“Wonder Woman” doesn’t look like a comic book.
With all the other things noteworthy about Patty Jenkins’ movie — it’s the first feature film about DC Comics’ third most enduring character (while her Justice League cohorts Superman and Batman have had tons), the first major superhero film directed by a woman, Warner Bros.’ latest and greatest hope to earn the critical cachet for one of its DC Extended Universe entries that Disney’s rival Marvel regularly enjoys — it should not be overlooked that Jenkins has made something very close to a personal auteurist vision here.
PHOTOS: Stars of ‘Wonder Woman’ attend L.A. premiere
“I had a surprising amount of control,” says Jenkins, whose only previous feature was a 2003 indie — but that movie was “Monster,” which won its star Charlize Theron a Best Actress Academy Award. “I didn’t have that different of a relationship from the one I did making ‘Monster.’ However, I also am conscientious that I am caring for something for other people. I’m not the kind of director that would have gone willy nilly against something that I thought would hurt the DC Universe. They had input, but I did feel incredibly supported to make the movie that I wanted to make.”
It shows. Jenkins may not have been responsible for “Wonder Woman’s” unique, World War I setting; that idea came from Warners’ DC movie braintrust, which includes, among other producers and writers, Zack Snyder, the director of last year’s “Batman v Superman,” the film that introduced Israeli actress Gal Gadot as the immortal Amazon Princess Diana, and the upcoming “Justice League” movie, where she’ll appear for the third time. But did Jenkins ever make it her own.
“It took me a second when I first thought about it,” says Jenkins, a longtime comic book fan who’d not only been in and out of the running to make a “Wonder Woman” for about a decade of the project’s tortured development history, but nearly directed a “Thor” film for Marvel as well. “Like, wow, World War I? But I very quickly got excited about the benefit of that. One, we’ve seen World War II so many times, and that was the period of the birth of all these superheroes [Wonder Woman first appeared in print in 1941] so we’ve already been there. The second reason was that World War I was so horrific, you could glean from the power of that.
“You take a god, a superhero, and intersect them with the Great War that mankind fought the first time, then watch her worldview change via war. And by the war, anytime you shoot a real war, all the details of that war are sinking into the fabric. It becomes not just anonymous war, it’s informed by all of that awesome detail.”
Before Diana, and the movie, get to that, though, we learn about the mythical history of the Amazons and her idyllic youth on Themyscira, the secret island of women warriors. Though her creation is a bit of a mystery itself — let’s just say Zeus, King of the Greek Gods, had a hand in it — young Diana grows into the mightiest of fighters, albeit somewhat to the distress of her mother, Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen).
When American aviator Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crashes his plane in the waters off Themyscira, Diana rescues him and, naturally, develops an instant curiosity about this never-before-seen creature called a male. Soon, though, far more alarming examples of the species, German Marines, storm the beach and, in the ensuing battle with the Amazons, naïve Diana gets her first shattering view of what real combat is like. Convinced that the God of War Ares is responsible for the carnage Steve tells her is going on in Europe, Diana accompanies him to England and, then, to the trenches in Belgium.
To envision all of this, Jenkins basically chucked anything you’ve ever seen in a superhero comic.
“The hardest thing about making the movie was tone,” she admits. “From the moment I signed on to it, I was like, ‘Oh God, fantasyland, fantasy characters, period England total reality, period war meets superheroes and then villains with super abilities. How to pull one tone through all of those things, so that each of them would be connected but that a superhero could walk out at any moment and it would not look absurd? That was very, very tricky, and took very delicate work with all of my key crew.”
Jenkins and company drew much of their inspiration not from original Wonder Woman cartoonist Harry G. Peter and the dozens of artists who have drawn her since, but from an Edwardian Era American painter.
“My formula was, we want to make this feel incredibly real and earthbound, with 10 percent pop,” the director explains. “That meant whenever we were shooting England or war or whatever, don’t just go completely straightforward. Give it a little more dimension, a more painterly approach. There, in particular, I applied John Singer Sargent. His style was very modern and attractive to the modern eye, with the very frontal, white lighting and the pitch blacks and the great organization. We applied that to all of England so it was never just England.”
While you might detect some influences of Sargent’s contemporary, fantasy illustrator Maxfield Parrish, in the Greek island sequences, Jenkins actually reversed her formula for those.
“In Themyscira, it’s the opposite, you’re trying to add reality,” she notes. “So the fantasy there is 10 percent, then you’re trying to jam in 90 percent reality, make it feel really real. Added animals all over the place, but never fake animals; they can’t be CG, they have to really exist. You have to feel like this is such a tangible place. The stuff has to be beat up and used and worn and have that history to it.”
“WW” looks different from your average war WWI movie, too.
“Even when we did No Man’s Land, all the smoke I tinted a cyan just to give it a slight difference to what you’re used to seeing,” Jenkins says of the scene in which Wonder Woman makes her first real appearance before shell-shocked soldiers. “Just a little bit of a pop, so that the superhero’s not alone in like a ‘Downton Abbey’ scene of World War I.”
It ain’t all just for looks. “Wonder Woman’s” visuals evoke Diana’s inner conflict as she grows, through the crucible of war, into a woman of the world as well as a hero.
“I just directed the story of a young woman with high hopes and dreams and very clear ideals, and that young woman’s journey through the world to becoming a wiser adult,” the filmmaker adds. “The superhero powers are just on top of that.”
The daughter of a Silver Star-winning Vietnam War fighter pilot and an environmental scientist, Jenkins, 45, has been hooked on Wonder Woman since Lynda Carter played her in the 1970s TV show.
“I can’t remember if I saw the comic book or the TV show first, but they both really went hand-in-hand,” she says. “What Lynda Carter was bringing to life on TV and what all of the iconography of Wonder Woman was doing was a very similar thing. It just rocked our world, and every little girl on the playground was fighting over who got to be Wonder Woman when everybody played Super Friends.
“The original spirit of that has always stuck with me. When you pretend to be Wonder Woman, you are her in your mind, and that was so inspiring and addictive and why we were all so drawn to it from there on. Capturing the spirit of that and trying to bring it to the big screen is so incredible to get to do, finally.”
Not one to go overboard on the significance of breaking the glass superhero blockbuster ceiling, Jenkins nonetheless feels honored to be the one to “take a step forward for women directors,” as she puts it, “but I’m also surprised that it has been such a hard hurdle for us to get more women into the tentpole industry.”
Could a man have made “Wonder Woman” the way she did?
“I don’t think any two directors would ever do it the same way,” Jenkins diplomatically states. “The greatest thing about being a woman director was that I wasn’t thinking about being a woman, or her being a woman. I was just directing a hero. That is what I think it freed me up to do. Maybe it takes all kinds of people to direct all kinds of different films for that reason, although I don’t believe that only a woman can direct a woman’s story or only a man can tell a man’s story. But yeah, everybody should strive to tell a universal story when they can, and that might have been easier for me in this case.”
