Writer/director James Gunn opens up about how he chose which characters to kill off in the DC Extended Universe follow-up The Suicide Squad. The upcoming action film centers on the titular group of villains tasked by Amanda Waller to destroy Nazi-era laboratory and prison Jotunheim on the fictional South American island of Corto Maltese. However, they find their mission complicated and made deadlier with the discovery of the telepathic, kaiju-sized starfish known as Starro.
The Suicide Squad acts as a stand-alone follow-up to David Ayer's critically-tarnished-but-financially-successful 2016 effort, with Margot Robbie, Jai Courtney, Joel Kinnaman and Viola Davis all reprising their roles. The new film also sees the DCEU debuts of John Cena, David Dastmalchian, Idris Elba, Sylvester Stallone, Peter Capaldi, Daniela Melchior, Michael Rooker, Nathan Fillion, Sean Gunn, Flula Borg and Taika Waititi. With less than a month to go until the film's arrival, the anticipation is growing higher for the DCEU follow-up.
Warner Bros. recently screened the highly-anticipated film for a group of journalists with Gunn attending a Q&A afterwards. During the conversation, Gunn opened up (via Heroic Hollywood) about his process in deciding which characters would be killed off in the film, noting some came organically from the story while others he knew ahead of time and some even surprised him. See what Gunn had to say below:
”It’s fun watching people die. I mean, I had to choose what characters I was going to use from DC and I had a huge trove of characters to choose from. Obviously, I chose some characters that I knew were going to die. We see that as the movie plays out and it was just about choosing different characters for different reasons. I wanted it to be a really wide spectrum of types of characters from DC to be able to have somebody who’s cool and sort of, you know, angry, like a dark character, like Bloodsport, but then also somebody who is completely over the top, seemingly goofy but [someone] we give soul to, like Polka-Dot Man. And then somebody who’s incredibly useless like Javelin, who’s going to a machine gun fight with a javelin of all things. And then an alien, Mongal, and having all these these different characters and seeing what happens.”
The writer/director also discussed his emotional connection to the wide roster of characters seen in the film and how killing them off wasn't always easy for him. Having gone back and forth on which characters could survive the explosive events of the film, Gunn expressed surprise at who lived while finding some still break his heart, namely two characters, bring tears to his eyes upon revisits. Gunn said:
“There are two characters who die later in the film that turned in amazing performances, at their best that are like, ‘Oh my god,’ and they’re such good guys, too. It was sort of organic. I’m just following the story. And the story dictates everything for me. And whatever the story needed in that moment, I didn’t balk. And, you know, in a way, it’s weird, because I love these characters. And in another way, it’s weird because I am Amanda Waller, I’m pushing that button on those characters. Because it serves our purposes as an audience to to see them go.”
Since signing on for the film, Gunn has teased his carte blanche reign from WB to kill off whomever he wanted in the film. As tempting as it could have been for him to wipe the slate clean from Ayer's film, it's been a nice assurance for trailers to point towards many original characters still maintaining a strong presence in the story. With the emotional departures Gunn delivered with his Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, there's no telling how heartbreaking some deaths will be with his new film.
For obvious spoiler reasons, Gunn and the attending journalists did well to keep mum about just how many characters will be dead by the end of The Suicide Squad, but Gunn's expressions of getting teary-eyed over two specific deaths is intriguing. The filmmaker has expressed praise for his entire ensemble cast, but between his love for Melchior's Ratcatcher 2 and Dastmalchian's Polka-Dot Man and his reunion with frequent collaborators Gunn, Rooker and Fillion, there's no telling what audiences can expect. Luckily the wait is almost over as the film arrives on August 5.
Source: Heroic Hollywood
