more of the creative on this

because we had a lot of R & D going on with graphics

and also all the visuals that we were gonna do.

I guess this was the late '90s,

and we were doing a lot of things at that time.

I mean, the business was absolutely exploding, in its prime.

Yeah, this was the kind of that genesis of when

production companies were getting savvy to the fact

that they could get the best price and the best quality work

out of companies like my own

by pitting three or four companies against each other

and basically creating a contest.

They said, "Show us this crazy, whacked-out"--

with notes from Tim--

the wildest, most iridescent soap-bubble

light-up-Las-Vegas-sign arm

as a test, as a prototype,

and you could make a couple if you want.

And so we worked and worked and worked

and came up with a couple of these prototypes.

I believe we did three. They said, "Wow, this stuff's great.

Nobody else came close to what you're doing.

Tim loves 'em. Let's go. Let's take the next step."

I'm like, "Well, I don't even know what we're building.

What's the next step?"

Number one, we had worked with Colleen Atwood the--

who always does Tim's stuff as a wardrobe designer.

She's pretty amazing.

I met Tim on "Edward Scissorhands,"

which was my first collaboration with him.

You know, we just hit it off and we had a good run on that.

And then when "Superman" came up, it was, you know,

a different kind of movie for me at the time to do.

I hadn't ever done any kind of

big, kind of, superhero-y sort of things at all.

With Tim, you always start, you know, with, like what his--

who he thinks the people are,

like his sort of take on it, which is always unique

and what makes him Tim and special, I think.

And his take on "Superman" was, you know,

was a new kind of version of it.

He didn't want to go with the sort of Mr. Clean version.

He wanted to go with kind of this unnoticed kind of person.

But with Tim, you see this recurring theme of the outsider

in a lot of his films.

He's interested in characters who kind of

carry this extraordinary capability or gift of some kind--

you'll see this in a lot of his films--

and how that character interacts with the outside world.

They don't often connect well.

Part of them needs to stay hidden

because if you were to reveal their real self,

it would be calamitous for that character.

Schnepp: Batman also had like a secondary role.

He was Bruce Wayne, and then he was Batman,

with the Superman character, there was Clark Kent.

What was your take on Clark Kent?

Well, it-- you know, it's like you said,

it's slightly similar, but this is on a much grander,

you know, this is like on a global scale, in a way,

in the sense of having to hide.

And, uh, you always try to put your personal feelings into it.

And I always felt like I was an alien.

So I think a lot of people do and a lot of kids do.

So that very simple through my...

that was probably the core thing, in a way.

That for me was, I think,

the main thing that interested me.

All of us feel like aliens.

Nobody is comfortable in their own skin

all of the time,

and we all feel that darkness.

And I wanted him to be able to talk about that darkness

in a way that would be interesting for the audience.

I think the humanizing of Superman was what I would look at

as sort of Tim's approach to him

that made me really get excited, made Warners get excited.

I remember I was in Hartford, Connecticut,

doing press for "Chasing Amy."

I got the phone call. "They just brought on Tim Burton."

I was like, "So, do you think I get to stay on for the whole show?"

He goes, "Oh, no, you're done."

Tim Burton came on and goes, "I don't want to do this script.

I want to do my version of 'Superman.'"

And so I guess-- I don't know

who the screenwriter was, maybe Wesley Strick.

I got involved because I had worked with Tim

on "Batman Returns" about six years earlier.

I ended up staying for the whole shoot

because he felt like he needed a writer

at his side through the process.

I remember him sort of complaining about making superhero movies.

He compared it to Chinese water torture.

I asked him, "If you hate it so much, why are you doing the sequel?"

And he said, "'Cause I think I learned a lot doing the first 'Batman' movie,

and I want a second movie in which I can put to use everything I learned"

and sort of undo the mistakes he felt he had made in the first one.

I knew that there was a Kevin Smith script.

I read it without any preconceived idea about it.

But as I read it, there was a lot about it I didn't--

it wasn't sort of clicking with me.

It's 'cause I'm not a sort of Superman fanboy.

'Cause I hadn't read any of the "Death of Superman" graphic novels,

so I wasn't up to speed with all that stuff.

I was just sort of curious what Tim's take on it was.

So we met-- I remember we met at the Chateau Marmont in the lobby there,

and I said, um, "So, Tim, I read the Kevin Smith script,"

and before I was finished with my sentence, he said,

"I don't want to talk about that script."

I was like, "Okay.

So, what do you want to-- like, what do you wanna do?"

And he wasn't sure.

We also were told by Warners there were aspects of Kevin's plot,

if not his script per se, that they wanted to keep intact.

Obviously, it was-- it was still based on "The Death of Superman,"

to some extent.

Jon Peters was very much involved

right from the get-go, and Tim was,

I think, really ambivalent about that, too.

He had-- he had already had a sort of bad experience with Peters on "Batman"

and told me that the reason he went to London to film it

was to get away from Peters.

And now he was making this movie-- the "Superman" movie in L.A.

in the same city as Jon, and he was a little--

already uptight about it.

I think he'd kind of-- could see the future.

Jon is a force of nature,

and he's passionate about things, and that's, I think,

where that sometimes, where it becomes, you know, the problem.

You know, it's-- it's-- it's-- it's...

it's like trying to control the weather, you know?

It's-- it's not-- it's kind of not...

can't really do it.

You have to, you know, even though you're the producer,

people just get mad at me-- I'm controlling, overbearing,

a force of nature, all these crazy things--

only because it takes tremendous energy

to move most people who say it can't be done,

and most people have no energy,

into being able to see the same vision and then get the money to do it.

What Tim and I always discussed

vis-à-vis "Superman" versus "Batman" was that "Superman"

takes place in daylight, in sunlight.

Batman was-- came out at night.

I mean, that was sort of the--

the real sort of yin-yang of the two characters.

And Tim was excited about doing it, 'cause I think he felt

that a lot of his movies were, sort of, movies made in the shadows

- and darkness... - Right.

...and all of that and he-- I think he wanted to challenge himself

to see if he could make a movie that was brighter, sunnier,

maybe a little more optimistic than what he was accustomed to doing.

Schnepp: So you basically changed Batman.

You were the one who came in and said,

"We're gonna get Batman a brand-new look."

We didn't really have the Internet back in 1988,

when you were shooting this,

so the grumbling whiners and complainers

didn't get a chance to attack

as hard as they do nowadays.

Where I just related to people like, you know,

Nicolas Cage as Superman, what a weird choice.

Or the same could be said or Michael Keaton.

But that-- you know, luckily, you're right.

It was before the Internet.

But there definitely was...

I luckily was here in England, but I know that--

I had heard there was a huge backlash

to that just because they thought, "Oh, it's gonna be like a joke."

Even back then, luckily enough, you know, I mean,

there wasn't the analysis that you get...

- The breakdown, yeah. ...'cause it's like picking apart

the carcass before it's even dead yet, you know?

No, it's true. Welcome to the Internet.

That's, uh, 5,000 people all have solid opinions.

- Yeah. - Die.

Yeah. ( chuckles )

Michael Keaton had done a movie called "Clean and Sober,"

which I saw, and I thought, "This guy is a genius actor."

The shouting about Michael Keaton as Batman

was so fucking loud and proliferate

in 1988, '89,

that even though the Internet didn't exist,

the Internet was still mad.

Like that's how fucking big it was.

People were like, "What? Mr. Mom?"

Keaton: I also want to say something in response to all the folks

who were, uh-- who kept those cards and letters coming, you know?

All you got to do is tell me no, baby.

