Zack Snyder Discusses Sucker Punch and Xerxes
Posted 07.31.10 by Ryan
One of the movies that received the biggest boost at this year's Comic-Con was director Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch, which surprised the audience with an action-packed teaser trailer full of martial arts battles, guns, sword fights and missiles used to fight dragons. Snyder, who co-wrote the original script after directing the comic book adaptations of 300 and Watchmen, told ComicBookResources that the crowd's reaction "was exactly what I would hope for," though he admits he was checking in on cast members Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, and Carla Gugino to gauge the response from a more personal angle.
"They hadn't seen the footage, either. They had no idea what they were going to see," said Snyder."They were shaking and out of their minds. That was good." Snyder says the trailer gives audiences a sense of what they can expect from the movie.
There is a dragon. [There's] a giant twelve foot samurai with a giant gun — kind of like a samurai version of a minigun, so it's got all these Japanese engravings on it. Every shell casing, if you look at it closely, has [detail] engraving.
Added Snyder's wife and Sucker Punch producer Deborah Snyder: "There's steampunk German soldiers. There's orcs and knights." The director described the movie as an invasion of his headspace, the origins of which came eight years prior to production.
"It was really born from an idea I had about making this transition, visually, into a dreamworld. It just started building from there," explained Snyder. Sucker Punch follows Emily Browning as a recently admitted patient to a mental hospital who escapes to a dream world to help herself and four other patients (Malone, Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, and Jamie Chung). Browning has said the movie works on three levels: "a reality, a sub-reality," and a "dream world." Invasion of headspace, indeed.
Though Sucker Punch has taken the Snyders away from comic books for the present, a plan to adapt Frank Miller's graphic novel Xerxes, which will serve as a semi-sequel to 300, is in the works. Xerxes will follow the Persian emperor's invasion of Greece, which occurred around the same time as the events in 300. Zack says the adaptation process is taking place simultaneously as Miller writes the comic, though he told CinemaBlend that progress is moving faster than Miller can keep up with.
I'm using Frank's frames to whack at this, using the same process Kurt [Johnstad] and I used when we wrote 300. Sometimes we don't have images — we're a little ahead of him right now. We have an outline, we have dialogue, it's pretty detailed. We might double back once we get the pictures to fill in if there's something cool, which there certainly will be.
Next Showing: Sucker Punch is scheduled to open March 25, 2011