Suicide Squad’s Women Have Very Interesting Things to Say About the Film
I honestly don’t have any idea how to feel about Warner Bros’ Suicide Squad anymore.
Like many other fans, the Suicide Squad trailers have really been selling me on the film (even if reports said they didn’t exactly match the tone of the movie and they were attempting to add in more humor after the fact). But Jared Leto’s ridiculously unprofessional behavior while playing the Joker has certainly turned me off. But the more I hear, the more unsure I am. Sometimes I’ll hear something great and then I’ll hear something terrible again. It’s really a mixed bag.
DailySuperhero transcribed some quotes from a recent Entertainment Weekly magazine feature in which the women of Suicide Squad gave very brief thoughts on their characters and the filming process. The section is titled “Meet Some Not-So-Nice Girls,” which is a bad start.
Viola Davis, who plays the awesome Amanda Waller in the film, said: “‘How can I be a badass?’ I had to do it internally. Of course I wore my ‘fro. And I embraced her bio. That was all I had. I didn’t have a cape or a golden lasso.”
Cool, so far so good. Then Karen Fukuhara had this to say about Katana: “She has this samurai spirit, and that’s something I’ve been watching and learning about my whole life. I felt like I knew Katana as soon as I read the comic.”
Yes, yes, very excited to see Katana on the big screen even though Rila Fukushima did a great job playing her on Arrow. Then it was Margot Robbie’s turn to talk about Harley Quinn and it seemed she and director David Ayer had a difference of opinion on the fun-loving character.
“David really wanted her to be strong, badass and nuts — but fun as well. Whenever I would be inclined to play into the comedy or play her more likable, he’d always direct me the other way,” Robbie said. “He wanted her to be pretty vicious.”
Harley can definitely be dangerous…I suppose she can be vicious if she has a real reason to be, but neither of those would be my first word to describe the character. And Harley should absolutely be likable even if she’s a villain. Hrm. Moving on.
Early on I was concerned about where the film would take Enchantress as they seemed to be ignoring how the character is normally depicted in the comics. Cara Delevingne revealed perhaps the most peculiar thing I’ve heard about Ayer and this film so far. “David asked me to go into a forest under a full moon and take my clothes off to feel what nature felt like, to feel what it felt like to be an animal,” she said. “And I did it. It didn’t sound that weird to me.”
It sounds pretty fucking weird to me for a director to instruct one of his actors to get naked in the woods. At least he didn’t ask to go with and film her I guess…
(via HitFix Harpy)
“David asked me to go into a forest under a full moon and take my clothes off to feel what nature felt like, to feel what it felt like to be an animal,”
Been there, done that.
Amanda Waller is supposed to be fat.
I had the same reaction to those quotes, especially combined with the ones from the actress playing Enchantress.
Im quite looking forward to this film. ^^
If nothing else, it seems tonally different from anything put out by anyone at the moment, which sounds like a treat to me.
“David asked me to go into a forest under a full moon and take my clothes off to feel what nature felt like, to feel what it felt like to be an animal”
Spelling correction – Rila, not Rilo
Based on the behind the scenes videos John Green made on the set of Paper Towns, I can picture Cara Delevingne being perfectly fine with those instructions, but I think it is a weird instruction for sure. How would that help?
Thanks for catching that, fixed!
Cracked.com actually had an article the other day about how Heath Ledger’s Joker has ruined supervillain performances since, and one of the ways is that there’s an idea surrounding Ledger’s Joker that he went full method actor and that’s how he gave such a good performance. And in the years since, there’s been a push to sell audiences on the idea that superhero actors are following those footsteps and going full method. When we hear reports or interviews that Cara Delevingne got naked in the woods under a full moon, there’s every chance that that’s much less an auteur director sharing acting tips with his method actress, and much more a publicity stunt to sell the idea that “these people were super invested in this movie, no matter how weird it got”.
Similarly, we get all these reports that Jared Leto was being a giant tool on set, but how much of that was honestly spontaneous and surprising, and how much of that is just a corporate cash in on how we expect method actors to behave. Mailing live rats to people would be obviously terrible completely out of the blue, but we have Instagram documentation that nobody seemed freaked out by the rat and most of the cast has selfies taken holding it (and it’s now Guillermo del Toro’s pet). This whole atmosphere may very well be a carefully constructed aesthetic surrounding the film, rather than it legitimately having played out as obnoxiously as we’re led to believe.
“Instagram documentation that nobody seemed freaked out by the rat” is debatable. They could just be trying to put on a good face for the sake of professionalism and the film’s publicity. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got some other stories after all is said and done.
And that’s very possible. All I know is that people outside the movie started talking about the rat when Cara Delevingne showed up kissing it on Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/3Un-ICDKA8/
I’m honestly still operating on the idea that Jared Leto’s behavior is terrible, unprofessional, and obnoxious. I’m just pointing out that it might not be spontaneously terrible, but rather corporate terrible. When people in general talk about Leto’s method acting on set, I’m seeing it frequently coming with an atmosphere of, “Wow, I bet his performance will be amazing, I can’t wait to see it”. I think it drums up more positive reaction for the studio to make Leto’s performance sound like a crazy artist than it does to make everyone else seem like they’re fine with it.
Enchantress was a villain pretty much up to her Shadowpact appearance. It’s why she was in the Suicide Squad.
What we’ve seen so far of her in the trailers looks similar to how she was in the Ostrander Suicide Squad run. You’ve got mild mannered June Moon who appears to be working with the Suicide Squad voluntarily (also has a romance with Rick Flag, so I think they’re combining her with Nightshade to a degree), but then you’ve got Enchantress who is a powerhouse but also an uncontrollable villain, and who may or may not be going totally rogue in the movie, which was always a fear in the comics whenever they called her out.
http://24.media.tumblr.com/e25caa40e56a8e7b9df0e1a4fb8e04c8/tumblr_mo3el5Cdc61rfk8fdo2_400.gif
Yeah, that strikes me as what one would call, A Problem. Though Ayer can make some pretty interesting films when he really tries, so maybe it was just a matter of making Harley more believably badass in a fight? Robbie clearly has a soft spot for the character, since she is more or less pushing through a spinoff film on her own.
Just hoping it was a one-off note or something he gave her.
I love it because then they had to go back and do reshoots to add in comedy. “Oh that first time, I wasted everyones time.”