The reason he worked for me is that because,

you know, he looked like somebody who needed to dress like a bat

to intimidate people.

I knew, being a street fighter my whole life,

that you can gauge the toughness of your opponent

by the look in their eyes.

And Michael Keaton had that look.

And it's lights out! Now, you wanna get nuts?

Come on! Let's get nuts.

And I had just read "The Dark Knight," uh, the Frank Miller comic book.

So I was like, "I want a badder-ass Batman."

- I wanted a darker Batman. - Right.

And I grew up as a little kid watching the Adam West Batmans,

and this Batman that came out

- was exactly what I wanted it. - It was

and it did almost a billion dollars in those days,

because we had a line where-- when he comes up he says, "I'm Batman,"

the line from the movie was, "I'm Batman, motherfucker."

And Warners made me take out the "motherfucker."

And I wanted to do that 'cause I knew the kids in the audience would go,

"Yeah! All right!"

There were lots of reasons why he chose, you know, Michael,

and so I knew, you know, in my heart that--

and we weren't making a joke, but there was-- I mean, you're right.

If the Internet had been around then, it would've been...

Oh, it's like they just did-- I mean, they just announced something

- with Ben Aff-- you know what I mean? - Oh, yeah, yeah.

Poor guy. You know, it's like,

you know, I'm sure he can handle it,

but, you know, it's tough out there.

Yeah. Lot of haters.

Lot of little trolls hiding behind their little Mom's basement.

All right, so you've got Tim Burton signed on, you've signed on,

you've got Warner Brothers, you've got the rights together.

How did Nic Cage enter the picture?

He reminded me of Michael Keaton. They both had this...

weren't the handsomest guys, but both had this tremendous,

tremendous gift as an actor.

Now when you think about it, if somebody was just like,

"Would you like to see a Nic Cage Superman movie,"

I'd be like "Fuck" and "Yes."

Take all my money, 'cause I wanna see what that looks like.

I was gonna play Superman,

and that fell apart, for whatever their reasons.

And then I saw that movie and said to myself,

"Well, that was a much more nostalgic,

traditional approach to that character."

And I didn't wanna do that.

I was gonna turn that character upside down along with Tim Burton.

The great thing about Nic was that he was also--

he was a fan of the comics but he also was a fan

of the sort of underpinnings and the psychology of it all.

So that-- that-- that's, again, what's what making it exciting.

He sort of understood, to me, sort of both sides of it.

I think Tim looks at these things slightly off-center.

You know, I mean, if you think about Michael Keaton,

it's not the guy you would've thought of casting as Batman.

And yet, when you saw it, it was great, you know?

And I think when we first heard the Nic Cage idea,

we were both intrigued and also going,

"Well, that wasn't really the way we were thinking of it, exactly."

I thought it was exciting that Warners was sot of pushing the envelope

and allowing not a pretty boy like Christopher Reeve.

I think that's what they were trying to do is not have that squared-off jaw

like Chris Reeve or any of the other people that have played

Superman in the past.

They wanted somebody who was a little edgier.

Yeah, so it was your call to get Nicolas Cage?

Yes, it was my call, my idea, yeah.

He could create a character that was an alien

from another planet,

so why couldn't he be a dark alien and light?

I didn't wanna make someone who was just... pink.

I wanted something for the street.

Because he's such an eloquent actor,

he's got a very powerful presence,

he can convey doubt and torment,

he can convey joy and happiness

and humor, and, you know, he's an actor.

And the Oscar is awarded to...

Nicolas Cage.

I know it's not hip to say it, but I just love acting,

and I hope that there will be more encouragement

for alternative movies where we can experiment

and fast-forward into the future of acting.

When you match that with this idea of making him a guy who

has some insecurities,

and Nic has that ability to play so vulnerable,

It was actually a very natural fit to his take.

Casting of Lois Lane--

um, some of the names that came up were Courteney Cox,

- Julianne Moore... - Courteney Cox I met with,

- Julianne Moore I met. - And Sandra Bullock.

Sandra Bullock was our main choice.

She would've made a great Lois Lane.

( chuckles )

Gee, where was I? I must not have been in that day.

Funny. She'd do it today, but at the time, she turned us down.

- And Chris Rock as Jimmy Olsen? - Yeah, I think...

I think we talked about Chris, yeah.

Yeah, I like Chris. Yeah, yeah, that...

that sounds about right. ( chuckles )

Chris Rock came into work one day on "Dogma" and was like,

"Guess who's playing Jimmy Olsen."

- And I was like, "You?" - And he goes, "Why not me?"

I was like, "I'm just asking." I was like, "That's awesome!"

He's going, "Just got the call today."

I had heard Jim Carrey as Brainiac.

Ooh.

Jim Carrey even born back then?

- Yes. - Was he?

Schnepp: He had just played The Riddler in "Batman Forever."

I also had sort of Christopher Walken in mind for Brainiac.

One of the reasons why we all liked Walken was because he's both

a very menacing cat, but he's also very funny, right?

So there's a slightly off-centered quality to who he is.

Your daughter's screaming.

Amy's screaming.

And Brainiac can come across, I think,

very cold and very intellectual.

The idea of embodying him with a guy like that

who has so much bursting out of him...

Shh!

Kevin Spacey, I know, he had talked about Luther,

- and that was eventually Bryan Singer. - Yeah. Yeah, we did.

We always thought he would be a good idea.

He'd done a lot of movies at Warners with us.

He was definitely a favorite, and I love him as an actor.

So it was sort of a no-brainer, that one.

I always had a certain thing in mind,

and talked to Kevin Spacey about Lex Luthor.

Smith: That is Lex Luthor.

The utter arrogance of, "Everyone in this room is fucking beneath me."

Like, what he has to be behind closed doors is,

"That fucking Kryptonian alien."

Like, everything is dripping with "He's not one of us."

'Cause that's the only way that he could possibly stand up to or over Superman.

Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes

and don't share their power with mankind.

So I had this sort of idea of kind of melding them in a certain way.

Strick: At some point, Brainiac and Lex Luthor merge physically,

and Tim was, like, kind of doubtful about that.

He said, "Isn't that gonna be too much like that movie

with Roosevelt Grier and Ray Milland, "The Thing with Two Heads"?

Like, that's when I read "Lex-iac." "Wow, that's amazing!"

Burton: I remember I had a meeting with Kevin,

and he's just-- he's very good at doing certain imitation.

And, uh, he did a great Christopher Walken.

Now, Christopher couldn't be here tonight, Mike,

but he did send the following telegram:

It's crazy.

You know, the A.F.I., it's an award--

it's like the Tony, which I'm up for,

and you have a bunch of-- it's crazy.

- Well, you're saying Christopher... - But that's who I wanted.

I mean, so, when I get something in my mind, you know...

But I also wanted Sammy Davis Jr. for "Beetlejuice."

Wrong.

In terms of design, you always try to match

the design with the cast and what you're going for and what--

you know, and I think nothing, you know, nothing ever really got finalized

because everything else was so, kind of, chaotic.

Well, a lot of the sort of guts of the story is about

an evolution that happens to our main character.

And we wanted, really, to show that visually with the suits.

Schnepp: A lot of people just jump to strange conclusions.

Especially, like, we have troll wars...

And we were crucified for that. Tim always talked about it

almost as though it was an alien that was cradling him

and bringing him back to life after he dies,

but it was a kind of a living organism.

Schnepp: Right. I think what happened with that--

the Kal-El character, and he had some kind of like robotic assistant

that then when Superman lost his powers,

or actually when he got killed by Doomsday,

he had this like Kryptonian kind of regeneration suit.

