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Lost Son Of Krypton

by Mike Russell

Read the print version here.

creenwriters Dan Harris and Michael Dougherty worked 24/7 to help Bryan Singer resurrect the Man of Steel, pitting Superman against his mightiest foe:
roiling angst!

uperman’s return to the big screen is one of the most convoluted — and expensive — development stories in Hollywood history.

After 1987’s “Superman IV: The Quest for Peace” cold-cocked the franchise that Richard Donner launched so reverently in 1978, the Man of Steel went into a 17-year development coma.

The behind-the-scenes saga is long, silly and mind-bogglingly pricey.

• There were abortive drafts (including a few by “Clerks” writer-director Kevin Smith) that tried to adapt the 1993 “Death of Superman” comic-book storyline, with producer Jon Peters allegedly suggesting the inclusion of giant spiders and/or computerized archvillain Brainiac fighting polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude.
• Tim Burton (“Batman,” “Planet of the Apes”) subsequently developed a version that reportedly jettisoned both the classic costume and Superman’s ability to fly, with Nicolas Cage donning whatever replaced the cape and tights.
• Wolfgang Peterson (“The Perfect Storm”) developed a “Batman vs. Superman” film.
• McG (“Charlie’s Angels”) and Brett Ratner (“Rush Hour”) were at different times attached to direct a controversial script by J.J. Abrams (TV’s “Alias”) that completely re-invented the Superman mythos against the backdrop of an interstellar war.

Enter director Bryan Singer — and Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris.

Dougherty and Harris had some experience with chaotic superhero franchises: They cut their teeth as a screenwriting team on the set of “X2” — working around the clock to help director Singer find a third act mid-shoot.

And when Singer came up with a clever (and more traditional) idea to resurrect the “Superman” franchise in 2004, he brought Dougherty, Harris and much of his “X-Men” production team with him.

With Donner’s blessing, Singer chose to continue, rather than re-boot, the “Superman” series — aiming to capture the spirit (if less of the slapstick) associated with “Superman: The Movie” and “Superman II.” The film follows Clark Kent’s (Brandon Routh) return to Earth after a multi-year trip to the cold remains of his original home, the planet Krypton. He comes back to a more complicated world — one where Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has a fiancé (James Marsden) and a son, and where a just-out-of-prison Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is plotting an elaborate revenge that may or may not involve technology stolen from Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

In Focus talked with Dougherty and Harris about Superman, the late Marlon Brando, Lex Luthor, Bryan Singer, Richard Donner, 24/7 screenwriting — and whether “Superman Returns” really is the unofficial “Superman III.” An edited transcript follows.

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SUPERMAN’S
EMOTIONAL RESCUE

IN FOCUS: Okay. We've read in the official release that Superman's adventure “takes him from the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of outer space.”

DAN HARRIS: And that’s literal.

Q. The depths of the ocean?

MICHAEL DOUGHERTY: Well, you know, he has to perform certain kinds of rescues and go underwater.

DH: Just wait and see. We’re taking him places he’s never been before. We have the technology.

Q. It must be tough to talk about this film and not be able to say anything.

MD: Actually, it’s kind of fun. Everybody wants to open their Christmas presents early these days.

Q. The online production documentaries have done a nice job of showing us a lot without telling us everything.

MD: Mm-hm. It gives people a lot of small appetizers. But it also calms people’s fears — because there was definitely a concern that we were gonna take things in some weird, wild direction after all the other incarnations [of this project].

Q. Superman’s a tough character to write interestingly. Because he's essentially invincible, his best crises on film tend to be spiritual — whether or not to use his powers for selfish ends, his love life, his adoptee status. What are his spiritual struggles in your movie?

MD: Well, they’re not so much spiritual as they are emotional. That’s what we realized very early on: We’ve seen Superman go up against every imaginable villain, weapon and obstacle in the movies, TV shows and comics. So we knew we had to attack him from an emotional point of view — to give him an emotional obstacle to overcome, in addition to the physical.

What makes him this identifiable character, and not this god, is the fact that he has very real, human emotions. What he’s dealing with [in “Superman Returns”] is that he’s come back to a world that’s changed in his absence — and what’s worse, the person he wants to build a relationship with, Lois Lane, has moved on.

Q. And has a kid.

MD: And has a kid. It’s a situation that completely throws him for a loop. It’s something he’s never dealt with. There’s a certain amount of confidence that we have, and he has, that he can go up against bank robbers and chase planes. But this is new.

DH: We have this problem, where the guy’s indestructible and stands for “Truth, Justice and the American Way”: very strong moral values that aren’t necessarily outdated, but we’ve seen them before. And you can’t change that about Superman — [those values] are as indestructible as he is.

