Tim Burton's SUPERMAN LIVES Discussed by Screenwriter Dan Gilroy
As silly as Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage's Superman Lives movie probably would have been, I still kind of wish we could have seen how is would have turned out, especially after everything I've learned about the production over the years. There's going to be a lot more to learn about it in a documentary currently in development called The Death of Superman Lives: What Happened? wihch is being made by filmmaker Jon Schnepp. You can watch the trailer for that here.
We don't have to wait for that to be released to be filled in on some additional information about the film though. Movies.com talked to one of the screenwriters who worked on Superman Lives, Dan Gilroy, who recently wrote the script for the upcoming film Nightcrawler. During the interview, the writer was asked about his favorite script that he worked on that never made it to the screen, and he replied,
"I had some pretty high-profile ones. You know, I spent a year working with Tim Burton on his Superman Lives movie and the day they pulled the plug on that was very, very disappointing. It was disappointing for all of us: for me, for Tim, for Nic Cage, for John Peters. We were very far along and Warner Bros. had gone through a cycle where nothing they were making was connecting and they were hemorrhaging money and they just didn't feel that they could sustain making that film. So that was a major disappointment. I think Tim would have made a really marvelous film out of what we had come up with. That was hard."
He went on to talk about how he felt when the movie was cancelled,
"It's a wound. It's like getting punched in the face. You spend a year pouring all your artistic and creative energy into it and suddenly it evaporates and goes away in the space of a phone call. And you have to regroup. It's a disappointment, though obviously there are greater disappointments in life than that, but you have to take the time to say that hurts and figure out what that means and as honestly as possible move on and continue what you're doing. I think Tim and all of us went through that process. It was very painful."
Gilroy then discussed a scene from the script that he's bummed will never see the light of day.
"Tim had the idea, which was really the driving force of the movie, that Jor-el didn't have the chance to tell Kal-el when he put him in the little spaceship meteorite where he came from or who he was. So poor little Kal-el grew up on Earth having no idea where these powers came from or who he was, and I always thought that was a really inverted, deconstructionist element to bring to the story. I loved it and working with Tim we tried to explore it as much as possible. I'd love to see it happen some day. I'm a big Tim Burton fan."
You know how Burton's Batman became a superhero movie classic? Do you think that Superman Lives could have been just as awesome?