Well, that has to be what it is, then. Look at me-- I made it,

and I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Atwood: That was, like, the beginning of the regeneration suit,

as the layers went on in the beginning, when he was in the tank.

So it's kind of the idea of replacing

neural and circulatory things in your body

that were kind of under the fluid that could be laser-driven and stuff

without the kind of ecto layer that you saw through later on it.

So the first thing we did is,

we sculpted a suit and we cast it in silicone.

But we did it over Nic Cage's light cast...

Kind of a biomechanical, much more standard-looking suit.

So we did this test on Nic with this

basic, solid, silicone suit in New York, and it was a complete disaster.

He hated it. I hated it. Tim hated it.

Colleen hated it. I'm surprised they didn't fire me right there.

Oh, no. It's not...

- What's doing it? - I think this stuff is.

Schnepp: You made a couple different things.

You made this exoskeleton where he's kind of in this

fluid, kind of regenerating,

and then the robotic-- kind of those clear things.

Johnson: The biggest problem with it, it's not clear enough,

it's not alive enough, it's not iridescent enough,

and, hello, it doesn't really move very well, so how can we fix that?

And I happen to have a fantastic team.

I believe Lennie Macdonald,

who's a complete mad scientist in this business and Bill Bryan as well,

teamed up on this, knowing what was possible,

what we could do, what we couldn't.

I first started working with Steve at Boss Films on "Ghostbusters."

He was in charge of Slimer and the librarian.

I decided, you know what?

How about I just take a bunch of the vacu-formed pieces,

go back upstairs to my loft and start messing with them.

Vacu-forming is when you take plastic, heat it up,

and then take suction and suck it around a hard plaster mold

that we previously laminated with an iridescent material.

Once that's set up, we can then vacu-form it,

and something interesting happened.

The iridescent qualities become amazing, like an oil slick.

And we had done this on "The Abyss" and it looked really cool,

so we thought, okay, that's step one.

That's a soap bubble.

They had these vacu-formed parts,

and they were all in the places that needed to move.

And I started overlapping them

and letting them slide against each other.

Colleen, when she came in and, uh, she looked at us and said,

"Hey, now, this has got some possibilities."

And then she had us develop it further.

Johnson: And we literally took hundreds and hundreds of these

beetle-like iridescent shapes, we sculpted all of these shapes--

every muscle in the body,

extending it a little bit further than you would need.

And we came up with little clear staples to go underneath,

and it was all held together with clear vinyl tubing.

Johnson: Tie them together, on Tim's recommendation

as he wanted to go a little "Edward Scissorhands,

make it haphazard, so we had this weird tubing

that was tying it together in a very asymmetrical fashion.

We ran fiber optics in all kinds of patterns,

sequenced them, laid into the Superman suit.

You've got to know that number one optic comes out at number one port,

number two-- through the hundreds of them,

so that you can then pattern the shapes, just like a Las Vegas sign.

That was a layered costume, so it was

a sculpt of musculature with a sculpt of clear,

almost like a plexi layer over it

with etching in the plexi where light could pass through it

and it would sort of have a glowing quality.

Which were powered with lasers, so it was really powerful stuff.

It looked great.

Heinrichs: Tim was not a comics geek.

His thing was film, television,

and he was able to synthesize a lot of what he saw

into a Tim Burton look and feel.

I've always admired the fact that

he doesn't approach things with the same kind of reverence

that somebody who loved the comics and loved certain things about them.

You know, every show Tim does, he initiates the show with

sketches, character designs,

and they immediately give you a sense of where he wants to go

and what he wants to do.

In your Tim Burton art book from your museum show,

there's a big picture of Brainiac, like with green flames,

and there's three characters standing.

Burton: Well, there was like a bit Wizard of Oz-y kind of...

What about some of those images that I saw in some of your artwork?

Like a-- he has like-- he's kind of a--

he was a supercomputer, so he's kind of a greenish...

Yeah, I kind of, I don't know, I had a weird mixture of, like,

that head in the ball of "The Haunted Mansion."

Sort of like a fishbowl

kind of head kind of thing.

And there was, like...

he had a cape on or he looked like he was human,

but then he's, like, more of a spider.

You know, I think I was inspired by

"The Brain That Wouldn't Die"

and there was a thing...

there was a spider creature in "Jonny Quest" that I remember.

Weird mixture of things.

I was given a sketch that Tim Burton did,

which I thought was cool.

Johnson: And the sketches that Tim does,

they end up looking a lot like that in the film.

It just was something I had never encountered before.

And so I'm like, "Does he want me to make this stuff look real,

or is he kidding?"

So I kind of took that sketch

and kind of made it a little more superhero-ish.

It was still interesting. We actually nicknamed that guy

"Edward Supermans."

How did those characters like Brainiac come about visually for you?

You know, obviously, they're very crude, so the thing is, is like, you know,

that's why you find people to work with

who you know you can get something crude and then interpret it

- to something that's real. - Yeah.

'Cause to be honest, if things looked exactly the way I drew them,

it wouldn't necessarily be so... you know.

One of the concepts we were pursuing is for Kal-El's journey,

that Jor-El provided with him a means to survive.

And one of the main means

for his survival in this new world was Kay.

It was to be a companion for him throughout his life.

Tim had a brilliant idea

to have Kay start out as almost a teddy bear.

Kal-El was a baby when he got in the craft to come to Earth,

and as Kal-El grew in the spaceship on his journey to Earth,

he'd have this little teddy bear, a companion,

something to comfort him a little bit.

And Kay had the abilities to morph and to change

to suit his needs.

Schnepp: There was a through-line with both

Superman and Kay.

I like the whole Kay concept.

Going from the rejuvenation suit

into basically, I guess, the Kay character

kind of becomes his suit for a little bit.

Atwood: We decided that it was protective.

We didn't want another Superman suit.

That was pretty much all I heard.

It's like, "Tim Burton, it's Superman, and you're gonna design a suit

that is gonna replicate his powers.

I knew that there was probably an element that he was healing inside it,

regenerating, possibly.

That kind of put this notion of something that was maybe a bit Egyptian.

What about all the glyphs on his suit?

Sharp: I thought the hieroglyphs would give it a sense of age

and to make it feel alien.

And I probably completely ripped off Ridley Scott with that.

The design I did was completely unwieldy and impractical,

but it was always meant to be just a leap-off point.

Carson: We were kind of exploring a gothic,

art-deco, New York-ish

kind of a design language on many of those.

Kind of different from the traditional guy flying with a cape

so that it was obvious that Kay

had melded with him and become one with him

and just assisted every part of his being.

Within the story, Superman, you know, almost dies,

he has a healing bath, he has a new suit at the end,

so it was a big deal with costumes and studio and all that.

Here, I believe, this one would be

after the Kay suit disengages,

and this is the reformed, newer version.

This is the new, darker Superman.

It feels a little more organic than the suit.

Like, it feels a little more exposed, in a way.

This "S" kind of broke apart into, like...

- almost like a boomerang. - Yeah, like weaponry.

And the logo was really important.

That logo had to break up into elements.

Schnepp: I've seen the silver "S," like, castings of it.

How far did you get with that final outfit?

Atwood: We kind of knew what the material was

and the shapes and all that, but as far as really mechanically

making all that stuff work, we weren't there yet.

Schnepp: Doing a good job of sculpting it up in 3-D,

vacu-forming those.

They vacu-formed them in clear, iridescent,

reflective colors and shiny stuff.

This was gonna have a super polished sort of feeling to it

to show all the different definitions of the muscles.