So making a story about that kind of character didn’t seem totally relevant, or easy, or that interesting to us. But the world has evolved since Superman was last on the big screen — it’s more contemporary, edgier and scarier. It’s in dire need of a hero more than it was in the ’70s.

It was Bryan’s big idea to send him away for a number of years, then bring him back — and have the world kind of move on and change with him gone. Bringing Superman back into a world he doesn’t fit in was the heart of the drama.

Lois Lane has moved on. His mother has moved on in certain ways. He comes back to situations that aren’t cats in trees. So he has to become a hero by kind of riding the middle line and getting at his own “Truth” — and not stepping on people’s toes.

Q. His motto is “Truth, Justice and the American Way.” But what is “Truth”? What is “Justice”? What is “the American Way”?

DH: It’s been distorted in the last 20 years. That’s at the heart of Superman’s struggle.

And he has an emotional story with Lois: What do you do when you come back to someone you love and they’ve moved on completely? He’s a good person who doesn’t lie — he doesn’t break up relationships. It’s the problem that’s almost impossible for him to solve, and that’s what makes the story interesting.

Q. When a character is invincible, how do you keep his actions motivated?

MD: Well, I think that comes more or less from his father — both sets of parents, really.

The Kents taught him that he had to use his powers for good, that he was put here for a reason — which is a line we actually have in the film. That’s backed up by Jor-El’s teachings, which are that he can serve as an example to humanity.

You have a character whose sole reason for being here is to make the world better — backed up with the traditional all-American values he was raised with. That Kent-farm upbringing provides the motivation. If Jor-El had sent him to Earth and he’d been raised by the wrong kind of people, we’d have an evil Superman on our hands.

Q. There’s a great alternate-universe comic where he’s raised by the Russians —

MD: Yeah. “Red Son.” That’s a great read. No matter what Jor-El taught him, the fact that he was raised by this humble farm couple made all the difference.

DH: And I think you have fun toying with his motivations. His motivation in this one isn’t entirely the same as it was in “Superman: The Movie.” He’s a man with history this time around. He’s been through years of fighting Lex Luthor. And he’s been away, so he’s lost his sense of identity — his place in the world. He’s lost his motivation to be who he is, and he has to re-discover it.

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SUPERDAD RETURNS

Q. Fans of the “Superman: The Movie” were gobsmacked to hear that Marlon Brando’s in “Superman Returns.” How important was it to have him in the film?

MD: It was really important to us. Bryan’s original pitch involved bringing Brando back. He was such a strong foundation in the original film, it wouldn’t feel right to have some other actor or sound-alike appear as Jor-El.

DH: He was so iconic — Brando as Superman’s father. If we could work him in without faking or denigrating anything, how special would that be?

MD: For people familiar with the original film, they know exactly who that is. And for some 8-year-old kid who’s never seen “Superman,” it’s such a strong performance that I think it’ll resonate.

Q. Did it take a lot of negotiating to get the Brando footage?

MD: There was the typical hassle, but it wasn’t a drawn-out process. I think we were all surprised how quickly things worked out.

Q. Did you have to write around the old Brando footage, or?…

DH: There’s no faking or voice-alikes. There won’t be any of that.

Q. But he does speak in the film?

DH: Uh, in a sense. It’s very cool the way it’s done; I can’t really get into it. It’s partly things we remember Jor-El being part of.

Q. Well, if Superman is sort of the comic-book Jesus, then Jor-El is God. You don’t re-cast God.

DH: Is Marlon Brando not God?

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IS THIS
‘SUPERMAN III’?

Q: Is “Superman Returns” the unofficial "Superman III"?

MD: [sighs] Okay, um, it’s funny — I think Bryan and Dan and I need to sit down and discuss this answer before we talk to too many other reporters.

My personal belief — and I know Bryan has been quoted as saying differently — is that this is not “Superman III.” I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to discount “Superman III” and “IV,” because a lot of people put a lot of hard work into them, and even if you don’t like them or don’t think they’re up to a certain quality, they’re still “Superman” movies.

DH: It’s complicated. If this is a sequel to “I” and “II,” then everything in “I” and “II” happened. But if we’re picking and choosing what we want — which is what I think is what happened, using our memories of “Superman: The Movie” to build our back story — then I can guarantee that it’s not the specifics, but the broad strokes of those movies that are part of the “Superman” we’re making.

MD: The comparison I like to make is that they’re closer to James Bond films. We had a series that starred Sean Connery, and then the torch is passed to another actor, all the way up to Daniel Craig. But they don’t call a sequel “James Bond 19,” and they don’t necessarily refer to events that took place in the previous film. But you do have certain conventions and supporting characters that you’re expected to use well. There’s always the opening with the iris and the theme song.

