The director of “Wonder Woman 1984” says she remains “super grateful” for her time at Marvel Studios.
With “Wonder Woman 1984”, Patty Jenkins has just marked the longest opening weekend for any film since the reopening of theaters. As a victory lap, she came to the WTF podcast with Marc Maron to talk about her journey towards making blockbuster superhero films, something many outside observers did not think likely after her 2003 independent drama “Monster”. A crucial point along the way was her brief time in charge of “Thor 2”, which ended up becoming the much-maligned “Thor: The Dark World” of 2013. She left this project to be replaced by the director of “Game of Thrones ”, Alan Taylor, but Jenkins hasn’t commented much in the past on exactly why she did it.
“Word got around that I wanted to make a superhero movie and to Marvel’s credit – in a movie that didn’t require any women – they hired me,” said Jenkins. “So I was always very grateful to them, even though it didn’t work out. They wanted to make a story that I didn’t think would work and I knew it couldn’t be me. It couldn’t be me that this happened. If they hired any guy to do that, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I knew in my heart that I couldn’t make a good movie with the story they wanted to do. “
So Jenkins walked away from the project, although directing “Thor 2” made her the first filmmaker to direct a big-budget superhero film. The implication here is that running a high-profile comic book loser would have hindered your prospects of running other highly successful tents, something that wouldn’t be as likely to happen if she were a man. Given the industry’s double standards, Jenkins felt he needed to navigate the highly successful film world almost perfectly to achieve and maintain a level of success. And also achieving her true goal: directing “Wonder Woman”, which she signaled to Warner Bros. that she wanted to do immediately after the success of “Monster” in 2003.
“I wanted to go in,” she said to Maron. “I wanted to make a great superhero movie after ‘Monster’. And I started saying that right after ‘Monster’. People were confused … I have all the ‘woman’ movies, any story about women. And I thought, ‘I want to make films about women, but I don’t want to make films about to be a woman, this is so boring. I want to make films about women doing all kinds of things. “
Someone once told her that she could be like a Woody Allen woman, but that was not what Jenkins really wanted. “I wanted a chance at the big emotions.”
After her initial meeting with Warner Bros. about “Wonder Woman” in 2004, Jenkins met with the studio once every two years after that, during which she suggested that 30 scripts be ordered for the film. The studio “didn’t know what to do with Wonder Woman” and “was terrified of previous failed superhero movies,” she said, and even walked away when they insisted on a direction for the story she didn’t want to either. be part of. That’s when she went to Marvel Studios.
Jenkins’ journey towards producing superhero films began much earlier, however. In the podcast, she cited Richard Donner’s “Superman: The Movie” as a formative experience for her when she was seven years old, her fighter pilot father had recently died.
“I was deeply shaken by that film and then by the release, when he became a superhero,” she said. “I have always liked – not all pillars – a certain massive and archetypal film that can affect audiences in this way. It has become big in my subconscious. “
Jenkins invoked his father’s career as a fighter pilot in a teaser produced by Lucasfilm for his next film, “Star Wars: Rogue Squadron” from 2023. She is also linked to “Wonder Woman 3”.
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