When you moved and flew, it would look really cool

because black is hard to film.

So this kind of kicked back enough light

that you could sort of see the body

and kind of feel the movement a little bit more.

What inspired you for some of the designs

of Superman's outfit,

which some were super shiny and rubbery.

What were you going for?

Well, we were kind of into a new discovery, you know?

We were looking for something that wasn't a leotard.

We were looking for the definition of muscle

which was more, kind of different than the original "Superman,"

that was more of that period where people didn't work out.

What she was doing also, using sculptors.

They were sculpting this fantastic suit.

Everybody wants to know about the suit, always.

We get e-mails-- I get e-mails all the time.

"Can you tell me about the suit?" I've never understood the fascination.

It's a suit.

He set up a team over there like Jose Fernandez,

was an incredible suit creator.

It's a different kind of vision of what the Superman meant.

So in this case, you know, he was cut.

And so his suit had to fit and be a certain way.

So it was a combination of Nic and sculpt.

The first motion picture I worked on with Tim

was "Mars Attacks!" So this was the follow-up to that.

To have that suit play a part

as the character goes through a transformation I thought

was really unique and something you really, I guess,

up to that point, you really hadn't seen in anything.

Between that and the different incarnations of the suit--

the bio suit, which a lot of people speculated about, talked about--

I'm glad you're clearing up a lot of those perceptions.

Two minutes. Two minutes in the movie

inside some kind of weird neutrino liquid bath,

you'd see this electric stuff--

That's it. That's all you would've seen.

It wasn't him flying around with a rainbow suit.

I know there's been stills out there from those tests,

and the stills actually don't do it justice at all.

Schnepp: It's fantastic. I was referring to this footage as the holy grail.

Frey: It is like the holy grail.

Initially, I was really struck at how he looked in that suit.

His physique, it was different than what we had seen before.

Obviously, he's quite a lean fellow,

but there was a certain power to him as well.

Obviously, they're early tests. It's about the giddiness,

the excitement of Tim and Nic and their passion for it

and their first exploration of the character.

That's what always got me excited.

What did Nic say about pixie dust? What was he saying? "Sparkle dust"?

The blue had a metallic finish to it. That's what he meant.

But he's a car guy, so they probably call it that in car world.

That kind of obre two-tone.

When it changes in the light, it goes back and forth.

We started with a darker blue,

but because it was a black suit at the end,

we ended up with a more kind of

metallic feeling on the surface of the suit.

So we tested a million different materials

to try to figure out what to make it out of.

I had guys coming in from 3M and all these places

going, "Hey, we have this new product."

It was really exciting that way just to see...

You know, it's like industrial design, almost.

With Superman's iconic kind of an "S" curl and things like that,

were you gonna go with like a bit--

like the pictures that we saw were like obviously a test-- long hair?

When they make wigs, they make them

- so that they can be... - Oh, yeah. They cut it down.

But we could've made it into a nice "S,"

we could've given it a nice bouffant,

a big comb-over...

I mean, we had so much at our disposal.

Of course the Superman of the '90s, also a lot of people forget

that the Superman of the '90s had long hair at the time.

In the comic books, he had longer hair.

We looked at long hair, short hair, this thing, that thing.

It's like your notes to yourself, you know?

I always looked at Superman--

"Can we get the diapers off of him a little bit? Ehh..."

The red underwear on the outside--

you know, we tried all different ways to avoid that, actually,

'cause people kind of tend to make fun of that element on Superman,

like the old "tighty-whitey" kind of vibe.

You know, with superhero costumes, it's always about the crotch.

There was a suggestion that Superman wears

basketball shorts like the Lakers.

I don't even know where this came up, if I'm dreaming this or...

They started mentioning, like, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe,

the Laker outfits and doing it more so it looks like

a basketball Laker... I don't know.

Atwood: And you're just like, "Really? How does that work?"

That's a horrible suggestion. I'm glad that they didn't go with that.

It went away.

Atwood: We had capes in all different surfaces and colors.

As the costume changed and evolved, then the cape could also

go from light to dark and for different purposes.

One of the things that I tried to get Tim to do

at the time, and we may have done it,

was to create a character out of the cape,

so that in situations that he was in, it became formidable.

It could take that cape and he could throw it

and bring somebody to him, cut their head off, whatever it is,

as a weapon that lived and came back on him.

The thing we were gonna do,

and obviously we didn't even get-- we just had the initial thing--

was to give it whatever that vibe was

but to make it him, so whatever that was.

And it usually takes you a while to organically find

what that image is.

You know, like in terms of the texture, the costume and, you know,

all of that was just real initial stuff.

Man: In the process of making your film,

you found that actual moment

when Nicolas Cage was closing his eyes in the middle of the screen test,

wasn't aware, he wasn't even posing or looking at the camera.

Yeah, I was literally going over the footage

and saw that flash frame, and I was like,

"Oh, my God! What is that?" And I went to it

and literally stepped through it and saw the half-eyed...

like, he's in mid-blink, and that's the picture

that went all around the entire globe.

Bryan Singer would carry around that picture of Nicolas Cage,

the one where he had the long hair, and it was obviously a costume test.

People on-line don't even understand

the beginning of the behind-the-scenes and how things operate.

Fair enough. Like, nowadays,

I do stuff... If I want to practice something,

you know, or experiment,

I just do it privately with my friends.

Those are like Halloween co-- you know, that's like kids playing,

you know, and they didn't even know.

"Well, that's just-- that's the wig.

I combed it. It's this and it's that."

- There's a whole bunch of... - There are things called lighting...

No, no, no. I mean,

it's literally like showing your kids Halloween costumes.

Back then, you didn't really think about it. It was just for us.

Now there's nothing that's just for you anymore.

So that's why we do it, you know,

three miles under the earth in a bunker

with only one camera.

What was your take on Krypton?

Well, you know, that was a bit interesting to explore,

and I had a thing with Brainiac involved,

and I thought was interesting.

Man: Tim had this concept of him as a creature

once again who's able to plug in,

hitting the biomechanical theme,

who can also pass as human in some places

and just be completely bizarre and alien in others.

Jackson: Tim said he felt like

Brainiac should appear as the Grim Reaper,

and so we illustrated him that way.

We did a quick sketch, and Tim acted all that out.

He throws back his cloak, and he reveals

who he is and what he looks like, truly.

And then we see that spider-esque form for the first time.

Did you ever interact with anybody from I.L.M.?

No. We never saw their art. Those worlds didn't collide, really.

Warner Brothers came to us

with the script for "Superman Lives" I think sometime in '97.

Tim had the ability to look at my drawings,

which were done almost entirely with colored pencil and markers

on scraps of cardboard and paper,

and imagine how it would play in the picture.

I kind of identified the sort of three poles of design,

and that was the core, the humanoid, and then the spider creature

with the holographic head and the tongue,

and then the sort of cobra-cloaked cobra Brainiac.

We were going to introduce

the organic, technical, biomechanical

look and feel into Krypton.

The idea of instead of space being depicted

as this cold, technological place,

there were a lot of organic qualities to what we were designing

that made you feel that it was beautiful,

made you feel that there was something poignant

that Clark missed out on

in his life on Earth.

My little contribution was trying to figure out if

Krypton's a sphere, it's a planetoid,

maybe it's split into tectonic plates that maybe telescope up and down

or shift or are constantly moving and reacting to the universe,

and also the Dr. Seussian pod shapes

that maybe dwell underneath the tectonic plates as they move.

It was fun playing with the atmosphere and how that would work.

And, you know, obviously, a sphere is the perfect vessel

to hold an atmosphere inside.