So I think we’re kind of taking a different franchise in the same direction. We’re not going back to square one.

We’re not doing a remake. We push the story forward.

DH: Except we’re not working with a villain of the day, or a villain of the movie…. It’s a “Returns” story. What does that mean? We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too — we’re remembering things we loved about “Superman I” and “II,” and moving forward at the same time. And we’ve used a big plot device to let us do both.

MD: But I think I have to sit down with Bryan and discuss this with him, because he went to a comic-book convention and said, “Yeah, I guess you could think of this as ‘Superman III.’” I just slapped my head and said, “Oh! No! No!”

Q. Have you seen the new so-called “Donner Cut” of "Superman II" heading to DVD with the restored Richard Donner footage?

MD: I haven’t seen the one they’ve put together.

DH: I don’t think it’s finished yet.

MD: I got a bootleg [of the “Restored International Cut” of “Superman II,” a fan-made edit that incorporates some footage broadcast on European TV] at a convention... [laughs] It’s really fun to watch. Any time you get to see an “Ultimate Version” of something you were raised on, it’s a fun bit of eye candy.

DH: But the bootleg is not Donner’s cut — it’s a different thing.

Q. Is Brando in the bootleg version?

MD: Not in the version I saw.

Q. I think he’s in the official version that’s coming out on DVD.

MD: That’s possible.

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SCREENWRITING
24/7

Q. Dan, you've said of Singer: "Bryan works with people who develop 24 hours a day. The idea of the draft goes out the window." Has that applied to "Superman Returns"? Any 3 a.m. writing sessions?

MD: Oh, God, yes.

DH: [snorts] God, have we had any 3 a.m. writing sessions…. I spent two birthdays in Australia working, and the majority of those nights were 3 a.m. sessions. And, you know, we’re all better people for it.

Q. And you’re on set, right? Which is very unusual.

MD: Yeah, it’s very rare. But when you’re working on a film like this, anything can happen, and you have to be available 24/7. Even now that we’re in post, there are always new ideas creeping in. I’m not surprised if I get a random phone call.

DH: For us, the thing is flexibility — this idea that things will always change, there will always be problems…. It’s part of our job to always be on-call to solve those issues.

Q. What’s the secret to keeping your energy up for that — particularly when you’re commuting to Australia?

MD: Red Bull. It’s that simple. Red Bull, Red Bull, Red Bull.

DH: The good thing about “Superman Returns” — and the difference between it and “X-Men 2,” or “Logan’s Run,” for that matter — is that the three of us nailed out the story of the movie very early on.

We took a vacation on July 4, 2004, and we started coming up with the idea for the movie. And we were all in such agreement — and there was such a weird symbiosis going on — that it all kind of poured out at once. We put together 80 or 90 percent of the movie in three days. It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation, but it turned into work.

We worked all weekend, and on the plane ride home, we worked on the treatment. And within a day or two, the treatment was done — 25 pages, single-spaced. That was the document that Bryan took in to the executives that got everybody the job.

The good news is that it really hasn’t changed much since then. What we had was pretty special. We had a strong backbone. So from one draft to the next, it wasn’t like “X-Men 2,” where we were constantly re-writing the third act. It’s mostly character work, trying to get our story as clear as possible, trying to get our dialogue as witty as possible.

But there was still constant development.

Q. Sometimes the project dictates the level of chaos.

DH: Yes. A lot of the … challenge of “X2” was that you were writing 12 mutants — this giant ensemble — and everyone has to have their allotted screentime and resolution. That is really hard work.

And ultimately, Superman isn’t just one character. You’re not just writing for Superman. Superman is different from Clark Kent, who’s different from Kal-El. There’s Superman at the farm and Superman alone. And when he’s alone, what’s the voice in his head? He’s not just a politician who puts a suit on, and he’s not just “bumbling Clark.”

Q. The scene I’m most looking forward to seeing is the one featured in the teaser trailer — where he’s floating alone, above the Earth, listening to the planet.

DH: Yeah. It’s turned into one of the more iconic moments in the movie. It was in the first treatment.

The question was, “How does Superman know who to save? Let’s clarify those rules.” And so we decided he has a perch where he goes, high above the Earth, and he hears every single sound on the planet all at once, and he whittles them down by importance, basically — until he finds that once sound he’s gotta go after.
It solved a logic issue for us, and became a beautiful kind of metaphor for the reason he’s there.

