For director Bryan Singer, bringing Superman back to our screens has been a labour of love. He tells Michael Dwyer how the character got under his skin
WHAT'S left at the end of another busy day spent saving the world's population from minor crises and potential catastrophes? Not a lot for the protagonist of Superman Returns, as played by newcomer Brandon Routh. Having been away from our planet for five years, Superman returns to find the object of his affection, Daily Planet journalist Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has a young son and is living with a new colleague (James Marsden), the nephew of her editor, Perry White (Frank Langella). It's a lonely life for our superhero.
Bryan Singer, the movie's director, empathises with Superman, as was clear time and again when we met on Tuesday afternoon in Paris, where he attended the film's European premiere the night before. "Superman was always one of the movie heroes of my childhood," he says. "I identified with him because I was an adopted kid and an only child, just as Clark Kent was. However, as an adult and, as I've grown as a film-maker, I find myself in a place with the illusion of popularity and the illusion of power and yet I see that with that work and responsibility, it's hard to have a normal life.
"So many people would like to able to do what Superman can do, but to be Superman involves making choices between your responsibilities and your opportunities. That causes a lot of loneliness and that was one of the things that fascinated me - the essential loneliness of Superman.
"There's the scene where he uses his X-ray vision to look into Lois Lane's house and he sees her inside with her fiance and her child, and then he flies up into space. That, to me, is the quintessential moment of the movie, where the audience gets to experience not just the dual role of Superman, but the dual role of Superman and Superman."
Singer's identification with Superman extends to his own experiences working far away from home, in Australia, on such a logistically complex and demanding production with all the attendant financial pressures and expectations of such a venture.
"That would be analogous to when Superman flies up into space and sits there," he says. "I would come home at the end of a day's shoot to my apartment in Sydney. It was a beautiful apartment, but I was alone usually, unless a friend was visiting from out of town. I would stand at the window every night and look out over Sydney, and then I would go to sleep, full of worry about the next day.
"At least I had the experience of making the two X-Men films, but Superman is a much larger film. We had a great crew and I'm happy with the film. I'm most happy with the response from women and how emotionally affected they are by the romantic core of the film. That was something I never addressed before in a film. Even my mother was affected by it, and she's never been a big fan of my movies."
What? Not even The Usual Suspects, the brilliant, teasingly plotted thriller that made Singer's name back in 1995, when he was just 29?
"My mother is very honest," he says. "She felt there was too much jumping around in X-Men and too much bad language in The Usual Suspects - although I guess that is the most vulgar movie ever. You should try doing the airline version of it and taking out all those words."
The duality of the Clark Kent/Superman character follows in a direct line from the enigmatic Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects and the Nazi war criminal who has re-invented himself in Singer's film of the Stephen King story, Apt Pupil. Singer evidently has a preoccupation with protagonists leading double lives.
"Yes, I do," he says. "I find that people are like onions. You peel them open and you see that they're much more complicated than what they appear to be on the surface. Superman is the ultimate one because he's got these three identities - Kal-el, the last son of Krypton; Clark, who's raised on a farm and has the disguise of the bumbling reporter in the newsroom; and then Superman, who's always watchful for the world's problems."
It is significant that the period when Superman was away spans the past five years, during which time New York, the model for the city of Metropolis in the Superman myth, was attacked on September 11th, 2001. The movie is replete with 9/11 resonances when Metropolis comes under attack. People panic as they flee from skyscrapers, and there is even an image of a falling man plunging to the ground.
"In one of the earlier drafts of the script," Singer says, "I actually had a scene where Superman is standing in front of Ground Zero after he has saved some people. I never intended shooting the scene because it would have dated the film - eventually there will be buildings and monuments there. The idea of the things that happened when he was not there was interesting. The scene reflected the conflict he constantly has with trying to have a semblance of normal life and serving the human side of himself, while at the same time balancing all the responsibilities of the cries for help he gets.
"When we were designing the sound for those scenes of disasters in the city, I realised that those images would, of course, be indelible to anyone who had seen the 9/11 coverage on television."
In another scene, when editor Perry White asks if Superman still stands for "truth and justice", he conspicuously omits the end of the familiar line: "and the American way". Was this deliberate? "That was first poked at in Richard Donner's 1978 film, where Superman says he's there to fight for truth, justice and the American way, and Lois says, 'Well, then, you're going to end up fighting every politician in Washington.' So even then that expression about the American way was being questioned."
That film came post-Watergate, of course. "Yeah, but it applies to any time after the Sixties. Truman's America was over and there were these questions about American diplomacy and so on. And because of Superman's extraordinary powers and his ability to be anywhere at any time, he has become very much a global superhero and not solely a hero for America."
For all its state-of-the-art technology and contemporary references, the story's values inevitably hark back to that relatively more innocent era when the comic books first appeared. "In the 1978 film they basically relied on Metropolis as New York City and they used a newsroom very much like the one in All the President's Men," Singer says. "Here I've tried to acknowledge the late 1930s origin of the comic by using muted colours and applying an Art Deco design for the Daily Planet building. I also wanted to catch the emotional resonance of that earlier era.
"That was why I cast Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane. I knew she could be like a 1940s movie star, that she could hold the screen differently than today's big-breasted vixens. Even though Kate is such a young actress, she can be very classy on the screen. I knew it would be the same with James Marsden after working with him on the X-Men films."
Singer now finds himself tagged over and over in the media as a director of comic-strip movies after making three in a row. He is as keen to defend those films as he is to emphasise the diversity of his work, most recently as the executive producer of the TV medical drama, House.
"I directed the pilot for that, and I've produced the series," he says. "It's the most successful scripted drama in America. I'm very proud of it, and it's very different from the comic book films I've done. But I believe that comic book characters are the 20th century's mythologies. People will look back on them 500 years from now in the way that we look back on King Arthur and Merlin. These stories are potent subject matter that just happens to be based on comic books.
"I find it almost thrilling because I never read comic books as a kid. I didn't even know who a Wolverine was before I was approached about the first X-Men movie. I went to movies a lot as a kid and I loved the original Star Trek series and I read a lot of science-fiction. It's kind of exciting for me to go to comic book conventions and encounter comic book fans who are very grateful that I have taken the care they would have hoped would be taken with these comic book characters. I can feel it in the room. There was a lot of fear and scepticism from them before I made the first X-Men film, and then I grew into their graces."
As for a sequel to his highly entertaining Superman Returns, Singer says: "I do these movies one at a time to see what the experience is like before I choose to do or not to do another one. So I'm not signed to do another Superman film. I have ideas for one, but I'm not committed to it yet. It's different for the actors. They have to commit because their images are so closely associated with it."
Singer has been associated with several other projects in recent years, chiefly The Mayor of Castro Street, which deals with San Fransisco's first openly gay elected councillor, Harvey Milk, who was murdered by a colleague, Dan White, in 1978. The story was the subject of a riveting Oscar-winning 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, and a dramatised version by Singer, a rare openly gay director working in the Hollywood mainstream, is certainly an intriguing prospect.
"Next for me is just a vacation and then I'll decide," Singer says. "I may have just signed a writer for The Mayor of Castro Street. He's a wonderful writer, but I can't say who it is because I don't have a deal with him yet. I think he has a really interesting take on it, just as I have my take on it. Harvey Milk's biography is so fascinating and he is one of the lesser-known great martyrs of the last century.
"I find it so Shakespearean in his relationship with Dan White, the fact that these people knew each other and revolved around each other, and that it all ended so shockingly and tragically. And I find it even more intriguing that these aspects of the story are set against this very important issue in this very important time. His martyrdom symbolised a revolution in the gay community."