My particular technique at the time, before computers,

was to take black paper and draw

with white or lighter colors onto it,

so you're basically drawing with light and how light affects things.

Rich Heinrich's production designer

wanted to stay true to Tim's design sensibilities,

so we did a lot of bulbous, spherical things.

We were playing with some different color schemes

that weren't always seen in film.

Let's go back and talk about your interior art

that you did for Krypton.

Because that had such a different tone to it.

What inspired you with those drawings?

I think that there's a sort of--

and this is something I've felt on every movie I've worked on--

it kind of has to do with jamming, like musicians.

The idea is to sort of go beyond technique

and just let yourself drift and see what the vibe is.

And I think what was happening is

Tim Burton was head of the project,

in a sense, organically.

The team that worked with him was people like Rich Heinrichs,

but there was Bill Boes, who was part of an entirely different team.

That part of the team was bringing in a certain knowledge

about how to make the idea of Tim Burton's world

function in three dimensions

in a fairly realistic world.

That's all the inspiration we needed, was to go, "Okay.

This is what you guys are doing, so what can we do

to kind of try to blend in?"

So I think we were all getting an organic idea

of what a Tim Burton adaptation

of a D.C. comic might look like.

Schnepp: So this outfit here...

Atwood: That was a Kryptonian partygoer.

This kind of thing I saw on the Superman suit,

like in the regeneration area there's some kind of--

Atwood: Yeah. I tried to use elements that tied it together

so it was sort of from pieces of things from the world.

( Atwood speaking )

I did a lot of stuff to get a look for Krypton,

so again I used these elements on the ecto thing

done together as headgear and a collar thing.

So I was just figuring out

ways I could apply the backing into the healing suit,

the elements of that, on the pedestrians in Krypton.

So she has the element of the hand thing on her foot.

It's an interesting exploration. Obviously never finalized it.

I just saw, like, yeah, some of the early designs

had a kind of Moebius/Giger type of biomechanical aspect to it.

Would that have ever-- I mean, who knows?

After a couple more months, it might've turned into

"Logan's Run"-like jumpsuits. Who knows?

I thought it might lose the tinfoil aspect of it.

Schnepp: Mm. Mm-hmm.

- The Jiffy-Pop... - ( chuckles )

I always expected, like,

Marlon Brando to just

- explode into popcorn. - ( laughs )

With Tim Burton, we never really got far enough

to develop the complexities about Krypton.

However, when Krypton blew up--

hold on a second. Just a second.

Pause for a second. Hello?

I'm in the middle of this interview. What do you need?

Yeah, do it. Do it, do it.

Okay. Hello?

Let me just take this one thing real quick.

Everybody has heard about the guy.

My guys know all about him. I would love to have lunch with him,

if you could set that up. Yeah.

How much money did you guys raise for him?

So I could put some in there if I wanted to? Okay.

All right, I love you. Set this up for me.

I really appreciate it. Okay, thanks. Bye.

- Sorry about that. Life goes on. - No worries.

Sylvain was working primarily on the skull ship.

He was doing concept illustration,

beautiful pen-and-ink and watercolor illustrations,

some done in marker.

This is one of the few times I remember Tim Burton kind of

interjecting privately that he wanted us

to try and design something, like an actual vessel.

But Peters wouldn't have it. He had a "National Geographic" cover

with an Australopithecus africanus,

you know, the Lucy thing,

and I think he pinned it on our wall and said,

"It's a skull ship. I want a skull ship.

Skull." ( grunts )

It obviously was a skull that floated in space,

kind of like "Zardoz," that big face that floats in the beginning of that.

The huge eye holes are the ports that they look out,

and there's these little guys, these little creatures about this big,

and in scale, the eyes are huge.

I did some sketch models of the skull ship

out of cardboard really quick.

That was going to be built

on Warner Brothers stage 16, which is their biggest stage.

So introduced some of the design elements from kind of a meld

between Giger and Burton.

That segued into

the skull ship being sculpted by Bill Boes.

The skull ship itself was probably about this big,

and then Rick wanted to have all this really cool, like, tubing

and mechanical stuff on the outside,

So him and I actually jumped in the car,

got some parts from the train store,

and we just started gluing things on,

and it just sort of took on its own identity.

Heinrichs: The extra of the skull ship actually was an incredible sculpture.

that I believe ended up over at Jon Peters' house.

Hey, Bill Boes, I found the skull ship.

It's right here.

In the original concept,

Krypton blew up into thousands of little pieces.

They all became colonies and all had their own monsters.

All these monsters were in the skull ship.

Right, they were called the menagerie.

The menagerie. And it was like a zoo.

And we had all of these monsters that were in the back of that big skull ship

which descended into Earth, which would've been amazing.

Johnson: We did hundreds of designs for aliens in Brainiac's ship.

We worked for months and months and months designing,

and got pretty excited about puppetry,

strange hybrid blends,

digital removal of certain aspects.

Kerry Gammill, which was a perfect choice

from his "Superman" days

as an artist for the comic, designed hundreds of designs for us.

I spent several weeks just drawing these things.

They put a little sign on the design room door

that said, "Kerry's Fortress of Solitude,"

because no one was allowed to come in there.

And then I went even a step further. I'm a huge Brom fan.

I thought, what can it hurt to call up Brom and see if he's interested?

And he was. ( snaps )

There was essentially a mad-scientist

part of an alien race that was coming in,

and they needed all these characters brought to life.

So they brought me on board and set me loose to start creating.

I could put a dark sense of humor to them,

and there were elements-- again, this was a mad-scientist's lab--

so there was a lot of experimentation going on.

Brainiac had gone through and collected all these specimens,

which is why he was coming to Earth.

There's one where it's basically like a giant dinosaur creature

attacking Superman inside of a spaceship-- where is that from?

I just made it up. It was like

they just wanted us to go crazy.

They said, "Just draw monsters."

Jon Peters liked the ones that I didn't like.

He would come in and look at them,

and I would say, "Look at this. Isn't this cool?"

And he'd go, "I like this one here."

I think the nickname I heard for him was "Loudmouth,"

'cause you could just hear the bellowing

coming from all the way down the hall whenever he showed up

with an army of women and children.

Jon Peters came by a couple times, and he had his own ideas?

He'd bring a little entourage of people in the room with him,

and it was very disruptive,

and everybody kind of went, "Oh, God, here he comes."

He'd bring these kids into the office

who would look at our drawings, never look at us,

and start commenting, going, "Oh, I like that one. I hate this."

Usually I bring my kids--

because-- I have four kids--

because you get very jaded

in a studio atmosphere.

It's very controlled. Most people are being paid by you,

so most people love everything, nobody gives you an honest opinion.

But kids give you a really good honest opinion.

I would be working on some of Tim's designs some days,

and Peters might come through the office,

and he might see that and then say,

"We're not doing any of that."

"No, I don't want that. I want to see muscles."

Every once in a while, he'd come in and want to demonstrate

some new jiu-jitsu move he had learned in front of these women,

so he would call Rick Heinrichs in the hall

and wrestle him to the ground in front of us.

So one day Rick comes into the art department, he goes,

"Man, we just had a meeting

with Jon Peters,

and he-- John Dexter,

the art director, was trying to explain something to him,

and he put me, like, in a headlock.

Man, it hurt!"

You being the producer, you'd come in, look at some art, and then, you know...

- Choke 'em out? - Choke somebody out.

Well, I was more creating an energy

of an action hero

and a world that most men don't know anything about.

I mean, you get both sides of it.

Sometimes he'd get somebody in a headlock.