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THE JOY OF LEX

Q. Many people love the first hour-and-a-half of "Superman: The Movie," which is somber and reverent — but have mixed reviews for the more overtly comical second half. Which leads me to ask how you guys are handling Lex Luthor.

MD: That was always one of the hardest parts about the film, finding the right tone for Lex.

Q. I can imagine.

MD: Because as much as we enjoyed Gene Hackman’s performance, there was a large segment of the population that — even though they enjoyed it — was like, “Can we get a more serious and menacing villain here?”

DH: That’s one of the most fun parts of this movie — getting into Lex Luthor’s head. We know Hackman’s classic performance, and when he was on, he was really on — but some of the comedy doesn’t work nowadays. It’s a little dated and over-the-top. How do we change that character and move him forward?

Well, Lex Luthor’s been in prison, because of Superman, for five years — and it’s really hardened him and darkened him. There’s still that hint of witty Lex, but this time around he’s a sadist out for revenge. It’s a much scarier side of Lex Luthor.

MD: He’s much more menacing — but at the same time, he enjoys what he does. You want to like the guy. You want to hang out with him. He’s not as grim as someone like Magneto, say, or as serious or heavy-handed. He’s a little bit of everything: We have a bit of the scientist and a bit of the politician. Definitely the criminal mastermind.

DH: He’s still a capitalist … but there’s a lot more that comes with his plan — and the way he interacts with Superman.

MD: And we had to throw in a dash of comedy — but black comedy.

Q. That’s where Parker Posey’s “Kitty Kowalski” character comes in?

MD: Yeah.

Q. She’s sort of a dark-comedy version of — not Otis, but…?

MD: — Miss Teschmacher. We definitely wanted to give Lex a foil within his own ranks, and figured that people tend to date the same kinds of people over and over. We figured if things went south with Miss Teschmacher, he’d find the next young thing — someone similar, but different.

Q. Some recent comics have explored Luthor’s motivation a little more, and given him a very valid point of view: Superman is an alien being. Maybe we shouldn’t trust him.

DH: Yeah. In this movie, someone says, “Well, you’re not a god, Lex.” And he says, “No, I’m not a god. Gods are selfish little beings who fly around in red capes and don’t share their powers with mankind.”

Q. Is Spacey doing an homage to Hackman’s performance at all, or…?

DH: He’s taking it his own way. It’s hard for me to talk about Kevin’s motivations, but I know what ended up onscreen. It’s a hardened, scarier Lex. We see hints of the Lex we love, but there’s a darker side. Something changed this guy, and he’s a real threat now. Not that he wasn’t before — but I think people are going to be afraid for that confrontation between Superman and Lex Luthor that finally happens, because it’s so built up.

We can’t talk about it right now. We should be doing these interviews after the movie comes out.

Q. [laughs] Maybe they’ll give you guys a commentary track.

DH: Yeah. We’ll say, “Remember when this line was there and we changed it?” That’s what writers tend to talk about — drafts.

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FLEISCHER-ESQUE

Q. Michael, with your animation background, the Max Fleischer "Superman" cartoons have to have been somewhere in the back of your mind as you were writing this.

MD: Yeah, they were — all throughout the production. Fleischer had a way of making Superman move that I don’t think we’ve ever seen on the big screen in live action. Only now, with today’s technology, can we make him move as fluidly as Fleischer did.

Q. How does Superman move differently here than in previous films?

MD: It’s more graceful. There’s a certain … ease that he has when he’s flying in this film.

Donner did an amazing job with what he had in the late ’70s — but Superman was almost always flying in kind of a straight line, or landing, and that’s as far as he got. But getting that sense of stopping in mid-air, and then darting in an entirely different direction? We can do that now.

Q. It’s great to have a former animator writing this.

MD: We’d be watching the pre-viz — which is kind of an animated storyboard — and I kept finding myself giving criticisms or advice. Bryan would say, “His takeoff doesn’t look right!” And I’d say, “That’s because he has no anticipation. — that’s when a character bends his knees before jumping in the air.” That’s an animation term. “His cape needs more secondary action.”

Q. Rumor control: According to the IMDb, Singer had General Zod removed from the script —

MD: No. Not true.

DH: Not in this movie. I mean, we love Zod. Zod is very cool. But there’s no time.

Q. We only saw him fall into some sort of dry-ice chasm. He could still be around.

DH: He could be.

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‘THIS TOWER OF
VIVID COLOR AND RIGHTEOUSNESS’

Q. One thing I always thought Christopher Reeve was really, really good at was shifting his persona between the Kent and Superman personas. You've seen Brandon Routh do it. How does he do it?

DH: Well, he does it with his own Brandon Routh flair. He’s not imitating anyone, but he is an amalgamation of all the previous Supermen out there.

