James Gunn explains ‘Top Gun’ inspiration
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David Corenswet remembers the first time he flew as Superman. It was underwhelming.
“It was really just a test,” the newly minted Man of Steel recalls to Entertainment Weekly. “It was in the screen test, actually. We did some wire work just to test our aptitude there, see how we felt up in the air.”
The first time he flew in his full hero costume for Superman, however, was a moment featured heavily in the trailer: his Kal-El/Clark Kent shouts, “Hey, buddy! Eyes up here,” at a kaiju attacking Metropolis before rocketing upward into the sky.
“They built the facade of the building, and then they burnt it out with flamethrowers, which we did practically for real,” Corenswet, 31, explains, alluding to the kaiju’s fire-breathing. “Then they brought me back in and I got to do that little piece where I’m flying in front of the building, which is one of the cooler things to get to do practically. Getting to float there in the air and then, on a cue, rocket straight up into the sky is just about as pure a feeling of flying as you can get.”
Warner Bros.
Writer/director James Gunn, who’s also the co-head of DC Studios with Peter Safran, shares how he wrote a 20-page document for the stunt team that detailed what he calls “a philosophy of action and how we were going to shoot it.” For the flying, specifically, “What I wanted to do was mimic more what it was like to shoot jet fighters,” Gunn, 58, says. “I was more inspired by Top Gun: Maverick than I was by other superhero movies.”
Corenswet makes his debut as Superman alongside Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor. There’s a lot of flying involved as the strongman from Krypton wrestles with giant monsters (namely that kaiju); adversaries like the Hammer of Boravia, Ultraman, and the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría); plus more of Luthor’s henchmen.
He’s also not the only character who flies. Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner, a Green Lantern with a severe bowl cut, and Isabela Merced’s Kendra Saunders, who goes by Hawkgirl, both live in the air quite a bit as members of the super-team known as the Justice Gang.
Some of the more, shall we say, zealous DC fans on social media criticized one particular flying sequence that popped up in an early trailer: a close-up shot of Superman flying away from the Fortress of Solitude with heavy CG.
“It was a TV commercial and it wasn’t a finished visual effects shot,” Gunn says. “So the part of him flying, it was a photograph of his face and him flying. It was a photograph of a drone flying in front of an actual background. So all the pieces were real, but it was incorporated in kind of a funky way. I didn’t love the shot, so it’s not even the shot that’s in the movie. Sometimes I’m pretty strict about when I’m going through a trailer and looking at each of the shots, but sometimes the commercials, I forget to look at this closely. So that one kind of got by me.”
DC Studios/ Warner Bros.
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Gunn, also known for helming the Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel, as well as The Suicide Squad and HBO’s Peacemaker series for DC, sought to shoot Corenswet’s flying sequences as if the camera crew themselves were flying around him. The filmmaker used different types of stabilized rigs, which are typically reserved for talking scenes.
“Now they’re much smaller. They’re called pico or nanos, depending on which size,” Gunn explains, for the cinephile crowd out there. “What they do is they give you the liveliness of handheld without making you feel like you’re seasick. Also, unlike on regular handheld, you’re able to get very, very intimate [close-ups] with people and back out because they’re so small. You don’t see flying scenes shot like that because it’s usually somebody on the ground and the superhero on wires.”
It took a lot of planning and coordination ahead of the shoot, but the results, Gunn adds, create “a much different experience when you’re watching the flying sequences because we don’t have the same limitations that you normally would have when they’re flying…. It creates a completely different sense of shooting, flying. It’s as if one fighter jet was shooting another fighter jet.”
Superman will soar into theaters this July 11.