One time he kissed me full on the lips.

Now, which is better? I don't know.

I think I might've preferred the headlock, but, you know.

Or kicked in the face, but whatever.

I wanted what it's like to break your nose--

I've been in 500 fights-- to break your hands,

to bleed, to taste someone else's blood...

I wanted that in these movies.

It's shooting fish in a barrel. We take a paycheck from his studio.

Of course he can humiliate us.

I mean, that's easy, you know? I'd like to see him wrestle a shark.

( both laugh )

I remember that Jon-- at the time, he had three

separate houses up Benedict Canyon that he was renovating.

Tim and were always driving up there, getting sort of uptight,

'cause you could never quite predict

what it was going to be this time-- it was always something.

And then Tim and I got into a conflict with Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

I'd been told that Terry Semel

had never read the script and he finally did,

and he said, "What is this? I hate this."

I was also told that Warners was changing

its strategy in terms of the slate,

and they didn't want to swing for the fences anymore.

They'd gotten burned on-- oh, I guess on "Batman Forever," maybe.

- Schnepp: "Batman & Robin." - "Batman & Robin."

And Tim has always been upset about the fact that

the "Superman" project was doomed by Joel Schumacher,

who fucked up Tim's own franchise

and then fucked up Tim's Superman movie.

And one day, Tim said, "Can you come over?"

This is three or four months into the process.

and I kinda said, "What's going on?"

And he started in this sheepish way to say,

"Well, you know, the Warners brass

and Lorenzo and Terry Semel..."

And I kind of interrupted him. I saw where it was going.

I said, "Tim, you're firing me." And he said, "Well, they told me to."

This is where it gets into that sort of gray area of studio,

the black-hole development.

It's the hardest thing to describe, but you go through it almost every time.

Why, I don't know.

It's just that I've been involved in so many scripts where you're fixing it,

but you're basically just smothering the life out of it.

And when you go down that track, it's not a good one,

but it happens a lot of the time.

You know, he told me that they were gonna

hire somebody else, which was Dan Gilroy, I think.

The first meeting was at Jon Peters' house up in Bel Air,

and we started talking about the current script,

and it was the idea of going deeper with the characters

and working on the action,

and just-- it became a sense that the script wasn't where they wanted it.

And the next day, I was at Warner Brothers,

going to meet with Tim at the production office,

and it became a daily, for the next year,

it became a seven-day-a-week job.

And I think what was brilliant about what Tim did

and what he wanted to explore is to take

a classic superhero character

who is beyond emotional turmoil.

What Tim latched onto was, "Wait a minute. He's an outsider."

Because Superman is unique. He's not of the world.

Batman's of the world. Spider-Man's of the world.

All of the X-Men are of the world. They're mutants of the world.

It was the emotional angst of somebody realizing

that they are not of us.

I think people who are drawn to fantasy very much are drawn to fantasy

because it's literally an escape from the bullshit nightmare societal damage

that gets created by growing up.

In the later draft that I have,

Kay turns into Jor-El.

Gilroy: Our Kay, I think, went much farther in the sense

of saying that somehow there was a Kryptonian technology

that imbued the essence of Jor-El,

that went beyond-- that went beyond just a projection.

I was playing with looking at owls

as a kind of a touchstone.

Sort of like Brainiac was cobra, I felt like Kay was owl

and was designed to not only sort of

nurture and envelop Superman when he was a baby,

but to teach him, to train him, to befriend him.

And literally, visually,

after Superman is killed by Doomsday,

Kay resurrects him and becomes the new costume.

I always felt that having Kay gave us a more physical presence of Jor-El.

Really, the focus was on

Nic's character on Superman

and Clark and that part of the story.

( Cage speaking )

( Burton speaking )

( Burton laughs )

It starts off with Clark Kent as a guy who works at the newspaper,

but he had an apartment, and inside his apartment

he had a separate place where it was sort of his changing room,

his little man-cave, and I remember on the wall

he had a tremendous number of newspaper articles.

You could tell there'd been a lot of research

that he'd done trying to figure out

what might have caused his condition,

that maybe this was some sort of medical condition that he had.

So, early on, when Lex, through Lexcorp,

uncovers the fragment of spaceship near the Clark family farm,

the second that Clark Kent realizes that he's an alien,

it is utterly, utterly devastating emotionally to him.

And these are things that dominated

the conversations that I would have with Tim.

Both Tim and Nic had this idea of, like--

Clark Kent was going to be a bigger freak than Superman, almost.

Like, Clark Kent would be the alien.

( Cage speaking )

( Atwood speaking )

( all laugh )

( Burton speaks )

Yeah, I guess the equivalent of Clark Kent now would be

those guys, like, in Silicon Valley,

like those kind of brainy guys that are sort of--

who knows what their secret life is?

( Cage speaking )

( Burton speaking )

It's a love story,

and we tried to make it as simple as that.

But he did have a dark side, like many men do.

On the other hand, he was extremely vulnerable

because he really didn't have anybody and he was alone.

She gave him the strength of feeling,

you know, that he was who he was

and that she loved him anyhow.

The relationship we established early on was stalled.

He had this deep concern-- "What if we have a baby?

What if this baby punches his way out of you, like 'Alien'?

What if the baby kills you?"

He doesn't share it, but you can tell this is the dilemma.

di Bonaventura: He was going to get engaged to Lois,

and he was sitting in a restaurant

and literally pumping his leg like this, you know?

And the water on everybody's table was shaking.

He's so anxiety-ridden that he leaves the restaurant--

it's, I think-- it was on top of a building--

and then flew around the building, like, 30 times,

trying to burn off steam.

He doesn't change his suit.

He doesn't look for a phone booth or anything.

He just burns out of his suit.

He just takes off, and that in itself is enough

to just shred the clothes.

Tim wanted more of a visceral punch that you saw

in those Max Fleischer cartoons, which is sort of an adaptation

of what Siegel and Shuster's original "Superman" was.

That was our Kal-El. That was our "Superman."

He's not somebody who can fly--

Tim said he didn't like the idea of-- of--

of the sort of magical flying, of just floating in space,

and so he said, "I want to ground it and tie it to physics.

And so if he jumps three miles in the air,

he comes right back down like a bullet."

The first thing I'd done for that was to do

almost a Superman parkour sequence on a grand scale,

so it shows Superman leaping across the city.

It might take him five or six leaps,

but he makes each leap

being the equivalent of two miles or three miles.

I'm much more interested in, like, somebody flying through the clouds

and, you know, feeling the texture of that on their face.

For me, it was very important--

was the idea of whatever was going on,

the feeling of

what it would feel like to be like that kind of a character.

So I was trying to get more into the sort of visceral feel of it,

uh, you know,

no matter what other bullshit was going on.

How do you make flying cool

and also affordable?

Man: I.L.M. got involved.

They were going to do the visuals on the movie.

So they ended up coming down and we did some tests

of just shooting this stuff

and then figuring out how the cape was gonna fly.

Atwood: We did a lot of testing with that,

and I think, you know, for the time,

the guys came up with some really great stuff.

It was pretty exciting.

It was still early in the process, and we had some evolution

to be done to the techniques that Tim was going for,

but we were gonna get there.

Then watching Nic Cage in an outfit land

was kind of like, "Whoa. There's Superman, the Nic Cage version."

That moment I remember really acutely, 'cause it really--

It was like, "Whoa, oh. We really are doing this.

You know, here we are."

There was lot of, like, "at-odds"

between the studio, the producers, and ourselves.

We were just like, "Well--"

You know, there was a push to have, like,

Superman having a lot of, like, kung-fu fights.