And the Brandon we know is not Clark or Superman — he’s somewhere in-between. He’s such a nice guy. He was the right guy for the movie.

MD: Brandon is definitely adding something of his own, but I think his performance was inspired by Christopher Reeve quite a bit. The way he described it was, “Every actor taking up the torch of Superman takes a little bit from the actor who played him before.”

Q. From the production stills I’ve seen, it looks like this might be the first “Superman” movie where Superman and Clark Kent actually look like two different people.

MD: That’s a first. Yeah.

When we dealt with Brandon on-set, it was like we were dealing with two different people. When he was Clark, he was approachable. But when he was Superman, he had such an imposing presence, it was hard to make eye contact with him or even talk to him. I think we felt like the characters in the film — Superman is this celebrity who makes you nervous.

DH: We were sitting in the makeup room, waiting for Brandon to come in with the suit for the first time. We’d seen the suit on a model, and we’d been working with it in our minds for a while. But the second he walked in the makeup room — and he had the curl done already, and he was like 6-foot-6 with the boots — we all went, “Gad. Holy shit. It’s Superman.” He was this tower of vivid color and righteousness in that all-white room with grey floors. Ever since then, it’s been a whole other movie.

All of a sudden, the Brandon who plays video games that I know isn’t there any more. I felt myself reacting to a character, not an actor. Which is really weird, because we’ve seen a lot of actors. I think the only other person I’ve felt that way around was Patrick Stewart as Xavier. There was something reverent about Patrick in that wheelchair.

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GEEKING OUT on the DONNERS

Q. Sam Raimi said he turned to the first hour-and-a-half of “Superman: The Movie” when he was looking for inspiration for “Spider-Man.” Richard Donner created such a template.

DH: Oh, absolutely. It’s gorgeous.

MD: Yeah. And we took the same approach. We watched Donner’s movie quite a bit.

Q. Were there other films you turned to for inspiration on “Superman Returns”?

MD: Well, no, to be totally honest. There’s “Superman” and “Superman II,” and so many TV shows and comics. If I had to get excited about writing an action scene, I’d pop in a Fleischer cartoon.

DH: It’s not that we worked in a vacuum, but that so much of the story came out so quickly. When we came back [from our working vacation], we started looking for iconic inspiration. We looked at things like Cavalier & Clay.

Q. I know how important the word “verisimilitude" was to Donner while he was making "Superman." He had it engraved in wood in his office. What did that word mean for you on a day-to-day basis?

MD: Well, Bryan never used that word —

DH: We’ve been working with Bryan for so many years, it doesn’t need to be said …

MD: But that’s always been Bryan’s mandate — that everything be believable. You don’t rely upon movie logic: “Oh, it’s just a movie. We can do anything.” There has to be a rhyme and reason. You can’t assume people know what Kryptonite is, or where it comes from. You have to explain it.

Q. Have you had any conversations with the Donners about this project?

MD: A few, here and there. They actually sent us a very nice letter when the project was announced. It was very short, but it was something to the effect of: “Just heard about ‘Superman.’ It couldn’t be in better hands.”

He’s such a classy guy — it was a great stamp of approval.

DH: We’re friends with the Donners. We know Lauren…. She was up there in Vancouver with us [on “X2”], and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. They’re film legends — and yet they live around the corner from us and like to have us over for dinner and watch movies. There’s nothing more fun than that.

I know that Bryan asked Dick’s permission to make this movie, and told him his idea behind the film — and if Donner was not on-board or happy with that, I don’t think we’d be making the movie.

I mean, he directed “The Goonies.” Nothing is cooler.

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READ MY LIPS:
NO NEW POWERS

Q. One problem I had with the "Superman" sequels as they went along was that they kept adding ridiculous new powers to the Man of Steel's repertoire. I'm thinking specificially of that big damn cellophane "S" he threw on Non.

MD: Yes.

Q. Was there a conscious effort to pare down of that sort of thing for this film?

MD: There was never any effort to pare down his powers — but we definitely did stay away from trying to introduce any new ones — like, say, telekinetic finger rays and cellophane “S”es. His powers are being used in, I guess, a realistic fashion.

So no. No strange new abilities.

Q. No magic amnesia kiss?

MD: Yeah.

DH: We’re pretty classic with the powers we’re sticking to. It was more a question of what his powers are, and how can we work a story around that — rather that having our story and pulling new powers out of him.

Q. Singer had a yen for explaining every comic-book convention in his “X-Men” films — even seemingly silly elements like Magneto's helmet always had a purpose. I'm dying to see how he explains the Super-suit and the “S.”

