UPDATED 1/6, 10 a.m. ET: Patty Jenkins has seen the writeups of her WTF with Marc Maron appearance and opted to make some clarifications on Twitter.
“Versions of this article seems to be everywhere and not true. There was no ‘war’ with warner bros. over ww. I'm talking about 10 years of discussions with 10 different execs through them. And whole beard thing was about other projects at other studios,” wrote the soon-to-be helmer of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron.
In a follow-up she said, “I felt extremely supported in my vision on both films by @wbpictures, @ZackSnyder all the producers and everyone on board our eventual team. Just was a long road to get to make it. Let's chill the dramatic headlines like ‘war.’”
See original story below.
There's a smoothness in everything about superhero movies. From the slick CGI backgrounds to the poreless faces of its stars to the regularity with which the films are cranked out by studios, comic book blockbusters look like a well-oiled operation from the outside.
Wonder Woman 1984 director Patty Jenkins said her experience getting Diana Prince to screen was anything but effortless. In an interview with Marc Maron on his WTF podcast, Jenkins revealed every inch of moving her two movies to the multiplex was a struggle.
Jenkins called the process of making the films an "internal war" between herself and Warner Bros. She claimed if she hadn't fought to see her ideas on the screen, they would have used her as a cover to make a movie they wanted, hiding behind the cred of a woman director.
"They wanted to hire me like a beard; they wanted me to walk around on set as a woman, but it was their story and their vision,” Jenkins told Maron. “And my ideas? They didn’t even want to read my script. There was such mistrust of a different way of doing things and a different point of view.”
Jenkins said she frequently pushed back against a studio vision of a harsh and cutting Wonder Woman, a sort of man-eater stereotype Jenkins was trying to excise from her movie. "I was like, ‘Women don’t want to see that. Her being harsh and tough and cutting people’s heads off,'" she said. "I’m a Wonder Woman fan, that’s not what we’re looking for. Still, I could feel that shaky nervousness [on their part] of my point of view.”
She admitted over 30 scripts were penned and taken into consideration when it was said and done. “This was an internal war on every level about what Wonder Woman should be.”
Jenkins fled the project over these differences, only to return after Warner Bros couldn't get the movie off the ground. Sufficiently cowed, they agreed to allow Jenkins to make the movie her way. "They came back to me a year later and said, ‘Do you want to do it your way?” she recalled. “And boom, I just went and made the movie.”
Control of the franchise carried over to Wonder Woman 1984. Jenkins told Complex recently that the sequel's aesthetics were born out of her desire to see that era of the character onscreen, saying, "I loved Wonder Woman in the late '70s and '80s, and so even though I loved making the first movie in the period that we did, I was craving my Wonder Woman. I was creating that poppy Wonder Woman that we got to see."
Wonder Woman 3 is now being fast-tracked, with Jenkins and star Gal Gadot coming back. Warner Bros. chief Toby Emmerich said the studio's "excited to be able to continue [Diana's] story with our real-life Wonder Women—Gal and Patty—who will return to conclude the long-planned theatrical trilogy."