It's like, well, he's not going to get into a kung-fu fight

with a bunch of ninjas.

And, you know, no-- ( grumbles )

There's this whole sequence

of Luthor's henchmen polluting the waterways of Metropolis,

and Superman at some point

has to contend with a group of ninjas.

( music playing )

I think they're there as sort of, um...

( music playing )

- I'm gonna stop. Can we go back? - Yeah.

I'm just trying to think what they were there for.

- I don't remember. - They had just seen "The Matrix,"

and they were like, "We won!"

I really don't remember.

"You're the one!" Superman's like, "I'm not Neo."

I think I thought it was just absurd.

( music playing )

We went scouting when we decided on

where we were going to shoot a lot of the exteriors.

Most of it's gonna be done on stage, obviously.

And we ended up going to Pittsburgh, and Tim fell in love with it.

Burton: Pittsburgh-- I don't know-- just had

an interesting feel to some of it and felt kind of right.

Man: A lot of our ideas were all about getting these locations

and expanding them,

extending the sets with visual effects.

There's the P.P.G. building that was going to be

Lex Luthor's place. You know, his lair.

Burton: Lex himself was going to appear

almost at one with his office that way.

Carson: We wanted similar proportions to the "Daily Planet,"

so it was kind of the counterpart-- more gothic, more weighty,

slightly more villainous.

- What about Perry White's office? - Instead of it being

the cliché newspaper office,

where it's basically the floor

surrounded with the editors' offices,

we wanted Perry himself also to have

a kind of vaunted sense of himself.

My last interaction or crossover with Superman

was when we were making "Dogma."

In 1998, we were in Pittsburgh,

and we went to use a building for our MovieCorp.

They were like, "You can't use that. That building's being held."

And I was like, "For what?"

And they're like, "That's going to be Lexcorp

for the Tim Burton 'Superman' movie."

And I was like, "Get out of here."

I knew Tim Burton loved kaiju and Godzilla stuff.

Doomsday can be our kaiju, our Hulk-plus thing.

So what if this was a thing, an organism that destroys,

but it propels its inanimate matter

with an engine of energy?

So this rock creature punches you with laser rocket power

driving the punch, and it's sharp,

then maybe I kind of create a power source.

Is is some sort of energy core in the middle of it?

Maybe its exoskeleton?

Let's also take it out of human anatomy and give it a second pair of arms.

And Doomsday was supposed to be cut in half

but some big ventilation fan or something under there,

and so we were doing some designs where he's cut into two pieces,

but then they sort of form two Doomsdays

and then they sort of meld back into another one.

In the comic book, he was more of a big, muscular thing

with kind of bony protrusions,

and I tried to get a little of that into the concept,

but they really just wanted a big monster.

I don't know what stuck.

I mean, we were all over the place.

So many hundreds of designs done.

I was reacting to what Tim put down initially.

He gave me a sketch of a creature that had multiple--

its entire body was covered with faces and heads,

And he explained that during the fight,

some of these faces and heads would morph and change

into people that Kal-El, that Superman, knew personally.

It would be somewhat unsettling to be fighting a creature,

and all of a sudden you see Lois Lane's face there

or you see Perry White's face there.

The one thing I was really interested in seeing the designs develop

was the Superman-Doomsday battle in the subway.

I think it was underground. A lot of it happened underground.

And just the real feeling of

power and force and strength and destruction.

The concept designs for that scene were quite striking.

The fight with Doomsday was chilling,

because you had this guy who you'd been tracking

for the first 50 pages of the movie,

and you knew emotionally he was dead.

He was emotionally devastated.

You could see, as the fight was going on, that he was losing.

And you could see that it was just all

being taken away from him.

And again, it goes to this emotional power

that comes from this decision,

this primal decision that Tim makes to want to go this route.

And I remember writing the death scene,

and as he was dying, I remember a part of me was thinking,

"There's a part of him that wants to die.

There's a part of him that wants to let go."

And I'll tell you something else that's interesting--

Princess Di died

right while I was writing that sequence.

And Jon Peters called me and said, "You've got to come over to the house."

I said, "Just copy what you see on TV

and write it into the script."

I wanted the grandness of a world weeping.

Thompson: We were watching the processionals and the funeral,

and that very much dictated how we saw the death of Superman.

Heinrichs: We had almost a severe fascist

or constructivist approach to the Superman tomb.

In the scene that takes place,

it was originally going to be at the Fortress of Solitude.

At the time the plug was pulled, we were considering

it being in Superman's tomb,

but this was the resuscitation of Superman.

What kind of brought "Superman" down?

I don't think there's any one reason.

As always, there's usually a combination of reasons,

and everybody will have a slightly different perspective.

As somebody inside,

"Superman" got caught in an unfortunate moment in time at Warner Brothers.

So when you're working on this script,

people are checking on almost a daily basis.

It was a studio movie. It was a huge budget.

I think it had a release date.

Before we handed in our first drafts, nobody was talking about money

in terms of the budget. It was just like,

"We're gonna-- this is a big movie. We're going to write this big."

I got a phone call that Warner Brothers had run a budget.

It was through the roof.

It would've been 200 for the movie,

another 100... it would've been a $300-million investment.

The budget was not an insignificant budget.

It was a really large budget.

There was a period of four weeks where it was like,

"We've got to retool this again and make this smaller.

It's too expensive. We have to start cutting things."

And these big, huge action sequences that

before had a blank check attached to them,

suddenly-- it was like, 14 buildings don't go down.

We're going to keep it inside the 5th floor of this one building.

And the Fortress of Solitude gets jettisoned.

Everything goes into the tomb.

And it was very much always in flux.

Development hell doesn't happen with no-name directors.

It happens only with famous directors

that a studio doesn't dare break up with.

And that's how you end up for two years just polishing a turd

until finally somebody walks away at great cost.

We had several films fail right around it

or under-perform right around it.

So suddenly, the economic pressure on all of us was very significant.

In the conference room at Warner Brothers,

there's a big board, and it's literally the size of a wall,

and it has their entire release slate for the year,

including all the other films coming out that weekend.

So it's broken up by weekend.

Warner Brothers got on one of the all-time terrible rolls.

Bob Daley and Terry Semel were in charge of the studio

and had a tremendous run.

These are very talented people. But at this point,

for some reason, things were misfiring.

And you could just see. It was just like

every week, the horserace was happening

and their horse was coming in last.

Big movies.

So as we're coming in to discuss at the conference table

our incredibly large-budget film

with a Tim Burton take, which is deconstructionist

and unusual and unique,

what's going on around us

is you were looking at the board and going--

you can just see the bombs as they were going off.

Every time I'd come in the conference room,

another executive had been fired.

And, as you know, from a human nature standpoint,

when money starts getting tight and people have to make big decisions,

safety becomes the big thing.

The risk that you can take when you're feeling confident

is very different than when you're feeling

a little bit on your heels.

And we were on our heels at that moment.

We were all interested in getting the script better,

the filmmakers were too, and it was still in process.

Lorenzo's utterly right. It's like, we need to work on it,

we needed to hone it, we needed to make it better all the time.

But there was enough there that you could see what it was going to be.

Dan Gilroy gave it some real shape.

And I kind of liked what he did. The studio didn't like it.

And there was nothing-- you never felt you were on solid ground

when you were going in to talk about the script,

because there was always the sense that it was--

It wasn't even a blinking green light.

It was a green light. They were moving ahead.

I think the day before it shut down,

I think Peters' assistant came by the art department

and said he needed the skull ship model for something-- for a meeting.