MD: Well, you know, we didn’t really try to go out of our way to do that. The suit, we all agreed, has a Kryptonian origin, but we didn’t go into detail about that. And as for the “S,” it’s definitely a family symbol.

Q. Yeah, that was pretty clearly established in the first film.

MD: In fact, I believe that was Donner’s idea. And we just continued that.

DH: They aren’t conventions we necessarily had to manipulate or create. I think a lot of it was there — it was just a matter of exploring it. When we see the “S,” is it just something we saw on a tinfoil suit? [laughs] Was it part of the architecture somewhere? What does it mean?

Thank God there was that swath of fabric in the baby’s pod [in “Superman: The Movie”]. That’s the suit. He didn’t make it himself.

Q. Yeah, Donner laid a lot of good groundwork. He really was the man for his time and place.

DH: He really was. And in our development of this movie, we happily echoed what he was doing.
Famously, he was handed a draft of the script in which two men tap a bald guy on the shoulder, thinking it’s Lex, and he turns around and it’s Kojak. That was in the script that Dick was given. And it was his work with Tom Mankiewicz that turned it into an iconic story — this giant analogy.

Q. Other than your own, what are some of the greatest superhero movies ever made?

DH: Well, “Superman: The Movie”…. It’s a tough question — I keep thinking of things that we haven’t loved. Of course, I love what Sam Raimi’s done with Spider-Man. I love the way that “Blade” carved a persona outside of the comic book.

MD: Burton’s “Batman.” I actually liked “Batman Begins” quite a bit, too. The first “X-Men,” which I didn’t actually work on. [laughs]

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THE NEW GODS

Q. What is it about superheroes that they lend themselves so nicely to re-makes and re-imaginings?

MD: Well, I think they’re our current gods. Back in the day, they had Achilles and Hercules and all those mythological characters, and these are ours.

You can call it escapism — and I think there’s an element of that — but I think it’s also people looking for characters to guide us. They serve as examples. We look for characters we can shape our own lives after, whether it’s Wolverine or Batman or Spider-Man or Superman.

DH: I think there’s a mix of nostalgia for the characters — remembering what we liked when we were young, when we first saw them — combined with the chance to introduce those characters into a new world.
There are always stories to be told when you mix up the world of characters you know so well.

Q. Dan, what's the difference between writing a superheroic (or supervillainous) character and writing something more dramatic — for example, Sigourney Weaver's character in [Harris’ 2004 writer-director effort] “Imaginary Heroes”?

DH: You know, we talked about this a lot on “X2” — and there’s not really a huge difference.

The characters come out of the story you’re telling, and they need to service certain things, and they have their own idiosyncrasies. But that doesn’t change whether you have Superman coming back to a married Lois or Sigourney Weaver confronting the truth that her husband doesn’t love her.

There’s an icing on the cake in superhero movies, where people have powers — which helps us in terms of plot and making things a little more complex. But to me, what makes Superman interesting in this movie is the emotional situation he’s been put in — and it’s a very human situation. The fact that he’s indestructible and can fly is the fun part, but the heart of the movie is emotional.

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JOHN OTTMAN, MEET JOHN WILLIAMS

Q. As a film-score geek, I have to ask if you've heard anything about what John Ottman is coming up with as he writes the “Superman Returns” score. I hear it owes a lot to the Williams score.

DH: Well, I’ve heard a lot about what John’s coming up with, but I’ve not heard what John’s coming up with….

MD: I’m a huge film-score geek also. The entire script was written with John Williams playing in the background, every day. And when I had to write a certain scene, I’d cue it up to a certain track. There’s a scene with Lois and Superman on the roof of the Daily Planet, and I kept going back to three tracks: “The Terrace,” “Lois and Clark” and “The Flying Sequence.” Because our scene is meant to be an homage to that.

DH: Absolutely. You listen to that soundtrack, you’re in that world. You’re writing a Lois scene? Time for Lois’ theme.

Q. Not so much “Can You Read My Mind?,” however. [laughs]

MD: Not so much. As for what Ottman is doing: The main theme you don’t change. So that will be intact. And other themes from the Williams score will find their way into the film at the appropriate moments — some more than others, and some updated and more contemporary. But they’ll be there.

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NO PRESSURE!

Q. How do you handle the pressure of being the custodians of a mythological character? Does the responsibility ever get to you?

MD: Well, you always feel it, to this day. But I think being as familiar as we are with the character and being fans, in our hearts there is no fear.

If I were setting out to do a movie about a topic I was completely unfamiliar with, I’d be much more nervous — like, if I was going out to do a football film. I’m not a sports guy. If I were writing a movie about a sports figure like Babe Ruth, I’d be terrified.

