The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
From cancellation to… studio darling?
Axed by Disney for his old tweets, the director of The Suicide Squad is now the toast of Tinseltown
At first, James Gunn thought it was just a Twitter thing. In July 2018, the director of Marvel’s much-loved, £1.2billiongrossing Guardians of the Galaxy films saw his name was trending on the social media site over a series of extremely bad-taste jokes he’d posted around a decade earlier, making light of paedophilia and the Holocaust. These had been dug up by a group of alt-Right agitators who weren’t fans of Gunn’s more recent outspoken criticism of the 45th US President. Being antiTrump hardly set him apart from his Hollywood peers, but his online footprints made him an easy target of cancel culture.
In the Noughties, transgressive schlock had been Gunn’s thing. He learned his trade at Troma Entertainment, the staunchly lo-fi production house behind The Toxic Avenger, Surf Nazis Must Die and Klown Kamp Massacre. But in 2012, having been impressed by his work on the comicbook satires The Specials and Super, Marvel brought him into the fold. And now the man who’d unlocked the gate – Kevin Feige, the head of Marvel Studios – was on the telephone, talking darkly of concerns among the higher-ups at Disney, which owns the comic-book brand. Gunn, who’d posted an unequivocal public apology that morning, was bemused. “I was just about to move to Georgia to shoot Guardians of the Galaxy 3,” he tells me, via Zoom, from his living room sofa. Now 54, his once distinctive gelstiffened hair has softened into a snowy mane and beard. “We were ready to start building sets; we’d opened a production office.” Later that evening, Feige called again. After reviewing the historical tweets, Alan Horn, the then-chairman of Walt Disney Studios, had decided not only to remove him from Guardians 3, but to put the film on ice and expel Gunn from the franchise outright. He describes the conversation as “stunning”, in the knocked- unconscious sense. “I felt like my career was done. That I was now unhireable. That I’d have to sell my house, and whatever money I’d made would have to last for the rest of my life.”
In the end, however, this was not how things panned out. A few weeks later, Warner Bros quietly got in touch to ask Gunn if he’d like to write and direct a Superman film. He was completely thrown by the offer, and didn’t feel able to take on something so onerous, so asked which other characters from the DC portfolio might be on the table. The studio told him to take his pick.
After jotting down some story ideas, including one for Clark
Kent’s pet, Krypto the Superdog, he went back with a proposal: a fresh take on the Suicide Squad, a black-ops unit made up of wacky and dyspeptic minor villains. The studio had already taken a stab at this in 2016 with the End of Watch director David Ayer, and the results had met with a mixed reception: strong returns, atrocious reviews.
Gunn’s flamboyantly tasteless take on the material – which is so much more fun than its predecessor it almost feels cruel – arrives in cinemas this weekend.
In a meeting with Walter Hamada, the boss of DC Films, Gunn asked what he had to retain from the earlier version. The answer was nothing. “He told me I could create a whole new team if I wanted. He said they’d love to see Margot Robbie return as Harley Quinn [the punky anti-heroine and one-time Joker’s moll] but that she didn’t have to be there at all.”
In the end, Gunn did draft Robbie into his otherwise all-new platoon, alongside Idris Elba, John Cena, the wrestler-turned-action-star, and a hulking bipedal shark voiced by Sylvester Stallone. (He wrote Elba’s character, a sharpshooting assassin called Bloodsport, with the 48-year-old London-born actor specifically in mind: “I loved him as Stringer Bell in The Wire, but he always struck me as the guy who should be a movie star but had never really got his true movie-star moment.”)
In place of the effortfully gritty urban combat of Ayer’s version, Gunn sent his squad to overthrow a fictional South American military dictatorship. He envisioned the film as a “war caper” in the style of The Dirty Dozen or Where Eagles Dare – “the movies I watched all the time with my dad as a kid”.
Writing the script was, he says, “exceptionally easy”: it came together in two months, as opposed to the year required to thrash out Guardians 3. “I was emotionally in the right place at the right time,” he explains. Marvel’s former golden boy was now himself a soldier of fortune with nothing to lose.
Then in March 2019, a plot twist hit. The Suicide Squad was about to start shooting, with a crew made up of many of Gunn’s most trusted Guardians collaborators, when he was suddenly summoned to Disney by Horn, who had been responsible for his sacking eight months previously. Long story short: they wanted him back.
Gunn is too diplomatic to suggest that Horn – an affable 78-yearold who’d nurtured Christopher Nolan’s career during his own time at Warner Bros – may have belatedly realised that the campaign to have Gunn sacked was a social media confection, ginned up by troublemakers looking for a liberal scalp. “People will never believe it – they’ll always think it was because I was being poached by another studio – but Alan is just a really good dude. He hadn’t been able to sleep from worrying about it, and said he needed to do what he felt was right by his conscience.”
So from his new berth at Warner Bros, wasn’t Gunn tempted to tell Disney to get lost?
“I was definitely tempted to say that,” he grins.
He didn’t, though. So after making The Suicide Squad and a spin-off TV series for Warner Bros, he’ll direct Guardians 3 for Marvel later this year.
Having emerged with his career not just intact but enhanced, Gunn sees his cancellation as a formative experience. “I was suddenly left with nothing, and had to ask myself ‘If I’m not a director any more, what am I?’ And at first, the answer was ‘nothing’. So I’ve since realised that [filmmaking] is what I like to do, but not who I am.”
As for cancel culture itself, to him it’s a simplistic response to a complex moment of upheaval in showbusiness at large. “I have to say Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby – they should all be cancelled,” he says. “Screw those people. The industry is better without them. But on the other hand, there are situations in which people are treated incredibly unfairly by the Twitter mob purely because they’re on another side of an issue. There’s accountability, and then there’s a group of people who are just waiting to be outraged.”
Gunn attributes his black sense of humour to his upbringing. His father, Jim, was a violent alcoholic during Gunn’s childhood, though he became sober in the 1980s, and the pair had long since reconciled before Jim’s death last year.
“I grew up with a lot of bad things happening, and my siblings and I dealt with that stuff by making jokes about it,” he says. “It was a form of protection against the world. But as I’ve got older, I’ve realised [humour] can be limiting. So I no longer use it as an emotional crutch.”
It’s thanks to Gunn’s sensibility that, more than a decade into Hollywood’s superhero phase, The Suicide Squad can still feel like a gale of fresh air. But as a filmmaker, he’s uneasy about the genre’s seeming inbuilt resistance to new ideas.
“I’ve had this exact conversation with A-list filmmakers who have promised they were going to do something big but interesting, then let me down with more cookie-cutter spectacle.”
Not that spectacle itself is the problem: “I love making it, and telling these big stories. What we have to do as filmmakers is make it more varied. How do we bring more artistry into it? How do we turn the modern blockbuster into a filmmaker’s medium in the same way as the blockbusters of the 1960s and 1970s, like Rosemary’s Baby and The Godfather? For better or worse – and whatever Martin Scorsese might say – they’re what people go to the cinema for.”
‘I felt like my career was done. That I was now unhireable. I’d have to sell my house’
The Suicide Squad is in cinemas now