And so we all thought it was strange

because they had just finished that model.

And so he took that model that evening.

That was at the end of the day.

I think the very next day, we got word that the production was shut down.

We built this test suit just for

one of the people that worked at my studio,

and by the time we got so excited

that we were ready to explode, spontaneously combust,

'cause we thought we'd come up with exactly what Tim wants

and something pretty damned unique,

we got the call that the show was off.

Everything had finally come together,

and we were ready to go to the next step.

Actually, the day of the camera test

was the day that they came and told us that the movie was off.

So we only had elements of that costume to camera-test

to make sure it was all visually strong.

So we never got to make the whole thing.

It's the one costume I've never gotten to really make

that I always thought would've been, like, amazing.

We were literally

three weeks before production.

We were ready to go. We were full-amped and ready to roll.

It was like getting run over by a car.

That afternoon, they called us all in,

and I remember Tim and I and Jon went in,

and we sat with Bob and Terry and Lorenzo,

and it was the "Look, we're talking about this

and we're talking about that, and the studio cannot sustain

this film at this point," and they pulled the plug.

Peters: Terry Semel came up.

We did a show-and-tell.

Showed him everything that we had--

the script, the storyboards, all the stuff--

and he was my closest friend,

and he took me in the room with Tim,

and he said, "We're gonna cancel the movie.

We're gonna shut it down."

So we were being asked to spend a lot of money

at a time where we were a bit ahead,

or the script was a bit behind where we were spending the money,

and then we had this overall pressure going on within the corporation.

And I think it's really three different sort of things

were happening at the same time.

I don't know that you can say, "That's the one," but they were.

And, you know, it is a financial reality

when you're inside a company.

When they're worried about their results,

they look at the risk factor in a different way.

I was angry, frustrated.

I felt betrayed, but it was their call.

What would you say are the top three reasons

they pulled the plug, from their perspective?

Budget, Nicolas Cage, and Tim Burton.

I think they didn't totally believe that Tim

could make a "Superman" that would be commercial.

People were scared of this movie, just like they were scared of "Batman."

Whether it was they were still sort of--

still freaked out about my "Batman Returns" or whatever

or "Mars Attacks!," whatever the dynamic was,

and I've had this happen from the beginning,

is, like, they, "Okay, yeah, do it,"

but then they're always slightly worried about you in some way.

Highly creative people

have a hard time getting their movies made.

Full stop. That's all it is.

Because they bring stuff that blows everyone away.

and as much as they claim they want original,

they're terrified of it. That's what happens.

So you don't see those movies

because they scare everybody up the chain of command.

You know, like, when you have a transplanted organ,

the body either rejects the organ or not,

you have to have somebody in the body that says, "No, I want that liver."

And usually with these dangerous movies,

people are kind of going, "I don't know."

And Jon is a tremendous, passionate believer

and proponent of the franchise,

and he fought like hell for this movie.

Oh, I went to Terry Semel and threatened him

with throwing him out his window.

I mean, I was like, "You can't do this to me.

I've worked on this for too many years.

We're ready to go. We're cast.

We have one of the great directors who just made

a billion-dollar franchise for you.

Roll the dice, man. Roll the dice."

Nope.

So that year you were working on "Superman Lives,"

how much money was spent?

I think it was somewhere close to between 10 and 12 million,

and then I don't know if there was any payoff to Tim

or any payoff to Nic Cage or anything,

'cause I don't know if they had a pay-or-play deal.

Tim was completely devastated. He ran out.

He wouldn't talk to me or anybody for a week.

A week-- a month.

Where the studio was, Jon, the studio, me--

you know, the combination just was, you know.

But it is pain-- I have to say, it is painful

to work so long on something, you know.

Once that was over with, and I couldn't even get Tim on the phone

to try to figure a way to get it going again--

'cause I wasn't going to give up on it until I got it made--

Will Smith said yes to "Wild Wild West,"

and we went off and began shooting that movie.

That was another big film that Warner Brothers was developing.

A quite expensive film. and we kind of got a sense like,

"Okay, we're gonna now focus on that."

They actually mentioned in the room while they were pulling the plug

that the funds were going to be going over to "Wild Wild West."

And, you know, that is its own story.

- Oh, that is a whole other documentary. - Yeah.

I went to a movie theater years later

to see a movie called "The Wild Wild West."

All of a sudden, the Kenneth Branagh character

shows up, like, in this gigantic metal

walking spider, this monster spider, bigger than fuck.

I was so caught up with this spider, the Thanagarian snare beast,

that we did a comedic version

with "Wild Wild West," and that's where the spider came in.

I remember Jon Peters' name in the credits.

I was like, "Goddamn it.

That motherfucker finally got his fucking spider."

Now when I go to conventions and I show people,

I'm actually doing the opposite of Bryan Singer.

I'm doing like, "Hey, come here a minute,"

and I show some fan who's like,

"Nic Cage is stupid!

He would've been horrible in that movie!"

"Check this out." "Whoa, that's not bad."

Cage: You know, that character is such a bull's-eye

that you have to hit.

He's almost-- he's one of the most

precious icons of our country.

And the fact that Tim and I

were pretty far down the road designing it--

and I know that with Tim and where I was going to go,

we would've done something really special--

at least it's out there in the ether that that could have happened,

but it doesn't have to-- we don't have to make the movie.

It's still interesting to people.

You know, from that perspective, it was a big disappointment,

because I think he would've really stretched

in a way he hadn't yet, and maybe hasn't since.

I don't know. He hasn't made that movie.

When "Superman Lives" ended,

obviously it was a very dark time, you know,

to have something that-- for everyone, everyone that worked on it.

You know, it's a horrible thing

to be working creatively on something

and then have it just pulled from your life.

It's just amazing to me to look back that way

and look at what's going on now with these kind of movies

and wonder what that would've been then and what it could've become.

It's just something I think people should know--

that they're looking at a process, not a product.

The ultimate product would've been an amazing film.

I don't know how it couldn't been at least received very interestingly

because it's a movie I'd still like to see.

And plus I would've been able to do a lot of cool monsters in it.

That was a big part of who I am today.

That was the moment-- like, going out there

and telling that story over and over again.

Because of "Superman Lives,"

that was when I realized my true talent, I think.

It obviously wasn't writing "Superman,"

it was talking about writing "Superman."

That was where the real money was, I guess.

I think it would've definitely established the fact

that you can make a tough guy

have a great deal of insecurity.

It might not have been the comic book "Superman"

or the television "Superman" or Dick Donner's "Superman,"

but Tim Burton's "Superman" would've been

something quite unique

and probably something we'd still be talking about, you know.

Well, we are talking about it anyway.

It didn't even get made and we're talking about it.

Tim is really, I've got to be honest, I think one of the only people

who could really do it justice, because he understands it.

He's lived it.

And he, uh--

man, he would've fucking knocked it out of the park.

I think it would've either been

laughed off the screen or a big hit.

I think Tim Burton would've made a movie I would've been proud of.

Would it have done these kind of numbers that we needed to do?

Maybe not.

If we would've been able to strip through all of the chaos,

I think we could've had an interesting movie,

'cause it would've had some cool imagery

and let Superman be Superman

and then also experience

what it's like to be hidden and to be that character.

I mean, all those things were-- that was the core essence

of what we were trying to do.

So any final thoughts on "Superman Lives"?

If you think back about it now, how do you feel about it?

Why are you trying to depress me so much today?

Anybody got any cyanide or anything I can take?

Visit me when I'm about 90,

and I'll be here...

( old man's voice ) Still gonna make it.

Gonna make it.