But when it comes to Superman, I know his history. We all have the Donner film in common. And I know the things that need to be part of a “Superman” film — as well as all the things I’ve always wanted to see in a “Superman” film. It kind of wipes away the fear.

DH: It becomes day-to-day work — and the grind of getting every line as good as it can be is more stressful, immediate and urgent than the worry about what we’re actually doing.

If you think about that [responsibility], or notice that every fifth car has a Superman bumper sticker…. I never really thought about that until I got home. We were all just motivated and excited by the big idea.

MD: But you feel the pressure. Some of that pressure is good, because then you know how many eyes are gonna be watching you — so there’s never a time when you slack off.

You go, “A lot of people are going to see this, and unless I want my house covered in toilet paper, I’m going to make it really good.”

Q. On some level, shooting in Australia might have helped, because Superman is such a fundamentally American character, you might gain a little perspective by traveling overseas.

DH: I think so. It forced us to really think about it, and not to get overwhelmed. We went to a foreign land to make something that was in our hearts. There’s something very interesting about going to the middle of the Outback and re-creating Kansas — the desert, but with acres of corn and barns.

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‘X3’ STICKS to the PLAN (WE THINK)

Q. Where would the Singer-Dougherty-Harris "X3" have gone?

DH: Whew. I don’t think we’d totally agreed on that ourselves — but we had a lot of ideas. It’s hard to say. I wanna see the movie first.

MD: It’s not like we had some thought-out outline in detail. We had ideas, but no detailed treatment.

We’re still friends with a lot of the people on “X3.” And funny enough, a lot of the stuff we’ve seen so far — surprisingly, I think they’ve actually accomplished quite a few of the ideas I wanted to pursue. For better or worse.

Q. Working Beast into the story, I’d imagine.

MD: More the “Dark Phoenix” stuff. Phoenix is definitely my personal favorite. I had very solid ideas as to where I think she should go — namely, the idea of Magneto using her as a weapon. And based on what I know, I think they’re doing that.

That’s actually kind of cool to know — that the people who are in charge of it actually know what they’re doing. They’re taking it in the right direction.

DH: Yeah — the biggest idea, for us, was setting up Phoenix. And the idea that in “X-Men,” the war is coming. “X-Men 2,” the war has begun. And in “X-Men 3”: This is the war. The war is here.

And that’s something that I feel bad about not being able to be a part of. It was such a payoff to the big ideas — a darker, scarier, more intense “X-Men.” It looks like they’ve captured that.

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HORROR ANTHOLOGIES and DYSTOPIAN ROCK OPERAS

Q. Michael, you've said: “I just want to make one good horror film before I die.” What’s up with your “Trick or Treat” horror project with Stan Winston?

MD: I’m actually working on it with Bryan right now. It’s an anthology horror film — kind of like “Creepshow” and “Twilight Zone.” It’s four short stories on Halloween night that all intertwine and criss-cross.

Q. We’ve haven’t had a good ’80s-vintage horror anthology in a while.

MD: When I sat down to write it, I didn’t want to create one of these teen slasher horror films that are either over-reliant on CGI or have a guy in a mask running around slashing people. I wanted something that was full of surprises.

Q. Will you be directing?

MD: That’s the idea, yeah.

Q. Tonally, what decade of horror will you be focusing on?

MD: I haven’t really nailed it yet. But I do miss that late-’70s to early-’80s horror — you know, that era where you had “Alien” and “Poltergeist.” Even some of the more comedic stuff, like “Gremlins” or “The Howling” and “American Werewolf.”

I think we’re in this era of horror right now that’s very similar to the mid-’80s, where it’s very dark, grungy, tortuous kind of horror — [remakes of] “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Hills Have Eyes.” It’s just unrelenting. And the answer to that, I think, are films like “American Werewolf” that let you laugh just a little. As terrifying as they were, they were also fun movies to watch.

Q. There’s a real writer’s voice in those films, as opposed to some of the more producer-driven horror projects today.

MD: They had a sense of humor. Even the first “Nightmare on Elm Street,” which introduced us to that serial killer who had fun with what he was doing. It was absolutely terrifying, but there were moments that were so funny — with a dash of black comedy. That’s what I miss. And that’s what I’d like to do.

Q. And Dan, you may have been joking when you said you wanted to make “a big budget musical about dystopia, the apocalypse, and the death of God.” But since you told IGN “I’m not joking!,” I have to ask what it’s about.

DH: I want to make a rock musical — that’s my goal in life. It’s definitely about dystopia.

