Ahead of the release of “The Suicide Squad,” the film’s director James Gunn has given a lengthy interview with The New York Times where he touched upon several subjects fairly candidly.
One of the biggest was his firing from Marvel Studios back in 2018 which led to him working on “The Suicide Squad”. In July of that year Gunn found many ill-advised and deeply inappropriate joke tweets had been dredged up and splashed across the far-right blogosphere.
Gunn had been hired to helm the two “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies partly due to his intentionally provocative and skilled work in B-movies. Having apologised for the tweets in the past, he took responsibility for them and publicly apologised again.
Still, the backlash against those resurfaced tweets was so loud that he found himself fired by Disney. In the interview he goes into detail about what happened on the day in question:
“It was conveyed to me by Kevin Feige [the Marvel Studios president]. I called Kevin the morning it was going on, and I said, ‘Is this a big deal?’ And he goes, ‘I don’t know.’ That was a moment. I was like, ‘You don’t know?’ I was surprised. Later he called me – he himself was in shock – and told me what the powers that be had decided. It was unbelievable. And for a day, it seemed like everything was gone. Everything was gone. I was going to have to sell my house. I was never going to be able to work again. That’s what it felt like.”
Gunn then expanded on what he learned from the whole thing. saying he chooses his words much more carefully since then and is more considerate of people’s feelings today. Along with acknowledging the awful things said in the tweets, he says he learned a lot, long before he got called out for them.
Gunn was also asked about the term ‘cancel culture’ which some could apply to this case and is a term in more frequent use today. Gunn was asked if he considers himself a victim of that movement and he offered an interesting response:
“I understand people’s preoccupation with that term. But it’s such a bigger issue than that. Because cancel culture also is people like Harvey Weinstein, who should be cancelled. People who have gotten cancelled and then remain cancelled – most of those people deserved that. The paparazzi are not just the people on the streets – they’re the people combing Twitter for any past sins. All of that sucks. It’s painful. But some of it is accountability. And that part of it is good. It’s just about finding that balance.”
Famously just a few days after his firing, Warner Bros. Pictures came knocking and offered him a Superman movie. He turned down that offer and decided to do “The Suicide Squad” instead. He offered a reason for that:
“At that time I said I can’t commit myself to something right now. It was traumatic. I had to deal with myself. I just have to take a step back. So I took the different possibilities of projects I could work on, and for a month, every day I worked on a different project. I really wanted to make sure that whatever I was going to write was going to be a great story, and if it worked out and I felt like directing it, I could. Suicide Squad was just the one that came to life immediately.”
In the end it worked out as once he was set to direct “The Suicide Squad” for Warners, Disney and Marvel re-hired him to come back for “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” which he’ll shoot this November. The full interview goes into much more detail and can be found on The New York Times website.