There was a script I read a long time ago about the death of God. It was called “The Sky is Falling.” It was about two priests who found physical proof that God had died at some point about four or five hundred years ago. And they carried this proof around in an orange fanny-pack. And because they lost their faith, they went on this killing rampage. There’s this amazing scene where the two priests are sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, shooting down angels.

Q. That sounds like “Preacher.”

DH: It’s completely bizarre. It was one of those things where you read it and you knew it was never gonna be made. So that was probably on my mind at the time [I said that].

Q. The large, pretentious rock musical hasn’t been revisited in far too long.

DH: What happened to the big rock musical? Pink Floyd broke up and grunge hit…. But everything comes in cycles. I’m waiting for my moment.

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THE HARRIS-DOUGHERTY METHOD

Q. You two have worked (or will be working) together on something like seven films. I'm curious how you split up the labor — and what you consider the secret to a longish professional partnership.

DH: The secret to a longish professional partnership is definitely not taking things personally — that it’s all work.

MD: Well, at first, we were friends, which I think is key — that just kind of created a shorthand and a familiarity. I know that I can call Dan up at 11:30 at night and I won’t be offending him, and when we’re hanging out and being social, we can bang around some ideas. I don’t know many other writing partners or how their relationships started. But we were friends first.

And we realized we had similar but different tastes and talents, which compliment each other really well. In terms of the types of films we enjoy, I’m kind of a horror/genre/sci-fi nut and Dan loves quirky family dramas, black comedies, and character pieces. So when you put those together for a “Superman” film, they work really well together.

DH: The first thing we learned on “X-Men 2,” our writers’ boot camp, was that nothing is precious — nothing you write is, you know, gold. Everything you write can be erased, read incorrectly, or re-written, or saved for a different script. Everything is disposable, and you need to keep on your toes, and never take anything personally. Once you accept that, it gets a lot easier, and you can exchange drafts and get back something that you love.

And for us, the way we do it is we get together in a room and we talk things through out loud. We talk structure and work it out together. And then we basically take scenes that we love — like, I’ll say, “I really want this scene with Lois and Clark,” and he’ll say, “Well, I want the next scene with Lois and someone else” — and we go off and write in our rooms. And we e-mail them to each other, and we re-write each other, e-mail them back to each other, and re-write each other again. And at some point along the way, we start assembling the script.

And, you know, disagreements are always fun. But they’re much easier to handle when we’ve got someone like Bryan around — when we’re working for a director. We’ve sort of learned along the way that it’s much more fun, and you get a lot more out of it, to write for a single mind — somebody who knows what they want to make.

Q. Dan, you've said, “Mike is a big horror-based person and I am a drama-based person, so things come together.” Does one of you spend more time on the action and one of you more time on the love story?

MD: I think it started that way — on “X2” especially. But we taught each other a lot. By the end, Dan could say, “I want to take that action sequence,” and I’d have no fear or worry.

That happened on “Superman,” as well. There’s an action sequence involving Kitty Kowalski that was completely Dan’s invention and execution. And then there are certain dramatic beats that I kind of took over. And no matter what, we’ll revise each other.

DH: There were incredible character beats and moments with Perry White that are absolutely Mike’s.

MD: At first, I’d say, it was pretty evenly split: I would handle the action and spectacle stuff, and Dan would handle the emotional. But it’s definitely more intertwined now.

DH: People who know us think they can go in and point out who wrote what — and they’re usually off, or get it half-right.

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LOGAN and ENDER

Q. Is "Logan's Run" still happening after "Superman"?

MD: Yes.

DH: I think so. That’s Bryan’s. He’s really the man behind that.

Q. Dan, you've said, "It's not a remake of the movie. It's a remake of the concept of the movie plus the book." Care to elaborate with any specifics?

DH: Well, Bryan’s developing that — and you never really know which direction he’s moving. Those are words that came from his mouth, originally.

MD: What Bryan’s doing is similar to what he’s doing with “Superman” — he’s taking the concepts presented in the film and the book and doing his own spin on it. There are elements from the film he’s definitely using — but at the same time, he’s throwing in his own original concepts and taking things from the book, as well.

Q. Do you think the forever-in-development “Ender's Game” [to which Harris and Dougherty are attached as screenwriters] will finally happen with Wolfgang Petersen?

MD: That’s a good question. Anyone’s guess. Some day I think that film will be made, but I don’t know under what circumstances.

DH: That’s a story that’s very important to me and very, very close to my heart. Nothing would make me happier than to see that movie get made.

Q. The weird thing about that book is that it grows with you. You read it as an adult, and it has a whole different resonance.

DH: Yeah. There’s a whole sociopolitical layer that you don’t get when you’re a kid. 

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